The Indigenous peoples of a settler colony (as different settlers fight their war): Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, Crimean Tatars: Claiming the Homeland, in Manuel Férez Gil, Olena Palko (eds), Ukraine’s Many Faces Land, People, and Culture Revisited, Transcript, 2023, pp. 247-262 | settler colonial studies blog

The Indigenous peoples of a settler colony (as different settlers fight their war): Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, Crimean Tatars: Claiming the Homeland, in Manuel Férez Gil, Olena Palko (eds), Ukraine’s Many Faces Land, People, and Culture Revisited, Transcript, 2023, pp. 247-262

25Oct23

Abstract: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine raised anew the issue of colonial nature of this war and intensified debates on decolonization of Ukraine and its history. Nonetheless, little has been done to discuss the history of the Crimea as of a Russian settler colony.1 The history of Russian presence in Crimea cannot be comprehensive without considering its indigenous people, the Crimean Tatars, who ever since the annexation of the Crimean Khanate by the Russian Empire in 1783, had been the object of state-driven persecution and discrimination. In this vein, deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 should be treated as a high point of the Russian colonial policy in the peninsula. As this chapter intends to show, the history of Crimean Tatars’ exile and return is distinctive from other cases of Soviet ethnic deportations, because they not only survived and maintained their connection with the homeland, but also managed to initiate a protest movement, inherently, anti-colonial, and eventually return to Crimea en masse.

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