May 18 has been declared the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Crimean Tatar Genocide. On this day in 1944, a criminal operation began in the USSR to forcibly evict the Crimean Tatars from their historical homeland to Central Asia. According to the National Movement of Crimean Tatars, in total about 230 thousand people were deported from Crimea. In the first years of deportation, from 20 to 46% of people died from hunger and disease.
Most of the people were forcibly resettled in Uzbekistan, as well as in adjacent areas of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Small groups were sent to the RSFSR: the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Southern Urals and the Kostroma region. The deportation claimed the lives of almost half of the Crimean Tatars, and the rehabilitation of the people during the Soviet period never happened.
Informally, the ban on the return of Crimean Tatars was in effect until 1989. Over the next four years, half of all Crimean Tatars who then lived in the USSR returned to Crimea - 250 thousand people.
In 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine recognized the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people as genocide.
