Customer Reviews

Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and Return (Anthropology, History, and Critical Imagination)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The actions of states against their own people or sub-cultures within their own or conquered country has been the cause of more deaths, pain, suffering than most wars. All the more tragic because the victums have been the weakest members of society: women, children, the elderly.

This book talks about one such case where some 191,000 people were rounded up one night and were moved some 4,000 miles across the Soviet Union. For years no one knew why Stalin ordered this. The stated reason was for collaboration with the Germans. But this seemed unlikely. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union has the information come about that they might have interferred with one of Stalin's plans to attack Turkey.

This book is a well researched story of the movement as forced by the Government, and the gradual return of many of the remaining people to their ancestral homeland.