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History of the Tatar Muslims in Eastern Europe, their jihad, and the Soviet genocide of the Tatars
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)

Print this Article    •    About the Author    •    Bibliography/Sources

This essay offers the complete history of the Tatars in Eastern Europe, a Turkic Muslim people who were long a source of inter-religious war with Orthodox Russia for centuries and have been stereotyped in Europe today for a perceived barbarism and Islamic jihad. Their history, however, is far more complicated than these lead one to believe. This essay is divided into several parts: their ethnic and cultural origins, their movement into what is now Russia with the Mongol hordes, their establishment of a massive Islamic empire of jihad, the Russians' conquest of all the Tatar peoples, and finally the brutal genocide and forced expulsion of the Tatars by the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. See our History of the Volga Germans to read of their genocide by Stalin as well. Lastly are some brief observations (with photos) from my research trip to the Crimea (Ukraine), where the Crimean Tatar Muslims have almost diseappeared as a result of the genocide.

 

Shortcut:   Ethnic background  • Tatar Muslims dominate Russians for 200 years • Russians unite and conquer the Tatars • Tatars under Imperial Russia, Identity Formation • Soviet genocide of Crimean Tatars • Slavic Crimea today


Ethnic, genetic, and linguistic background on the Tatar Muslims

The term "Tatar" or "Tartar" in European societies conjures up the image of semi-nomadic Muslim equestrians pillaging the Christians of Eastern Europe and consigning them to slavery for centuries of occupation. Indeed, this was all very true throughout many centuries of Russian history, but beyond the stereotype lies a complicated history of difficult inter-ethnic struggles that caused brutality on both sides and ended with the complete genocide and forced expulsion of almost their entire race to distant Central Asia during the Soviet era.

The genetic and ethnic definitions of the word "Tatar" are very difficult. Rather than referring to a specific racial or cultural group, Arabs and especially Europeans often generalized all the invading nomadic hordes that were marauding the Middle East and Russia regardless of their race or culture [1]. Viewing these invading tribes as a scourge, Europeans often spelled their name "Tartar," believed to be in reference to the hellhound from Greek mythology (Tartarus).

Today, "the Tatars" more legitimately refers to the disparate Turkic Muslim people of modern Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine who moved westward with the Mongol invasion in the 13th century before being absorbed into Russia for 500 years to this day. Although Turkic peoples dominate almost all of Central Asia, the Tatars are only one of these Turkic minorities, living mostly in Tatarstan (central Russia). The original legitimate Tatar ethnic group (in contrast to the generalizing stereotype) was a large Turkic tribal confederation north of Mongolia that spoke a Turkic language and worshiped nature via a shamanist religious ethos. Their name is believed to properly derive from the early Turkic tribal chieftain called Tatur [1]. The Tatar ethnic group of Russia and Central Asia has strongly retained itsindependent Turkic cultural identity that coalesced during the late Russian imperial era in the 19th century.

 

The Tatars enter Russia, convert to Islam, and dominate and enslave the Russian Christians for over 200 years

Although Turkic peoples were in Central Asia and along the Volga River (today central Russia) since the 10th century, the Turkic Tatar tribe moved westward only with the world-conquering khans of the Mongol hordes. Batu Khan, one of Chinggis Khan's successors, conscripted the then-pagan Tatar tribes on his westward march across Central Asia and Europe. Batu's armies -- consisting of an elite ethnic Mongol caste and massive Turkic Tatar cavalry -- obliterated Russia (the Kievan Rus empire), Volga Bulgaria, the Turkic Kipchak and Cuman tribes of southern Ukraine, and laid waste to Poland and Hungary before withdrawing to ceremonially honor the death of the Great Khan Ögedei thousands of miles away in Qaraqarum in Mongolia. It is this timely event that many believe saved much of the rest of Europe from total Mongol hegemony.

The realm that Batu Khan's Mongols left behind was known as the Kipchak Khanate, dominated by a elite caste of a handful of ethnic Mongol pagan ruling over an overwhelmingly Turkic population of Kipchak Turks and newly-settled Tatars [2]. This khanate was but one of many empires within the extremely-unified "Mongol Empire." Islam had already proliferated pervasively among the Kipchaks in the region, and as a result the new invading Tatar settlers and their Mongol overlords quickly became absorbed into sedentary Islamic culture. It was at this point that the Tatars converted to Sunni Islam as they still remain today. Although the pagan Mongol elite sponsored Islam and the construction of mosques to appease their subjects, the Mongol government of this khanate would not officially embrace Islam until Uzbeg Khan over a century later.

The massive Kipchak Khanate (known as the mighty Golden Horde by the 1370's), which stretched from the gates of Lithuania to Kazakhstan, brutally dominated the Christian Russian and East Slavic principalities through either exorbitant taxation or harsh direct rule. Although the Tatars were only one Turkic constituent of this empire, the Russians referred to all of their occupying oppressors as Tatars [3]. The Slavic states of Ryazan, Tver, Kiev, and Galicia were firmly controlled by strict subjugation for 200 years until at least the 15th century. Novogorod was the only Russian Christian state that was not incinerated by the Turko-Mongol armies and enjoyed relative autonomy, but was a tributary vassal. The khans of the Golden Horde, with their Muslim Turkic and Tatar armies, raided rival and vassal territories constantly for slaves and loot [4]. They replaced, punished, and dismissed the sovereigns of their Russian puppets at will, and forced the nobilities of their dependencies to personally travel to the distant silk tents of the khan and humbly prostrate. This was a habitual feeling of occupation and humiliation that would endure until Ivan the Terrible's brutal revolt in the 16th century. The fact that most of the raiders were Turkic Muslims invading Christian territories was equally salient in the subjugated Slavs' culture.


The flag of the Golden Horde.

The Golden Horde and its Tatar-Kipchak Muslim population administered a wealthy realm from their capital of Saray. Foreign dignitaries traveling along the trade routes to this gold-swaddled capital described it as a major center for textiles, jewelry, artisanry, silk, and a massive market for the slave trade. Russians and Ukrainians (even children) were enslaved and delivered into the huge slave networks of the Muslim world [7]. The very name Golden Horde is believed to refer to the radiant golden and silk tents of the wealthy and resplendent khan [5].

Although the majority of the population remained Muslim, the small ruling ethnic Mongol elite followed a very different religious ethos. The Mongol leaders obdurately obeyed Chinggis Khan's code of law called the Yasa, including the strict policy of tolerating diverse religious groups within Mongol dominions. As a result, the modern image of Islamist-ruled hordes of Tatar Mujahidin dominating and enslaving the Russian Christians is extremely oversimplified. However, this modernist image of a multi-cultural and tolerant Muslim society is equally fanciful. The tolerant ethnic Mongols were only a small elite caste [2]. The Turkic Tatars and Kipchaks who dominated the Golden Horde population were definitively Muslims. Therefore, when the pagan Mongol government ordered its Muslim subjects to raid or occupy Russian and Ukrainian Christian lands, it is almost inevitable that they were incited by Islamic rhetoric and the vocabulary of jihad by the imams who certainly accompanied them to battle. Textual and visual sources during the era of Ivan the Terrible (16th century) portray a religious struggle between the Russian Christians and their Islamic occupants, with Ivan and his army being showered with divine protection by angels. It was indeed a time of religious occupation by a Turkic Muslim army performing raids and jihad against Russian Christians. This reality is intimated by the fact that upon the collapse of the Mongol hegemony along with the Golden Horde in the early 16th century, the native Turkic Muslim successor states installed legal and political systems of a firmly Islamic character [6]. This is the reason for Europeans' stereotype of a bitter inter-religious war between Muslim Tatars and European Christians. However, this is not to say that the Tatars and Kipchaks of the Golden Horde were legitimately pious Muslims. Turkic tribes continued to drink libations derived from blood and they constantly drink wine, two intensely eschewed transgressions in the Qur'an and the Hadith. The Arab scholar ibn Taymiyya rabidly portrayed the Tatars as equally as kafir (infidel) as the pagans. The "Tatar" world-conquerer Timur (Tamerlane), who styled himself as a Ghazi (holy warrior), would hold massive drunken bouts right after praying to God for victory in battle against Muslim opponents. So too, the Mongol government of the Golden Horde occupiers -- which genuinely practiced increasingly limited forms of religious tolerance until their demise -- likely punished Tatar Muslims who waged jihad against their Christian subjects. Even after officially embracing "Islam" under Uzbeg Khan (1312-41), the Mongol elite remained reputedly impious. This, however, in no way disproves the undeniable antagonism between Christian Russians and their Muslim occupiers.

 


A map of the many Mongol Empires. Contrary to popular stereotype, Chinggis Khan did not conquer the world, nor was the Mongol world ever unified fully. Notice the Khanate of the Golden Horde in orange dominating the Russian vassals. (from http://www.freewebs.com/worldtrade/themongols.htm)

 

 

 

The Russian Slavic Christians unite and expel the Muslim conquerers

The Russian Orthodox Christians had endured nearly 200 years of the hegemony of the Turko-Mongol Muslim yoke of the Golden Horde. Fortunately for the Europeans, the now officially-Muslim empire (by 1435) had rapidly tumbled into decline, perfidity, contumacy, and dynastic rivalry. Worst of all was the Black Plague, which decimated the Middle East and the capital of Saray via trade and slave routes just as much if not more than it did Europe. The Golden Horde's unity split into rival sub-hordes. At the same time, the Slavs were exploiting their occupiers' intimations of decline to establish their solidarity and independence to throw off the foreign hegemon. Ivan the Great (III) of Moscow, though still officially a subject of the Golden Horde, proved that their occupiers' authority had effectively collapsed when he conquered Novgorod to create a massive expanding realm of virtually-independent Russians.

Although Russian nationalists would seldom admit it, the real deathblow to the Golden Horde was delivered not by a Christian Slav, but by a fellow Muslim holy warrior. Timur (Tamerlane), one of history's most magnificent conquerers who literally obliterated almost every world power in only a few years without ever losing a battle, considered the Golden Horde's Khan Tokhtamysh to be in violation of their previous alliance and transformed the Golden Horde's capital at Saray into smoldering ruin. The Golden Horde essentially (although not officially) dissolved into Tatar Muslim successor Khanates, including the Kazan Khanate, Crimean Khanate, Sibir, Astrakhan, and more.

His successor, Ivan the Terrible, seized the opportunity and declared himself universal autocratic dictator of All Russias, the sovereign of the Third Rome (after the second, Constantinople, had fallen to the jihad of the Ottoman Turks in 1453), and declared all official ties and obligations to the Muslim Tatars abolished in 1480 [8]. He fashioned himself as a God-ordained crusader liberating the Russians from Muslim Tatar rule, as illustrated by official drawings during his reign. In 1571, a Tatar Muslim army from the Crimea in occupied Ukraine raided Russia and burnt villages en masse, capturing thousands for the massive slave markets of the Muslim world [9]. Muslim raids against the Russians were constant since the 16th century [10]. The Tatars later sent a royal army to Russia to intimidate them into submission, but Ivan the Terrible intercepted it and annihilated it. The Tatars withdrew in humiliation. Consolidating the new Russian Empire under his reign as the first Tsar (Russian for "Caesar"), Ivan the Terrible sent his armies to the Kazan Khanate, the main Tatar successor state to the shattered Golden Horde. He obliterated it, converted its population to Christendom by force, and then proceeded to crush the Astrakhan and Sibir (Siberia) khanates. Russia had how reversed 200 years of Muslim Tatar occupation. The famous onion domes on his most enduring artistic legacy, St. Basil's Cathedral, are said to symbolized the severed turban-donning heads of Russia's slain Tatar Muslim enemies.

The last independent Tatar population, the very Islamic ([6]) Crimean Khanate in today's Ukraine, was finally conquered in the 18th century by Catherine the Great. The Tatars were now firmly entrenched into the Russian Empire as they would remain for 500 years. The tables had turned.

 


Ivan the Terrible, first emperor of "all Russia", emperor of the Third Rome (Moscow), and conquerer of the Muslim Tatars at Kazan and Astrakhan


Ivan the Terrible's architectural wonder symbolized the severed turban-wearing heads of the Muslim Tatar conquerers


Our EHL video of the Soviet propaganda film "Ivan the Terrible," showing the ruthless Russian hero uniting the East Slavs under his brutally centralized autocratic authority and expelling the Muslim occupiers of the Golden Horde (in reality, its remnants)

 

 

 

Tatars under Russian rule and the coalescence of a Tatar Muslim identity under Communist Soviet rule

In the 18th century, Russia's "Europeanization" process of Peter the Great allowed the ethnic German Catherine the Great to seize power. In part to propitiate her constant struggle against the Russian elite for not being a Slav, Catherine promoted a system of superficial ethnic and religious autonomy. As a result, the Tatar minority enjoyed remarkable cultural autonomy as Turkic Muslims until the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. This was largely done because of the little threat or influence the illiterate and remote Tatars could wield. She even funded the construction of a mosque and a Madrasa school in the main Tatar center, Kazan (in today's Tatarstan province in Russia). The Orthodox Bible was printed in Tatar in 1803, and also the Qur'an [11]. The Tatar Muslim minority survived in the Crimea (although displaced by settlement by ethnic Slav nobles), Kazan, and the new province of Azerbaijan. During the 19th century, Tatar nationalists like İsmail Gaspıralı promoted a pan-Turkic, pan-Muslim consciousness throughout the Russian Empire called the Jadid movement. Tatars Jadids asserted the formation of a unified Tatar Muslim identity and Tatar language through newspapers like Tercüman that called for modernization and education.

 


A map of the Russian empire by 1880, after the conquest of the Crimea. (click to enlarge)


This process of Tatar identity coalescence continued during the Russian Revolutionary crisis. When the Russian Empire collapsed due to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Tatars anxiously broke from Russian control. Tatar and Turkic nationalists like the Basmachi used brutal violence to expel Slavs from their lands. The Tatars of Tatarstan (Kazan) declared an independent republic. The Crimean Tatars, soon to be the victim of genocide, declared the Crimean People's Republic which established Islam and Tatar nationalism in southeast Ukraine.

All of these independent Tatar Muslim nationalist states were again crushed by the invading Communist Red Army by 1920, including Kazan/Tatarstan, the Crimean Tatars, Khiva, and Buqara. Ever practical, the Tatars hoped that they could combine their Islamic faith with their new Communist dominators. Prominent statesman Hanafi Muzaffar of the Volga Tatars said, "Muslim people will unite themselves to Communism: like Communism, Islam rejects narrow nationalism" [12]. Others like Sultan Galiyev promoted so-called Islamic Marxism. All of these hopes were fanciful. Despite initial auspicious All-Russia Muslim Congresses, Islam was effectively abolished, almost all mosques were eventually destroyed, and major loyal Islamic Communists like Galiyev were executed by the Communists in the name of the collective.

The Crimean Tatars lost their religion and their sovereignty, absorbed into the Ukrainian SSR. The independence of the Tatars of Kazan (Tatarstan) was destroyed and the Red Army formed the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). The forced abolition of the Tatars' religion and their long-sought autonomy was a major problem that would cause many Tatars to actively join the anti-Communist White Army and the invading Nazi killing squads against Jews and Communists during the war [13]. Nonetheless, the Tatars of the Tatarstan ASSR were given significant cultural and ethnic autonomy (as all other minorities) so long as they did not conflict with Stalin's dictate, in which case they were instantly purged and massively executed.

Like the Chechens, Kazakhs, and Ukrainians, the Tatars suffered tremendously as a result of Soviet rule. Some 30-40,000 Tatars were forced from their homes to work on collective farms during the collectivization campaigns of the 1930's by Stalin, and about half the Tatar population was completely gone by the time the Germans arrived [14].




The exclusive EHL map charting the USSR and modern Russia's autonomous republics. Tatarstan is in the center-west. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)


The flag of the shattered Crimean People's Republic after it was destroyed by the Red Army (from flagspot.net)


 

The Soviet genocide of the Tatars and their forced expulsion to Central Asia

Any autonomy that the Tatar minority of the Crimea and Tatarstan (Kazan) enjoyed was forever lost as a result of World War II. When the Germans, Romanians, and Hungarians invaded the Soviet Union after 1941, they found huge segments of Soviet minorities like the Muslim Tatars, Chechens, Dagestanis, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Ukrainians actively joining the Nazis against the Soviets. Some were, like the Bosnian Muslims, inspired by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husayni in Islamic jihad against Jews and atheistic Communists. Most Tatars, however, have not been proven to have supported the invading Axis armies. Most Tatars lived in the Tatarstan SSR, which was never even taken by the Germans in the war.

But the ruthless paranoia of Joseph Stalin implicated the Tatars as being a potentially perfidious threat to the Soviet Union. The Crimean Tatar sect were the worst victim of the Tatars. What ensued were several of the worst -- and yet bizarrely unheard of -- genocides of the 20th century. Along with 800,000 ethnic German civilians and nearly half of the Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyk, and Koreans, almost the entire Tatar Turkic race was expelled from Russia to the distant wastelands of Central Asia and Siberia for forced labor. More than 11,000,000 ethnic German civilians were expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The entire Crimean Tatar population was expelled and resettled by Ukrainian Slavs encouraged by government subsidy. Tatars were shipped en masse on train rides lasting weeks with no heat, food, or waste disposal to forced labor camps in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, with about 46% of Tatars and ethnic Germans dying on the way [14]. About a total of 190,000 Crimean Tatars alone were sent to Central Asia [15]. Many Tatars remained in Tatarstan after a thorough purging, but the remaining Tatar culture that was disparately settled throughout the Russian SFSR was forever dismantled.

After Stalin's death in 1953, the "de-Stalization" reforms of Nikita Khrushchev assuaged the race-based forced labor and segregation against resettled minorities like the Chechens, Volga Germans, and Koreans. The Tatars, however, were disallowed to return to the Crimea until 1988. As there is no certain documentation, the pervading theory for this delay is because of the significant role that the Crimea played in the Ukrainian SSR's economics, which were in part supported by the ethnic Ukrainian Khrushchev's authority. After 1968, Some Soviet human rights groups increasingly campaigned for the return of Tatars to their homelands. A massive street riot in the Uzbek SSR by Tatars was met with arrests and gunshots. It was only in 1988 with the liberalization of Gorbachev's Perestroika that the Crimean Tatars, now almost entirely extinct, were allowed to return to Ukraine.

Today, Tatarstan (still a legal province of Russia) has a slight ethnic Tatar Muslim majority. Most Crimean Tatars, ironically, live in Uzbekistan (1.5% of the population) and Kazakhstan (1.7%) [16]. About 50,000 Tatars have returned to the Crimea since the 1990's [15]. Most are reluctant to leave due to the tremendous cost and uncertainty, and the inter-ethnic hostility they would receive in ultra-homogeneous Slavic Ukraine versus Turkic Central Asia (where their languages are inter-communicable).

 


The Crimea is the southernmost tip of Ukraine on the Black Sea (from mytravelguide.com) (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

The Crimea today, land of the disappeared Tatars (with my photos)

(See my gallery of Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine for the Tsar's Palace of the Yalta Conference and more)

Today, Ukraine is now one of the most homogeneous countries of Europe, with an almost universally Slavic genetic stock. When I went to the Crimea for my research trip, it was so culturally and ethnically homogeneous that one would easily think that this region was not thoroughly dominated by Turkic Muslim Tatars for some 500 years. Mosques long destroyed by Communist rule have been replaced by resplendent Orthodox cathedrals (shown below). There are hardly any non-Slavs, Turks, or Muslims. Ukraine is officially only 0.5% ethnic Crimean Tatar [16]. The Crimea itself is officially 11.4% ethnic Tatar [17]. They have their own propitiatory representative body in the Ukrainian political structure. The Turkic Muslim population is quickly growing due to immigration from Turkey and repatriation from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in addition to the huge birthrate of Muslims over the native Ukrainians. They are sedulously encouraging the construction of new mosques, new measures for academic commemoration for the genocide of the Tatars, and the encouragement for government support to foster or subsdize Tatar immigration. Hookah (waterpipe) bars and Turkish food restaurants can be seen popping up with Turkic owners. Despite the Tatars' auspicious hopes for an increased repopulation of the area and the achievement of autonomy or independence for their tiny minority, there is growing inter-racial hatred between the overwhelming Slavic majority and the incoming Tatar Muslim minority. From a few interviews and observations I gained of the interaction between Ukrainians and the few Turkic people I saw, there was a strong sense of antipathy for this incoming population. They greatly derided the "flooding" of their city by what they portrayed as illiterate, unemployed, and incredibly foreign Muslims who (in their words) expect tremendous economic, social, and political leniency and taxpayer support for the crimes of Stalin with which the Ukrainians were not involved. The Ukrainians insist (perhaps correctly) that the suffering of the Tatars is completely insignificant compared with the Holodomor famines caused by Stalin against the Ukrainians, causing some of the highest death tolls of the 20th century that most Russians refuse to acknowledge even happened. Two Ukrainians I interviewed intimated the same notion, "why should we support the Muslims when the Russians don't even compensate us for Holodomor?" Street violence between gangs and even citizens has escalated recently from the context of a growing inter-ethnic antipathy in Europe for Muslim immigrants (see our Muslims in Europe map). Russia and Ukraine have exploding far-right and racialist populations that have even entered the governments. I saw grafitti that included Swastikas everywhere and said "F*CK JEWS" and "F*CK MUSLIMS." Some Tatar groups were described by the local government as being sponsored by foreign Wahhabi groups seeking to proliferate Islam in this newly-settled Turkic Muslim population [18]. Arab extremist groups like the Hizb-i-Tehrir, emphasizing a supposedly concentrated Christian persecution of Tatar Muslims by the very un-Christian Communists, have caused clashes with the semi-autonomous Tatar government. Even assassinations of journalists and death threats against Russian nationalists and reconciliatory Tatar officials have occurred. The Tatar government (the Mejliler) has responded with a very acquiescent policy in hopes of gaining a respected sociopolitical standing. However, as immigrants from a very foreign and disliked Muslim culture barrage into this incredibly homogeneous and nationalistic country with an exploding population of far-right racialists, the Crimean Tatars' hopes for a reversal of their history of persecution and an integration into Ukraine seem to be illusory. The Crimea is now Slavic.

 


My photo of a majestic Orthodox Ukrainian cathedral. By no means are Ukraine and the Crimea Islamic as they were before the Slavic conquest. (click to enlarge)


My photo of a close-up of the above Orthodox conservative cathedral. (click to enlarge)


My photo of a Tatar huqqah bar for tobacco, brought by the Tatar and Turkish immigrants.


My photo of a magnificent Christian Slavic palace for Russia's heroic general against Napoleon and the Caucasian Jihad near Chechnya. Here the Iranian Shi'ia style is shown in the backside of the palace.


My photo of one of Ukraine's last standing statues of Lenin. The text at the base means "Lenin" in the Ukrainian Cyrillic script.


 

 

________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:

-Images that lack an EHL watermark are not our property. If no link is provided, we were unable to locate the original owner. If you find that your property has been used, feel free to notify us.

-Personal photos, interviews, and observations in the Crimea in Ukraine

[1] Marozzi, Justin. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conquerer of the World. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004. Page 8.

[2] Grousset, Rene. Empire of the Steppes. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970. Page 473.

[3] Kort, Michael. A Brief History of Russia. New York: Checkmark Books, 2008. Page 13.

[4] Grousset 1970, 395.

[5] Marozzi 2004, 71.

[6] Grousset 1970, 471.

[7] Marozzi 2004, 75.

[8] Kort 2008, 24.

[9] Kort 2008, 40.

[10] Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. New York: Harper Collins, 2005. Page 433.

[11] Ostler 2005, 435.

[12] Hosking, Geoffrey. The First Socialist Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Page 108.

[13] Hosking 1992, 110.

[14] Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Hill and Wang, 2001. Page 748.

[15] Ostler 2005, 433.

[16] CIA World Factbook

[17] http://www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/language/Crimea/

[18] http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p09s02-coop.html


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