De-Tatarization of Crimea in the context of "Tatarophobia"

The Russian Empire formally annexed the Crimean Khanate on 19 April [O.S. 8 April] 1783, following a decade-long campaign of intervention in the Crimean Peninsula. Russia aimed to control the Black Sea and end raids by Crimean slavers into its territory. To accomplish this, the Russians waged a series of wars against the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean vassal state, culminating in victory in the 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed in 1774, granted the Crimean Khanate nominal independence from the Ottomans under Russian influence. In subsequent years, Russia would intervene widely in Crimean affairs, provoking a series of revolts by the Crimean Tatars, while the Ottomans watched in ambivalence. Crimea was finally annexed by Russia on 19 April 1783, after Russian imperial advisor Prince Grigory Potemkin encouraged Empress Catherine the Great to dissolve the khanate and formally claim its territory. The annexation ended the centuries-long Crimean slave trade. Under Russian administration, the former khanate was subjected to a long-term policy of de-Tatarisation. Tatar property was confiscated, and Russians were encouraged to settle in the region, sparking waves of Tatar emigration.

Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: qırımtatarlar, къырымтатарлар), or simply Crimeans (qırımlılar, къырымлылар), are an Eastern European Turkic ethnic group and nation indigenous to Crimea. Their ethnogenesis lasted thousands of years in Crimea and the northern regions along the coast of the Black Sea, uniting Mediterranean populations with those of the Eurasian Steppe.

Until the 20th century, Crimean Tatars were the most populous demographic cohort in Crimea, constituting the majority of the peninsula's population as a whole. Following the Russian Empire's annexation of the Crimean Khanate in 1783, they were subjected to attempts at driving them from the region through a combination of physical violence and harassment, forced resettlement, and legalized forms of discrimination. By 1800, between 100,000 and 300,000 Crimean Tatars had left Crimea.

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: Qırımtatar halqınıñ sürgünligi, Cyrillic: Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars that was carried out by Soviet Union authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet state security and the secret police, and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, even Soviet Communist Party members and Red Army soldiers, from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of several ethnicities that were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.

Officially, the Soviet government presented the deportation as a policy of collective punishment, based on its claim that some Crimean Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II, despite the fact that the 20,000 who collaborated with the Axis powers were half the 40,000 who served in the Soviet Red Army. Several modern scholars believe rather that the government deported them as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea, and 80,000 houses and 360,000 acres of land were left abandoned. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions in which they were forced to live during their exile. After the deportation, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence.

Massive renaming of Crimean toponyms by the Soviet government took place during the conversion of the Crimean ASSR into the Crimean Oblast, in four waves (in 1944, 1945, 1948, and 1949). Renaming occurred after the deportation in 1944 of Crimean Tatars and other non-Slavic peoples living in Crimea. The old names were mostly of Crimean Tatar origin, while the new ones were Russian. As a result of the renaming, over 1300 settlements in Crimea received new names (over 90% of the peninsula's settlements). A large part of the villages disappeared in the following decades. After 1990, three settlements returned to their historical names (Koktebel, Partenit, and Sarybash). The renaming is one aspect of de-Tatarization of Crimea.

In 1944, raions (districts) and raion centers of Crimea were renamed; in 1945, village councils and their centers; and in 1948 and 1949, the majority of settlements. This list includes only settlements (i.e., it does not list the renamed districts and village councils). Settlements are divided by districts of the Crimean ASSR with their names before the renaming in the 1940s.

Makhachkala Uytash Airport (Russian: Аэропорт Махачкала Уйташ) (IATA: MCX, ICAO: URML) is a civil airport located near Makhachkala and just south of the city of Kaspiysk which is on the west side of the Caspian Sea. It is named after Amet-khan Sultan, World War II fighter pilot, twice Hero of the Soviet Union. The naming was found controversial by the Crimean Tatars, with whom Amet-khan openly affiliated, as an attempt to detatarize his origins.

South East Airlines (formerly Dagestan Airlines) had its head office on the property of the airport.