Tatarzy Krymscy - naród czy mniejszość etniczna: w poszukiwaniu nowej drogi odrodzenia narodowego
The Crimean tatars – a nation or an ethnic minority: in search for a new way of national revival

Summary/Abstract: The Russian Empire, increasing its aggressive expansion to all sites of the world, conquered the Crimean Khanate in 1783. This Khanate was the only one of its kind link connecting the European (Christian) and Asian (Islamic) civilizations. It was the state of high multilateral culture with strong – in the beginning of the New Times – secularism trends and democratic bases of social and political life (there was no serfdom, the equality of rights existed on the high level, tolerance with regard to religious and ethnic communities dominated, and these communities-minorities co-existed and developed on the Peninsula – in the Tatar Crimea – in the peace). Within the framework of the Crimean Khanate the process of ethnic genesis of the Crimean-Tatar people as an ethnic-cultural subject was completed, although many differences of tribal origin and regional character remained within this unity and expressed in the heterogeneity of the anthropologic types, of every-day life’s tradition and of dialects spread between the Tatars living in the North Crimean steppe, in the Mountains (highland) and on the South Coast of the Peninsula. That ethnic community (Crimean Tatars) was a nation in the modern meaning of this word, it had its own state, intellectual elite, high organization and culture. The destruction of this state-nation by the Russian Empire and the systematic genocide if the Crimean Tatars during next two centuries, reached its culmination in the act of the total deportation on May 18th 1944, are the treasons and international-large crimes. The annexation of the Crimea by the Russian Federation on March 2014 (its tearing away from the Ukrainian state and military occupation) means the continuation of this felonious policy, which the Crimean Tatars resist, displaying bravery in the very difficult condition.

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