Staunton, May 22 – Moscow is seeking to force the mufti of Crimea to break with the Crimean Tatar Mejlis or face the prospect that he and his Crimean Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) will be “marginalized” by the authorities who will move to create “a more adequate centralized structure” for the Muslims of Crimea, according […]
Staunton, May 21 – As Harvard historian Richard Pipes documented a half century ago, Stalin’s first great act of ethno-political engineering was the division of the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Middle Volga as part of a broader effort to weaken Kazan’s influence and that of the Muslim national communists led by Sultan-Galiyev. Now, that […]
Staunton, May 18 – Despite a ban on any demonstrations by the Russian occupation authorities and a decision by the Milli Mejlis not to hold a mass commemoration lest it become the occasion for a Russian provocation, thousands of Crimean Tatars have assembled in their homeland today to mark the 70th anniversary of their deportation […]
Staunton, April 27 – One of the darkest pages in Soviet and indeed Russian history was the anti-cosmopolitan campaign Stalin unleashed against everything Western in 1949, a campaign that ultimately focused on the Jews whom the Soviet dictator was planning to deport beyond the Urals at the time of his death. Even those who remain […]
Staunton, April 19 – In a demonstration of principled toughness, Mustafa Cemilev, the longtime leader of the Crimean Tatars and a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, has very publicly returned to his homeland after declaring that he remains a Ukrainian citizen and that some in Moscow are thinking about a new deportation of his people. […]
Staunton, March 21 – By annexing Crimea, Vladimir Putin has created “the only ethnic Russian republic” within the Russian Federation, an ethnicization of political life there that will begin by threatening the Crimean Tatars with a new round of repression and end by threatening more of Russia’s neighbors and Russia itself, according to Renat Akhmetov. […]
Following the race riots in the southern Moscow district of Biryulyovo, where ethnic-Russian Neo-Nazis attacked a warehouse full of immigrants, Moscow police were forced to act to appease the furious Russian nationalists. And act they did. Police raided warehouses, arrested migrants, and filmed the beating and humiliation of one migrant who stands accused of committing […]
