Russian historians have tended to argue that  Crimean Tatars had no settled “civilization” functioning other than being horse-borne slave traders for the Ottomans.

Crimean Tatars’ claim of statehood survived and indeed flourished until 1783, as demonstrated by the Girays’ palace at Bakhchisaray, the magnificent Cuma Cami mosque, and the madras at Zincirli Medresa.

The Khanate also outlasted all other remnants of the Golden Horde, such as Kazan and Astrakhan, which were conquered by Ivan IV in 1552 and in 1556 respectively.

The Khanate’s military might was a match for — and often a serious threat to — Moscow, parts of which were burnt down by the Crimean Tatars in 1571. No less than 83 percent of the population of Crimea was made up of Crimean Tatars at the time of its annexation in 1783.

Successive waves of emigration, particularly at the time of the Crimean War in the 1850s, reduced the Crimean Tatar population to 26 percent by 1921, but they were still strong enough to set up an assembly, the Qurultay, after the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917.

Bolsheviks were forced to concede the creation of a Crimean Soviet Republic, which was a territorial, not an ethnic one. However, it resulted in a brief period of ethnic power sharing between Russians, Ukrainians, and Crimean Tatars in the 1920s.

The First World War brought disaster; Stalin and Beria accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with Germans, and Tatars were deported en masse overnight to Central Asia on 18 May 1944.

Some 188,000 were forcibly deported; almost half died on route or soon after. Despite a well-organized protest campaign beginning in the 1960s, return to Crimea only became possible when the Soviet Union collapsed in early 1990s.

Most Crimean Tatars continue to look to the Khanate as the only possible Crimean Tatars’ “Golden Age” though some are nostalgic for the 1920s.

Interestingly, however, there is also a theory that modern Crimean Tatars are descendents of the Kipchaks or Polovtsians who dominated southern Eurasia from the 9th century until their defeat by the Mongols in 1241.

Most claim they were Turkic-speaking Muslims, but there is also a version of history that says that they were “Turkic-speaking Arians”, which is designed to paint the Crimean Tatars in a more Slav-friendly, semi-European light. The Kipchaks, it is claimed, had a more developed civilization that the nomadic Kazakhs or Kalmyks.

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