The Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea reported suspicion to Joseph Stalin and Lavrenty Beria about their involvement in the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and other indigenous peoples of the peninsula. From a political point of view, this kind of statement, of course, must testify to respect for memory and readiness to call those responsible for crimes against humanity. But for the sake of justice, it must be said that Stalin, Beria and other Soviet leaders never denied their involvement in the eviction of the Crimean Tatars. Moreover, they were proud of this deportation.

From my point of view, historical justice consists in another - in restoring the lost as much as possible. One hundred years ago it could seem that the Jews forever lost their national focus, 70 years ago - that most of this people is irretrievably destroyed. And today Israel is not history, but modernity, and the Jewish people are not a fragment of the past, but part of this. But this required the political will of free nations.

Crimean Tatars have the same right to their national home in the Crimea, as Jews to their state in the Promised Land. The fact that most of the Crimean Tatars had to leave their lands during the times of the Russian Empire did not diminish, but strengthened the right of the remaining and returning ones - the Jews were also expelled from their land by the Roman emperor Titus Flavius. The question, however, is how to exercise this right.

Crimean autonomy was restored in the years of Soviet perestroika precisely as an autonomy of the indigenous peoples of the Crimea - this was written in black and white in the corresponding decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. But in practice this decision has never been implemented. Moreover, for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, not national but territorial autonomy appeared on its map. Autonomy does not understand whom. Each national autonomy in Russia and other Soviet republics has always been associated with the national component, with the realization of state rights, and the Crimean Tatars, after the restoration of autonomy, were deprived of these rights - first in the Ukrainian SSR, and later in independent Ukraine.

It seemed to the leadership of the new state that agreements with the Crimean regional committee of the party, which turned into the Supreme Council of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and incorporated into its composition a variety of bandits, are more reliable than the people for whom autonomy was created. After the annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin, little has changed. The Republic of Crimea appeared already in the Constitution of Russia, which makes one wonder: what is its autonomous meaning? If the majority of Russians - the Russians and the majority of the Crimean population - are Russian, and the activists of the indigenous people are perceived as troublemakers, why Crimea is a republic? Why do you need a Russian republic in Russia?.

This question is not answered - and in the near future there will be no. "Autonomy" of the Crimea, restored for the sake of indigenous peoples, has turned into an effective tool for suppressing the rights of these peoples.

While the Crimea will remain annexed by Russia, it will remain only as a "Russian republic that has joined its native land". But even in Ukraine the proposals to impart the status of the Crimean-Tatar autonomy to the annexed Crimea - while at least on paper - face the secret and obvious resistance of home-grown chauvinists, differing from chauvinists in Moscow only by the fact that they are on the other side of the barricade.

Sometimes - instead of suspecting Stalin - it's better to suspect yourself.

Original.