The same day — 45 years later
On 14 November 1944 the people began to be deported from 212 villages. On 14 November 1989, exactly 45 years later, the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted Declaration No. 772-I “On recognising as illegal and criminal the repressive acts against peoples subjected to forced resettlement, and on securing their rights”.
What it says
The Declaration lists the peoples deported during the Second World War: Balkars, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachays, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Meskhetian Turks, Chechens. Our people is named in it directly, under its own name. It also says the same policy affected Koreans, Greeks, Kurds and others.
The Supreme Soviet “unconditionally condemns the practice of forcibly resettling whole peoples” as a grave crime, and guarantees that the violation of human rights at state level “will never happen again”. It also says that laws are needed to fully restore the rights of all the peoples who suffered.
Why we can be proud of this
It is not a pardon. The people were guilty of nothing, and there was nothing to forgive. It is the state admitting its own guilt: the country’s highest body, in its own words, called the deportation a crime. It was won by people who for decades wrote letters, collected signatures and travelled to Moscow — our elders among them.
What came next
On 7 March 1991 the USSR Supreme Soviet, by resolution No. 2013-I, annulled the acts on which the bans rested. Among them were article 2 of the decree of 28 April 1956 (it lifted the special-settlement regime from Turks, Kurds, Hemshins and others, but did not allow them to go home) and a 1968 act concerning Turks, Kurds, Hemshins and Azerbaijanis who had lived in the Georgian SSR.
What the Declaration did not change
It did not bring the people home. In the summer of 1989, a few months before it, after the events in the Fergana Valley, thousands of families were forced to leave their homes a second time. The Declaration gave no right to return to Meskhetia; Georgia opened that path with its own law only in 2007. That is why 14 November is both a day of remembrance and the day the truth was said aloud.
How to say it
Briefly and accurately: “On 14 November 1989 the USSR Supreme Soviet recognised the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks as illegal and criminal.” The document number is 772-I; it was published in the Gazette of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 1990, No. 23, item 449.
More about the deportation itself is in “The deportation of 1944”; you can write the name of a relative on the Day of Remembrance page.
