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The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar Qırımtatar sürgünligi; Russian Депортация крымских татар; Ukrainian Депортація кримських татар) refers to the ethnic cleansing of Tatars from Crimea on 18 May 1944 carried out by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the Soviet security and secret police, under the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within a space of three days, the Soviet NKVD deported at least 191,044 Crimean Tatar people in cattle trains—including women, children, and the elderly, as well as Communists and members of the Red Army−several thousands kilometers away to modern-day Uzbekistan. The deportation was ordered by Stalin as collective punishment for the 15,000–20,000 Tatars who had joined the Wehrmacht during the German occupation of Crimea in World War II, even though 25,033 Crimean Tatars had joined the Soviet Red Army during the war.

Nearly 8,000 people died during the deportation, and tens of thousands would die in later years in the harsh conditions of exile. They were forced to abandon 80,000 houses and 360,000 acres of land. Stalin's regime ordered the eradication of all traces of Crimean Tatars, and in subsequent censuses it was forbidden to even mention that nation in the files of the USSR. In 1956, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin's crimes, including the deportation of various nations, but did not lift the directive forbidding the return of Crimean Tatars. Thus, they were forced to remain in Central Asia for several decades, and it was not until the Perestroika era in the late 1980s that 260,000 Tatars were given permission to return to their homeland. The ban on their return was officially declared null and void, and the Supreme Council of Crimea issued a declaration on 14 November 1989 that the deportations of people during the Stalin era had been a criminal act. Even though the local authorities did not help the Tatars to return and did not compensate them for their lost land, by 2004 the Crimean Tatars had experienced a fragile revival, comprising 12% of the Crimean population. The Russian Federation, the successor state of the USSR, never paid reparations to the Crimean Tatars, nor did it compensate then for their lost property. Also, it never filed any charges or legal proceedings against the perpetrators of this forcible resettlement. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars was a crucial event in the history of that nation and has come to be seen as a symbol of the plight and oppression of smaller nations by the Soviet Union.

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