Russia’s Destructive “Restoration” on Crimean Indigenous People’s Cultural Heritage Site

Since the Soviet era, Russia has shown a tendency to disrespect and disregard historical and cultural heritages. They have had a bad track record of chauvinism, as they had never stopped enforcing russification on the people and territory they conquered since the time of Tsarist Russia. But during the Soviet times, the destruction of traditional cultures of various ethnic groups within the USSR national border was unprecedented. After the USSR collapsed, despite old traditions and ways of life being rediscovered and reembraced into the daily life of citizens across Russia, the Russian government has not been fulfilling its responsibility properly for heritage protection, especially on those they deemed “not belong to Russia.” An example of this is the so-called “restoration” of the Khan Palace in Bakhchysarai, Crimea.

To give a brief background to this discussion, the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Muslim population, are the biggest group of Indigenous people in Crimea and Ukraine, numbering less than 300,000 population in Crimea, and they have been living under constant oppression since Crimea was annexed by Russia since 2014. Many of their human rights activists were accused by the Russian authorities of Islam extremist without evidence and detained or “made disappear” (in a style similar to the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, which deals with dissidents). Historically, the relationship between them and the Russian has not been good. In 1944, being accused by Stalin of “Nazi collaborators,” the entire Crimean Tatar population was deported to Central Asia. After decades of struggling and peacefully expressing the will to return their homeland to the Soviet authorities, they were finally allowed to return to Crimea in 1989. Despite facing various problems after returning to their homeland, many were able to re-establish themselves and lived a relatively peaceful and quiet life until 2014. They have to live under constant fear of oppression and are forced to remain silent even when they receive unequal treatment.