Rollan Kadyev

At his trial he took the stand to issue lengthy statement (over two hours long) in his defense against the prosecution's claims point by point. While he never denied having written the content of various leaflets and letters, he asserted that everything he wrote was truthful, countering the prosecutions claims that he was producing and distributing documents containing "deliberately false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system". Later in his speech he sharply criticized Soviet national policy towards Crimean Tatars as assimilationist to further defend his right to use the word genocide to describe how they were treated; to further emphasize Soviet hypocrisy on the issue of national policy, he brought an article from issue No27 of the 1969 circulation of Novoe vremya, a Russian-language Soviet magazine,[7] and read it aloud followed by his own commentary. The article, produced in the era of the Sino-Soviet split, condemned Chinese national policy in Xinjiang as "reactionary" and claimed that Maoists were trying to dissolve national minorities into the Han nation via forced assimilation. Kadyev then compared the alleged treatment of Uyghurs described in the article to that of Crimean Tatars, noting that the Soviet government treated Crimean Tatars worse than what it alleged China was doing to Uyghurs — with Crimean Tatars being exiled, their national republic dissolved, and not even recognized as a distinct ethnic group — while in contrast, Uyghurs were still allowed to live in Xinjiang and held status as titular people of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, yet the Soviet government was strongly condemning China's alleged treatment of Uyghurs while enforcing an even more harsh policy against Crimean Tatars than what alleged against China. He also compared the December 1966 statement Soviet government official Aleksey Kosygin claiming that absolutely all ethnic groups in the country were equal (even though the 1967 decree claiming to rehabilitate "people of Tatar nationality who formerly lived in Crimea" had not been made at the time) and expressed rage at the blatant lie, and contrasted it with a statement by Nixon (who Kadyev did not hesitate to describe as "an American Imperialist") tacitly acknowledging the plight of Native Americans, followed by the demand that the government at least recognize the bitter truth by acknowledging that Crimean Tatars were wronged instead of making outright lies and denying the reality about the position of Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Union; in the prosecution's filings, the indictments mocked the idea that Crimean Tatars were exile and referred to them as "allegations", put the word "exile" in quotations to delegitimize the defendants desires to return to Crimea, and frequently went out of their way to avoid acknowledging Crimean Tatars to be a distinct ethic group via substituting the proper ethnonym "Crimean Tatar" with various degrading euphemisms.[2][8][9]

Kadyev further attacked the national policy against Crimean Tatars as being fundamentally anti-Leninist, citing a 1927 Crimean magazine article that described ideal Leninist national policy in Crimea as one that empowers Crimean Tatars in Crimea to build communism, completely contrary to the Stalinist policy of a Crimea without Crimean Tatars. He later went on to point out how groundless the accusations against other defendants in the trial, describing as "lawless" the fact that part of the criminal case against Izzet Khairov and Nurfet Murakhas was a so-called "libelous" note in they left in the guest book at the Crimean Regional Museum of Local Lore during their trip to Crimea in which they requested that various Crimean Tatar war heroes and partisans including Bekir Osmanov be mentioned in museum, along with a note that Heroes of the Soviet Union Teyfuq Abdul, Uzeir Abduramanov, Abduraim Reshidov, and Seytnafe Seytveliyev (who were all Crimean Tatar) should have their portraits included in the museum's photo gallery of Crimeans awarded the title. Before eventually ending is speech with the cry "Crimea is the homeland of the Crimean Tatars", towards the end of his speech he issued the powerful lines that he became famous for:[2]

The Motherland rejected us in 1944, throwing us into exile from our native land. The Motherland rejected in 1945, eliminating the national statehood of our people [by dissolving the Crimean ASSR]. The Motherland rejected us in 1956, taking away the name of Crimean Tatar from us and recognizing us as "rooted" in the places of exile. The Motherland rejected us today too, having put us in the dock only because we could not come to terms with the situation of our outcast

Despite his strong and passionate defense refuting the prosecution's claims, he and all the other defendants were found guilty, and he was sentenced to three years in prison on 5 August 1969.[2] His prophetic warnings that fundamentally un-Leninist national policy in blatant violation of the constitution was detrimental to preserving the union went unheeded.[10]

After spending three years in a penal colony he returned his activities with the Crimean Tatar civil rights movement, co-authoring the Cessation Statement addressed to the Central Committee of the CPSU demanding the complete abolition of all decrees and resolutions targeting and discriminating against Crimean Tatars. In April 1977 he wrote a letter to Brezhnev criticizing the current version of the Soviet constitution and the document's contradictory stance on the national issue (since it proclaimed to be supportive of minorities yet officially solidified Crimea's status as a mere oblast of the Ukrainian SSR, impeding restoration of the Crimean ASSR sought by Crimean Tatars).[1][11]

In September 1979 he was called to a faculty meeting at the university in which he was publicly berated and reprimanded before being given a "last warning" to fall in line and stop supporting the Crimean Tatar movement, and on 22 September that year one of the largest newspapers in the region, Pravda Vostoka, published a lengthy article shaming him for the same reason. Later that year, Kadyev was arrested on charges of "malicious hooliganism" for which he was sentenced to three years in strict regime camps in January 1980; the incident that led to the charges took place on 28 November when a party organizer publicly demeaned him in front of students, making Kadyev lose his temper and hit him. In February 1981, while he was imprisoned in the Komi ASSR, an open letter appealing to Ayshe Seitmuratova, sharply criticizing her activities with Radio Liberty in the United States, was published in the newspapers Lenin Bayrağı and Pravda Vostoka appearing to be written and signed by him; later in 1982 several other Crimean Tatars received typewritten letters appearing to be from him saying he wrote the letter entirely voluntarily without pressure from authorities. Speculation remains as to the extent to which Kadyev agreed with the message of the letters, or even wrote them: Mustafa Dzhemilev has suggested that Kadyev did not write the letter at all but was merely forced to sign its contents while in prison,[12] and historian Edward Allworth indicated Kadyev was probably blackmailed by the KGB into signing them;[13] Yuri Osmanov and Mikhail Guboglo indicate that the system eventually broke Kadyev and convinced him to give up in order to get paroled early;[14][15] Gulnara Bekirova implied that the KGB had gotten Kadyev to turn on the movement altogether, while Ruslan Eminov insists that Kadyev changed his tone in the 1980s for reasons of political pragmatism and still firmly desired right of return, and did so simply because he thought a different approach would have greater chances of success.[16] Nevertheless, it is universally agreed that he was at the forefront of the Crimean Tatar movement in its early years, and always feared death of the nation via assimilation. Eventually, he was one of the delegates to the 1987 meeting in Moscow with high-ranking leaders in the government, where he expressed his concerns, which were in agreement with some of the more moderate members of the delegation but were the subject of harsh disagreement with others such as Dzhemilev.[13][17][18]