Part 3, "The Crimean Tatars in the USSR," describes mainly the tragic fate of the Tatars during and after the Second World War. Accused collectively of "treason" and "collaboration" with the Germans, deported in 1943 to Siberia and Central Asia, rehabilitated after Stalin's death-but not allowed to return to their homeland, Crimea, now entirely occupied by Slav settlers-some four hundred thousand Tatars currently live in their places of deportation and are condemned to assimilation by the local

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... population. The pathetic and seemingly hopeless struggle of this small community against the Soviet state is the subject matter of the last chapter of this book, which is based primarily on samizdat material.