“The Transfer of the Crimea to the Ukraine” From: Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR (Munich), vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1954): 30-33.
This transfer reveals the long term policy. The Ukraine, as the largest republic outside of the RSFSR, is quite understandably the republic with local sentiments which all the other republics listen to. It is the center in which, as it were, all the republics are united in their national aspirations. The Central Committee of the KPSU had in mind, as well, the idea of weakening the significance of the Ukraine as such a center when it ordered the Supreme Soviet to issue this decree. In the first place, the Ukraine, having received the Crimea, an area which in fact belongs to the Crimean Tatars, at the same time makes itself an empire to a certain degree, for now it possesses lands without justification based on ethnographic principles. Therefore, it is the Ukraine and not the RSFSR which turns up as a party to the dispute over the lands of the Crimean Tatars. This places all the republics of Central Asia—the whole Moslem world of the USSR—in opposition to the Ukraine.
Full essay here.
