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During the Crimean War, Crimean Tatars were charged en masse with collaborating with the Allies. At the war's conclusion, nearly 200,000 Tatars left the peninsula to relocate in the Ottoman empire. Mara Kozelsky contributes to an understanding of this critical episode in the Crimean War by examining secret surveillance documents, a collection that records complex state attitudes toward Tatars from the Allied landing on the Crimean coast to the Treaty of Paris. These documents reveal that intelligence operations provided no evidence of a collective Tatar guilt and instead testified to the diversity of pressures on state policies toward subject populations on the front lines of battie. Shifting wartime conditions, religious tensions, and repeated crises at the front highlighted unresolved debates about religion and loyalty to the state. Some officials recommended deporting the Tatars, others encouraged their migration, and still others advocated on the Tatars’ behalf.

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Crimea in War and Transformation examines the capacity of violence to permanently alter peoples and spaces.The war named for Crimea began as a border dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empires in 1853, but transferred unexpectedly to Crimea in September 1854 after European Allies joined forces with the Sultan. In the course of one day, belligerent armies doubled the peninsula’s population and pressed the local population into labor. Within one month, ravenous men fell upon orchards like locusts, and slaughtered Crimean livestock. For more than one year, engineering brigades mowed down forests to build barracks. Both sides of the war used scorched earth tactics. At the apex of violence, desperate Russian officials scapegoated Crimea’s native Muslim population, accusing these and other civilians of hoarding food and collaborating with the enemy. Before humanitarian impulses prevailed, officials initiated a deadly deportation, forcing thousands of Tatars from their homes.