The partisan movement in Crimea during the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the condition of partisan’s movement’s in Crimea. While analyzing the preparatory period, author shows the principles of forming, the direct requirements, and the existing time frame, which made impossible reaching the goals the organizers of partisan squads had faced. These goals consisted in founding a stable material base of the future struggle. The author observes human potential and armament of future partisan squads. While discovering first stage of struggle (defined by the author as November 1941 — November 1942) the author explores qualitative changes in partisan movement: massive arrival of soldiers and their occupation of command duties in partisan hierarchy and points strategic mistakes, which lead to confrontation between partisans and locals and, as the result, inner conflict between “army men” and representatives of party nomenclature. The article provides data on the partisans’ numerical strength, shows the consequences of the punishing operations and true reasons of partisans’ hunger. In discussing the second stage of partisan movement (November 1942 — October 1943) the author has shown the violent dynamic of qualitative changes during the struggle, structural transformations in high commandment of Crimean partisans, the strengthening of partial commandment`s role and sending into forests of Crimean Tatar communists. Numerical statistics on this stage are also given. While analyzing the third stage (October 1943 — April the 20th 1944) the author shows the military-political situation around Crimean peninsula, the quantitative and qualitative changes in structure and acts of partisans, the return to massive partisan movement and forests’ potential unsuitability to it. In conclusion the article tells about discriminative politics against Crimean partisans in matter of awarding as well as in personnel matters in already-freed Crimea. It considers the negative influence on historiography of the matter of nation’s deportation. Refs 25.