At the beginning of this century, in Crimea, among a circle of intellectuals, some Crimean Tatars decided to illustrate the scale of their people’s losses. Simply put, just how much of a failure we are as a people. This person simply showed two political maps of Europe: one from the 18th century and one from the 21st. The first showed fewer than twenty states; the second, more than forty. 

It turned out that not a single people who had a state in the 18th century lost it in the 21st. Some saw their territories shrink, others expanded. Another three dozen peoples found their national home.  And only one people in Europe who had a state in the 18th century do not have one now: the Crimean Tatars. 

No lengthy analysis, no investigation of causes, no consideration of development options. Just two maps and a stark conclusion. No one has dropped out of the top league of nations with a state in Europe 

except us. Over two hundred years, many nations have formed states of varying degrees of influence in this “professional league.” The Crimean Tatars made their last attempt in 1917, and having lost their homeland in 1944 as well, for many years they were forced to regard the Soviet autonomy of 1921 as the pinnacle of their statehood—an autonomy for whose restoration they fought for several decades in exile.

Such a brief look at history is sobering. It plunges some into depression. It leads others to a frantic search for causes and culprits. Some place all the blame on external factors, idealizing the people and turning them into innocent victims of historical circumstances. Some use methods suitable for individual psychotherapy, trying to rid themselves of the “external locus of control” and place the blame for all failures on the people themselves or on the leaders who implemented failed policies. 

The truth does not lie somewhere in the middle. It simply does not exist, even if someone scientifically proves what was the main factor in the state’s collapse: missing the Industrial Revolution and economic backwardness; an unfavorable geographical location—Crimea is, after all, a pocket that is easy to capture from both the mainland and the sea; the absence of medieval absolutism and the weakness of the monarchy…

Today, there are no individuals responsible for this, and the political models of monarchy and absolutism, in my view, are irrelevant. Until 1917, the nation could move forward by reclaiming its lost sovereignty; after 1944, the focus was on physical survival and reinventing itself. And this rebirth of the nation is more reminiscent of biological regeneration, a process found in very few species, where the organism rebuilds itself from surviving cells.

In this journey, the Crimean Tatars have been pioneers in many ways. We did not become like the Etruscans, whose language remains undeciphered to this day. We are not the Livonians, who were wiped out by the ceaseless wars in the Baltic region. We are a people who were supposed to disappear—like the Volga Germans, the Turks of Meskhetia, or the Dzungars.

But it is not even survival that has made the Crimean Tatars, over the past 10–12 years, a role model for dozens of other stateless nations. A new perspective on the Crimean Tatars has emerged. An external perspective that arose with the occupation of Crimea in 2014. To paraphrase Turkish President Erdogan, who has been insisting for many years that the world is bigger than the five members of the UN Security Council, the world is bigger than 200 states. The population of stateless peoples and nations is at least 300 million people. That is twice the population of Russia and nearly equivalent to the population of the United States. And not all of them are as successful as the Scots or the Basques.

The Great War has forced the world to speak openly about Russia’s colonial nature. Moscow’s desire to destroy Ukraine has led to the voices of those nations and peoples within the Russian Federation—whose enslavement the world preferred to ignore—now being heard.

Russia, which started this war under the slogan of “denazifying” Ukraine, has been dealt a counterblow. The idea of decolonizing Russia itself has emerged. An idea that at first seemed like the fantasies of Ukrainian ideologues is slowly but surely taking root in the minds of European elites. An idea designed to shatter the myth of an anti-colonial Moscow, which for many years was an ally of African and Asian national liberation movements.

It is not that difficult to feel sorry for the nearly extinct Karaites and Ubykhs. It is far more difficult to support the peoples of Russia, who under Putin have lost the remnants of the rights they received back in Lenin’s time, because this requires a clear understanding—that the liquidation of the Russian Empire must be completed. Unlike the British Empire and the colonial French Republic, Russia is shrinking in cycles through a process of half-decay and therefore still exists.

The Tatars (of Kazan) and Bashkirs, the Sakha (Yakuts) and Tuvans, the Circassians and Udmurts, the Chechens and Kalmyks. Dozens of peoples with their own languages, cultures, and histories of statehood will, in the foreseeable future, have an interest in parting ways with Moscow, if only to avoid bearing joint responsibility for the crimes of the Russian regime. Their nominal statehood within an aggressor nation has ceased to protect what remains of their identity, and they have no other means of preservation and development at this time.

And it turned out that it was the Crimean Tatar national movement that developed the systems and mechanisms now gaining visibility in the world’s most elite capitals: Washington, Berlin, and London.

All anti-colonial initiatives previously known to the world were based on armed struggle, guerrilla warfare, or outright terror. The Crimean Tatar movement has faced such temptations many times, but never in history has it employed the methods of the Kurdish PKK, the Armenian ASALA, or Palestinian groups. Nonviolent resistance was the form of struggle with which the dissident movement originated in the USSR. Initiative groups in the places of deportation, which sent representatives of the peoples to Moscow to draw attention to Stalin’s atrocities, petition campaigns, communication with foreign journalists, hunger strikes, pickets, unauthorized returns to Crimea, and the unauthorized occupation of land for building homes (those very “land seizures,” which allowed them to return to Crimea without conflict over Crimean Tatar real estate that had been occupied by settlers from Russia)—all of this gradually led to the formation in 1991 of the national parliament—the Kurultai, the national government—the Mejlis, and other institutions, including those opposed to the Mejlis. The Crimean Tatars created an internal political market in which administrative resources emerged.

The struggle for these resources gave rise to dozens of political, religious, educational, and cultural organizations (quasi-parties), transforming the Crimean Tatars into an extremely politicized yet simultaneously extremely active nation. A nation without a state, but with all the elements of statehood except the apparatus of violence.

Having fallen out of the top league of sovereign nations, the Crimean Tatars have created a model of a people who do not merely survive, but live a full life, visible to many other ethnic groups, including those with states.

There are dozens of examples in the world where the influence of states is limited to a voice in the UN General Assembly, and their basic economic survival depends on aid from wealthy countries. Against this backdrop, the stateless Crimean Tatars have become a role model for those who are just embarking on the path of revival. The dozens of meetings that delegations from Ingushetia, Circassia, and other peoples of Russia hold with the Mejlis to study the path of long-term and institutionalized struggle are the best evidence that the model, which originated in the exile camps of Central Asia, has proven to be a viable form of preservation and rapid revival when a window of opportunity opens.

It is often said that the current Mejlis is a House of Lords consisting of a few dozen elderly men who have lost their initiative and are fighting only to preserve their status. Perhaps some of the criticism directed at this representative body is justified, and the legalization of the Mejlis—which began with a resolution by the Ukrainian parliament in 2014, continued with the Law on Indigenous Peoples in 2021, and concluded with a presidential decree in April 2026—presents national institutions with a new challenge: elections, the creation of a system of checks and balances, the preservation of pluralistic democracy, and so on. But that is a topic for another article…