After the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet government no longer recognized Crimean Tatars as a distinct ethnic group and forbade internal passports and official documents from using the term in the nationality section despite previously permitting it.
The Steppe Crimean Tatars are of Kipchak Nogay origin;[1] the Mountain Tats descend from all pre-Nogay inhabitants of Crimea who adopted Islam;[2][3] the Yaliboylu Crimean Tatars are Oghuz descend from coastal Europeans like Greeks, Italians, and Armenians who converted to Islam after the arrival of the Golden Horde;[4][2] and the Crimean Roma are a mixture of different waves of Romani Muslims who came to Crimea before Russian rule.
[22][23] Uzeir Abduramanov, a full-blooded Crimean Tatar born and raised in Crimea,[24] was labeled as an Azerbaijani in a photo gallery of Heroes of the Soviet Union in a 1944 issue of the popular magazine Ogonyok.
[28] In 1984 the government of the Uzbek SSR began formally allowing use of the term in very limited contexts, such as specifying the language of newspapers and radio programs.
[29] Despite this, the government continued to withhold official recognition of Crimean Tatars as a distinct ethnic group.
[31][32] While Crimean Tatars were heavily restricted in using their ethnonym, the government freely used the term in the context of describing accusations of mass treason by Crimean Tatars, like the 1987 TASS statement issued at the start of the Gromyko Commission in perestroika that heavily detailed allegations of collaboration, many false, by Crimean Tatars during World War II.