Taking as its starting point the 1783 Russian conquest of the independent Tatar state known as the Crimean Khanate, this book explains how the peninsula's native population, with ethnic roots among the Goths, Kipchak Turks, and Mongols, was scattered across the Ottoman Empire. It also traces their later emigration and the radical transformation of this conservative tribal-religious group into a modern, politically mobilized, secular nation under Soviet rule.