Ukraine picks ethnic Crimean to sing in Eurovision, with pop song about horrors of Stalin

Ukrainians have chosen a Crimean Tatar singer and her song about the mass deportation of Tatars under Josef Stalin as the country’s entry for this year’s Eurovision song contest.

Susana Jamaladinova, who performs under the stage name Jamala, was chosen Sunday night by the combined votes of a three-person jury and some 380,000 votes from viewers watching the televised final round.

Her song 1944 refers to the year in which Stalin uprooted Tatars from their homeland and shipped them in badly overcrowded trains to Central Asia; thousands died during the journey or starved to death on the barren steppes after they arrived. They were not allowed to return to Crimea until the 1980s; Jamaladinova was born in Kyrgyzstan.

The song is a peculiar combination of a mid-tempo pop confection and anguished lyrics. “When strangers are coming, they come to your house, they kill you all and say ‘We’re not guilty’,” the song begins.

“That terrible year changed forever the life of one fragile woman, my great-grandmother Nazylkhan. Her life was never the same,” Jamaladinovasaid in an interview before the Sunday broadcast.

The song lyrics do not touch on Russia’s annexation of Crimea two years ago, but entering the singer in the hugely popular song contest could raise the issue by implication. Crimean Tatars, who are a Turkic and mostly Muslim ethnic group, say oppression against them has increased since Russia annexed the peninsula.