Nowadays, he maintains, the Tatars are hand-in-glove with the Chechens, and help run secret training camps with other Islamic extremists.
There is certainly great sympathy among the Tatars for the Chechens' plight.
The Tatars, he breezily says, should have stayed in Central Asia.
Sergei Shubainikov, leader of the Congress of Russian Communities, insists that the Tatars deserved to be deported because they collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war.
During the second world war, the mix of nationalities was further increased when Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens and others from the Caucasus were deported to Central Asia.
These divisions, imperfect to start with, were subsequently blurred further by heavy Russian immigration and Stalin's eastward push in the 1930s to ethnic groups such as the Volga Germans and Tatars.
The combination of lingering historical injustice and latent pan-Turkic nationalism provokes extreme hostility from Crimea's Russians, who make up about two-thirds of the peninsula's 2.7m people, whereas the Tatars number less than a tenth.
Viscri's glory is its stunning white medieval church (which gives the place its name) within a high-walled 12th-century citadel which like 100 or so other such German fortifications in Transylvania fended off Turks and Tatars as well as occasionally warring locals.
Yes, the 22, 000 Polish officers (including hundreds of Polish Jews as well as Russian Orthodox, Protestants and Muslim Tatars in Polish uniform) killed in the forest pale against other death counts from the Holocaust to the tens of millions of Soviet citizens who perished under Stalin.
That did not seem to fit very well with Mr Primakov's comments, or with the line taken by a third OVR leader, President Shaimiev of Tatarstan, who initially told the federal authorities he did not want any young Tatars to be conscripted to fight in the south.
The total replacement of the Shari'a of Allah with a Shari'a of men was first done by Muslims during the time of the Tatars, in which they replaced the Shari'a with the laws of Yasiq (or Yasa) during the time of Gengis Khan, which consisted of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic laws.
Or can it become a multinational country where Russian just happens to be the main language and culture, but where Tatars, Kalmyks, and others, who make up more than a sixth of the population, can feel equally at home and respected like, say, Latinos in America or the Swedish minority in Finland?
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