SIX
The Takeover
The native Crimean cast of the 2014 crisis is usually described as Russians, Ukrainians, and Tatars, as if national identities were as distinct as military insignia, superseding generation and class. No matter how you define “ethnicity” (“language,” “blood,” “tradition”), it alone could never have determined how Crimeans reasoned and acted during the crisis. No cultural group on the peninsula was monolithic.
Native Cast
The pending change on the peninsula jeopardized the rights and privileges of some and promised to expand them for others. Russia was not exactly an unknown quantity; on the peninsula, it had a presence, a reputation, and a history. Similarly, Ukraine, which was on the way to losing Crimea, was not a paragon of peace and prosperity. Wages in Ukrainian Crimea were among the lowest in Europe: they averaged $300 a month, versus $700 in the rest of Ukraine, $1,200 in Russia, and $1,500 in Poland. In theory, at least, Crimea was moving from a poorer community to a richer one in becoming part of Russia, with higher living standards, more jobs, and more upward mobility.[1]
For Crimean Russophiles, a group containing many ethnic and cultural backgrounds, reunification with Russia had been a priority for twenty years. In 1994, a democratically elected president of Crimea, Yury Meshkov, actually attempted secession, but Yeltsin’s Kremlin brushed him off; the Russian economy at the time was in shambles, Yeltsin needed U.S. aid, and he did not want to jeopardize his good standing with President Clinton. Also, Moscow was fighting a war in Chechnya and had neither the resources nor the willpower for a conflict with Ukraine.[2]
Nationalist ideologues and populist politicians in mainland Russia, meanwhile, never gave up their claims on Crimea and the “City of Russian Glory.” Unspecified but not insignificant sums of private money fed Russophile cultural and political nongovernmental organizations on the peninsula. An American visitor to the city in the 1990s noted “its passionate Russian-ness, its stunned refusal to acknowledge the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Local newspapers were called Glory to Sevastopol and The Motherland Flag.[3]
Crimean Russophiles hoped reunification would bring structure and order. A Russian anthropologist has called Crimea an “oasis of conservatism,” a condition originating in the service industry built around government residences, in the power of the military, and in the prejudices and insecurities of Russian and Ukrainian settlers now occupying Tatars’ land. Vladimir Putin’s system of governance was built on conservative values. The appeal of order, even if not necessarily coupled with law, increased dramatically after the extremist wing of the Euromaidan triggered violent clashes all over Ukraine.[4]
On the eve of the crisis, Ukraine had eighteen thousand troops stationed in Crimea; Russia around sixteen thousand. Apart from their strictly military role, Russian garrisons on the peninsula were important strategically as close-knit expatriate communities. Sailors, soldiers, and airmen came and went, drafted and then discharged, but their commanding officers stayed longer, often marrying and starting families in Crimea. These military communities were magnets for Russophile groups. There can be little doubt that Moscow secret services had been nurturing them. A prime example is a Sevastopol bikers’ club with the tacky name Night Wolves, which would gain notoriety in the 2014 events.[5]
The pro-Kiev minority in Crimea was no less diverse than the Russophiles. These groups included enterprises owned by or financially dependent on mainland Ukraine; state workers with vested interests in the preservation of the existing order; idealistic patriots; multicultural liberals preferring Ukrainian chaos to Russian authoritarianism; and, last but not least, Tatars who rightfully believed that their autonomy would suffer under Russian rule.
Tatars
Crimean Tatars were allowed to begin the painful process of repatriation from Central Asia only when the Soviet state grew weak, in the late 1980s. Their movement, led by Mustafa Dzhemilev, was never encouraged by Moscow or Kiev. A comrade of Andrei Sakharov, Dzhemilev came from the humanistic intelligentsia tradition. He preached nonviolence. He had in mind something more than physical return to the Green Isle: his plan was to reinvent the Crimean Tatar nation.
Western and Russian historiography traditionally maintained that Crimean Tatars had originated in the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, with the Crimean Khanate forming the “last Mongol outpost.” The new generation of Tatar intelligentsia, raised and educated in exile, decided on a new interpretation of their origins: yes, they were related to Mongols, but also to every other group in Crimea’s early history, including Huns, Alans, Avars, Goths, Greeks. They rejected the label “Crimean Tatars” as a colonialist misnomer, saying they were simply Crimeans, Kirim, the sum of the peninsula’s history, not a mere part of it, unlike Russians and Ukrainians. Anthropologically, this claim was impossible to verify or refute. Intellectually, it was challenging; politically it was confrontational, naming Tatars as the only true indigenous Crimean nation.[6]
In 1979, just 5,000 Tatars lived in Crimea; by the spring of 1987, their numbers had grown to 17,500; by the end of 1990, to 100,000. By 1996, 240,000 had returned, and they made up 9.1 percent of the Crimean population. After that, mass repatriation stalled.[7]
It was estimated that 500,000 Crimean Tatars lived in the former USSR, mostly in Central Asia. Half of them chose to stay where Stalin’s deportation had brought them fifty years earlier. Of course, they made that choice for a reason.
From the start, the authorities—first Soviet, then Ukrainian—intended to keep the return migration limited to Crimea’s northern steppe area, excluding Tatars from the South Shore with its prime property, resorts, and military installations. In that they largely succeeded. The Soviet and Ukrainian central governments refused to provide any legal framework regulating property rights and residence permits for the repatriates. Individual settlers’ fates, therefore, were decided locally: arbitrarily and meanly.[8]
Crimean authorities, citing a not unreasonable need to identify legitimate repatriates, demanded proof of their origins. In practice, however, the requirement was absurd. The repatriate had to have a proof of his or his ancestors’ legal address as of May 18, 1944. But many Tatar families had left their homes without any documents.
Furthermore, for any Tatars who had such documentation, it was a curse. The Crimean authorities sent them back to the rural areas where the majority of Tatars had come from in 1944. Fifty years earlier, their families had been farmers, but now these educated people, born and raised in urban areas of Soviet Central Asia, were “repatriated” to the countryside, where they were not prepared to make a living. This was an appalling case of discrimination: people of other ethnic backgrounds could settle wherever they wanted in Crimea.[9]
There was no concept of restitution. Tatars returning to Crimea had to build their lives from scratch. Unsurprisingly, the building lots they were able to secure tended to be horrible. Ethnic harassment was common, extortion endemic. In many cases, unable to get any approval from the town hall, Tatars settled as squatters. Just 20 percent of their settlements had electricity. Despite the authorities’ precautions and Dzhemilev’s efforts to advocate nonviolence, the early 1990s saw bitter clashes between settlers and Slavs, the latter often supported by corrupt and brutal police.[10]
1
“Chto takoe Krym: tsifry i fakty,” Allcrimea.net, March 8, 2014, http://news.allcrimea.net/news/2014/3/8/chto-takoe-krym-tsifry-i-fakty-6949 (retrieved November 11, 2014).
3
Anna Reid,
5
Roland Oliphant, “Ukraine’s Defence Chief Resigns as Troops Leave Crimea,”