The Crimean Nexus: Putin's War and the Clash of Civilizations

INTRODUCTION Green Isle, Paradise Lost

Not everyone can find the Crimean peninsula on a map, but once you do, its shape, like that of Italy, is hard to forget. Variously compared to a leaf, a stingray, a pendant, and an eagle, it barely touches on the continent, protruding with almost perfect geometrical precision into the center of the Black Sea.

The thin stem making Crimea not an island is called Perekop Isthmus. The Black Sea squeezes it from the west, and Sivash, a bay of the Sea of Azov, from the east. Sivash is not really a bay but rather a shape-shifting conglomerate of lakes, islets, and shoals about forty miles wide whose silt, salt, and mud contours have changed numerous times within human memory.

The road to Kiev runs through Perekop, a bottleneck only four miles wide—roughly the distance between Fourteenth and Ninety-sixth streets in Manhattan. The other dry-land connection to the mainland is a short man-made bridge across the Sivash; that road takes you to Moscow. Close the two connections, and Crimea would effectively become an island.

Entering Crimea is a joy. One moment you are on the plowed-up steppe, enduring five hours of monotony by train or car; then, in a split second, you are on a thin strip of land, barely wide enough to support the road, and there are sea bays all around, as far as the eye can see. The pink, blue, and green coves, flats, shoals, and promontories are all hazy, uncertain, tentative; ebbing and flowing. In a moment you start actually smelling the haze. God help you if your train slows down or your car stalls, because Sivash emits sulfur dioxide. In plain language, it reeks. The Turkic name Sivash means “dirt”; in Slavic languages, the bay is equally uncharitably but realistically known as Gniloye More—the Rotten Sea.

Once past Sivash, you find yourself back on the steppe, not quite distinguishable from the one you left half an hour before; perhaps it looks a shade softer and greener, but that may be only your expectant mood, a result, in the words of an early traveler, of “those paradisiacal ideas” you had formed of the peninsula’s beauty. Here the peninsula swells, its two wings unfolding, the western to Cape Tarkhankut, the eastern to Kerch Strait; to the south there are mountains, and beyond them the subtropical South Shore, the area you are very likely headed toward, because that’s what most people come to Crimea for: the glittering resort town of Yalta, and the naval legend, the City of the Russian Glory, Sevastopol.[1]

Not terribly tall—a mile at most—the Crimean Mountains are still not to be taken lightly. Erosion of the limestone they are made of has turned the range into a wall. Of the three roads traversing it, two are closed by the snow between November and April. A trekker has more options, but those are not numerous either: the southern side of the range is a cliff; the few canyons are too rocky and slippery for a human to negotiate comfortably; depending on your definition of a mountain pass, there are three to seven notches, which cannot be discovered without extensive homework or a day or two of painful stumbling around.

The ridge is cut into five plateaus still bearing Greek or Turkic names: Ai Petri, Babughan, Chatyr Dagh, Demerdji, Karabi. These plateaus are separated by gorges, and to get from plateau A to plateau B you have to follow the gorge edge, a detour easily taking half a day. On the plateaus, rain and wind have eaten up most of the soil, leaving a barren surface studded with vertically standing limestone arrows, or “dragon teeth” in local speak. There is no water to be found on the plateaus in summertime, except in caves.

Across the ridge sits the subtropical littoral, commonly referred to as the South Shore: orchards, castles, palaces, whitewashed villages, parks; beaches, fruit markets, sweet wine; sunburn, queues, peddlers, souvenirs, nightlife.

Crimea is fully maritime, and it is possible to chart its past through the stories of the shipwrecks sitting on the seabed around its coasts: Athenian, Roman, Byzantine, Genoese; British in the Crimean War, Soviet in World War II. The sea has had many names, always with some unwelcoming connotation. The name the Greeks gave it, Pontus Axeinos, “Dark,” lives today as Kara Deniz in Turkish, Black Sea in English, Chornoye More in Russian, Chorne in Ukrainian, and Marea Neagra in Romanian.[2]

The Black Sea bottom is largely hydrogen sulfide, like oceans of a planet from a science-fiction story. The “largest mass of lifeless water in the world,” the author of a Black Sea travelogue, Neal Ascherson, called it. Very low in oxygen, the bottom waters support little life, and that makes it an ideal excavation site for marine archeology: organic matter, such as a ship’s hull, decomposes there very slowly, so that artifacts may sit unspoiled for centuries. An unknown scroll covered with Aristotle’s handwriting could still be lying in some shipwreck’s hold, curling in a sealed amphora, the universal container of antiquity. Deep-sea archeology is extremely costly, and so far just one ancient wreck has been recovered, a Byzantine ship off Turkish Sinop. Christened Sinop D, it is supposed to be the best-preserved underwater artifact ever found.[3]

The existence of the hydrogen sulfide layer explains the columns of fire reportedly seen rising from the sea after earthquakes. In 2007, an article in a European scientific journal caused a media splash by arguing that the Black Sea was so combustible that if an asteroid ever hit it, the release of fire and gas would annihilate all life along its coasts.[4]

The other sea, the one washing Crimea’s eastern shore, Azov, has mud volcanoes. There, the Byzantine Greeks collected naphtha, a combustible liquid similar to gasoline, to use in hand grenades, remembered famously as “Greek fire.” A nineteenth-century traveler compared the naphtha springs to “the chimneys of the infernal regions, as the crust of the soil is pierced with black holes surmounted by little cones, from whence the mud and gas bubble up together. The whole soil around trembles when walked upon, and one fears to sink into the bowels of the earth.” Perhaps because of the naphtha and the volcanoes, one interpretation of Greek myths puts the entrance to Hades on the Azov Sea. Henry James used the sea as a symbol of absolute evil in The Turn of the Screw.[5]

Descriptions of Crimea can be found in the texts forming the early Western canon: Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon, Strabo, Pliny. Compared with parts of the eastern Mediterranean such as Peloponnesus or Cyprus, Crimea is not particularly striking, but it is the only chunk of land anywhere near the Mediterranean that Russia and Ukraine have ever owned. Crimea is their only connection to the cradle of the Western world, and this is part of the reason why both nations cling to the peninsula so fiercely.

A random dig in the Crimean soil may turn up chunks of Venetian pottery, an Ottoman coin, and German shrapnel. Every old building in use today was very likely something else in the past: a church was a mosque, a grain depot was a church, a rental slum was a villa, a town library was a customs house. There is hardly a square mile where you would not come across the ruins of past habitats—farms, monasteries, mosques, forts, castles, walled gardens, shepherds’ shelters, terraces, wells. It doesn’t matter where you go—could be a notch saddling a mountain range or a ravine in the prairie—ruins will be there, signifying that people once lived on that spot before someone came and drove them away or killed them.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s quip about the Balkans, Crimea has produced more history than it can consume, and as in the Balkans, the excess has led to strife. The perpetual struggle for Crimea has given the peninsula a mythical clout as a “paradise lost” for a surprising range of cultures. The Nazis, for example, believed it was the homeland of Tyrol Germans. With the German boots on the ground in 1941, Hitler renamed Crimea Gotenland and—prematurely as it happened—ordered a repatriation program.

Two devastating wars of the twentieth century—the Russian civil war of 1917–1920 and World War II—brought massacres, deportation, and emigration so massive that today just 10 percent of Crimean families can claim uninterrupted presence on the peninsula going back farther than three generations. Out of today’s population of two million, 58 percent identify as Russian, 24 percent as Ukrainian, and 12 percent as Tatar, the remaining 6 percent split among Jews, Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Byelorussians.[6]

But what makes the peninsula so appealing for that part of the world that Moscow was willing to sacrifice its place at the table of “civilized” nations to annex it in 2014?

What is Crimea?

Climatically, the peninsula is a shard of the Mediterranean, the northernmost subtropics, a Côte d’Azur on the edge of snow and ice. Tatars called it Green Isle; Catherine the Great called it Eden; an early American visitor said it was “an emerald in a sea of sapphire.”[7]

Geopolitically, Crimea is the gateway to the Eurasian heartland. A maritime citadel in the middle of the Black Sea, colonized by every major Mediterranean power from the Romans to the Ottomans, Crimea allows an empire to project its presence onto the Caucasus and the Middle East. Whoever rules Crimea commands the Black Sea, and who rules the Black Sea commands the continental trade routes between the Balkans and China. The famed Silk Road started in the Crimean port of Kaffa (today’s Feodosia). In the twenty-first century, the Black Sea is an energy connector. Fifty tankers a day sail through the Bosporus, and the Blue Stream pipeline brings Russian natural gas to Turkey. Currently, Moscow is pushing for a megaproject, a trans–Black Sea pipeline that would deliver Russian gas straight to southern Europe.

Culturally, Crimea sits on a great divide between “East” and “West,” where European Christendom meets the Middle Eastern lands of Islam. In the twenty-first century, it is where NATO and the European Union’s territory comes in contact with Eurasian heartlands. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine involves Russia and the West; in Crimea, it is tripartite because Crimea is as much a part of the Islamic world as it is part of the West and Russia. Unsurprisingly, Crimea’s identity is transient, fleeting, ever evolving, never reaching a final point. Each culture sees its own Crimea.

All of this makes Crimea a linchpin of Eurasian security, a flashpoint of conflicting ideologies, and a petri dish for figuring out the rules of engagement in the new cold war.

The conflict has been in the making for a very long time. Neal Ascherson wrote in 1996 that the Black Sea coasts belonged “to all their people, but also to none of them”; when “some fantasy of national unity” arrives, the “apparent solidarity of centuries can dissolve within days or hours.” A territory traditionally prized and contested, a place with no permanent ethnic core, a national fetish for Russians, Ukrainians, and Tatars, Crimea has long been a time bomb. When the bomb went off in 2014, it jump-started the separatists’ insurgency in eastern Ukraine and sent waves of foreboding throughout Eastern Europe.[8]

In his World War II memoir Lost Victories, the German field marshal Erich von Manstein recalls the funeral of his “truest comrade of all,” the driver Fritz Nagel, a man with “frank brown eyes” who was killed in an air raid in the summer of 1942. “We buried him,” Manstein writes, “alongside all our other German and Italian comrades in the Yalta cemetery high above the sea—perhaps one of the most lovely spots on the whole of that glorious coastline.”[9] Five years later, my grandfather died in Yalta, and in all honesty, I cannot be sure that the 1947 graves were not dug on top of the graves of the Axis soldiers. Three years after the occupation, enemy burials were not something people in Eastern Europe respected or honored.

My mother was ten at the time, my grandmother thirty-three, the dead man thirty-two.

I am a third-generation Crimean, a fact that makes me suspect in the eyes of every warring faction. I am expected to know where my allegiances are, and I don’t. According to my U.S. passport, I was born in Ukraine; my certificate of naturalization lists my previous citizenship as “Russian”; some older immigration documents suggest I come from the USSR.

Like so many others, ours was a family of mutts. It depresses me to hear how casually many people from that part of the world call themselves “Russian” or “Ukrainian.” Ethnicity is an empty word, and culture is hardly better. In the end it is little more than the mother tongue and an idiosyncratic set of prejudices.

Because the archives in the former USSR are only partially open to the public, it is a miracle I was able to trace our family roots to the late eighteenth century. According to the information I now have, my ancestors practiced Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Old Rite Eastern Christianity, and shamanism; the languages they spoke included Mari (a Finno-Ugric cousin of Hungarian and Finnish), Romanian, Russian, and Ukrainian. A Ukrainian archpriest, a Romanian schoolteacher, a Russian shopkeeper, a Cossack farmer—all, presumably, hyperconscious of their ethnicity and class, they could not possibly have imagined that their children would intermarry. Made only briefly possible by Marxist cosmopolitanism, the theory and practice of the melting pot did not last, and two generations later the former Soviets are at least as concerned about their bloodlines as their forebears were a century earlier.

Inauspiciously, our family geography coincides with the 2014–2016 war zone—Crimea and eastern Ukraine, or Donbass. My grandparents met on the coal mines of Luhansk; the year was 1934 and both were engineers, grandma among the first in that traditionally male profession. My mother was born in a company town with the futuristic name of Krasnyi Luch, or Red Ray. Then there was a transfer to a power plant in Sevastopol, then war, German air raids, occupation, famine, deaths in the family. In the summer of 1942, grandma had to walk from Yalta to Sevastopol: she hoped she would be able to find her sister, a Red Army nurse who might have survived the siege of Sevastopol and could be hiding in the ruins of the city. Dead tired after walking the first twenty miles, she did a thing a young woman should not have done in an occupied country under any circumstances: she tried hitchhiking. The German driver who stopped was in a sarcastic mood. “Give you a ride? Give you a ride?” he said. “See that?” and he pointed at the German soldiers’ graves stretching along the curb as far as the eye could see. “When my brothers rise, then I will give you a ride. Now go fetch one from Stalin.”

As I am writing this, the town of Krasnyi Luch is again in a war zone. Sevastopol seems to have been reduced to a symbol; Russian imperial glory or Ukrainian sovereignty, its meaning is not its people but a bigger concept, at the moment strangely accepted as something worthier. The Crimean power grid, Krymenergo, which my grandparents helped to build, now operates virtually on an island, cut off from the mainland by the 2014 annexation, and as a result suffers one blackout after another. Disconnect, alienation, absurdity.

Our house in Yalta was just five minutes’ walk from a villa once occupied by Anton Chekhov (who, it must be said, detested Yalta, a sleepy strange place that was supposed to ease his tuberculosis but didn’t). Since his day, the neighborhood had changed. The river running through our little valley never flooded anymore, even when the snows melted, because most of its water was now siphoned off for irrigation. On the other side of the river, where in Chekhov’s day a Romanov grand duchess lived, now our power plant stood. The river had been given a new Russian name, but everyone still called it the Uchan Su, Turkic for “streaming water.”

In Chekhov’s time, Autka, as our neighborhood was called, had been largely Tatar and Greek, but in 1944 Stalin ordered the minorities deported, and the only reason our family did not live in somebody else’s home was that our apartment building was recent. In Crimea, we resembled what the French people call pieds-noirs, referring to the generations of Europeans living in colonized North Africa and calling it home.

I first met an American forty years ago on the Yalta promenade. She was a passenger from a cruise ship that had docked in our little port that morning; I was fourteen or fifteen at the time. The conversation had little substance, yet the encounter made me the first person in our family ever to speak to an American. We read that as a sign of hope: a better world seemed to be hatching. Western cruise ships were becoming a familiar sight, Americans were allowed to explore the town unchaperoned, and in Yalta’s western cove, Soviet leaders entertained Richard Nixon.

Things were going so well that, forty years later, we thought, Americans would be buying properties along Crimea’s coast and travel agencies would sell packages to the “Black Sea Riviera.” A better world could have hatched, but it did not. Instead, America and Russia have sleepwalked into another cold war.

The clash is again ideological, only instead of Communism, Russia now promotes a pure and holy “special Russian way.” As before, Moscow is building an international coalition of anti-American underdogs. The fight for spheres of influence is back, along with another staple Cold War feature—proxy wars. For all intents and purposes, in 2014–2016 in Ukraine, the insurgents fought for Putin, and the Kiev government forces for NATO.

It is as if we have been struck by the Tower of Babel curse again. The story told in Genesis starts with the whole world speaking a single language and dreaming of greatness. “Come,” people said, “let’s make great piles of burnt brick and collect natural asphalt to use as mortar. Let’s build a great city with a tower that reaches to the skies—a monument to our greatness! This will bring us together and keep us from scattering all over the world.” As we know, the project was not finished: alarmed by the new power of humans, God gave them “different languages,” and that proved enough to rekindle discord.[10]

The early 1990s were the time when the world probably came closest to speaking a single language. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, according to the political theorist Samuel Huntington, had generated the “belief that a global democratic revolution was underway and that in short order Western concepts of human rights and Western forms of political democracy would prevail throughout the world.” Francis Fukuyama announced that history, as a contest of ideas, had ended and that liberal democracy had proved itself the fittest. Yet since then, we have somehow lost the shared language, and now the same word—“democracy,” “progress,” or “nationalism”—carries different meanings depending on who utters it.[11]

Today, writes Robert Kagan in the New Republic, “the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us.” Twenty-five years after we buried the Cold War, the BBC news site finds it acceptable to publish a plane spotter’s article called “How to tell if a Russian bomber is flying overhead.”[12]

In a book published in 1995, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, William Miller, wrote: “Inclusion, consensus, and the absence of violence have been hallmarks of Ukrainian politics, producing an atmosphere of political stability in which extremism has been all but avoided.”[13] On a chance visit to the American embassy in Kiev a year later, that was what I heard from Ambassador Miller and other diplomats. At the time, it was hard to disagree with that optimistic assessment. Two decades later, it sounds like the description of a different country.

On the same trip in 1996 I revisited Crimea. The people I met were preoccupied with two ills: sudden impoverishment and organized crime. People I had grown up with were now selling rubbish in a flea market. The Ukrainian currency was so weak that cashiers, forced to accept wads of cash, did not even bother to count the bills, let alone check them for (numerous) forgeries; they just dumped them into the register with the look of tired resignation.

Mobsters from every corner of the diseased state had descended upon Crimea’s South Shore like hungry scavengers. In Yalta, we were the only customers in our hotel because the manager had been gunned down in the lobby two days before. The only antique dealership in town had been bombed into dust. Better restaurants were closed for “private parties,” and in all the lesser food joints stray dogs, begging for food, kept you company. The favorite café of my childhood, Little Bee, was now a casino called Third Rome. All but three of the former Romanov palaces on the coast had been appropriated by the mob. One had a sign on the gate: “Don’t stop. Guards open fire without warning.” Mobsters had designated one particular stretch of the coastal highway as a meeting place, and when their BMWs stopped there right in the middle of the road for chitchat, traffic in both directions froze—no honking, no arguing, not a peep, not even from the habitually short-fused truck drivers.

That free-for-all had a strange feeling of timelessness to it. A lost island, a pirates’ republic, a territory off the maps, forgetting the world, and seemingly already forgotten by it.

In restaurants, scantily dressed women sold rare Alpine flowers. Fresh fish was back on the menu because industry along the coast remained shut down, and the species had recuperated. Old panting steamboats ferried peddlers to Istanbul and back; the family now occupying our old apartment had turned it into a warehouse for contraband goods. The only person to bring up reunification with Russia was the cemetery worker I had hired to fix my grandfather’s tomb. For gravediggers, being a maverick comes with the territory, and I paid little attention to the old man’s rumblings.

What I saw made me very angry, because that had been my home. Yet Russia at the time was not faring much better, and as all the ex-Soviets had learned the hard way, transition to a market economy is painful and ugly. Its pains, I thought, were not something Crimea, the rest of Ukraine, or Russia would be unable to outgrow. I don’t think anyone believed war would come next.