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

The “little green men,” or “polite soldiers,” as local Russophiles affectionately called them, first appeared on Crimean streets in the last week of February 2014. Masked and silent, they wore green camouflage uniforms without any insignia and would not reveal their identity; they had clearly come from elsewhere, were very knowledgeable concerning the whereabouts of Ukrainian troops, and were armed with Russian military weapons. Sometimes mixing with the grassroots Russian militias, sometimes leading them, often pretending to be them, the strangers took over government buildings, train stations, and airports, and blocked Ukrainian forces in their bases. Surrounded by these armed men, the Crimean parliament appointed a new government, which in turn quickly scheduled a referendum on whether Crimea should secede from Ukraine and join Russia.

Ostensibly to protect the ethnic Russian population in Crimea and potentially elsewhere, Putin asked the Russian parliament to authorize the use of troops in Ukraine. On March 1, the parliament obliged. By then, in reality, the stealth invasion was well under way, and the “little green men” were already on the ground in Crimea.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea was a reactive act, a hard-power response to American involvement in the Kiev crisis, which had culminated in a regime change. It is difficult to dispute that Russia had legitimate strategic interests on the Crimean Peninsula. Sevastopol was the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s only major base, and the revolutionary Euromaidan had made the Kremlin believe it might be slipping away. No American leader had seriously considered adding Ukraine to NATO, but several who were no longer in a position to make anything of the kind happen, including former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, pretended that it had to be done. The noise such statements made hid their hollowness from the Russian ear. By striking in Crimea, Moscow believed it was preemptively getting control over the peninsula before NATO arrived.

Not some piecemeal or creeping expansion, but a brazen gambit, the annexation announced to the world that Russia had “risen from her knees” (in Putin’s words), that the country was strong and determined to defend its spheres of influence, by military force, if necessary. After years of warning the West that interfering in Ukraine would be crossing the red line, the Kremlin felt it could not but respond.

No other aggression could be sold to the Russian public so easily. Most Russians could be expected to support the action because Crimea was a national fetish that had ended up in Ukraine accidentally, due to a bit of political pandering by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.

“Revolutions” of Crimea

The term “revolutions of Crimea,” meaning cycles of violent transfer of power from one dominant group to another, comes from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European visitors. They used the term “revolution” as in “revolving door,” not as in “overthrow of a government in favor of a new order.” Such cycles seem to be the structural framework of Crimea’s history.

Crimea is a natural lure; a fat piece of low-hanging fruit dangling from the continent’s underbelly, strikingly warmer and lusher than the adjoining northern plains. The eighteenth-century British traveler Elizabeth Craven compared its steppes to “the finest green velvet”; the Tatar nickname for Crimea is Yesil Ada, or Green Isle.[1]

It sits on a busy intersection. In the past, peoples that had never heard of it—early nomadic groups like the Huns, Goths, and Kipchaks—still found themselves at its doors while traversing the east-to-west corridor across Eurasia.

Crimea is also a trap. It is very close to being an island, and like an island, it is difficult to evacuate in case of a foreign invasion. The Perekop Isthmus, just four miles wide, is too narrow to let one dodge an invading army, and the Kerch Strait, two miles across, is uncomfortably wide to traverse by boat. As hard as it is to leave physically, it is almost as hard to let go emotionally. Every group exiled or pushed out from Crimea has mourned the loss of Eden ever since, perpetuating the separation trauma for future generations. There has never been a unique Crimean product or resource that would be a hot commodity on world markets, except for the peninsula itself, a fetish in many cultures, epitomizing comfortable living in an accommodating environment.

For the people of the north—first nomads, then Slavs—Crimea was the most verdant place they had ever seen. For the people of the Mediterranean—Greeks, Jews, Italians—it was the northernmost breath of familiar terrain. Significantly colder than Attica, Liguria, or Palestine, it was nevertheless recognizable, acceptable, homelike.

For a place the size of Massachusetts—ten thousand square miles—Crimea is extraordinarily diverse: steppes, salt marshes, a desert, three mountain ranges, five plateaus, a subtropical littoral. Until the mid–twentieth century, its population was comparably diverse: Tatar, Turk, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Karaite, Jewish, Armenian, Bulgarian, Italian, Greek. With only a certain degree of exaggeration, a medieval visitor from Europe reported that nearly every settlement along the South Shore had its own language.[2]

Crimea’s history is of successive waves of colonization: early nomads; Greeks and Romans; Byzantines; Genoese and Venetians; Tatars and Ottoman Turks; Russians and Ukrainians. Alongside the dominant groups came minorities. Never noticeable politically, Armenians, Jews, Germans, and others were yeast to the peninsula’s economy. Maintaining close ties with their kin overseas, they had shaped Crimea’s cosmopolitan character and made it a hub of maritime trade. Though locked together in a small space, these ethnicities and their economies did not merge. Crimea developed not as a melting pot but as a salad bowl. Each of its urban neighborhoods had a distinct ethnic character, as did the villages in the countryside.

On a macro level, Crimea falls into three distinct zones: the steppes, the mountains, and the littoral. “Its northeastern division is a steppe and has neither tree nor hill, but its southern part presents a far different appearance, the mountains rising to a considerable height and encircling valleys of great beauty and fertility,” an early U.S. Navy manual says. To an American eye, the gently rolling Crimean steppes resemble the Great Plains—and the South Shore, the Pacific coast.[3]

In the days of horseback travel, the steppe took five days to cross north to south. Traditionally, it belonged to nomads—Taurii, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Kipchaks. The historian Brian G. Williams writes: “From the dawn of recorded history, the plains of the northern Black Sea were dominated by nomads who mounted hardy steppe ponies, mastered the deadly art of mounted archery and fought one another for control over the rich pasture lands.” The weapons and strategy applied in this endless struggle remained basic yet effective. According to estimates by Edward N. Luttwak, a nomadic expeditionary force could cover between thirty and fifty miles per day “for quite a few days in a row.” The army of the strongest sedentary state in the region, Byzantium, could not exceed fifteen.[4]

According to Brian G. Williams’s history of the region, the “losers in these largely unrecorded struggles” for control of the steppes “were either absorbed by the victors or scattered into mountain ranges of the south”: the Crimean mountains served as “a sanctuary for tribes and ethnic groups fleeing the waves of more powerful nomadic groups.” One group, the Goths, maintained a steady presence in the mountains for centuries. The commercial nations of the Mediterranean occupied the littoral.[5]

The steppe, the mountains, and the littoral tended to have amazingly little contact with each other—three separate realms on the meager ten thousand square miles, meeting mostly at border trading posts. Ruins of miniature but sturdy fortifications still block every north-to-south gorge connecting the littoral to the plateau. Built fifteen centuries ago by the order of a Byzantine emperor, and differently referred to by later visitors as “castles,” “fortresses,” or just “walls,” in their prime they sealed every hole in the mountain range. A small Byzantine garrison guarded each one, wardens of a rich realm threatened by marauders. Most of them stood in clear visibility of each other, meaning that every suspicious activity on the border, let alone a breach, would be swiftly communicated along the whole security perimeter.[6]

Until the first time the Russians conquered Crimea, in 1783, the littoral region existed independently from the rest of the peninsula. Greeks developed it in the seventh century BCE; Romans and Byzantines maintained what the Greeks had left them; and so later did the merchant republics of Genoa and Venice. No Mediterranean power ever tried annexing the rest of the peninsula. The only thing Mediterraneans wanted in Crimea was a string of trading posts, and the littoral, the meeting place of the Asiatic steppe and the Mediterranean city, served the purpose. The littoral received little investment, and no significant public buildings or urban spreads. What the maritime people needed was port facilities, fortresses, and a handful of northbound highways.

Europeans used Crimea as a mudroom, Europe’s easternmost port of entry, a place were you dress up for the journey or unwind on completing one. Constantinople was just two days away by sail—by Middle Ages standards, practically a commuting distance. For Silk Road businessmen like Marco Polo, it was the last respite before stepping into the unknown, the edge of the familiar world. It did not merit more than two lines in Polo’s book of travels (“taking their departure from Constantinople,” the merchants reach a “port named Soldaia,” whence the longest leg of their eastward journey started). These settlements became the foundation for Crimea’s future urban structure. The majority of Crimean cities and towns—Sevastopol, Yevpatoria, Feodosia, Kerch, Alushta—grew on antiquity’s humus.[7]

The only formidable structures Mediterraneans ever built on the peninsula, fortresses, came into disuse long ago and now exist mostly as ruins. To see majesty beyond neglect and decay, one has to refer to their Italian prototypes in Liguria and Golfo della Spezza (the Genoese castle in Crimean Gurzuf, for example, was modeled on the fortress in Lerice). For the Republic of Genoa, the Crimean littoral and its eastward continuation on the Sea of Azov were important enough to deserve a special bureau in the central government, the Office of Gazaria (as Italians called the area at the time).

In addition to the Silk Road, filling Crimean warehouses with spices, pearls, cloth, and precious stones, the coast served the northbound route to what later would become Ukraine and Russia. From the river Don came a novelty—caviar, the salted fish eggs of sturgeon. Slavic merchants brought furs and slaves. Even Catholic missionaries did not have to think twice before buying a boy when in need of a companion for a long journey to heathens’ lands. Because Italians preferred light-skin people, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian slaves were in greatest demand.[8]

Everything could be sold and bought in Kaffa, the main port and trading center for the Genoese, and now known as Feodosia. Horrified by the sight of “fathers selling their children and brother selling brother,” tavern owners offering lodgers “young virgins for a measure of wine,” a Spanish traveler called the city the place of evil doings, theft, and wickedness.[9]

The three Crimean realms—the steppe, the mountains, and the littoral—hang in a fragile balance, overlapping only tentatively. That changed when a new nomadic group invaded from the north: Mongols.

Clash of Civilizations

The Turkic name for the peninsula is Kirim—“fortress.” Other languages adopted this term; the English “Crimea,” or Russian and Ukrainian “Krym,” all originate in corrupted Turkic.

As the inhabitants of Crimea were ignorant of the scope, charge, and potential of the Mongol conquests, their invasion at first looked like any other. But the Mongols were the first group in history to occupy the whole of the peninsula, not just the steppe but the mountains and littoral too.

The Genoese colonies proved difficult to subdue. War for the littoral lasted for several decades. A freak yet monumental consequence was the Black Death pandemic in Europe. Plague bacterium lives on the arid plains of Central Asia, and advancing west, the Mongols had to cross those. The Mongol army group that besieged Genoese Kaffa in 1346 suffered an outbreak of the disease causing more casualties than war. Their commanders ordered the Mongols to catapult the dead bodies into the besieged city—perhaps the earliest occasion when biological warfare was employed. The Genoese colonists fleeing Kaffa carried the disease to Constantinople and then to Italy, thus triggering the catastrophe that eventually killed at least 75 million people.[10]

Within two generations after their invasion of Crimea, the Mongols adopted Islam. Genghis Khan and his generation had worshiped “Tengri, the god of the blue sky,” but in the early 1300s a ruler of the Golden Horde together with his aristocracy converted to Sunni Islam. Crimea saw its first mosque built in 1314.[11]

The peninsula became part of umma, the global Muslim community, and of the Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, metaphysically opposed to the lands of unbelievers, Dar al-Harb, the House of War. Meanwhile, across the sea in the Balkans and Anatolia, a new hegemonic power emerged: the Ottoman Empire. With the Golden Horde’s conversion, Mongols and Turks now shared a cultural space.[12]

The Ottomans’ clash with the Byzantines and the West transcended the standard pattern of struggling for territory and resources. What had started as a border war grew into a clash of three civilizations—Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, and Western.

For a century, Crimea remained a province of the Golden Horde; as the Mongol empire weakened, it broke away to form the Crimean Khanate. This was ruled by a Genghizid, as Mongol custom dictated, but its independence was short-lived (1443–1475). War flared up between clans, pretenders, the Italians, and the still unconquered mountaineer Goths. After a faction of clan leaders asked the Ottomans for help, the Ottomans landed in Crimea, defeated every party, and turned the peninsula into their protectorate.

The Ottoman era in Crimean history did not cancel the structures laid down before but built upon them. The Ottomans let the khanate control the steppes and the mountains, but they claimed the littoral as their own, turning it into a province of the empire. Unlike previous Mediterranean colonizers, they took over the whole coastal perimeter and built fortresses along its entire length, the biggest at the northern gateways, Perekop and Arabat, and then continued the line of coastal fortifications east and west. The Black Sea became known as the Ottoman Lake.[13]

The Ottoman Empire’s government, known as the Sublime Porte, is largely absent from the twenty-first-century Western conversation about Crimea, Russia, and Ukraine, and this is unfortunate because its impact on the area was no less significant and lasting than Kiev’s or Moscow’s. Not content with mere conquest of the Black Sea steppe, the Ottomans aspired to be a transforming economic force in the area. Imperial overstretch forced the abandonment of the most daring (and expensive) projects, but in the mid–sixteenth century the empire attempted to build a canal connecting the Don and Volga rivers—and thus two seas, the Black and the Caspian—a bold engineering venture that was not accomplished until four centuries later, by the Soviet Union, and was deemed so amazing even in 1951 that Stalin asked Sergei Prokofiev to write a celebratory symphony for the occasion.[14]

The Ottomans deftly developed the urban structure and trade routes they had inherited. Kaffa became the coastal Ottoman capital, and grew into a thriving trade hub, routinely referred to as Kuchuk Stamboul—Little Istanbul. With a population ranging between 70,000 and 100,000, Kaffa ranked as the eighth-largest city in the Ottoman Empire, after Istanbul, Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, Bursa, Adrianople, and Salonika. As practiced in other parts of the empire, in Kaffa the Ottomans tolerated the presence of other ethnic groups as long as they remained economically useful—Jews, Italians, Greeks, and the largest minority, Armenians, reportedly maintaining more than twenty churches in the city.[15]

The capital of the khanate, Bakhchisaray, was by comparison a sad little affair. The entrance to the palace of the khans carried the Genghizid dynastic symbol, the tamgha trident, but the khanate could not live up to the dynasty’s legacy. The only port the khanate was allowed to keep was the smallish Goezleve (Yevpatoria) on the underdeveloped western coast, its sole adornment the graceful Juma Jami Mosque, designed by the Ottoman architect of genius Mimar Sinan at the peak of the khanate’s might. A miniature variation on the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and modest compared with Sinan’s great works, the Juma Jami still supplied the city with a distinguished silhouette, its dome identifiable fifteen miles off.[16]

In the twentieth century, when Crimean Tatar intellectuals were reinventing their nation, the khanate’s statehood became a principal issue. Having a fully independent state in one’s past was viewed as indispensable to a national creation myth. This resulted in a lively revisionist discourse that gave rise to widely divergent descriptions of the relationship between Bakhchisaray and Istanbul. According to most historians, the Giray dynasty that ruled the Crimean Khanate “recognized Ottoman suzerainty” and served as Istanbul’s “vassals”; but in the nationalists’ view, the “two states existed in a tense, respectful alliance,” the Giray khans “more allies than subjects,” and the khanate had “partial independence” while enjoying the “protection of the Ottoman sultans, who regarded it as a valuable bulwark against the Russians.”[17]

In the language of modern political science, the khanate most closely fits the definition of a “client state.” On one hand, Bakhchisaray minted its own coins and maintained diplomatic relations with Russia and Poland. On the other, each Genghizid claiming succession rights traveled to Istanbul to be approved and anointed by the Ottoman sultan, the Sunni Caliph. When required by Istanbul, Crimean cavalry fought for the sultan throughout the region, making a critical contribution in many battles, including the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. The Ottoman coastal fortresses, originally meant to keep an eye on the Tatars, also guarded Crimea from the occasional Russo-Ukrainian amphibious raids.[18]

The Tatar core of the khanate consisted of three groups: Nogai (Kipchak) nomads, Tat mountaineers, and Yaliboyu coastal dwellers. An eighteenth-century British visitor, Maria Guthrie, described three different “races of men” on the peninsula. The Nogai were “distinguished by high cheek bones” and looked exactly like the “Huns of ancient authors, who committed such horrible ravages in Europe in old times.” The Tat had “round, and rather ruddy faces, and stout well-made bodies,” while the Yaliboyu were “distinguished by a dark complexion and a rather longish face, with features much more resembling the European” than the “frightful” Huns.[19]

In Turkic languages, “Tat” refers to conquered people, and in the hierarchy of the khanate Tats sat the lowest, with a special cabinet minister of the khan, “Lord of the Tats,” regulating their affairs.[20] The Yaliboyu on the littoral were understandably the closest to the Ottomans, and their upper classes had absorbed the culture of Turkish Anatolia. The most numerous group, the nomadic Nogai in the north, made up the bulk of the khanate’s army, and the incessant raids plaguing Ukraine, Russia, and Poland were more Nogai than “Tatar.”[21]

The economy of the khanate was based on pillaging and the slave trade. As the raids pursued material benefit more than anything else, they were executed not only by the khan’s army but also by troops loyal to individual aristocrats (beys). In addition to sustaining the state bursary and the aristocracy, they also served to weaken and destroy Slavic settlements on the steppes. One of the most famous campaigns was Khan Devlet Giray’s attack on Moscow in May 1571, when his troops burned down everything in the Russian capital except for the Kremlin walls, which were made of brick. The Russian tsar at the time was none other than Ivan the Terrible. Remembered as a successful empire builder, he was powerless against the khanate’s cavalry.[22]

Kaffa became the largest center of slave trading in Eastern Europe. A Polish historian estimates that Poland lost a million people to Tatar raiders between 1550 and 1694. A Soviet historian argued that eastern Ukraine lost a hundred thousand a year.[23]

The peninsula’s agriculture was supported in the mountain valleys by Tats. Finance, trade, and crafts were in the hands of Greeks, Armenians, and Karaites living mostly on the Ottoman littoral.[24]

The war between Russia and Crimea, which went on for four centuries, had nothing to do with grand strategy. The Ottoman Empire was already overstretched and could not possibly have been interested in subjugating Russia or wresting Ukraine away from Poland. The goal of the Ottomans and their Crimean client state was to maintain Russia and Ukraine as a permanent source of slaves.

At first, Russia’s military goal was just basic security in the south. Until the 1600s, the Crimean Khanate remained the stronger power, but even after the two had reached military equilibrium, the annual devastation of its southern provinces depleted Russia’s labor pool and kept the local economy at a subsistence level. As the Russian state strengthened, it found another goal in the war against the Crimean Khanate: to annex the fertile black earth belt, the Wild Fields, where Nogai Tatars lived. Later, still another motivation emerged: Russia’s perceived place in the clash of civilizations.

The Third Rome

In an essay written in 1985 called “Flight from Byzantium,” a meditative Istanbul travelogue, Joseph Brodsky talks about observing “the aircraft carriers of the Third Rome sailing slowly through the gates of the Second on their way to the First.”[25] The trope is more meaningful than elegant.

The “Third Rome” concept is a noxious perennial of Russian history. Formulated around 1511 by an ecclesiastic named Philotheus from the Pskov Eleazer Monastery, it announced that after the fall of Rome and then of the Second Rome (Constantinople) because of their transgressions against true Christianity, the center of the world had moved to Moscow. “Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, a fourth there shall not be.” Within a few decades, this grand concept grew into Russian state doctrine. Not only did the princes of Moscow reinvent themselves as “tsars,” a corruption of “Caesar.” As James H. Billington puts it in his seminal interpretation of Russian history The Icon and the Axe, “All of Muscovy came to be viewed as a kind of vast monastery under the discipline of a Tsar-Archimandrite.”[26]

An upstart community stuck on the periphery of Christianity and Islam, destitute even by the forgiving standards of sixteenth-century Europe, suddenly imagined itself the leader of humankind. Here is what made this happen.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia became the only Orthodox country still standing. Its place in world affairs remained utterly humble—precisely the reason it had been allowed to survive, as no foreign conqueror was interested in the cold and wet patch of landlocked woods that was Russia at the time. It is not even mentioned in The Alexiad, a war and diplomacy treatise by the twelfth-century Byzantine princess Anna Komnene.[27] To reformulate their country, Russians needed an intellectual push from the outside; it appears to have come from an exceptional European woman, Princess Sophia Palaeolog. Born Zoe, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and raised as a ward of Pope Paul II, she was married off to the grand prince of Moscow, Ivan III, in 1472. One example of her strong influence on her husband and his court is the Kremlin: the architects invited to build it came from Italy, and its walls and towers bear a striking resemblance to the Milan castle of the Sforzas, from the color of the bricks to the swallowtail merlons.

Sophia believed Russia could ally with Catholic Europe against the Ottomans and reclaim her ancestral Constantinople for her children. The concept of Rome as a wandering imperial capital had been the foundation of Constantinople (Anna Komnene mentions in passing that “power was transferred from Rome to our country and the Queen of Cities”). Though centered in the east, the empire still called itself “Roman”; the misleading term “Byzantium” did not come into general use in European languages until the nineteenth century.[28]

The Third Rome was part of Sophia’s dowry, and came from the Byzantine ecclesiastical tradition, yet Moscow had little sway in the Greek-speaking parts of Christendom. However, all Slavic Orthodox territories, such as Serbia, Bulgaria, and of course Ukraine, shared a sacred language with Russians—the Church Slavonic, adapted from the ninth-century Macedonian dialect. That made the Third Rome transnational community possible—“imaginable,” in Benedict Anderson’s words. To use another term from Anderson, the Third Rome concept was nothing but “territorialization of faith.”[29]

In later centuries, the idea became Russia’s damnation. Peter the Great, an adept of realpolitik, saw little value in waging war against the Ottomans when a shorter way to Europe lay in the north. But for later Romanovs, “returning the cross” to the top of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople became an obligation. Pursuing the mirage of the Third Rome, they dragged Russia into one war after another in the Black Sea area and in the Balkans. As late as World War I, to keep Russia as an ally, Britain and France promised Tsar Nicholas II Constantinople, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. After World War II, Stalin demanded that Turkey hand over control of the straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles), a push that made the White House respond with the Truman Doctrine, explicitly protecting Turkey and Greece from Russian aggression.

For Russians, the road to Constantinople started in Crimea. Russian troops stormed Perekop in 1736 and sacked most of the peninsula before being forced to withdraw. The next generation of generals was more successful. In 1771, Russians again occupied the peninsula; this time, the Ottoman government in Kaffa evacuated to Istanbul.

Russia’s ruler at the time was Catherine the Great. Far ahead of her time, extraordinarily successful in her conquests and diplomacy, she and her inner circle of advisers made the grandiose decision that Crimea would be a stepping-stone in the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean. Catherine was certain that the Ottoman Empire was ready to crumble. Having named her eldest grandson after Alexander the Great, she named the second Constantine, as he was destined to be the king of Constantinople, the capital of a “Greek monarchy.” Her lover, Grigory Potemkin, would become king of “Dacia”—an imagined country roughly contiguous with modern Romania. She modestly referred to this entire plan as her “Greek Project.”[30]

Catherine’s conquests on the Black Sea met with widespread approval in Europe. The Ottoman Empire was a traditional foe that had last laid siege to Vienna just a century earlier. Feeling very secure, Catherine started with an experiment: in 1774, Russia and Turkey signed a treaty establishing Crimea as an independent state. For the Ottomans, the khanate would be a buffer zone, and for Catherine a test site for what would centuries later be called “nation-building.” Her Greek monarchy and Dacia would have to be built from the Ottoman bureaucratic and social fabric. She thought Crimea was perfect for trying this out.

Khan Shagin Giray, whom she supported in Bakhchisaray, saw himself as a Crimean Peter the Great—a modernizer who would borrow technology and governmental structures from Europe. Catherine returned the littoral to the khanate and took care of its bursary. As an attempt at social engineering, Catherine’s Crimean project anticipated later Western efforts in the non-Western world. While its stated good intentions, such as social reform and modernization, are impossible to prove or disprove, the pragmatism of the strategy is as valid now as it was in Catherine’s day: to raise a junior ally whose new (Westernized) elites would be completely dependent on the creator.[31]

And not unlike the twenty-first-century attempts at nation-building, Catherine’s Crimea project collapsed. The experiment had a bloody ending—civil war—unsurprisingly so because the khan was rightly seen as a puppet of an alien power. In 1783, Russia squashed the rebellion and annexed Crimea.

Catherine dismissed the failed experiment in Crimea as a freak loss, still sure that the Greek monarchy and Dacia would succeed. To demonstrate her commitment to the development of the conquered Ottoman lands and to celebrate her victory in the clash of civilizations, in 1787 she put herself through the terrible inconvenience of visiting Crimea in person, with European ambassadors and the emperor of Austria in tow.

The six-month journey proved monumental, belonging among the top PR campaigns in history. Catherine was delighted by what she saw and proclaimed Crimea the “Garden of Eden.” Having failed to engineer change on the peninsula through its government, she now launched a massive campaign of colonization.[32]

Catherine reimagined Crimea as a Russian Greece to exist alongside Moscow, the Third Rome. The territories of the khanate were divided into three provinces: Kherson and Yekaterinoslav on the mainland steppe, and Taurida as the Crimean peninsula per se. The name Taurida reflected Catherine’s Greek pretensions for the place, as did the names of two major cities she started on the peninsula—Sevastopol and Simferopol. Kaffa and Goezleve had their ancient Greek names restored: Feodosia and Yevpatoria, respectively.

Tellingly, the rest of the toponyms were kept Turkic, with su for “river,” dahg for “mountain,” and gol for “lake.” Catherine ruled by corruption, not coercion. Tatar nobles were given Russian nobility, land grants, and power over the previously free peasantry. With the aristocracy thus brought over to her side, revolts on the peninsula remained few and insignificant. Catherine also brought in new settlers: the steppes had hardly any tradition of agriculture.

Although international trade was considerable (the port of Yevpatoria alone received 170 foreign ships a year), the peninsula’s export-import structure did not look satisfactory. Crimea exported salt from the Perekop marshes, wool, and sheepskin—both products of semi-nomadic Tatar shepherds. From the Mediterranean, it imported silk and cotton cloth, wine, lemons, oranges, chestnuts, olives, apples, dates, coffee, and tobacco. From mainland Russia, wheat, butter, and linen came, and also one telling item, locks, exceeding eighteen thousand a year—clear evidence of the redistribution of property. Importing items like oranges and coffee was unavoidable, but the Garden of Eden was certainly capable of producing more domestically. The list the colonizers came up with included wheat, wine, silk, raisins, almonds, figs, prunes, olives, capers, herring, anchovies, and oysters. Having little regard for Russian and Ukrainian peasantry, the empress invited farmers from abroad, starting with her home country, Germany.[33]

Within two decades, Crimea’s South Shore became popular with the imperial aristocracy. Some built summer retreats, others moved to the littoral permanently—a quaint community consisting of devoted agriculturalists excited by the opportunities the subtropical climate offered, retirees disenchanted with the metropolitan glamour, spiritualists seeking seclusion, and former courtiers marred by scandal.[34]

Mary Holderness, an intrepid British traveler who spent four years in the village of Karagoz in eastern Crimea between 1816 and 1820, left a detailed account of her sojourn on the peninsula. I am unable to find a good explanation for why a British woman would move to a very basic settlement in the wooded hills, easily a day’s journey from the nearest town. But others did the same thing; something about Crimea appealed to restive spirits, the kind of people who in later centuries would move to Tangier or Bali.

Mary Holderness caught Crimean diversity at its peak: all the people of the khanate were still there, and the government’s resettlement campaign had added newcomers. In the towns of Crimea, Holderness reported, one could find the “descendants of more than fifteen different nations.”[35] Like most travelers, Holderness had carried her prejudices with her and brought them back home unchanged; the classification of Crimeans she suggests tells us at least as much about a colonizer’s mindset as about the people she was observing.

She found the “habits and modes of agriculture” of the Tatars “rude and simple,” their wealth still consisting “in flocks and herds.” The Nogai Tatars, she thought, had fared especially poorly, despite the Russian government’s efforts to conquer the “inveterate prejudices of this wandering horde” and induce them to take up farming. “They are, however, of all the colonists, far the worst cultivators; and are still much addicted to grazing large flocks and herds, and numerous studs of mares.”[36]

According to Holderness, the largest minorities were Greeks and Germans, each constituting about 10 percent of the population. “The occupations of the Greeks are perhaps more various than those of most of the settlers. In the towns they are found as respectable merchants, as small shopkeepers. …The Greeks also are the only fishers who adventure far for the purpose of fishing.”[37]

The German Mennonites, or Moravians, in the steppes “came over with plenty of money, knowledge of business, and superior industry, and are at present a wealthy race; having built large farm-houses and offices, planted extensive orchards, and laid out great gardens, possessing the finest breed of cows in the country, and growing a great abundance of corn.” But a different group of Germans, the Swabians, she found low and brutal in their manners, “the least civilized inhabitants of the Crimea.”[38]

“The Bulgarians, though ranking low in point of numbers amongst the other colonists of New Russia, are perhaps deserving the first notice, from the high character they bear, as a sober, industrious, and meritorious class. …As agriculturalists, the Bulgarians hold also pre-eminence amongst their neighbours.”

The Armenians were “universally resident in the towns, either as merchants or burghers; and the application so contemptuously bestowed by Buonaparte on the English, seems, in truth, perfectly applicable to these people—they are really a nation of shopkeepers.”[39]

“The Jews are very numerous indeed in all the colonies, composing from one-fifth to one-tenth of the whole population. But they are, with very few exceptions, fixed in the class of burghers and shopkeepers, in every one of the towns of New Russia.” The Karaites, a Jewish group speaking a Turkic language and not recognizing rabbinical authority or the Talmud, were “commonly the most wealthy, and are on all accounts the most respectable. They hold themselves very distinct from their Polish brethren.” They “aver that they were no way concerned in, or consenting to,” Jesus Christ’s death, and “thus reject the dreadful responsibility entailed on them by the declaration of their forefathers—‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’”[40]

A few French and Swiss; some Poles (“tall, and finely formed: even the servants are superior in their manners to any other of the peasantry”). “The gypsies of the Crimea, called Tsigans, resemble in habits and appearance those of England, and, like them, exist chiefly by plunder. They are commonly the musicians at weddings, profess fortune-telling, and have all the tricks and cant of begging.”[41]

Among the minorities Holderness described, three groups had been on the peninsula before the Russian conquest and even before the Tatars: Greeks, Armenians, and Karaites. Their salad bowl coexistence encouraged a niche economy: Armenians controlled exports of salt, with a town in the salt-producing area bearing the name Armenian Bazar; a thriving community of Karaites in Yevpatoria carried on commerce with Constantinople and the Levant.[42]

Theoretically, in Crimea, Catherine practiced something we might call laissez-faire multiculturalism, yet in the process, the Tatar community got severely undermined. The Russians prided themselves on letting Crimean Muslims practice their faith, but at the same time, with the arrogance typical of a “civilizing” nation, they forced the Nogai Tatars to take up agriculture, eradicating the nomadic economy of the steppes and damaging the old social fabric.

The Crimean Tatar concept of land and property was based on the interpretation of shariat, or Islamic law, and the nomadic tradition. No one could claim ownership over forests, steppes, wells, and pastures belonging to the whole umma. Twenty-five percent of Crimean lands were vakif—endowments donated to religious institutions. After a short period of accommodation, the Russian government started confiscating the vakif lands. A mass exodus of Tatars began. By the end of the eighteenth century, around 120,000 out of the population of 300,000 had left for the Ottoman Empire. In mystical terms, this was a hijra, religious repatriation from the land of unbelievers to the Dar al-Islam. That left their economic niches and property up for grabs, enticing more settlers to come: Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians from the Ottoman Empire, and Rabbinite Jews from Poland.[43]

The Romanov who revived Catherine’s Greek Project was her grandson, Nicholas I. His push onto Ottoman lands culminated in the invasion of the two Danube principalities—Moldavia and Wallachia—in 1853. For Nicholas, this was a crusade, an effort to retake Muslim-controlled lands and restore them to Christian rule. But the days when the Russian victories over the sultan’s armies were trumpeted in Europe as a triumph of “Christianity” against “Islam” were gone. Russo-European solidarity had been short-lived and opportunistic. The great powers of Europe had stopped viewing Turkey as a threat to their interests and were now worried about a new challenger—none other than Nicholas’s empire. The leading Western power at the time, Britain, found itself confronted by a Russian onslaught on two fronts—in the Balkans and Central Asia. The latter clash had come to be known as the Great Game. It was not an actual war, as it was not feasible strategically to fight a meaningful campaign on the fringes of Afghanistan and Tibet. The Black Sea was a different matter. Responding to the Russian invasion, a British-French force landed in Crimea with support from the Ottomans and the Italian kingdom of Piedmont. The goal was to intimidate Russia enough to ensure Turkey’s continued existence.[44]

The Crimean War of 1853–1856 turned out to be a seminal conflict in the history of nineteenth-century Europe. For the first time, Russia found Europe united in its determination to check Russian expansion. This pattern, a European coalition facing a lone Russian aggressor, would often recur.

Geopolitically, the British-French strategy was brilliantly asymmetrical: “You assail our interests on the periphery, we punch you in the gut.” To demonstrate their advantage over Russia’s purely land-based power, Britain and France also sent fleets to attack Kamchatka in the Pacific and Archangel on the White Sea, and made a showy appearance at the doorstep of St. Petersburg, the imperial capital on the Baltic Sea (the Romanovs grimly watched from shore).

Initially landing in Kalamita Bay north of Sevastopol, the Allied force took hold of the western part of the Crimean peninsula. The fighting almost immediately focused on Sevastopol, where the siege of the city lasted for 349 days.[45]

The war ended in a crushing defeat for Russia, but not before 450,000 Russian servicemen, 100,000 French, and 20,000 British died. The subsequent peace treaty required Russia to stay away from Ottoman territories and barred it from having a navy in the Black Sea, but the humiliation prompted the period known in Russian history as the Great Reforms—including emancipation of the serfs and the introduction of a jury system in the courts, to name just two. Russia recuperated fast, and despite the treaty resumed its attacks on the Ottomans in the Balkans. Independent Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia were products of these campaigns. The most lasting impacts of the Crimean War were cultural: it was the first war in history to receive daily coverage in the press. Just as Florence Nightingale and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” became canonical pieces of British patriotic myth, the tragic perseverance of Russian troops in Crimea, particularly in Sevastopol, entered the Russian national pantheon. One writer laid down the foundations of this mythology: the young artillery officer Leo Tolstoy, in The Sebastopol Sketches.[46]

Another lasting effect of the war happened in Crimea. Accused of collaborating with the invading allies, Tatars once again departed for Turkey in large numbers. Aside from the fact that the colonizer was not entitled to any loyalty of the colonized, the Tatars had a language, culture, and religion in common with the Turkish troops. In any case, the anti-Russian hostilities were largely limited to the pillaging of Russian landlords’ estates.[47]

This second exodus started in 1860 and 1861. Some 135,000 Tatars left, roughly 40 percent of the Crimean Tatar community. It does not seem that Russian reprisals against the Tatars were gross or consistent enough to cause the flight. Scholars suggest that the general feeling of insecurity made the community “prone to calls for migration” from religious leaders. In other words, social distress manifested itself in religious terms. Tatars leaving for the Ottoman Empire identified as muhajir, Muslims fleeing a homeland occupied by unbelievers to reunite with the Dar al-Islam.[48]

For Russian and Ukrainian farmers, the departures were an opportunity. Tens of thousands of Slavs moved into the areas vacated by the Tatars. That should not have been a cause for celebration: Crimea may be fertile, but the chronic lack of water makes it a precarious garden. Experience, knowledge, and skills had departed with the Tatars. One example would be camels: widely and wisely used by Tatars in the arid parts of the peninsula, they were branded “Asiatic” and “backward” by settlers, to be quickly replaced by horses, which were not always suitable for the terrain. “No settler, Russian, Bulgarian, or German, would ever be able to create gardens and vineyards” that perfect “on a terrain foreign to him,” Princess Yelena Gorchakova sighed. Another Russian visitor wrote: “Every person who has spent at least a month in Crimea knows that with the Tatar exodus Crimea died.” Huge areas in the steppes began looking like “the coasts of the Dead Sea,” and the whole of Crimea was like a “house after a fire.” The second Tatar exodus sealed the fate of the peninsula. From then on, the Kirim people would always be a minority in the land of their ancestors.[49]

With Tatars leaving and new settlers coming, Crimea was developing as a confusing cultural mosaic, with old landmarks receding or gone, and new ones in the making. In Russian discourse, the empire had defeated “Oriental” backwardness in Crimea through “Occidental” modernization. Crimean towns came to be divided into what was called “new,” or “European,” and “Asiatic,” or “Tatar,” parts. The European neighborhoods faced the sea; the Tatar opening up on the steppes or the mountains. “Nothing of particular interest” could be found in the “Asiatic” parts, a Russian visitor wrote with much contempt, except for the “stillness of Oriental despotism,” represented by walled houses, narrow empty streets, women wearing hijabs, and idle males.[50]

Colonization brought modern agriculture, urban development, industry, education, and infrastructure. In 1875, a railroad connected Sevastopol to European Russia, making Crimea a Russian alternative to the French Riviera. The Romanovs built residences on the south shore. Aristocrats followed suit. Resort towns such as Yalta sprang up, and by the end of the nineteenth century the south shore had become the vacation spot for the middle class and the literati too. In 1892, Yalta had a population of ten thousand, and the Baedeker guide called it the “most fashionable and expensive of all” Crimean towns, popular for “sea bathing” and the “grape cure.” Another type of holistic healing, the “mud cure,” with resorts, clinics, and spas, enriched Yevpatoria.[51]

A Riviera it could have been called, but with the standards and services of an underdeveloped country. Said one American tourist in the 1910s: “If that place belonged to us, I guess we would make it the beauty-spot of Europe!”[52] Nonetheless, capitalist development brought a print boom, and for colonized minorities the colonizer’s language was a vehicle for accessing contemporary political theory. The anti-colonial Tatar movement in Crimea led to the creation of a party called Vatan, or Fatherland. It remained largely unnoticed by the peninsula’s Slavic majority until 1917.

Red Star

Just as in Ukraine, in Crimea the Russian revolutions of 1917 brought terror, civil war, and foreign intervention. As the central Russian government collapsed, the Vatan revolutionaries saw a one-off chance to create a national state for the Tatars. Fighting started between nationalist forces and the Red paramilitary units, proxies of Lenin’s government. Neither side shied away from brutality. The bloodbath was brought to an end only by the German occupation in April 1918.

Also as in Ukraine, in Crimea, nationalists, this time Tatar, allied with Germany, and the gambit backfired because they had chosen the losing side in the world war. The fighting that followed after the Germans evacuated at the end of 1918 was worse than what had gone before. The civil war in Crimea was not a bit less horrible than in Ukraine, and for the same reason: while the two major protagonists, the Reds and the Whites, danced a deadly waltz, smaller armies devastated any pockets the big guns missed.[53]

Reds, Whites, Reds, Whites, each with dreadful “counterintelligence” dungeons; neighbors reporting each other out of vengefulness or paranoia; arrests; appeals to strangers in positions of authority; executions, utter unpredictability, despair. Vladimir Nabokov’s father, a cabinet minister in a short-lived Crimean liberal government, did not have a single good word for the Whites, citing their lawlessness, anti-Semitism, plundering, searches, arrests, confiscations of private property, and random executions. A small Allied force briefly landed in Crimea, but feeling helpless in the face of an unmanageable civil conflict, quickly evacuated.[54]

In the fall of 1920, Crimea was the last White stronghold still standing. Among other things, that meant it was the last haven for refugees. When the evacuation from Sevastopol began, “nightmarish because of chaos and panic” according to one contemporary observer, it seemed like the definitive end of the old world. In fact it was. On reaching Istanbul, the White generals immediately started a public fight about who had lost Crimea. Among the survivors of the catastrophe, this debate never ceased.[55]

The Bolshevik revolution was the work of two forces, one destructive, the other creative. As it did everywhere else in the Soviet Union, in Crimea the horrifying terror against the former nobility and bourgeoisie went hand-in-hand with development and social engineering.

For Tatars, that meant nation-building within the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The republic was not defined as “Tatar” because they made up only 25 percent of the population (Crimea was 50 percent Russian and Ukrainian; Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Germans and others accounted for the remaining 25 percent).[56] Yet according to the historian Brian G. Williams, “For all intents and purposes, the Crimean ASSR was, from 1921–1945, established as an unofficial Crimean Tatar republic and the Crimean Tatars were the state-sponsored ‘native people.’” Among other progressive achievements was the establishment of universal education in the Tatar language. In 1917, only 17 percent of Tatar girls were enrolled in schools; by 1928, 44.9 percent were. On the destructive side, collectivization, political purges, and, finally, the surreal Great Terror of 1937–1939 hit Tatars as badly as every other group in Crimea. As the Soviet elites were abandoning Marxist cosmopolitanism in favor of pan-Slavic nationalism, the Arabic script that Tatars had traditionally used got changed first to Latin and then, doubling the confusion, into Cyrillic. Planned as a mechanism of reeducation, the change cut off younger people from their heritage.[57]

When Hitler planned the invasion of the Soviet Union and the future disposition of its territories, he gave Crimea a special place. The Crimean mountains had been populated by Germanic Goths, and according to the Nazis’ research, these Goths were closely related to the Germans living in South Tyrol. This meant, first, that Germans of South Tyrol would be “repatriated” to Crimea after the war, and second, that Tatars of the Crimean mountains would be spared the horrors of racial cleansing because of the possibility that under the veneer of Islamic culture there pulsed noble Aryan blood. After the war, Crimea was to be renamed Gotenland. Simferopol would become Gotenburg, and Sevastopol would be Theodorichhafen. The peninsula would become the southernmost Germanic land, the Nazi Riviera.[58]

The German Eleventh Army took Perekop on October 21, 1941. Two and a half years of German occupation followed.[59]

Persistently blind to opportunities for collaboration with the anti-Soviet Russians and Ukrainians, Hitler found collaboration with Muslim peoples ideologically permissible. Tragically, as they had done in 1918, Tatar nationalist activists once again gambled their people’s future on an alliance with the wrong side. This mistake was not unique among national liberation movements: Irish nationalists had sided with Germany in World War I.

Out of a population of 218,000, 20,000 Tatars served in the Red Army. Another 20,000 joined “self-defense battalions” directed by the German occupation forces, with the primary mission of hunting down resistance guerrillas in the mountains (at least 20 percent of these guerrillas were Tatars). During the years of occupation, German punitive squads eliminated up to 130,000 Crimean civilians and resistance fighters, including 40,000 Jews; Tatar self-defense units are known to have participated in several massacres.[60]

Historians sympathetic to the Crimean Tatars do not fail to note that a very significant number of Crimean Russians and Ukrainians collaborated with the German occupying force too, both in local administration and volunteer punitive units. Survivors of the occupation have confirmed that. The real dividing line between Tatars and Slavs during the war was not political but economic: Germans let Tatars establish a governing network of so-called Muslim Committees. These committees had very limited functions, such as expanding religious services and establishing a national newspaper and a theater; the most important was the opportunity to regulate economic life in Tatar neighborhoods—an enormous benefit in wartime. Compared with the hand-to-mouth existence of the surviving Slavs, the Tatars’ condition of regulated and collective poverty looked like riches.[61]

Once the Red Army returned to the peninsula in May 1944, Stalin ordered every single Tatar deported. They were accused of blanket treason and exiled—in all, about 200,000 people—to Uzbekistan in Central Asia, to spend forty years in a land foreign to them. Other minorities were also kicked out without any explanation: 10,016 Armenians, 12,075 Bulgarians, 14,368 Greeks. All of the 60,000 Crimean Germans had been deported shortly after the war started in 1941. Stalin had decided to make Crimea homogenously Slavic.[62]

What the participants in the Yalta Conference saw ten months later, in February 1945, was a grim, depopulated territory, with Red Army troops lining the roads for heightened security. For many American and British participants, this was their first visit to a territory devastated by war, and they were shocked: “We saw burned-out freight trains, burned-out tanks, and other damaged materiel,” Edward R. Stettinius remembered. According to Charles E. Bohlen, the “wreckage Roosevelt saw on the drive hardened his view on Germany. ‘I’m more bloodthirsty than a year ago,’ he told Stalin when they met.” Churchill called Crimea “The Riviera of Hades.”[63]

The Kremlin briefly considered creating a Jewish autonomous republic in Crimea, a “Jewish California,” an idea already floated in the 1920s. But anti-Semitism, submerged in the 1920s and 1930s, became an official policy of late Stalinism. It was decided that all new settlers would be Ukrainian and Russian.[64]

The majority came from the provinces devastated by war: Russians from the Voronezh, Briansk, Kursk, and Rostov regions; Ukrainians from Kiev, Chernigov, Poltava, and Kamenetz-Podolsk. After the war, 90 percent of the people in Crimea were newcomers. Within a few years, the look of the place had changed. It had become poorer, wanting, confused.[65]

Crimea’s history became subject to Slavic revisionism, both Russian and Ukrainian. Both celebrated Crimea as part of “Slavdom,” a province of the Kievan Rus’. Most mosques were destroyed, with a few historic ones in tourist centers kept as museums. Agriculture in the mountains was abandoned as too strenuous for Slavs. Tatar villages were razed, leaving abandoned fruit gardens, or chaeers, as the only reminders of their occupants’ very recent presence. Except for some well-known geographical features, such as capes and mountaintops, Turkic toponyms were either translated into Russian or replaced by something utterly Soviet or distastefully generic.[66]

In 1954, the year of the three hundredth anniversary of the “reunification” of Russia and Ukraine, the then leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, transferred Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian SSR. To Russophiles in Crimea and Russians in general, the transfer was infuriating, yet the insult was not monumental. Khrushchev was not strengthening Ukraine at Russia’s expense, he was simply gerrymandering. With the Kremlin power struggle following Stalin’s death far from over, he hoped to solidify his power base among the influential Ukrainian apparatchiks who commanded at least 30 percent of the Party Central Committee vote. He also had a soft spot for Ukraine: though not Ukrainian himself, he had been Moscow’s viceroy in Kiev. Khrushchev had tried to secure Crimea for Ukraine once before, in 1944 (“Ukraine is in ruins—what if it received Crimea?”). Still, for Russians and Russophiles in Crimea, being transferred to a different republic was not persecution, but it was a degrading objectification. That is how it went down in Russians’ memory.[67]

Unlike other Muslim people purged by Stalin in 1944—Chechens, for example—Tatars were never allowed to return: not under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or Gorbachev. The reason was simple: Crimea’s South Shore had become the resort of the dominant Soviet minority, and repatriation of a purged group was a security risk.

As the “All-Union resort,” the Black Sea Fleet base, and the vacation spot, the peninsula was in many ways governed directly from Moscow. The umbilical cord was cut only when the Soviet Union unexpectedly fell apart in 1991, and Crimea, by default, remained with Ukraine.

As I have mentioned, no Crimean product has ever been big internationally, except for the place itself, which is a fetish in several cultures.

The word “fetish” belongs to different narratives—anthropological, sociopolitical, erotic. Definitions vary, but generally speaking, a fetish is something that is assigned a value disconnected from its physical usefulness (a pearl is a good example), but having no inflated meaning outside a certain group of people. Karl Marx, one of the first scholars to start using the term, called the fetishized object a “social hieroglyphic” abounding in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” It is not possible to understand Russian aggression in Crimea without delving into Crimea’s status as a fetish.[1]

“To South, to South!”

The famous refrain of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, from 1900, is “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!”—the groan of a person stifled by a dull, small-town existence, childishly trusting that a move to the capital will mend broken hearts and restore her sense of purpose. The tension between center and periphery is widely acknowledged as pivotal to Russians; examples, alongside The Three Sisters, include Nikolai Nekrasov’s canonic juxtaposition of capitals “rocked with thunder / Of orators in wordy feuds” against the “depths of Russia” with its “age-long silence.”[2] But another powerful cultural dichotomy, between north and south, is not necessarily noticed.

At around the same time Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters, a young Muscovite made an entry in his diary, just as representative as the three sisters’ pitiful cry: “Farewell, Moscow!” the boy wrote. “Now to South, to South! To that bright, ever young, ever blooming, beautiful, wondrous South!” Unsurprisingly, he was heading to Crimea—“the sun, the sea,” away from “Moscow’s mud, cold, and sleet.” Since the end of the nineteenth century, numerous texts have echoed the feeling. “Assailed by winter, I withdrew to South,” Joseph Brodsky’s poem says, his destination “Crimea in January.”[3]

On some level, the longing for Crimea of a person living in Russia’s hinterlands is not unlike a New Englander’s midwinter dream of moving to Florida. In January, the average daytime high temperature in Moscow is eighteen degrees Fahrenheit; in Kiev it is thirty, while in Yalta it is fifty.[4] The only fruit that can be reliably grown around Moscow is an apple the size of a golf ball; in Crimea, mulberries, apricot trees, and grapevines line the streets. Even in the dead of winter, something is in bloom there; the only vegetation thriving at that time of year in Moscow is frost flowers on frozen windows.

But there is more to the Russian fascination with Crimea than a comfortable climate and fresh fruit.

In Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov notes that “Crimea in general, and Yalta in particular, are very beautiful places.” Commenting on a line in Chekhov’s short story “The Lady with a Dog,” set in Yalta, “the sea was of a warm lilac hue with a golden path for the moon,” he wistfully writes: “Whoever has lived in Yalta knows how exactly this conveys the impression of a summer evening there.” The essay was started twenty years after Nabokov’s brief teenage sojourn on Crimea’s South Shore, before he was exiled following the revolution, and since then he had traveled extensively along the coasts of France and Italy, in ecosystems similar to southern Crimea and at least as beautiful. For the title of one of the short stories, he nostalgically referenced Crimea as Eden lost, crafting a mesmerizing alliteration “Spring in Fialta”–merging “violet” (fialka in Russian) with “Yalta.”[5]

There can be little doubt that beauty is a construct. It took our species thousands of years to generally agree that a “warm lilac hue” is more attractive than gray and that the “golden path” of the moon has value beyond the volume of light it adds to navigation, fishing, and war. But again, there is more to the Crimea myth than beauty.

Crimea as a Russian national fetish has layers ranging from spiritual—imperial pride, accumulated sacrifice, accrued effort—to physical. In a materially and emotionally poor country, the physicality of Crimean products carried the whiff of the dolce vita: peaches tender to the touch, sweet tomatoes, fragrant wines—sherry (called by its original Spanish name, jerez); madeira; port; moscato; champagne (infringement of the French trademark nonchalantly dismissed). The famously aromatic Sinap apples started to be brought by land-carriage to Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1790s; two centuries later, people still bring them home from their Crimean vacations. Yet nothing exemplifies the fetishization of Crimea more than the “Koktebel rocks.”[6]

Koktebel is a seaside location in eastern Crimea. At the end of the nineteenth century, before the Russian literati colonized it, it was a simple Bulgarian village on a picturesque but not exactly breathtaking bay. Many are deceived by its French-sounding name (côte de bel? coq de belle?), but only because they want to be. “Koktebel” comes from Tatar and means Gray Hills. The exact path of the transformation that made Koktebel a cult destination is a separate subject; here, let’s look at the end product.[7]

In Chekhov’s time, Russians compared Koktebel favorably with Greece, Alicante in Spain, and Italy’s Amalfi Coast. This was not totally wrong, as arid Mediterranean coasts have bays much like Koktebel, but still an exaggeration. Koktebel would have been at best mediocre in, say, Peloponnesus. In the Russian empire, it stood out because it was one of the few corners in that uncomfortably northern country that even resembled Greece. By the 1960s, Koktebel had become the place to visit in summer, a combination of artists’ colony, playground of the rich, and backpackers’ camp—Provincetown, St. Bart’s, and South Beach all in one, celebrated in dozens of poems from Marina Tsvetaeva to Brodsky.[8]

Koktebel stands at the foothills of a dead volcano, and the peculiarities of the local currents and seabed put its bay on the receiving end of an underwater bounty, as each storm delivers tens of thousands of semiprecious pebbles of volcanic origin—green, pink, red, yellow, sometimes blue, and called by different names—jasper, agate, chalcedony, carnelian, sardonyx. Usually a beautiful stone collected from the beach loses most of its attractiveness when it dries, its brilliant colors when wet fading like a dead fish. Not so with Koktebel rocks.

On some level, Koktebel rock hunting is similar to collecting shells on Sanibel Island in Florida—but not really. Normally, gathering shells (or rocks) is largely a matter of taxonomy, and for a collector, Sanibel Island is simply the best hunting ground for a wide variety of interesting specimens, a matter of practicality and convenience. With Koktebel rocks, the thing that matters is the origin, not the quality of the specimen. You could have found a brighter jasper elsewhere, but it would be just a rock.

Harvested, transported, kept as family heirlooms, cherished in almost a religious way, Koktebel rocks become talismans of a better, higher world. The cult of collecting was reported as early as the 1890s; by the 1950s, the “colored beaches” of Koktebel had become famous (of course, by now decades of overharvesting have bleached a lot of the color from the Koktebel beach).[9]

Koktebel got a mythologized patron, the poet and artist Maksimillian Voloshin (1877–1932), whose diary entry (“To South! To South!”) I quoted a few pages ago. Definitely not a first-tier or second-tier poet, and perhaps worse as an artist, fondly remembered by fans for hundreds of watercolor views of the bay from every possible angle, Voloshin was Koktebel’s genius loci. Referred to as Max (the nickname intentionally “Western”), he maintained a salon that later, when times turned hard with the civil war, became a hostel for Russian literati. Inexplicably, he lived through revolution, civil war, and terror unscathed.

Over the years, Voloshin gave shelter and food to hundreds of people. Eventually, an invitation to spend a month at Voloshin’s became a definitive sign that one had made it in Moscow’s literary and artistic world. Yet his transformation from mere host into Koktebel’s patron saint is telling. The whole area became perceived as a territory of singular qualities, largely immune to state meddling, something resembling a safe magical forest in a tale by J. R. R. Tolkien. Max was eccentric, loud, larger than life, and he regarded his village as a sovereign realm. He walked around Koktebel barefoot, in a nightgown, holding an oversized staff—an earthy figure of magical powers.[10]

In the past fifty years, Russian academic hagiography of Voloshin and other literary and artistic figures of the Russian “Silver Age” who happened to reside or visit in the Koktebel area has become amazingly rich. V. P. Kupchenko, for example, a philologist, had spent thirty-four years constructing a day-to-day chronicle of Voloshin’s life, a rare level of attention for any cultural icon. All of the scholarly volumes, conferences, shows, and readings are more a monument to their authors than to their subjects. They also celebrate a fetish—the Crimean peninsula’s Mediterranean corner.[11]

Romanticism and Orientalism

In Crimea, the Russian encountered an element he had not likely seen before: the sea. Similarly, living in country that was flat or (barely) rolling, in Crimea he met earth in an intriguing incarnation: mountains.

The empire conquered the mountains and the seacoasts at the time when European Romantics were busy reinventing both. Before that, a cliff had been either an annoying hindrance or a natural foundation for a castle, not something “beautiful.” The beach was where fishing boats moored, gulls littered, and winds howled. It was the Romantics who discovered these places as aesthetic experiences. When the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, who visited the peninsula in 1825, published his Crimean Sonnets, out of eighteen poems, six were about bays and beaches, six glorified mountaintops and cliffs, and five sang of ruins.[12] For educated Russians arriving in Crimea, the new domain came with a prefabricated mood.

To Russian visitors from the north, the Black Sea seemed like an outlet to a freer world. Their national poet, Alexander Pushkin, dubbed it the “free element” in a canonic poem. The poem’s story is, in fact, deeply unpatriotic: the narrator, like Pushkin in real life, plans to escape Russia by crossing the sea, and fails.[13]

The Black Sea fixation looks strange, as the imperial capital, St. Petersburg, sits on a seacoast too. But by the early nineteenth century (Pushkin wrote his poem in 1824), the shores of the Baltic Sea had been secured by the Russian state, and its traffic was diligently monitored by the police, the customs service, and the navy. Across the sea from St. Petersburg was a Russian protectorate, Finland. A rebel hoping for escape might have said, “Thanks for nothing, Baltic, you are about as free as I am.”

But in the south, the state had not had time to build up its controls. Mikhail Lermontov’s “Taman,” set on the desolate shores of the Sea of Azov, romanticizes a couple of young and attractive partners in crime, “honest smugglers,” as Lermontov calls them (the woman tries drowning the narrator after he discovers what their family business is). The same story mentions a local beauty who had eloped to Turkey across the sea with a Crimean boatman.[14] (Lermontov visited Taman in 1837, at the time of the first Tatar exodus.)

Only a totalitarian state could close coasts that porous. In the USSR, Crimea acquired a new quality—that of a frontier, tantalizingly close to “abroad.” The coast became the Black Sea equivalent of the Berlin Wall, from which one occasionally might spot NATO warships teasing the Soviets from the safety of international waters.

Crimea was among the oldest civilizations Russia conquered. The first time Moscow is mentioned in a chronicle is 1147; by then, the Crimean town of Feodosia was fifteen centuries old. To Russians, the cradle of their civilization lies in the eastern Mediterranean—Greece, Palestine, Asia Minor—lands of antiquity and early Christianity. Crimea was the bridge to all that. The prince of the Kievan Rus’ who would “baptize” Russia, Vladimir, converted to Orthodox Christianity in Chersonesus, now a suburb of Sevastopol. After Greek myths reached the Russians during the Enlightenment, they were delighted to discover that Crimea and the adjoining Black Sea coasts figure prominently in the stories of Iphigeneia, the Argonauts, and Achilles. Even before setting foot in Crimea, Catherine the Great reimagined the peninsula as a continuation of ancient Greece. That tradition is alive and well two hundred fifty years later.[15]

Pushkin wrote about the green waves of the sea “kissing Taurida,” for good measure throwing in an imaginary sighting of the “demi-goddess” Nereid. But Pushkin lived in the age of Romanticism, and for a Romantic pretty much everything came with a classical allusion. A century later, however, in a very different voice, Osip Mandelshtam called Crimean vineyards “Hellenic art in rocky Taurida” and alluded to “Bacchus rites” (nothing but a euphemism for “binge drinking”).[16]

Unlike Pushkin, Joseph Brodsky was able to emigrate, but before he did, stifled by the state like Pushkin, he sought refuge in Crimea, again like Pushkin, and reimagined it as a Greco-Roman haven. Brodsky comes not to Yalta but to the “shores of Pontus that does not freeze.” He celebrates Christmas in a “tavern”; a random companion in the bar has a “Levantine” face; the bartender circles the room like a “young dolphin”; the steamboats in the harbor are “soiled ichthyosaurs.”[17]

Crimea’s exoticism made it an ideal setting for Romantic melodrama. Having visited the khans’ palace, Pushkin wrote a narrative poem, “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray”—a racy story about passion, betrayal, and vengeance in a harem.[18] The fountain in question is a beautiful mid-eighteenth-century artwork. A cascade carved of white marble belongs to the category of Selsibil, the mythical Islamic wellspring of life. Pushkin renamed it the Fountain of Tears. Since then, the poem has inspired an opera and a ballet, and the bust of Pushkin placed next to the fountain itself in the Bakhchisaray palace could be a perfect cover image for a new edition of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

After “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray,” Crimea became for Russian artists what Egypt and the Levant were to their French and Italian contemporaries. As Said put it, they were reinventing the “Orient” through “positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.” Another Crimea testimony from Vladimir Nabokov: “The whole place seemed completely foreign; the smells were not Russian, the sounds were not Russian, the donkey braying every evening just as the muezzin started to chant from the village minaret (a slim blue tower silhouetted against a peach-colored sky) was positively Baghdadian.”[19]

Almost every major Russian author of the twentieth century contributed to the collective portrayal of Crimea. Aleksandr Kuprin reimagined the sleepy community of Greek fishermen in the village of Balaclava as descendants of giants, the Laestrygonians of Homer’s Odyssey. Aleksandr Grinevsky, a favorite companion of several generations of Soviet young adults, writing under a foreign-sounding pen name, Grin, disguised Crimea as a foreign country in a series of action-packed novellas, of which The Scarlet Sails is the most popular (and the tackiest). Consistently developing an imagined land around the fair cities of Liss and Zurbagan, the series was later affectionately dubbed “Grinland.” The sentimental Konstantin Paustovsky lovingly created a Crimea of abandonment, melancholy, and mystery (unkind reviewers called him delusional for writing about Sevastopol as if it were Marseilles).[20]

As late as the 1950s, books were published on contemporary travels in the Crimean mountains on a par with the Caucasus and Central Asia. With the coasts processed and overdeveloped, Russians wanted to know that some parts of the peninsula remained as exotic, wild, and mysterious as the Pamir Mountains. Joseph Brodsky’s narrative poem “Homage to Yalta” is set in the wintery mists of Crimea’s South Shore—as if his home city of St. Petersburg (Leningrad at the time) were not sufficiently gloomy to accommodate a murder story.[21]

In the mainland Russian view, the Romantic hero, call him Byronic or demonic, suited Crimea. Look at the narratives woven around the true stories of Crimea at the time of revolution and civil war, 1917–1920.

It happened that in the fall of 1920, Crimea became the last European territory of the former empire to which the Whites still clung. The evacuation of Sevastopol that November was the definitive conclusion of the civil war, ultimate victory for the Reds, ultimate catastrophe for the Whites. Soldiers of the defeated army and civilians of the failed society boarded steamboats in panic, losing track of family and friends, sometimes forever. Horses abandoned by cavalrymen plunged into the sea, following them, apparently also feeling that the separation was final; unable to take the reality of departure, a number of officers shot themselves on deck amid the howling crowds.

Soviet culture treated this exodus with surprising respect. Instead of portraying it as a flight of the low-life scum who got what they richly deserved, Soviet narratives focused on the tragic nature of the human condition—duty, allegiance, and choice—in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s words, “yesterday’s Russians, tomorrow’s refugees.” Even more surprising is the representation of the Whites’ commander-in-chief, Baron Pyotr Wrangel. Typically, in Red vernacular, Wrangel is “the Black Baron”; but not in November 1920 in Sevastopol. In Mayakovsky’s narrative poem, the doomed general is the last to evacuate Sevastopol, as the captain of a perishing ship, and he says his goodbyes to the country he leaves behind kneeling publicly, in the seaport, with bullets whizzing by.[22] Ironically, this grudging admiration comes from the man Stalin called the “best and brightest poet of the Soviet era.”

In the words of Osip Mandelshtam, the exodus of 1920 provided Crimea with a permanent “guilty look.” Guilt coupled with nostalgia became the emotional core of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Beg (Flight), which became a cult phenomenon for its cinematographic rendition in 1970. One could call it a Russian Gone With the Wind, a sentimental snapshot of a civilization cut short. Flight is a love story, but it starts with the evacuation of Sevastopol in 1920, and one of the protagonists is a White general. Bulgakov’s Roman Khludov is based on a real-life character—another Crimean “demon,” General Yakov Slashchov (1885–1929).[23]

Thirty-five in 1920, Slashchov was so critical to the defenses of Crimea that Wrangel awarded him the honorific last name “Krymsky,” and the town of Yalta made Slashchov an honorary citizen. A gifted strategist, he was also a brutal warlord and a maverick. An American military observer hitching a ride with Slashchov reported to Washington that the general’s adjutant “was practically unconscious… as he was suffering from a severe head wound he had received the previous day. This is the third adjutant General Slashchev [sic] has had in as many months, the first having been killed outright and the second having died of wounds; in both cases the general was within a few feet when the accident occurred. The previous day a shell had landed beneath the general’s horse but had not exploded. The general attributed his luck to a large black crow, which, with two ducklings of which he is very fond, shared the front seat of the automobile with a very plump young lieutenant who had given up skirts for red breeches and Hussar boots, and never stirred without rifle and revolver.”[24] (The latter misogynistic description refers to Slashchov’s wartime mistress.)

As described by witnesses, the flight of the Whites from Odessa and Novorossiysk was just as brutal, chaotic, and inhumanely final, but what remains of history is a story, and in the contemporary narrative it is the evacuation of Sevastopol that concludes the Russian Armageddon of 1917–1920.

“Good Life”

The origins of the town of Yalta are modest and unclear. It may have started as a Greek fishing village or a tiny Genoese post, but it cannot be found on a map until the mid–nineteenth century, when it was incorporated. At that point, Yalta was a sad little affair: in the words of contemporaries, a “village of some forty white houses, forming a single street,” an “abode of poor fishermen,” surrounded by “extensive woods.” Its industry was a handful of boats harvesting oysters. Half a century later, it was an established resort with all the expected “European” amenities, including snow and ice delivered from the mountains by the Tatars.[25]

Romanticism revolutionized this inconspicuous coastal town. Before the age of Byron, when natural beauty was worth nothing, settlements were built where they were built because the location was either secure or profitable, preferably both. People started coming to Yalta because that was what the upper classes were doing in Europe—going to small coastal places to relax in style and meet other people who also relaxed in style. Yalta got incorporated because it had potential for the new resort industry.

A visitor in the 1840s wrote: “Nothing can be more charming than the sight of that white Ialta [sic], seated at the head of a bay like a beautiful sultana bathing her feet in the sea, and sheltering her fair forehead from the sun under rocks festooned with verdure. Elegant buildings, handsome hotels, and a comfortable, cheerful population, indicate that opulence and pleasure have taken the town under their patronage; its prosperity, indeed, depends entirely on the travellers who fill its hotels for several months of the year.” A Western writer called it “one of the most charming places in Europe for the invalid.”[26]

After the Crimean War, not just the tsar but his brothers, uncles, and cousins thought it patriotic to build estates on the Russian Riviera. In 1867, the passengers of the first American cruise ship ever to visit the Black Sea were given a tour of several royal residences and an audience with Emperor Alexander II and his wife. One of the passengers was Mark Twain, who registered the imperial couple’s strong desire to impress the American “innocents” with “handsome” gardens, “grand old groves,” and “Grecian architecture.”[27]

Another visitor observed in 1874: “For twelve miles after leaving Yalta, there is a succession of highly-cultivated estates, and the palaces attached to them glimmer white upon the mountain side. More delightful abodes it would be impossible for the imagination to picture. One would almost believe that neither sorrow nor sickness could enter their doors; and yet, if it were so, how hard it would be to leave them for the grave!” Among the last generation of the Romanovs, almost every member of the royal family had a residence in Crimea, and in 1919, when the survivors were leaving Yalta on the British battleship Marlborough, the separation was hard indeed.[28]

The scenery of the South Shore has been variously compared to Amalfi and the Maritime Alps; one group of visitors agreed that “never, on the coasts of Italy, Spain, or Northern Africa had we seen such a combination of the magnificent and the beautiful, united with such a glow of colour, as on this seaboard.” Another visitor argued that even Switzerland could scarcely compare with the “tremendous granite precipices” of South Shore. To Mark Twain, a “beautiful spot” of “Yalta, Russia” resembled a “vision of the Sierras.”[29]

But now let us listen to another witness: Anton Chekhov, who very unhappily spent the last years of his life in Yalta, exiled there by tuberculosis. Visitors and vacationers admired the South Shore’s looks; Chekhov abhorred its soul. Yalta, he wrote in a letter, “is a cross that not everyone can bear. It abounds in drabness, slanders, intrigue and the most shameless calumny.”[30]

Chekhov’s iconic Yalta story, “The Lady With the Dog,” portrays Yalta as a place of one-night stands, a banal seaside resort where people shed their inhibitions with the full knowledge that this would have no consequences for their real life up north. When Anna Sergeevna tells Gurov that he will stop respecting her now, he finds this so obvious that he just keeps eating a watermelon. There are several shockers in the story, and one is that a trite vacation dalliance inexplicably grows into something more consequential. When this realization hits him, Gurov blurts out to an acquaintance, If you only knew what a remarkable woman I met in Yalta! The acquaintance replies: You were right about the fish they served today—it was not fresh. He knows exactly what kind of encounters occur in Yalta and dismisses Gurov’s exclamation as a bout of sentimentality brought on by excessive drinking (and possibly by the bad fish).[31]

In a less famous story, Chekhov identifies Crimea, and Yalta in particular, as a destination for Russian middle-class female sex tourists, hiring Tatar escorts for the duration of their stay so as to brag about the adventures back home. A contemporary conservative Russian journalist lamented the “loose” morals of women vacationers in Yalta, the town “not a resort, but a school of seduction.”[32]

Chekhov would have been annoyed to learn that for more than a century, Yalta has been his shrine, with a museum, conferences, readings, and theater festivals. Meeting in Yalta in 2009 to negotiate an energy deal amid an atmosphere of bonhomie and flirtation, Vladimir Putin and the then Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced they would be having a tête-à-tête dinner. “We will be discussing Chekhov,” Putin playfully told the reporters.[33]

Sevastopol

To a person not fixed on politics or war, Sevastopol may look like an utterly delightful city. Profoundly maritime, it rides the hills above a calm narrow bay where sharp warships sit at anchor.

The bay is sometimes called a fjord, though specialists insist it is a ria, a drowned river valley, just like another mariners’ haven in the eastern Mediterranean, the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro. In Sevastopol, the river is the Chornaya, nowadays an insignificant affair barely twenty miles long.

Sevastopol means August City. Founded in 1783 on Catherine the Great’s orders, it was meant to be the military springboard of Russian imperial expansion into Ottoman lands. Ironically, it became famous for the 349-day siege it suffered during the Crimean War. Habitually calculating patriotism through loss, Russians still seem proud that 127,500 of their compatriots died there in 1854 and 1855. Another way of looking at it is that the sailors and soldiers had no choice: they were at the mercy of their commanders, who were at the mercy of Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar.[34]

In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans—founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person). Yet the book’s message lives: Sevastopol is the City of Russian Glory. What also likely played a role was that nineteenth-century Russians needed to put an ethnic stamp on the still somewhat alien Crimean shore.[35]

Twelve years after the siege, Mark Twain noted that “Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sevastopol. Here, you may look in whatsoever direction you please, and your eye encounters scarcely any thing but ruin, ruin, ruin!” Two years later, an Englishwoman reported: “Not a single ship in the harbor, and all the forts and fortifications—indeed, the whole town on the south side—almost one mass of ruins. The débris of houses, forts, and barracks remain just as they were left in 1856, and a population which then amounted, it is said, to 60,000, has been reduced to 5,500!”[36]

The poet Anna Akhmatova spent her childhood summers in the vicinity. The narrator of her poem about Sevastopol picks “French bullets, like others pick mushrooms.” Imagining herself a tsarina, the girl dispatches “six battleships and six gunboats” to protect the area’s bays.[37]

During World War II, history repeated itself: Sevastopol was put through another siege. On June 22, 1941, it became the first Soviet city bombed by the Germans, and it was the call from the commander of the Black Sea Fleet that alerted Moscow to the catastrophe. In November, after the Red Army evacuated the rest of the peninsula, the siege of Sevastopol continued for eight more months. A German soldier remembered: “Numerous Russians lay wounded, scattered among the vineyards under a merciless, scorching sun. There was no water available to them where they lay, and they were quickly overcome with a sense of apathy as they lay waiting to die on the open ground.”[38]

Soviet generals seem to have been touched by the tragic continuity, sort of a deadly noblesse oblige. In 1941–1942, Sevastopol “fought heroically,” “true to its military heritage,” Stalin’s chief of general staff wrote. The minister of the navy reported that the city stood like an “invincible rock” where “real life heroes shed blood for the Fatherland” next to the ghosts of Tolstoy’s “no less dear and familiar heroes.”[39]

In both wars, Sevastopol was a fortress, holding off the enemy for months and refusing to surrender, not the base of aggressive naval operations envisioned at its birth. If Sevastopol is the “City of Russian Glory,” its glory is tragic. “If we are told to die fighting, we will die fighting unquestioningly,” its story seems to tell us. This is exactly the kind of pledge the Leviathan of the Russian state likes to hear.

But according to Russian Orthodoxy, Sevastopol is sacred grounds twice over. In 988, Prince Vladimir, the ruler of Kievan Rus’, converted to Christianity in Chersonesus; returning to Kiev, he made Orthodoxy the state religion—as tradition says, converting the rest of the country “by sword and fire.”[40]

In the mid–nineteenth century, local clergy tried making Crimea a “Russian Athos,” intending to steal the clout of the original Mount Athos, an autonomous theocracy on the Chalkidiki Peninsula in northern Greece, which had traditionally been the center of Eastern Orthodox mysticism. Crimea’s South Shore resembled the Holy Mountain in looks; some Christian sites on the peninsula were old; Christians and Muslims alike venerated a number of locales for their alleged paranormal qualities.

To that purpose, several monasteries got fixed or built—St. George’s near Balaklava, Dormition in Bakhchisaray, Inkerman off Sevastopol, Cosmas’ and Damian’s deep in the mountains. For several years, the rebranding seemed to work, attracting Orthodox pilgrims. What unexpectedly killed the project was technological progress: steamships allowed a pilgrim to reach the real Athos from any Black Sea port in only two or three days.[41]

The Black Sea Fleet

One can’t tell the story of the Crimean War or World War II without Sevastopol. But take out the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and nothing in the bigger picture changes. Here we come to one of the many paradoxes of Russian history: although it is a staple of Russian state mythology, and a powerful presence in literature, art, and politics, the Russian navy has very little to boast of in terms of battles won and enemy fleets destroyed. To this day, its biggest feat remains its tragic journey around Europe, Africa, and Asia in 1904–1905 to the Sea of Japan, where it was decimated by the Japanese navy in the infamous Battle of Tsushima.[42]

The navy is the “favorite child of Peter the Great,” because he built it from scratch, first by learning for himself how to build warships on the wharfs of Holland and England. The new capital, St. Petersburg, was conceived as a glorified base for his favorite child. Yet despite all the effort, cost, sweat, and blood spilled, the Russian navy remained more a meme than a real thing, more romantic than sensible, more patriotic than practical.

Russia’s geographical limits make a big navy an expensive toy: few warm-water ports, too many inner seas, and a total inability to move a fleet quickly from one theater to another. A winning weapon for Russia is aircraft and missile, not cruiser and submarine.

The folly is particularly apparent in the south. The Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean are like three nesting dolls. An unfriendly force can lock each one of them shut—the Sea of Azov at the Strait of Kerch, the Black Sea at the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean at Gibraltar. Short of an unimaginable collapse of the West, there is no geostrategic situation that could give the Russian Black Sea Navy unhindered access to the Atlantic.

During the Crimean War, the Russian fleet, blockaded in Sevastopol by the British and the French, became a heroic sitting duck. The Russians ended up scuttling their ships to prevent the Allies from moving into the harbor. In 1918, to keep Germans from capturing it, Russians scuttled the fleet in Novorossiysk. In 1942, abandoning Sevastopol, the Soviets scuttled the fleet again. One could say that the Russian Black Sea Fleet kills itself with shocking readiness: suicide may be its most effective tactic. The Monument to the Scuttled Ships at the entrance to Sevastopol harbor, a tasteless column awkwardly stuck into a pyramid of rocks, has been a symbol of the city since 1905. The bronze eagle on top, crowning the column with a laurel wreath, looks eternally perplexed, as if it were not sure what exactly the monument celebrates.

The admirals who presided over the defense of Sevastopol in 1853–1856, Vladimir Kornilov, Pavel Nakhimov, and Vladimir Istomin, all killed during the siege and buried in the Admirals’ Vault in St. Vladimir Cathedral in Sevastopol, entered the pantheon of Russian military geniuses. At least five Russian ships have borne Nakhimov’s name. In 1944, Joseph Stalin established the Nakhimov Medal for sailors, the Nakhimov Order for officers, and Nakhimov schools for young cadets.

As a fetish, Crimea appeals to every ideological camp. Members of the liberal intelligentsia are attracted to Chekhov, Koktebel, and Brodsky, while the far right, despising Koktebel as decadent, idolizes Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet.

As Russia’s fixation focuses on Crimea as an assemblage of inanimate objects (relics of the past; urban structures; rock, sea, beach) and memories (people and narratives), the agency of the actual people living on the peninsula fades to the background. In Russian eyes, the peninsula has little function except as an object of desire. The Tatars’ legacy and current strife are ignored, Ukraine’s are ridiculed, and the Crimean Russophiles are seen only as hostages Russia had to rescue.

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]

To Moscow’s relief, after 1991 the Kirim became Kiev’s burden. Ukraine tried to engage Russia and Uzbekistan, holding them responsible for the Tatars’ plight and asking for financial help, but the request was brushed off. The only stable foreign donor for the Kirim was the Ottomans’ successor state, Turkey, which pledged about $87 million for home construction and study programs in Turkey for young people. Religious revival got more funding, as numerous foreign Islamic groups donated money to build or restore mosques and start schools and charities.[11]

By the turn of the century, the dust had settled a bit. Dzhemilev’s group had negotiated a kind of benign apartheid for the Tatars: they had their own national assembly, the Qurultai, and an executive arm, the Mejlis. For all intents and purposes, these were institutions of self-rule, operating within a perhaps intentionally vague delimitation of power between themselves and the Ukrainian state. Dzhemilev was able to wrest this precariously de facto autonomy from Kiev because Ukrainian leaders intended to use the Crimean Tatars as a counterbalance to the peninsula’s Russophiles.

In the absence of any survey data, it is hard to tell what percentage of Tatar settlers found Ukrainian rule in Crimea a lesser evil than Russian rule. A factor to consider is the rise of the Tatar propertied class. Settlers arriving in Crimea in the 1980s were more or less equal; since then, capitalism had created stratification within the community. Svetlana Chervonnaya, a scholar who did fieldwork in Crimea, bitterly commented that after seeing shantytowns next to mansions, she found it “difficult to imagine a united Crimean Tatar nation.” Nationalism and identity aside, the Tatar upper class simply could not have risen without integrating with the Crimean economy, which meant collaborating with the Russophile elites. That helped the intercommunal armistice stand.[12]

Agitation

Carelessness, infighting, bad judgment, and corruption had prevented Ukraine from forging a strong military. Counting on exactly that, Vladimir Putin launched a covert takeover operation that precluded bloodshed or the conspicuous use of arms. Putin claimed that he ordered the annexation of Crimea only after the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych, in the small hours of February 23, 2014. This may be true, but some preparations for the takeover must have begun earlier.[13]

Three political goals had to be reached before the military operation began. The Russophiles on the peninsula had to be mobilized; the political establishment of Crimean Tatars had to be neutralized; and world opinion had to be probed for sympathy and prepared for the eventuality.

The casus belli for Crimean separatism was the specter of “Ukrainian fascism.” Far-right nationalist groups commanded only marginal support in Ukraine, but their presence in Euromaidan and riots elsewhere suggested a determination and vengefulness lacking in other political forces. The Russophiles in the Crimean government, grassroots activists, and of course Putin’s propaganda machine predicted imminent invasion and massacres by “fascists from Western Ukraine.”

This catastrophic scenario was far-fetched but not baseless. The Ukrainian far-right parties and militias were already spread too thin throughout Ukraine’s core, and there was no way they could seriously threaten Crimea. But, usefully for Putin, they talked a good game. Their bellicose rhetoric, their smug use of Nazi symbols, and their declarations of an all-out war against “Ivans” (moskaly) were all real.

All over Ukraine, people died in ambushes, street fighting, and arsons, and although the total casualties probably did not exceed two hundred, rumors increased that number tenfold. In the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, and with the Ukrainian state collapsing, the idea of seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia was an easy sell to Crimea’s majority.

Neutralizing the Tatar leadership was more difficult. Mustafa Dzhemilev warned that Tatars would not accept a referendum at gunpoint. He could not be swayed even when Putin called him personally. But Crimea’s new class of Tatar entrepreneurs was less resistant to Moscow’s overtures.

The Kremlin asked leaders of the Volga Tatar community to intercede in Crimea, to showcase the benefits of being with Russia. The 2 million Volga Tatars were autonomous within the Russian Federation—the Republic of Tatarstan, centered on its capital, Kazan, a thriving regional metropolis. Predictably, Kazan loyalists failed to persuade Dzhemilev, but their effect on the Crimean Tatar business community was significant.[14]

Russia has 20 million Muslims, more than any other country in Europe, and they make up the country’s second-largest religious group after Orthodox Christians. In a new spirit of interfaith cooptation, Putin declared Islam “a striking element of the Russian cultural code, an inalienable, organic part of Russian history.” Russia’s mainstream Muslim clerics embraced the “harmony and unity” approach. All of that should have at least somewhat alleviated the Crimean Muslims’ concerns.[15]

The Kremlin could not possibly have hoped to achieve as much in the outside world. The “Ukrainian fascists” card was hard to play with foreign audiences. First, the threat posed by the Euromaidan far right was largely latent. Second, after the numerous follies of the 2000s—especially its effort to present a brutal war on Chechnya as a defensive battle against terrorists—Putin’s propaganda apparatus had zero credibility in the West. Third, mainstream Western media venues, both liberal and conservative, had sided with the Euromaidan from the very beginning. Changing their minds was an impossible task.

But the Kosovo precedent could not be easily dismissed. Military intervention in Kosovo under Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush’s blithe sponsorship of Kosovo’s independence, now became Moscow’s constant source of justification for the impending Crimea takeover.

Just like Crimea, Kosovo had been an autonomous region of a sovereign state, Serbia. If Kosovo had been allowed to secede, Moscow argued, why not Crimea? The difference, said Western commentators, was Serbian atrocities in Kosovo, to which Moscow wryly responded that it did not plan to wait until Ukrainian extremists started massacring the citizens of Sevastopol.[16]

Hybrid Warfare

The peninsula fell under Russian control within three weeks, even though Moscow officially had no troops on the ground. The Kremlin announced that there was no need for them because grassroots Crimean militias were taking over effectively, independently, and bloodlessly. There were, in fact, Russophile militias in Crimea consisting of local volunteers, but they were herded and led by armed strangers, the “little green men.” Putin did not admit to using Russian special forces until the first anniversary of the takeover.

Variously called a “stealth invasion,” “non-linear war,” “hybrid war,” “special war,” “asymmetric,” and “ambiguous” warfare, the strategy would resurface in eastern Ukraine. Based, in the words of Western military analysts, on “deception, deniability and special operations troops mixed with volunteer militias,” it was a “new form of warfare that cannot be characterized as a military campaign in the classic sense of the term. The invisible military occupation cannot be considered an occupation by definition.”[17]

Russia expert Mark Galeotti provides strong evidence that the “hybrid war” doctrine was conceived at least a year before the actual invasion.[18] That would certainly explain its success in Crimea. This is what happened.

Hardcore nationalist cells on the peninsula, such as the Night Wolves, were called to arms. Presumably, Moscow told them the general plan of the campaign and assigned roles to individual groups. Ways of supplying them with weapons were arranged. A similar process occurred in the regions of mainland Russia that already had nationalistic militias. The Kuban Cossacks were one such group, which crossed into Crimea across the Strait of Kerch in the early days of the campaign.

Russian commandos disrupted cable communications between Ukrainian forces in Crimea and central command in Kiev, while Russian military hackers mounted “denial-of-service attacks” against Ukrainian government and media outlets in cyberspace. Cyber PR professionals, the Kremlin “trolls” in Internet-speak, invaded social networks, mobilizing Crimean separatists and confusing the Ukrainian adversary.

Ukrainian military commanders in Crimea found themselves stalked and threatened, mob-style. When threats did not persuade a Ukrainian commander to desert, defect, or surrender, paramilitary groups like the Night Wolves stepped in. On at least one occasion, they kidnapped a high-ranking Ukrainian general.

At the end of February, Russian marines, paratroopers, and military intelligence special forces began to arrive in Crimea, either undercover via legitimate ports of entry or landing at the Sevastopol naval base or at Russian air force bases in the steppes. After their numbers reached six or seven thousand, Russian commandos blockaded Ukrainian troops in their bases. All strategic locations were occupied. One of the first was Chernomorneftegaz (Black Sea Oil and Gas Company) headquarters and its offshore platforms in the Sea of Azov.[19]

Perhaps the main value of this approach was that Russia’s larger strategic plan remained invisible, and every new step took Ukraine by surprise. The biggest feat in this respect was the neutralization of the Ukrainian navy stationed in the Donuzlav lagoon north of Sevastopol. Instead of engaging it in battle or even threatening to, the Russians just sank four of their own older ships at the mouth of the lagoon. No doubt this was also meant as a macabre joke, a reference to the sinking of the Russian fleet during the Crimean War.[20]

To make sure NATO understood the seriousness of Russian intentions, Moscow deployed to Sevastopol an advanced coastal defensive missile system, called Bastion. As Putin put it slyly, “We deployed them so they could be seen clearly from space.” The Bastions were a statement. According to foreign experts, the Bastions covered the coast of southern Ukraine, including Odessa, its only major port, and “much of the Black Sea itself.” The missiles were thought to be able to select an individual target from a group “even in a jamming environment.”[21]

Except for a few half-hearted attempts at resistance, Ukrainian forces gave up Crimea without a fight. On March 21, the Russian flag was raised at 147 Ukrainian military facilities in Crimea and on 54 Ukrainian naval ships, including the nation’s lone submarine.[22]

It is important to note that Moscow’s spectacular military success in Crimea was explained not by Putin’s prowess or Russian strategic ingenuity, but by the tragic disarray of the Ukrainian military on and around the peninsula. The infiltration of the “little green men” could have been prevented, or at least effectively contained, had Ukraine maintained even modestly operational border controls and special forces. The entry points were few and well known. The Strait of Kerch (ferries), and the Perekop Isthmus (trains and automobiles) could have been securely blockaded with just a few hundred determined servicemen. The same goes for the perimeters of Russian air force and navy bases, which received planeloads of “polite soldiers.” A combat-ready force of two thousand soldiers might have been all Ukraine needed to deter Russian aggression in Crimea. This should not be too much to ask of a state that, at least on paper, had an army of 130,000.[23]

A lasting lesson from the 2014 takeover of Crimea is that the “new Russian military strategy” can be used only against failing states. In Ukraine, like an opportunistic infection, it finished off a body already eaten up by disease. Putin’s is a strategy of vultures, not raptors.

Ascension

With the referendum in progress, on March 11, eighty-five Russian artists and writers published an open letter supporting Putin’s policy in “Ukraine and Crimea.” One of the signers was long dead and another had not been consulted, but the rest of signatures were real. Many belonged to intellectuals typically described as “pro-Western,” including regulars of the Manhattan cultural scene—the pianist Denis Matsuev, conductors Yury Bashmet and Vladimir Spivakov, the dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze. The father of perestroika and glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev, called the annexation a “happy event.” He was seconded by the head of the House of Romanov in exile, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna.[24]

Russian state-controlled media exploited American involvement, making it sound as if U.S. puppeteers now made every decision for Kiev. TV anchors warned that Ukraine could join NATO at any time. Putin and the Russian street saw eye to eye on many things: Crimea as an imperial fetish, the threat from NATO, U.S. involvement in Kiev and military interventions worldwide. The mood in Russia was one of resurgence and Reconquista.

Despite the international outcry, Crimean polls opened as scheduled on March 16. Many Tatars boycotted an election that they could not sway in any case. The official figures—96 percent saying “yes,” with 82 percent turnout—are hard to believe and impossible to verify. Yet observers agree that Crimeans overwhelmingly supported the move. Had the referendum been transparent, with foreign observers present, Crimea would have still voted “yes.” It is hard to explain rationally why Putin would not have allowed that.

In the Kremlin on March 18, with much pomp, Putin signed a “treaty of ascension” of Crimea and Sevastopol to Russia. The Republic of Crimea was incorporated as a federal subject of the Russian Federation, and Sevastopol as a federal city. That put the City of the Russian Glory in the same category with Moscow and St. Petersburg, an unprecedented honor, but also an indication that the fortress would now be ruled directly by the Kremlin. Jubilant Russian social networks spat up a patriotic Twitter hashtag, #CrimeaIsOurs (krymnash). This quickly developed into a noun for the ardent supporters of the Russian president (as in “only krymnashi will be attending”).

Not undeservedly, Vladimir Putin took credit for the “reunification.” When he visited Sevastopol on May 9 (not coincidentally, V-Day in the Russian calendar) his theatrical entry into the bay onboard a warship was meant to look like the return of a king.