Battle for Crimea Rages On
By
Lubomyr Luciuk
I did not expect the call of a muezzin
in Simferopol.
Not that hearing the chosen being invited to their devotions troubles me. I
appreciate this caution against allowing the commerce of daily life to distract
one from giving thanks to God. Yet other residents of this Crimean city find
the five-times-daily summoning of Muslims to prayer, the adhan,
worrisome. It reminds them that ownership of this peninsula is contested. They
forget one thing – it always has been.
Nearly the size of Belgium, Crimea
historically was a bridgehead connecting the empires of the Eurasian steppes
with those of the Black sea
and Mediterranean sea
basins. Invaders have come and gone – ancient Greeks and Scythians, Rome’s
legions, then Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, various Turkic nomads,
Venetians, Genoese, Ottoman Turks and, finally, Tsarist Russia’s armies,
conquering in 1783.
That gateway role is
reflected in Crimea’s
history. In 988 in Chersones, now part of Sevastopol,
Kyiv’s Prince Volodymyr converted to Christianity, then that faith was diffused
among the East Slavs.
Today, the region’s vistas are pleasant – vineyards covering gently rolling
hills and wide valleys – but this very same terrain witnessed the Ukrainian
Cossacks of the Zaparozhian Sich fight marauding Tatars and resist Ottoman
encroachment. And Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
immortalized the disaster that befell another band of cavalry near Balaklava in
1854. Heroically interpreted by Errol Flynn in his 1936 film of the same name,
this Hollywood version of that Crimean War battle left at least one young boy
begging his mother to take him to their local public library, to read that
paean in its entirety – the first time I sought out poetry.
In 1919-1920, this headland
became a bastion for the anti-Bolshevik White Army of General Denikin, a point
d’appui for foreign military interventions unsuccessfully deployed against
Lenin’s regime. Crimea
was next overrun by the Nazis, in 1942, then suffered cultural genocide in May
1944 when the Soviets returned and deported the Tatars because of their
supposed disloyalty during the German occupation. Stalin is said to have
contemplated a similar treatment for Ukrainians, a deed left undone only
because there were too many of them. And at Yalta, Eastern
Europe’s postwar fate was sealed in February 1945
when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met in the Livadia Palace to
carve out the ‘spheres of influence’ that shaped Europe’s
geopolitics for another half century.
Soviet Ukraine
acquired Crimea in
1954 after Nikita Khrushchev transferred the property’s legal title from the Russian
Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, a gift marking 300
years of allegedly fraternal relations between these two distinct nations. It
was a hollow gesture as Crimea
remained in the USSR
and no one then envisioned the Soviet empire’s collapse or an independent Ukraine.
As for the Tatars, permitted to trickle back from Central Asian exile only at
the end of the Soviet period, they began returning in greater numbers after
1991 when Ukraine’s government tried to redress the historical injustice they
had endured, even though that crime was of Moscow’s making, not Kyiv’s. Still,
Crimean society remains Russified, retarded by a relic Soviet mentality akin to
the one most of Ukraine’s eastern marches wallow in, an ignorance fuelling
Ukraine’s current drift away from Europe. So, Lenin statues stand prominent in Simferopol, Sevastopol,
and Yalta.
Asking why, I was told: “We were allowed to dump Communism but had to keep
Lenin.” They have not really rid themselves of either.
Making matters worse are
revanchists campaigning to bag Crime for ‘Mother Russia.’ Dozens of billboards
proclaim Crimea’s
future prosperity lies in reunification, a blatantly secessionist placarding
not being countered by Kyiv. The very few posters heralding Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych as Crimea’s
hope, and Ukraine’s,
are in Russian only. Perhaps the President’s propagandists have their countries
confused.
Will Crimea’s
status remain uncertain? Maybe there’s an answer in what I found in a madras,
an Islamic school, in Bakhchisaray. There, I saw a mullah instructing a
small group of children, young boys and girls learning the Koran
together. I asked in Ukrainian if I might take their photograph. When the
Turkish teacher replied that he spoke no Russian, one of his pupils, a girl,
aged 11, began translating – in perfect Ukrainian. Aware of her Crimean Tatar
heritage and Islamic faith she also proudly identified herself as a Ukrainian.
If more of her fellow citizens did likewise, Ukraine
might still make it back to Europe.
Lubomyr Luciuk, PhD., teaches political
geography at the Royal Military College of
Canada
PHOTO
Lubomyr Luciuk at the British Army Memorial of the Battle of Balaklava in Crimea