2014 March « culturedallroundman

Archives For February 28, 2014 @ 12:00 am

A Brief History of Ukraine

March 28, 2014 @ 6:01 pm — 2 Comments

With the situation in Crimea apparently resolved, at least for the time being, attention is turning to other sites in Ukraine and beyond. The withdrawal of Ukrainian forces at the beginning of this week – after Russian troops seized the Belbek airbase and Feodosia naval base – marked the interim Ukrainian government’s tacit acceptance that Crimea has been lost. Russian military action in the region following the Crimean referendum on 16 March has been efficient – threatening rather than violent, utilising unidentified pro-Russian groups to storm bases, backed up by official military personnel – as a lack of explicit direction from Kiev has left Ukrainian troops seemingly little more than caretakers, waiting for Crimea to pass into Russian hands. Six of the eleven senior Ukrainian officers held by Russia following these takeovers have now been released. Meanwhile, following the assent of the Crimean parliament, the city council of Sevastopol, and Vladimir Putin, both the Federation Council and the State Duma have ratified Crimea’s integration into the Russian Federation. Two Crimean senators are scheduled to join Russia’s Federation Council from 16 April.

Across the West, the international community continues to decry Russia’s intervention in Crimea, and will not accept the legitimacy of Crimea’s separation from Ukraine. A symbolic vote in the UN on Thursday saw 100 countries affirm that the Crimean referendum took place illegally; 11 countries disagreed, while 58 abstained. The US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Japan have opted to temporarily suspend Russia from the G8 group of nations, and will continue to meet without Russia, reverting to the G7. Russia has described this as ‘no great tragedy’; while other commentators, including former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, have dismissed this and other sanctions as ineffective, stressing that the G8 has been superseded as an economic forum by the G20, which incorporates emerging economies and still includes Russia.

There is a certain pragmatism in all parties accepting the current state of affairs in Crimea. Putin has achieved a show of force, asserting his position back home and emboldening nationalist sentiment, while bolstering Russia’s military authority across the Crimean peninsula. As things stand, Ukraine has maintained the territorial integrity of its mainland, and the ability to move towards presidential elections and constitutional reform come May. The sanctions imposed by the EU, the US and Canada will continue to be decried as weak, especially by those on the right of politics; but they went perhaps further than expected in targeting some prominent Russian officials and businessmen. Both Ukraine and the West must really content themselves with their mutual sympathies, and with Russia’s loss of international sway, given the impracticality of attempting to keep Crimea as part of Ukraine. While Ukraine’s interim Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has stressed that the country’s financial position remains perilous, the International Monetary Fund has promised it $18 billion in loans – which, for good or ill, will provide the IMF and its backers with significant influence over the country’s future economic development. The US Congress has guaranteed a $1 billion loan of its own, plus $150 million in direct aid. It is the Crimeans themselves who have arguably lost the most, in so far as they have been forced to choose between Russia on the one hand and Ukraine and the EU on the other; but the choice they have made seems clear, and it enables them to retain their crucial economic and close cultural ties with Russia.

Still, what spoke for the Russians restraining their ambitions, and embarking on a lesser show of force in order to secure only military access to Crimea – while leaving the region perhaps with greater autonomy from Ukraine, but still politically part of the country – was that it would have maintained Russia’s influence over Ukraine, ideologically and electorally. Russia will not settle gladly for an antagonistic Ukraine: it values its economic role in the country; their shared cultural bonds; and Russia has always protected itself in terms of land, seeking to maintain buffer regions between its capital and the outposts of its supposed enemies. But Putin perhaps presumes that by manipulating tensions in eastern Ukraine when it suits, and owing to Ukraine’s financial dependence on Russia, especially when it comes to gas, Ukraine can scarcely afford to sever their relationship completely.

It is to Ukraine’s east that attention has now turned. Ukraine and the West allege that Russia is poised to launch an invasion into eastern Ukraine, which has seen a wave of demonstrations since the ousting of President Yanukovych towards the end of last month. The region has a significant ethnic Russian populace, and its economy is reliant on Russian trade. A history of separatist feeling in the east extends back to the foundations of the Ukrainian state. Russia has carried out military exercises on the Ukrainian border, but the extent of its interest in eastern Ukraine is hard to gauge amid inevitable claim and counterclaim. Russia asserts that it has no desire to divide Ukraine, and argues that violence in the east has been incited by far-right Ukrainian nationalists and by American defence contractors. Ukraine and the US suggest instead that Russian soldiers have infiltrated the east, that pro-Russian protesters are being transported across the border into Ukraine, and that Russia is amassing its military with intent. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Philip Breedlove, has raised additional concerns that Russian forces could sweep through southern Ukraine into neighbouring Transdniestria, which broke away from Moldova in 1990 as the Soviet Union began to fall, but has never been given international recognition. The half-million population of Transdniestria is evenly split between Moldovans, Russians, and Ukrainians. Russia has continued, since Moldovan independence in 1992, to maintain a contested military presence of 1,200 troops in the region. Fears over Russian incursions into the Baltic states appear at this point unfounded, and would be impeded by their memberships of the EU and NATO.

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Following my history of Crimea – which summarised the course of the region until its absorption into the Russian Empire in the 1700s; from which I looked at events in Crimea in more depth, through the eyes of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nabokov – what proceeds is a brief but involved history of Ukraine. It begins in the early middle ages, with Kievan Rus as a loose federation of the East Slavic peoples. Taking a paragraph from my earlier piece:

Kievan Rus flourished from about 882 – when Prince Oleg moved the capital of the Rus from Novgorod to Kiev – until the 13th century, when the Mongol Empire invaded and destroyed their major cities. While Russia gradually threw off the ‘Mongol-Tatar Yoke’, and began to emerge round the city of Moscow as a powerful independent state, Kiev and much of what is now northern and central Ukraine came under Polish-Lithuanian control. The Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 ended in a truce, but one which forced the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to relinquish Kiev and the lands east of the Dnieper River (plus Smolensk further north) to the Tsardom of Russia. These lands continued to rule themselves with some autonomy for the next hundred years, the period of the Cossack Hetmanate; but this autonomy was successively diminished during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), and the region came to be fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. Russia often considers the union between Kiev and Moscow to extend back to the beginnings of the the Russo-Polish War in 1654.

The partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 1700s added to the Russian Empire the lands west of the Dnieper. Together, the lands won from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1654 and the end the 18th century would come to comprise much of modern mainland Ukraine. With the span and diversity within the enlarged Russian Empire, the concept of an All-Russian nation was promulgated as an attempt to unify its collected peoples under one state. The concept recognised the differences between the peoples of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, but endeavoured to subsume them, positioning them as deviations which obscured a fundamental cultural and historical unity.

Nevertheless, within the Russian Empire the people spread east and west of the Dnieper came to be called Little Russians, while the region was referred to as Little Russia (‘Малороссия’, Malorossiya). These labels were readily embraced by those wealthy members of the populace who quickly rose to positions of prominence within the Empire. However, the larger population identified instead as Ruthenian – a historical term for the East Slavic people who lived in an area between modern west-Ukraine and Poland, broadly equivalent with the geographic territory of Galicia. This larger population of the region maintained a common language discrete from Russian: while both were rooted in Old East Slavic, which had been established during the period of Kievan Rus, the language they spoke had developed differently, owing to internal forces and to the influence of Polish-Lithuanian rule.

Fearful that nationalist sentiment would emerge among their ‘Little Russians’, in the early 1800s the Russian Empire banned the use of the regional language and enforced Russian as the language of political administration and education. Nationalist sentiment still arose, notably in Kiev, where in the middle of the 1840s it grew around the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. This secretive nationalist political society had as one of its party the poet Taras Shevchenko. Born on 9 March 1814 in Moryntsi, a couple of hundred kilometres south of Kiev, Shevchenko moved to Saint Petersburg in 1831, and towards the end of the decade enrolled there in the Academy of Arts. Painting landscapes, portraits and rural idylls, he began writing poetry in the language of his homeland. His first collection, Kobzar, was published in 1840.

Shevchenko visited the regions of ‘Little Russia’ on several occasions in the following years; then in 1847, he was arrested, preliminarily owing to his connection with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. As an artist rather than an activist, he was set to escape severe punishment, until Emperor Nicholas I uncovered one of his poems which mocked both the Emperor and his wife. Shevchenko was imprisoned in Petersburg, then exiled to Orsk near the Ural Mountains, where he would spend the next decade. After a further two years in Nizhniy Novgorod, in May 1859 he was finally allowed to return to Kiev; but this respite proved short lived, for in July he was arrested again, remaining in Petersburg until his death on 10 March 1861. Buried initially in Petersburg, his remains were transported by his friends to a hill on the banks of the Dnieper River, near Kaniv.

Shevchenko is esteemed today as Ukraine’s national poet; the anniversary of his birth celebrated several weeks ago was the occasion of marked clashes between opposing groups in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. His poetry is considered foundational in the development of Ukrainian literature, and influential too in the emergence of the modern Ukrainian tongue. As he wrote in the regional language, and expressed nationalist views in a number of his works, to call Shevchenko a Ukrainian poet seems entirely warranted. In the case of Nikolai Gogol – the most famous of writers born on Ukrainian soil – attempted recastings of him as a Ukrainian writer remain controversial, open to the charge of anachronism. Gogol was born on 31 March 1809 in Sorochyntsi, on the left-bank of the Dnieper, and grew up in a family that spoke both Russian and the regional language. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1828, then travelled abroad in 1836, spending most of the next twelve years in Rome. After returning to the Russian Empire in 1848, via a curtailed pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he died in Moscow on 4 March 1852.

Gogol drew for his earliest stories from Ukrainian settings, customs, folklore, and theatre. His first collections of short stories – Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, published in two volumes in 1831 and 1832, and Mirgorod, published in 1835 – are set with fondness in the rural ‘Little Russia’ of his youth. Working on these in Petersburg, Gogol would write home for points of detail on which to elaborate his fiction. He maintained until his final years friendships with scholars of Ukrainian language and history, who shared friendships also with Shevchenko. At the same time, Gogol wrote solely in Russian. His mature stories are set predominantly in Petersburg. According to Gogol, several of them took their plot from ideas given to the author by Pushkin. The loosely political sentiments which may be derived from Gogol’s letters and his notoriously peculiar Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, published in 1847, speak towards a vaguely pan-Slavic spiritual identity, conceived as Russian, rather than to any nationalist movement. He would write:

‘We Little Russians and Great Russians need a common poetry, a calm, strong and everlasting poetry of truth, goodness and beauty. The Little and the Great Russian are the souls of twins who complement each other, who are closely related and equally strong. It is impossible to prefer one of them at the cost of the other.’

Gogol’s art was adopted so wholly into the great body of Russian literature which followed, from Dostoevsky to Bely to Nabokov – three of his most perceptive interpreters – that disengaging him from this mainstream of Russian letters proves difficult, and would appear to bear relatively little fruit. On the other hand a full understanding of his art must contemplate its distinctly Ukrainian beginnings. Whatever, unlike Shevchenko, Gogol today is not regarded in any way a symbol of Ukrainian statehood.

While national sentiment began to grow on the banks of the Dnieper, it was not until the late 1800s that the concept of a ‘Ukrainian’ people – and of the word ‘Ukraine’ as the proper name for the region – began to appear. This marked a rejection of the diminutive ‘Little Russian’ and of the historical term ‘Ruthenian’, considered insufficient to represent the sense and the aims of the emerging nationalist movement. The word ‘ukraina’ had been used from the 1500s to essentially mean ‘borderland’: derived from the Proto-Slavic ‘krajь’, meaning border or edge, the term had referred to the frontiers of the Kingdom of Poland in and around Kiev. It was used informally to denote the region during the rule of the Cossack Hetmanate. By the 1840s, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius were calling the people of the region ‘Ukrainians’ – though the appellation was never adopted by Shevchenko, who used ‘Little Russian’ even in his nationalist texts. By the turn of the century, the usage ‘Ukrainian’ was entrenched among nationalists, and referred to themselves as a distinct ethnic group. The usage would only become standard beyond the banks of the Dnieper over the next two decades.

Politically, Ukraine’s existence as an independent state can be traced back to 1917 and the February Revolution which effectively marked the end of the Russian Empire. Within days of the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky forming in Saint Petersburg (then called Petrograd), the nationalist movement in Kiev consolidated and established a central council, called the Tsentralna Rada. The Tsentralna Rada issued an early declaration calling on ‘the Ukrainian people’ to support Kerensky’s Provisional Government. It then elected the prominent nationalist academic Mykhailo Hrushevskyi as its head, and formed a parliament of 150 which effectively began administering Ukrainian affairs. Towards the end of June, after back-and-forth with Kerensky, the Rada issued its ‘First Universal’, declaring Ukrainian autonomy as part of the Russian Republic. A Ukrainian government was formed, called the General Secretariat and comprising nine ministers, and it was recognised by Kerensky.

Disagreements between the Provisional Government in Petrograd and the Tsentralna Rada regarding the degree of autonomy the General Secretariat should possess were rendered irrelevant following the October Revolution, which saw the Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd. Initially maintaining relations with the Bolsheviks, in November the Rada, via another ‘Universal’ decree, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The extent of the autonomous state’s jurisdiction was also defined: it would govern over the majority of the regions which comprise modern Ukraine, including the Kharkiv region, but not including Crimea. As relationships with the Bolsheviks broke down, and with the Bolsheviks setting up base in Kharkiv, in late January 1918 the Tsentralna Rada issued its ‘Fourth Universal’, declaring the full independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.

The Bolsheviks had continued to press within the newly emerged state. Regions within the Ukrainian People’s Republic were encouraged to break away, and to establish their own Soviet republics. Lacking a strong military capacity, the Ukrainian People’s Republic sought foreign aid, turning to the Russian Empire’s opponents in the ongoing First World War, the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The first treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Central Powers on 9 February, in theory secured Ukrainian sovereignty, but in practise made the Republic a German protectorate. Amidst Ukrainian resentment, on 29 April a German-backed coup saw the Tsentralna Rada dismissed and a former Russian General, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, installed as the state’s new ruler.

Skoropadskyi styled himself Hetman of Ukraine. Where under Hrushevskyi’s leadership the Tsentralna Rada had been broadly socialist, the new Hetmanate was conservative. When it too fell following the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I in November, a socialist Directorate was formed to govern; but within a month, fighting broke out as the Republic became fully embroiled in the Russian Civil War. At the same time, Austria’s defeat saw its province of Galicia become divided between the claims of Ukrainians and Poles. Ukrainians in the region proclaimed the West Ukrainian People’s Republic days before the restoration of the Polish state on 11 November 1918. On 22 January 1919, a Unification Act was signed between the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Kiev. The Polish-Ukrainian War over Galicia lasted until July, and ended in a Polish victory.

Meanwhile Ukraine saw battle between the Soviet Red Army and the anti-Bolshevik White Army, and authority in Kiev fluctuated back and forth between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Bolsheviks. By the spring of 1920, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was again in desperate need of foreign intervention, and now allied with Poland, whose forces over the coming months repelled the Bolshevik advance. A decisive Polish victory at the Battle of Warsaw in August forced Soviet Russia to sue for peace. The drawing to a close of Polish-Soviet hostilities, allied to General Wrangel’s defeat in Crimea – the last bastion of the White Army – in November, effectively ended the Russian Civil War. The Treaty of Riga – signed between Poland and Soviet Russia on 18 March 1921 – ensured for Poland Galicia and a significant area of western Ukraine; while Soviet Russia established control over the central and eastern Ukrainian mainland. Poland’s victory in the Polish-Soviet War was crucial in the development of 20th century Europe: beyond securing the status of Poland, it is perceived as halting Soviet ambitions towards ‘international revolution’, the spreading of communist revolution by force. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – Soviet Ukraine – was confirmed, and inaugurated as part of the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922.

Power in the Soviet Union was centralised by Stalin in Moscow, and nationalist sentiment in the Soviet Republics was suppressed. The Holodomor of 1932-33 saw from 2 million to as many as 7 million Ukrainians die of starvation, owing to famine. It remains contentious whether the famine was a product of negligent economic policy, in the period of rapid Soviet industrialization and forced collectivisation; or whether it was in fact deliberately engineered, thereby constituting a genocide of the Ukrainian people. At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union would retain those Polish regions adjoining Soviet Ukraine which it had annexed during the war. It thus regained all of the western territories which Ukraine had lost by the Treaty of Riga in 1921: including, most controversially, Lviv, the old capital of Galicia. Ukraine would gain its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in a process depicted in my most recent post.

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While the above deals with western Ukraine and the formation of the Ukrainian state, it is necessary to consider in more detail the major cities of eastern Ukraine. Many of the major cites of today’s south-eastern Ukraine once comprised the Yekaterinoslav Governorate, established in the Russian Empire in 1802, and continuing in its administration through until 1925. The Yekaterinoslav Governorate included Yekaterinoslav – a city on the Dnieper which was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in 1926, and became closed to foreigners, serving as a centre of the Soviet arms and space industries – and extended east to the cities of Luhansk, Mariupol, and what would become Donetsk. Briefly, the Yekaterinoslav Governorate even took in Rostov-on-Don, deep into modern-day Russia; though the port of Taganrog remained outside the Governorate, with special city status and its own Governor. Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don would both become part of the Don Host Oblast in 1887, the precursor to today’s Rostov Oblast.

Donetsk traces its history to 1869, when a small settlement built up around a metal works developed by the Welsh industrialist, John Hughes. The settlement took the name ‘Hughesovka’, rendered Yuzovka, and grew rapidly as the metal works became one of the most productive in the Russian Empire. In 1917, Yuzovka was given the status of a city. During the Russian Civil War, it became part of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. This was one of the self-proclaimed republics encouraged into fruition by the Bolsheviks: it sought to break from the fledgling Ukrainiain People’s Republic, and comprised the cities and towns of the Donets Basin, the cities of Yekaterinoslav and Luhansk, parts of the Kherson Governorate and the Don Host Oblast and, momentarily, also Kharkiv. Kharkiv then Luhansk served as the short-lived breakaway republic’s capital: established in early February 1918, it went unrecognised and collapsed the following month with the second treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This second treaty, signed between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers on 3 March, removed Soviet Russia from World War I, with the Central Powers ensuring that the Bolsheviks recognised the Ukrainian People’s Republic, by the time effectively a German protectorate.

As part of Soviet Ukraine, Yuzovka was renamed Stalin in 1924, then Stalino in 1928. In 1920, the Donetsk Governorate had been formed, taking from the Yekaterinoslav Governorate administrative control over the Donets Basin. In 1932 – following the transitional ‘okruha’ system of administration, which saw Soviet Ukraine’s Governorates subdivided into smaller districts – the Donetsk Governorate became the Donetsk Oblast. As the population of Stalino and of the wider region quickly grew – with the city building new tram lines, theatres and opera houses, and installing a water system in 1931 followed by a sewage system two years later – in 1938 the oblast was split into two, with the creation of the Stalino Oblast and the Voroshilovgrad Oblast. The Nazi occupation during World War II devastated the city’s development, and it was forced to rebuild. In 1961, Stalino became Donetsk.

Luhansk too traces its foundation to a British industrialist, growing out of a metal works established by Charles Gascoigne in 1795. Luhansk achieved city-status in 1882. It was renamed Voroshilovgrad in 1935, and became the centre of the oblast created in 1938. After suffering Nazi occupation during the war and rebuilding, the city was retitled Luhansk in 1958; Voroshilovgrad was restored as its name in 1970; and Luhansk reemerged again in 1990. Both Donetsk and Luhansk remain today important centres of industry, particularly in coal and steel.

Kharkiv in the north east has a longer past. The Cossack uprising which prefaced the Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667, and the civil war which continued until the ascension of Ivan Mazepa as Cossack Hetman in 1687, caused many to flee from the banks of the Dnieper. Settlers had formed what would become the city of Kharkiv by 1656. Voivodes were appointed by Moscow to govern the new settlement, and soon a fortress had been built to secure it from quarrelsome neighbours. The settlement grew into a city as part of the Russian Empire, establishing the University of Kharkiv in 1804 (the second oldest in Ukraine, after the University of Lviv), and acquiring running water in 1870. Throughout the 1800s it became an important centre of nationalist sentiment outside Kiev: a nationalist society was formed, and the city saw published the first newspaper in the Ukrainian language. The prominent nationalist Mykola Mikhnovsky gave a speech in Kharkiv in 1900 – during celebrations commemorating the anniversary of Taras Shevchenko – which would be published as the pamphlet ‘Independent Ukraine’. Mikhnovsky was the first to propound the idea of independent Ukrainian statehood, and was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party and the radical Ukrainian People’s party, which would propel the nationalist cause in the first decade of the 1900s.

After the Bolsheviks had used Kharkiv as their base of power during the Ukrainian War of Independence from 1917, and after its brief role as part of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, Kharkiv served as the capital of Soviet Ukraine following its establishment, until the capital was transferred to Kiev at the end of 1934. The Kharkiv Oblast suffered severely during the Holodomor; and it was the site of major battles during World War II, as the city of Kharkiv passed between the Soviets and Nazi occupation. Much of the city was destroyed, and tens of thousands killed; including 30,000 people from the city’s sizeable Jewish minority. As the city was rebuilt, it became a centre of Soviet science and industry.

Today the cities of the east are some of the most populous in Ukraine. Kharkiv is the country’s second most-populous city, with 1.5 million inhabitants. After Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk, with about one million citizens each, Donetsk is fifth, with 960,000. Nearby Makiivka has a population of 360,000, and is merging with Donetsk as the two cities expand, forming a conurbation. Mariupol has a population of just under 500,000, including the largest Greek population in Ukraine, with more than 50,000 Greeks living in the area. 450,000 people live in Luhansk. The Luhansk Oblast is the easternmost oblast in Ukraine, with the Kharkiv Oblast immediately west, the Donetsk Oblast to the south-west, and the Rostov Oblast east, across the border in Russia. Comprising the cities of Donetsk, Mariupol and Makiivka, the Donetsk Oblast is Ukraine’s most populous. Where ethnic Russians make up about 17% of Ukraine’s total population – against 78% ethnic Ukrainians – in the east this overview is skewed: 44% in Kharkiv are ethnic Russian, 50 % ethnic Ukrainian; and in Donetsk, 48% are ethnic Russian, 47% Ukrainian. Again, the east is the industrial heart of Ukraine, and remains heavily dependent on the Russian economy, with which it carries out most of its trade.

While there have been smaller protests in Dnipropetrovsk, in Odessa, and in Mykolayiv (a shipbuilding city in the south), it is Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv which have seen the strongest pro-Russian expression. These cities have seen protests gathering in excess of 10,000 people, as rival pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian – or pro and anti-interim government, or pro and anti-Ukrainian far-right, or pro and anti-Yanukovych, or pro and anti-Putin – demonstrators have clashed, sometimes violently, amid the waving and hoisting of national and regional flags (the old flag of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic has made several appearances). At the beginning of March – compelled in part by the inclusion of members of Svoboda in the interim Ukrainian government, and by the proposed repeal of a law establishing Russian as an official second language – pro-Russian supporters took control of administrative buildings in Kharkiv and Donetsk. ‘People’s Governors’, calling for referendums on union with Russia, were elected in Donetsk and Luhansk. The proclaimed ‘People’s Governor’ of Donetsk, Pavel Gubarev, was arrested on 6 March by Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, charged with separatism. On 10 March, Mikhail Dobkin, the pro-Russian former Governor of Kharkiv Oblast and Mayor of Kharkiv, was also arrested by the SBU. The interim Ukrainian government has stated its hope to try such individuals at the International Criminal Court.

These conflicts turned bloody when, on 13 March, a pro-Ukrainian protester was stabbed to death in Donetsk, as rival groups fought on the city’s Lenin Square. On 15 March, two men – reportedly a pro-Russian protester and a passerby – were shot dead in Kharkiv, by a group of Ukrainian nationalists. Since then, and in the aftermath of the Crimean referendum, the situation in the east has calmed. Both Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, have repeatedly stressed no desire to invade or annex eastern Ukraine. In the speech he gave to both houses of the Federal Assembly last week – full of his own increasingly nationalistic rhetoric as Crimea’s integration with the Russian Federation moved a step closer – Putin asserted ‘we do not need a divided Ukraine’.

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One of the most important facets of many major revolutions is the degree to which they have centred on capital cities. The French Revolution was spurred when – seeking to uphold the newly formed National Constituent Assembly, and fearful of the gathering foreign mercenaries who might fight to preserve the old regime – the people of Paris rioted and stormed the Bastille. The Russian revolutions of February and October centred entirely on Petersburg (then Petrograd): the former the result of a series of protests culminating on International Women’s Day; the latter achieved when the Bolsheviks seized an empty Winter Palace, from which proceeded the Russian Civil War. In a related vein, whatever one terms the culmination of events in Ukraine last month – whether they constituted a revolution, an uprising, or a coup – the impetus for the ousting of President Yanukovych was in Kiev. The public feeling and the political machinations displayed there were not acutely representative of the shades of feeling elsewhere in the country.

Given the situation in Kiev – the removal of an elected though significantly disgraced president, the formation of an interim government containing protest leaders and members of a controversial right-wing group, the broad lack of diplomacy, and the local nature of the protests – it could hardly have been objected on moral or democratic grounds if the people and the political instruments of Crimea had called and voted in their own referendum. Many Crimeans may understandably feel themselves entitled to determine their region’s future – and regardless of the Ukrainian constitution, for after all, it was the Ukrainian parliament which unilaterally diminished Crimea’s autonomy in 1995, abolishing the post of President of Crimea and forcing the Crimean parliament to redraw and renegotiate Crimea’s constitution. The overt and intimidating Russian military presence must render the referendum which did take place illegitimate – a vote held under duress can never be acceptable – but it does not render it meaningless, because the will of Crimeans seems clear. Impelled to take a position in grossly unsatisfactory circumstances, the majority of Crimeans prefer to retain close connections with Russia.

The scenario in eastern Ukraine is different, however. It must be remembered that Crimea was – and will remain, in name at least – an autonomous republic, with its own parliament. It already possessed a significant degree of independence from the rest of Ukraine. This sense of distinctness has been enhanced by the continuing presence on Crimea of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which has been based at Sevastopol since the city’s founding in 1783. There is in fact no history prior to 1991 of the Ukrainian mainland and the Crimean peninsula existing together as one independent state: after the fall of Kievan Rus, the history of mainland Ukraine is one of Polish-Lithuanian control and the Cossack Hetmanate, while the history of Crimea is of the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire. Crimea only joined the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, transferred by Soviet Russia, and together they would remain tied to the Soviet Union until Ukrainian independence.

Ethnic Russians are in the majority in Crimea today: 59%, compared to 24% ethnic Ukrainians and 12% Crimean Tatars. In the east, where the ethnic balance is more even, there is a sense that economic attachment to Russia does not equate to close cultural attachment: people define themselves based less on narrow ethnic definitions, more in relation to their shared culture and their experiences building their cities together. If referendums were somehow called in the east on the issue of independence from Ukraine or integration with Russia, it is not clear which side would win. The east – bound in its past to the banks of the Dnieper as much as it is to the Russian Empire, and having suffered so much as part of the Soviet Union – has perhaps less cultural resonance for Russians than Crimea; while its loss would be much more costly for Ukraine, inevitably leading to a protracted and militarised engagement were Russia to try their hand.

Once more, any suggestion that Russia will do so amounts, at this stage, to speculation, carrying with it a palpable degree of scaremongering. For its part, Ukraine must look firmly ahead to the presidential elections scheduled for 25 May. These seem set to draw an array of candidates: from the oligarchy, the political elite, and the professional classes, and covering the whole of the political spectrum. Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko yesterday confirmed her candidacy, which may – along with the prospective candidacies from Svoboda and the militant Pravy Sektor – be cause for lament, as Ukraine needs neither divisive politics nor symbols of the persistent corruption that has been at the government’s head. Other potential candidates include the former boxer and opposition politician Vitali Klitschko, and the ‘Chocolate King’ Petro Poroshenko, an independent businessman who stands as the current favourite in polls despite not yet formally announcing his candidacy. Interim Prime Minister Yatsenyuk – who signed last Friday part of the Association Agreement with the EU whose suspension instigated the Euromaidan protests – could also still stand. Open elections and a real willingness to reform the political structure will guarantee nothing, but still affirm themselves as the best means for securing true Ukrainian independence, and for calming ongoing tensions in the east.

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And why not give Gogol a final word? His Cossack horror story ‘A Terrible Vengeance’ – translated here by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky – contains one of his most famous descriptive passages. It depicts the Dnieper:

‘Master Danilo sits and looks with his left eye at his writing and with his right eye out the window. And from the window the gleam of the distant hills and the Dnieper can be seen. Beyond the Dnieper, mountains show blue. Up above sparkles the now clear night sky. But it is not the distant sky or the blue forest that Master Danilo admires: he gazes at the jutting spit of land on which the old castle blackens. He fancied that light flashed in a narrow window of the castle. But all is quiet. He must have imagined it. Only the muted rush of the Dnieper can be heard below, and on three sides, one after the other, the echo of momentarily awakened waves. The river is not mutinous. He grumbles and murmurs like an old man: nothing pleases him; everything has changed around him; he is quietly at war with the hills, forests, and meadows on his banks, and carries his complaint against them to the Black Sea.’

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The Crimean Referendums of 1991 and 1994

March 19, 2014 @ 2:36 pm — 1 Comment

Yesterday was an eventful day in the uneventful life of this site. The piece I published last Thursday, ‘Crimea: A Literary Perspective‘, was linked to in an article by Gary Brecher of PandoDaily. Owing to this, my site more than doubled its previous best view count for a single day.

Gary Brecher writes a regular column for PandoDaily, entitled ‘War Nerd’. The excellent piece he published on Monday covers the situation in Crimea, and takes the full title ‘War Nerd: Everything you know about Crimea is wrong(-er)‘. It elucidates the response to the situation of US journalists and politicians, and identifies the vital role that Russian oil will continue to play amid talk of sanctions and other consequences. It builds a picture of international relations following the end of the Cold War. More, it provides a suggestive history of Ukraine across the twentieth century, and gives a concise reading list towards a fuller understanding of the region.

Brecher noted in his piece – for the sake of comparison with the referendum which took place on Sunday – a Crimean referendum of 20 January 1991. The referendum asked Crimeans whether they wanted to restore autonomy to the region, and just over 93% of voters approved. I disagree with Brecher’s analysis of that referendum; and responded in the comments below his piece. I am quoting my response in full here, because it considers more deeply some of the recent political history of Crimea touched on in my previous two articles. In short, it looks at how Crimea reemerged as an Autonomous Republic during the latter days of the Soviet Union; and at how events in the years immediately following Ukrainian independence continue to influence developments in Crimea today. My response to Brecher’s piece:

In an insightful, informative, engaging and entertaining article, the interpretation of the Crimean referendum of January 1991 is one of the few points on which I disagree with you, Gary. I think there’s just about room for the interpretation – and it is very difficult to capture the full and convoluted complexity of the various shifts in Crimea’s modern political history, certainly without writing at vast length – but I wouldn’t depict the January 1991 referendum as Crimeans voting ‘to restore their ties with Russia’.

Crimea was governed as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from the end of the Russian Civil War until 1945, when it lost its autonomous status, and was made an Oblast, essentially a region of Soviet Russia. In 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the authority of Soviet Ukraine. Whether this was simply a gift, or whether it served a richer political purpose is debatable; but it wasn’t of profound significance at the time, because power in the Soviet Union was so centralised in Moscow.

The referendum of January 1991 asked Crimeans whether they wanted Crimea to regain autonomy. The vote has to be viewed in its immediate context. The Soviet Union was breaking down owing to separatist movements in numerous Soviet Republics. Through 1990, Gorbachev proposed to reform the Soviet Union, hoping that he could keep the political structure together by significantly decentralising power. Meanwhile Soviet Ukraine held parliamentary elections, and its parliament declared in July 1990 the sovereignty of the state. This was an assertion of Ukraine’s right to govern itself; but Ukraine still remained a Soviet Republic, and it was one of the Republics which began negotiating towards the end of the year Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty.

Crimea asking for a referendum on autonomy, and voting decisively in January 1991 for the ‘restoration of the Crimean ASSR as a subject of the USSR and as a party to the Union Treaty’, can be read as a response to the Ukrainian parliament’s declaration of state sovereignty. On the other hand, as an Autonomous Republic after January it was still part of Soviet Ukraine. Autonomous Republics in the Soviet Union were parts of Soviet Republics, granted much more autonomy than that possessed by mere regions. So the referendum didn’t mark Crimea severing ties with Ukraine and rejoining Russia; but it did imply a willingness to remain part of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty was never implemented: Ukraine couldn’t agree its terms, and by late 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolving. On 1 December, Ukraine held a referendum and Ukrainians voted for independence. This essentially marked the end of the Soviet Union. 54% of Crimean voters opted for Ukrainian independence, with the turnout in Crimea placed at 60%. Thus Ukraine became independent, and Crimea remained part of the newly independent Ukraine, retaining its autonomous status. Throughout 1992, the Crimean parliament made gestures towards full Crimean independence, but really sought to secure only greater autonomy from Kiev.

Perhaps more controversially – and as the refworld.org link details – in May 1992 the Crimean parliament established a Crimean constitution, and in September-October 1993 it established the post of President of Crimea. But in early 1994, after a polarising election campaign, Crimeans elected as their President a strongly pro-Russian candidate, Yuriy Meshkov. A power struggle between the Ukrainian parliament and the Crimean parliament commenced. Another Crimean referendum in March 1994 asked three questions: ‘1.3 million voted, 78.4% of whom supported greater autonomy from Ukraine, 82.8% supported allowing dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship, and 77.9% favored giving Crimean presidential decrees the force of law’. Yet after more political turbulence – with the Crimean parliament voting to oust Meshkov in September – in March 1995 the Ukrainian parliament unilaterally abolished the post of President of Crimea, and scrapped the Crimean constitution. The Crimean parliament was forced to define a new constitution, which the Ukrainian parliament finally ratified in 1998.

So when the interim Ukrainian government today talks about the Crimean parliament’s lack of legislative power – when it comes to appointing a Prime Minister, and when it comes to calling a referendum – there is an argument that this power was taken from Crimeans by Kiev in an underhand, undemocratic, if not entirely illegitimate manner back in 1995.

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The refworld.org link referred to above, which Brecher cites in his piece, is: http://www.refworld.org/docid/469f38ec2.html

Crimean Referendum: What Comes Next?

March 17, 2014 @ 5:10 pm — 1 Comment

The referendum in Crimea which took place yesterday resulted – according to Mikhail Malyshev, the head of the Crimean referendum commission – in 96.77% of voters opting for Crimea’s integration with Russia. The referendum was dismissed and decried by the interim government in Kiev as a ‘circus performance’; by British Foreign Secretary William Hague as a ‘mockery of proper democratic practise’; while President Barack Obama restated that the US would never accept the validity of the referendum, and stressed that sanctions upon Russia were now imminent.

Malyshev also placed the turnout for the referendum at 83.1%, with 1,274,096 of the eligible population voting. 1,233,002 Crimeans voted for integration with the Russian Federation. 31,997 voted for the other option on the ballot, which would have seen the region remain part of Ukraine, but with the greater autonomy which it possessed back in 1992 when, following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Crimean parliament struck a hard bargain before confirming its unity with the newly independent Ukrainian state. 9,097 ballot papers were declared spoilt.

A turnout of 83.1% appears impressive, and suggests a weight of feeling within the region. Nevertheless, without independent verification – the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe) rejected an offer to observe the referendum in some capacity – these figures will be disputed; and the legality of holding a referendum without Kiev’s consent, amidst the strong presence of the Russian military, will continue to be called into question wherever it is not rejected outright. To the Crimean parliament and the city council of Sevastopol, the referendum was valid in so far as neither body accepts the legitimacy of the change of regime in Kiev: with an elected President overthrown in what they and the Russians regard as a coup, they argue that it was necessary to consult the people of their region regarding the region’s future political status. To Ukraine, and all those states across the EU and in North America who support the interim government and the impeachment of President Yanukovych, the calling of any referendum in Crimea would require parliamentary approval from Kiev.

The result of the referendum and the apparently high turnout call into question the status of Crimea’s Tatars, frequently referred to and given primacy in reports on the region both because their leadership strongly opposes integration with Russia, and because of their long and complex history within Crimea. This history is recounted more fully in the literary history of the region I published last week. Concisely, it extends back to the time of the Golden Horde in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the establishment of the Crimean Khanate, ruled by Crimean Tatars, in 1441. The Crimean Khanate existed, as a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, until the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774; which saw Crimea become nominally independent before being annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783. From this point in time, Crimea experienced rapid and fundamental political and demographic change. The Tatar capital of Bakhchysarai and other major Tatar cities and settlements were replaced, as the modern cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol were built and established. With an influx of Russians, and with the resorts of Yalta and nearby Odessa becoming increasingly international, the Crimean Tatars lost influence in Crimea; and with the continuance of the Russo-Turkish Wars, culminating in the Crimean War (1853-1856), many of the Tatar populace left the region. By the end of World War I, the Crimean Tatars still made up about a third of Crimea’s population; but during World War II their number was decimated, as 200,000 Tatars were forcibly deported on Stalin’s orders, 46% of these people dying during deportation.

Today, the Crimean Tatars number just over 12% of Crimea’s population: comprising about 250,000 of a population of little over two million. The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People acts as the representative of the Tatar population in Crimea, and is currently led by Refat Chubarov, who has called the referendum a ‘clown show’ and the results ‘predetermined’. The Crimean Tatars were encouraged to boycott the referendum, and it appears that many did so; but the results imply significant support for integration with Russia among not only ethnic Russians but among ethnic Ukrainians too. The dissenting position of Crimea’s Tatars ought not overshadow the extent of the present-day Crimean population who evidently desire some form of close attachment with Russia, whether owing to cultural feeling or to perceived economic necessity. Opposition to the referendum must reside in the lack of proper political process and in the overt Russian military presence, rather than in the attitude of a prestigious minority group. While the history of the Tatars in Crimea is long and of undoubted importance, and their deportation during World War II tragic, the region saw centuries of rule before the establishment of the Crimean Khanate, and became something different again as part of the Russian Empire; there is little sense in positioning the Crimean Tatars as the arbiters of Crimean morality.

The Crimean Prime Minister Sergey Aksyonov – installed at the end of last month – and the Crimean parliament today formally applied for Crimea to become part of the Russian Federation, ‘as a new subject with the status of a republic’. Aksyonov has also announced plans to introduce the Russian ruble as the region’s second official currency, alongside the Ukrainian hryvnia; while scheduling for Crimea to turn its clocks forward two hours, to Moscow time, on 30 March. For their part, the Russians seem ready to push integration through both houses of their Federal Assembly: stating that the move would require no new legislative basis, it may be passed by the lower house, the State Duma, within days.

Still, what this will mean in practise – whether it will in fact prefigure a period of genuine political and economic transition – remains unclear. The Russians on the one hand continue military exercises with around 8,000 troops plus vehicles close to the Ukrainian border; while the Ukrainian press reported on Saturday a Russian military incursion into Kherson Oblast, just north of Crimea, with Russian military personnel apparently lowered by helicopter before seizing a natural gas plant. The Ukrainian parliament – who accuse the Russians of now amassing more than 20,000 troops in Crimea – have responded with the creation of a 60,000-strong National Guard, and by calling up as many as 40,000 reservists. On the other hand, all parties appear eager to keep diplomatic channels open: Vladimir Putin engaging on Sunday in talks with Barack Obama and Angela Merkel; and Russia and Ukraine agreeing a truce in Crimea until Friday, with Ukrainian military facilities allowed to replenish their reserves. Russia and the Crimean authorities have guaranteed Ukrainian military personnel safe passage from the region should it secede and confirm a new union with Russia. This, of course, depends on the Ukrainians being willing to leave.

Since Ukrainian independence in 1991, Russia has repeatedly voiced its support for Crimea to separate from Ukraine and embrace closer ties with Moscow. The integration of Crimea with Russia may therefore be seen as a fait accompli, a coming to fruition of one of Russia’s deepest wishes, securing for it economic and military access to the region and to the Black Sea. We could take the question asked by the referendum and the application made by the Crimean parliament at face value; and Russia may simply welcome Crimea as an autonomous republic as part of the Russian Federation, and set about entrenching the economic, cultural, and ideological links between the two, regardless of the costs.

Yet the costs of a perceived annexation of Crimea will be significant. Russia perhaps assumes that any sanctions imposed by the international community will not prove too severe or long-lasting, given the size of the Russian economy, their key role in the supply of European gas, and the desire to prevent anything approaching a second Cold War. A first wave of proposed sanctions proved hard to conclude, given differences within the international community regarding whether they should cover only Crimean politicians, or extend to those within Putin’s circle (the interim Ukrainian Prime Minster, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has vigorously expressed his resolution to try the politicians involved in the referendum as separatist criminals). The sanctions announced today against 21 officials went a little further than the Russians may have expected, as they will extend to senior Russian politicians, including a deputy Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house. Nevertheless, they have been quickly denounced as weak and insufficient in scope. But aside from the threat and imposition of sanctions, and the broader damage to Russia’s international relationships, the anger the loss of Crimea would cause in Kiev and the absence of the Crimean voting block could wrench Ukraine decisively from Russia’s influence, turning an uncertain ally into a determined foe.

Trouble in eastern Ukraine – which remains economically bound with Russia – centring on the cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv has encouraged some analysts, and some within the interim Ukrainian government, to suggest that Russia’s military presence might now extend to encompass these areas. This logic assumes that Russia would hope for a repeat of the Crimean outcome in the east of the country, with the major cities demanding independence from Kiev in order to redefine their links with Russia. However, the populace of the east is more evenly divided between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. Any extra-political endeavour to encourage secession would be met with fierce internal opposition; Russian military progress would likely be countered by the enlarged Ukrainian army, perhaps with the support of international forces; and the situation in the east could become both protracted and bloody.

There are alternatives to a clearly defined, fully legislated integration between Crimea and Russia, and the more extreme scenario of further Russian military aggression across eastern Ukraine. The murkier possibilities for Crimea’s political future are that it operates as an autonomous republic in name, but as essentially a Russian puppet state in practise, focused solely on Moscow’s interests; or else that Russia is using the region more as a bargaining tool than with any determinate end in mind. Still other analysts have argued that the motive for Russian intervention in Crimea is a weak Russian economy, with Putin seeking first and foremost to bolster his image back home and to rouse Russian nationalist sentiment. Even at this stage, it remains possible that Russia has acted in Crimea primarily to secure its military bases and access to ports, without much thought for its long-term governance; and that the region will continue with some autonomy from Ukraine and from Russia without any fundamental change in political structure. The future of the region – if this is not to be the future of eastern Ukraine – could be as the ground of fraught negotiation and compromise between Russia, Ukraine, and the EU.

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A selection of news sources:

RT details the Crimean referendum results: http://rt.com/news/crimea-referendum-results-official-250/

Reuters and CBC reports: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/16/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSBREA1Q1E820140316, http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/crimea-crisis-u-s-eu-freeze-assets-of-russian-officials-1.2575297

The Guardian details Crimea’s application to become part of the Russian Federation: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/17/ukraine-crimea-russia-referendum-complain-result

A DW interview with Refat Chubarov, leader of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People: http://www.dw.de/tatar-leader-referendums-results-predetermined/a-17500078

Crimea: A Literary Perspective

March 13, 2014 @ 3:42 pm — 5 Comments

The situation in Crimea continues to develop agallop. Following events in Kiev, unidentified Russian troops have taken control of Crimea’s airports, public buildings, military installations, and ports. Amid claim and counterclaim – the apparent defection of the chief of the Ukrainian Navy, the claimed defection of thousands of Ukrainian armed forces, and allegations that the human rights of UN envoys and journalists are being abused – and with occasional clashes between opposition groups – notably that which took place on 9 March, as the anniversary of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was commemorated – a referendum has been scheduled which would decide the region’s future.

Initially proposed for May, brought forward by the Crimean parliament and the city council of Sevastopol (one of two cities – along with Kiev – with special status in Ukraine) to 16 March, the referendum will ask the populace of Crimea whether the region should unify with Russia. The referendum has been declared unconstitutional and therefore illegal by the interim Ukrainian government and by governments throughout Europe and in the United States. For a richer exploration of the contexts involved as the sequence of things shifts and continues in Crimea, it is necessary to provide some detail regarding the wider situation in Ukraine.

Amidst a political background of economic uncertainty and reliance on Russian oil, and with growing allegations of governmental corruption, the protest movement in Ukraine began in earnest on the evening of 21 November 2013. Earlier that day, the Ukrainian parliament had rejected a series of measures which called for imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to be allowed medical treatment abroad; and the Ukrainian government, and President Viktor Yanukovych, issued a decree suspending the signing of an Association Agreement with the EU. This agreement, some aspects of which have been under discussion as far back as 1999, would mean closer political and economic integration between Ukraine and the EU. It includes policy on a ‘deep and comprehensive free trade area’, on visa-free movement between Ukraine and the EU (which at the moment extends only one way, with Ukrainian citizens required to possess a visa to visit EU states), and emphasises the ‘European identity’ of Ukraine.

It is worth noting that the agreement which was to be signed represented a certain amount of progress made during Yanukovych’s Presidency. Attempts towards closer integration had largely stalled under the Presidency of Viktor Yuschenko and the twin governments of Tymoshenko. More, in suspending the signing of the agreement, Yanukovych and the government underneath him – headed by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov – were not explicitly rejecting it, and at first they continued to negotiate with the EU. However, the EU had asked Ukraine to sign the Association Agreement during the EU summit in Vilnius, on 28-29 November. That this would not now occur was taken by many pro-European Ukrainians to indicate the implicit rejection of closer EU ties, in favour of a strengthening of bonds with Russia. Russia had previously indicated that the signing of the Association Agreement would negatively impact Russia-Ukraine trade relations.

Thus, on 21 November, utilising social media and encouraged by several opposition politicians, protesters began to gather at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (‘Independence Square’), the central square in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, and one which has been used for political rallies since Ukrainian independence in 1991. The number of protesters swelled from 2,000 to as many as 100,000 over the course of the next week, with tensions rising as the Vilnius summit drew to a close: Ukraine had attended, and Azarov continued to assert the government’s desire to reach some deal with the EU, but no agreement had been signed.

Throughout the following two weeks, the protests spread to other cities – notably to Lviv, close to the border with Poland – and began calling for the resignation of the President and the government. Public buildings, including the Kiev city hall, were occupied by groups of protesters. What had began relatively peacefully became increasingly confrontational. The police commenced using batons, stun grenades and tear gas, at first to halt those protesters trying to access governmental buildings, then increasingly to break up all large-scale demonstrations. The police for their part would claim that the protesters initiated these escalations by using tear gas and other explosives. The Azarov government survived a vote of no confidence in parliament on 3 December. On 8 December, the third Sunday of the protests, the number of protesters in Kiev reached at least 500,000; but a few days later the police coordinated their efforts to clear protesters from the Maidan.

Then on 17 December, President Yanukovych and President Putin signed a treaty which saw Russia buy $15 billion of Ukrainian debt, and significantly reduce the price it charged Ukraine for natural gas. The treaty also apparently gave the Russian Navy increased access to the Kerch Peninsula in eastern Crimea. Prime Minister Azarov asserted that the deal had saved Ukraine from potential bankruptcy; while suggesting that the Association Agreement with the EU was still being considered, but some way from being signed. EU ministers stated that the treaty with Russia would not prevent the signing of the Association Agreement; still, the treaty was roundly denounced by the Ukrainian opposition.

Despite this – and despite the attack on Tetiana Chornovol, a journalist and prominent leader of the protest campaign, on 25 December – the protests remained relatively peaceful from the middle of December until the middle of January. On 16 January, a series of draconian anti-protest laws were pushed through parliament. These decreed lengthy jail terms for those engaging in ill-defined ‘extremist activity’, and introduced provisions for the censorship of the internet and social media; and quickly became referred to as the ‘dictatorship laws’. In the aftermath to the passing of these laws, the protests and the response of the authorities intensified. Three protesters were killed between 21-22 January, one shot to death by the police; prominent protest leaders Ihor Lutsenko and Yuriy Verbytsky were abducted, the latter soon found dead; and police began using water cannon on protesters despite the freezing temperatures.

On 28 January, Prime Minister Azarov tended his resignation, which was accepted. He flew first to Austria, later moving on to Russia. In early February, meetings between Yanukovych and leaders of the opposition saw some movement towards compromise and constitutional reform. However, the rhetorical confrontation engaged in by both sides continued apace. On 14 February, the 234 protesters arrested since the beginning of the protests were released from custody; and on 16 February, protesters relinquished their occupation of the Kiev city hall. But on 18 February, around 20,000 protesters began to march on the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament; and in the fighting which followed, with both protesters and the police firing automatic weapons and utilising explosive devices, 20 people were killed with more than a thousand injured. A brief truce held on the evening of 19 February, but the following morning the fighting resumed. With reports of police snipers targeting civilians and leaders of the opposition, a further sixty people were killed, the vast majority from the numbers of the protesters. 21 February saw a deal reached between President Yanukovych and opposition leaders, brokered by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France. Yet this deal too did not hold; Yanukovych fled from Kiev; parliament impeached him and formed an interim government; and the situation in the Crimea began to escalate.

Russia – alongside ministers from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – has consistently alleged that the violence which has marked the protests has been initiated by the protesters. It argues that the protest movement has been infiltrated by or has contained within and enabled far-right nationalists, quick to adopt violent measures. The symbols and signa of nationalists have been apparent during some of the protest’s fiercest clashes; the Right Sector collective have been implicated in some of the protest’s most critical – and bloodiest – battles. In contrast, the protest movement and opposition leaders have squarely blamed a brutal and reactionary police force for the number of injured and dead; arguing that they were ordered by governmental ministers fighting to remain in power whatever the cost. In particular, the Minister for Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, has been labelled a criminal for supporting the use of deadly force by the Berkut, the special police force governed by his Ministry. Immediately following the deal struck on 21 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted unanimously to suspend Zakharchenko; also voting to restore the amendments made to the Ukrainian constitution in 2004, which sought to weaken the powers of the President. Zakharchenko’s successor, the acting Minister for Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov, has since dissolved the Berkut.

In tune with their allegations regarding the involvement of far-right nationalists, Russia calls the impeachment of Yanukovych and the formation of a new government illegal, an anti-constitutional coup achieved by force. They point to the cabinet positions the interim government – led by interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk – has afforded three protest leaders, along with four members of the controversial nationalist party Svoboda. To the protesters and to the politicians of the opposition, this marks instead the success of a popular uprising, and the deposition of a Presidency and a government who had rendered themselves illegitimate. It could certainly be argued that – disregarding any prior instances of corruption – the grotesque actions of the Berkut were sufficient to delegitimise Yanukovych’s regime. The view of the opposition is the view which appears predominant in Western Europe and North America, and it is the view strongly forwarded by the governments of these countries. One of the problems with this view, however – and preventing any clear delineation of right and wrong – is the apparent lack of political process, the apparent absence of diplomacy, which has marked events in Kiev in the aftermath of 21 February.

The deal signed by Yanukovych and opposition leaders and impelled by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France called for a restoration of the 2004 constitution to prefigure further constitutional reform; the formation of a new unity government; amnesty for protesters arrested from 17 February; and presidential elections to be held no later than December. Yet in the twenty-four hours following its agreement, protesters – who condemned the deal – continued to rally and to occupy public buildings across Ukraine. Police officers abandoned the capital, whether recalled from Kiev to face protests in their home cities, fearful of riots, or refusing to uphold Yanukovych’s position any longer. Presidential buildings became unguarded; Yanukovych hurried to Kharkiv, in the north east of the country; and the Euromaidan protesters entered peacefully and unfettered the governmental buildings of the capital. With around 40 Party of Regions MPs leaving their posts or defecting, and with the tenor in the Verkhovna Rada having fundamentally altered, a new coalition was formed and parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych. Disembodied in the east, Yanukovych responded by asserting the legality of his position as Ukraine’s lawfully elected president, and denouncing events in Kiev as a coup.

Russia had already, during the course of the protests, accused Western governments – particularly the United States – of funding the opposition. But the breakdown of diplomacy immediately following the 21 February agreement increased the sense of Western meddling and Western hypocrisy, and made Russian intervention in some form all but inevitable. Russia undoubtedly perceives the hands of the West behind the ultimate ousting of Yanukovych; and considers that attempts to reach a political compromise were abandoned once the EU and the US saw their preferred outcome emerge via extra-political means. If the West portrays itself as upholding the right for Ukrainians to decide how and by whom they are governed, free from the interference of their often repressively violent and overbearing neighbour, then Russia sees the West acting out of self-interest: heralding and supporting the attempts for independence of those who would seek closer ties with it, while decrying those who would associate with alternative areas of power.

The moral case of the West inevitably implicates democracy as the system of government which best establishes and upholds the rights of the human beings who fall under it. To this supposition, democracy itself must be opened out and questioned, both for its fundamental principles and in its historical development. It is debatable whether modern democracy, as practised in the EU and US, truly allows individuals a significant say regarding how they are governed. This covers a range of concerns, from the lack of choice afforded by too-similar politicians, to revolving door policies and the power of lobbying groups, to the bailout of big banks at the expense of taxpayers, to apparently flawed electoral systems, to a perceived democratic deficit in the governance of the EU.

A notable facet of modern democracies appears to be how efficiently they stifle protest – at an ideological level, before it comes to the legal restrictions placed upon the right to protest and excessive policing of those protests which do take place. Protesters in modern democratic societies are routinely cast and outcast as dangerous and extremist regardless of the specificities of their views. Little over a week ago, 1,000 environmental protesters protested peacefully outside the White House in Washington, over the controversial fourth phase of the Keystone oil pipeline project. 400 of these protesters were arrested, their appeals dismissed as constituting ‘an extreme position…well outside the American mainstream’. De Tocqueville warned of the ‘soft despotism’ inherent in the democratic system, and always to be considered and guarded against:

‘Thus, after having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.‘

Nor can the recent history of Russian-Western relations beyond Ukraine and Crimea be dismissed. Russia can justifiably mock US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that ‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext’, given the invasion of Iraq – which Kerry voted for – based on alleged but nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, the West’s analysis of the ongoing conflict in Syria seems increasingly open to debate. One prominent study of rocket trajectories argues that the rockets which delivered sarin gas to Ghouta, near Damascus, last August could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government.

Thus Russia’s engagement in Crimea implicates Russian concern over Western influence, Western sleight-of-hand, and a breakdown in diplomacy; it has been encouraged by some of the protest movement’s association with aspects of the far-right; and it reflects Russia’s dislike of Ukraine’s change in political regime, as well as a perception that the Ukrainian political class is disorganised, self-absorbed, backed by various competing oligarchs, and incapable of providing the stability that could be conducive to its purposes as well as to the Ukrainian populace. Reading between the lines, there is a sense that many Ukrainian citizens would welcome close cooperation with both Russia and the EU, for economic and cultural reasons; but the more the situation in the country escalates, the more they are forced to pick sides. One of the reshaped parliament’s least helpful measures was its overturning, on 23 February, of a minority languages law, which allowed Russian to function as an official second language in those regions with a sizeable Russian population.

What Russia desires as the result of its excessively militarised response remains unclear. The annexation of Crimea is presumed, based upon the example set in Georgia, but any serious attempt towards this end would be met with international opposition: there would undoubtedly be sanctions, and a serious deterioration in Russia’s international relationships. Russia would have much to lose by perceived annexation: without the ethnic Russian population of Crimea to balance opinion in the west, and in response to such an outcome, Ukraine could slip decisively, electorally and ideologically, from its powers of influence. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, founded along with the city of Sevastopol in 1783, is now small and old and in need of modernisation; but access to the Black Sea from Crimea remains a strategic and economic imperative for Russia. In 1997, a partition treaty divided the Black Sea Fleet and effectively formed the Ukrainian Navy; as part of the treaty, Russia was ensured military access to Crimea, and the base of its fleet in Sevastopol, until 2017. In 2010 this agreement was extended until 2042. According to its terms, Russia are allowed to station 25,000 troops on Crimea – more than the 16,000 which Ukraine claims are currently present – but, of course, these troops are not allowed to assert themselves off base and unidentified. It is plausible that Russia is endeavouring to secure primarily its military access to the region. At this point in time, any further excursions appear as unlikely as they would be unwarranted.

More than a swift reaction to recent political events, Russia’s intervention in Crimea must be read from a longer cultural and historical perspective. The broader response from the populace of Crimea to the protests in the west of the country must equally be viewed not merely within their immediate context – portrayed in opposition to the protesters’ successes in Kiev – but with an understanding of the Crimea’s own highly distinct history and culture. The trajectory of the Crimea does not merely parallel or diametrically oppose what is happening elsewhere in Ukraine: it has unique roots and currents.

The short history of Crimea as part of Ukraine began on 19 February 1954, when the Crimean Oblast was transferred from the authority of Soviet Russia to the authority of Soviet Ukraine. The rationale behind this transfer remains a subject of debate: some have considered it essentially a gift, marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire; others have stressed the close cultural, economic, and practical links between the region and the Ukrainian mainland. In January 1991, Crimea was upgraded from an Oblast to an Autonomous Republic. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it remained part of independent Ukraine, with much autonomy and its own parliament. Across 1992 the Crimean parliament agreed to retain unity with Ukraine, but only after securing even greater autonomy from Kiev; in May, the parliament also established a Crimean constitution.

In October 1993, the Crimean parliament established the post of President of Crimea. At the same time, it agreed upon parliamentary representation for Crimea’s Tatars: the Crimean Tatars were given 14 seats in the body of 100, despite their protests that Crimea should not possess a president distinct from the President of Ukraine. After a pro-Russian President of Crimea was voted into power in 1994, in March 1995 the Ukrainian parliament unilaterally abolished the post and scrapped the Crimean constitution. A new constitution was formed and finally ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 1998; while the treaty of friendship of 1997 regarding the division of the Black Sea Fleet calmed differences between Kiev and Moscow concerning the region.

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For those who desire a retreat from such densely political frontiers; who would extend their political understanding via other contexts; or else derive pleasure or relaxation through incidental knowledge – what follows is the long history of Crimea, seen through the eyes and down the nibs of some of the great men of Russian letters. It is a political history, a cultural history, and a literary history.

The history of Crimea is distinct from the history of Kiev and mainland Ukraine. The region passed through the firm and fragile hands of the Cimmerians, Greeks, Bulgars, and Kievan Rus, among hordes of others, before the 13th century, when it became implicated in the Venetian-Genoese Wars, between the rival Republics of Venice and Genoa. The Republic of Genoa ruled Crimea for two centuries, its rule authorised by the Golden Horde which had fragmented from the Mongol Empire. As the Golden Horde itself began to fragment and dissolve, Tatars who had settled in the region came to power and established the Crimean Khanate in 1441. This Crimean Khanate, ruled by Crimean Tatars, came under Ottoman rule in 1475, but functioned as a protectorate, with significant autonomy from the Ottoman Empire.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 resulted in a decisive victory for Russia. It annexed the area of land which is now southern Ukraine; and while the Crimean Khanate became nominally independent, in reality it came under Russian control and was annexed in 1783. Thus by the late 1700s, all of modern Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. The lands of southern Ukraine and Crimea were referred to as Novorossiya (‘New Russia’), and many of the region’s prominent cities were founded at this time: including Sevastopol in 1783, and Simferopol a year later, both in Crimea; and further north-west, on the mainland overlooking the Black Sea, Odessa in 1794.

Odessa grew rapidly, governed in its early years by the Duc de Richelieu, becoming a free port in 1819, and emerging as a truly multinational and multilingual city: Italian was the lingua franca, spoken alongside Russian and French (Binyon, 154). Pushkin, exiled from Saint Petersburg for writing revolutionary epigrams, spent several months in the Caucasus and Crimea in 1820. He joined the company of General Nikolay Raevksy, famous for his feats on Russia’s behalf during the Napoleonic Wars; and Pushkin formed enduring friendships with Raevsky’s sons and daughters. According to D. S. Mirsky, these months, ‘spent in the company of the Rayévskys…were one of the happiest periods of Pushkin’s life. It was from the Rayévskys also that he got his first knowledge of Byron’ (Mirsky, 81). Then, between exiles, Pushkin would spend a year in Odessa from July 1823 until July 1824. The period was particularly fruitful for his work. He had begun writing Eugene Onegin in May, and completed most of the first three chapters, including Tatyana’s letter, in Odessa. Meanwhile, he published the narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray; and Odessa also proved the source for a number of his greatest love lyrics. Personal intrigue and the proclamation of atheism in one of Pushkin’s letters was enough for the authorities to force Pushkin’s departure from Odessa; he spent the next two years at Mikhailovskoe, his family estate near Pskov.

The Crimean War (1853-1856) would come to centre upon Sevastopol, after impacting Odessa along with many of the major Russian and Ottoman cities by the Black Sea. The war may be perceived as a culmination of the Russo-Turkish wars of the previous three centuries. Provisionally, it was the result of a series of political intrigues concerning the status of Christianity in Palestine, which was then controlled by the Ottomans. Ever since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Russia had considered itself the protector of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. The see of Moscow had been accepted as an Orthodox patriarchate in 1589; though rather than taking the traditional place of Rome as the first patriarchate, it was listed fifth, behind the patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. One of the consequences of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 had been the assertion of Russia’s right to protect all Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule. Roman Catholic France, during the reign of Napoleon III, sought to alter this state of affairs, and began to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire demanding that it be given power over the Christian peoples and places of Palestine.

After the Ottoman Empire initially upheld the position of Russia, France undertook a show of force, sending the warship Charlemagne to the Black Sea. Cowed by the superior naval capacity of the French, the Ottomans ceded to their demands, allowing France and the Roman Catholic Church authority over Christianity in Palestine, and reverting to Latin an inscription at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, symbolically placing it under French control. Attempts towards a diplomatic resolution made little progress, and the Russian Empire responded by sending soldiers through Moldavia and Wallachia (regions of modern-day Moldova and Romania), and to the Caucasus, which it was in the long process of annexing. (Lermontov was twice exiled as an officer to the Caucasus, and depicted the region in his novel A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, in the middle of the Caucasian War). With both the Russians and the Ottomans also building their fleets in the Black Sea, this first phase of the Crimean War reached a climax with the Battle of Sinop. Sinop, historically called Sinope, was itself the birthplace of important writers, philosophers and theologians: Diogenes of Sinope is noted as the founder of philosophical Cynicism, and his witticisms, bold manners, and frequent quarrels with Plato are amusingly recounted in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers; Aquila of Sinope completed a translation of the Old Testament into Greek, the influence of which was recognised ans assured when Origen included it as part of his Hexapla: and Marcion of Sinope was ultimately declared a heretic for his rejection of the God of the Old Testament, but his writings encouraged the formation of the New Testament biblical canon. The battle which took place in the waters of Sinop in November 1853 saw Russian warships attack an anchored Ottoman patrol force, and come away with a significant victory.

This forced the hand of the French and the British, both of whom desired to prevent the expansion of the Russian Empire into the weakening Ottoman state. In March 1854, both declared war on the Russian Empire. By September, the focus of the war had turned to Crimea, and the allied forces of the French, British and Ottomans laid siege to Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and home to the Russian Empire’s Black Sea Fleet. Battles were fought in nearby towns and ports, and Sevastopol was repeatedly bombarded by the allies; despite the death of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I in March 1855, the Siege of Sevastopol persisted throughout the year, until the Russian forces withdrew the following September.

The fall of Sevastopol meant Russian defeat in the Crimean War. The Treaty of Paris, signed in March 1856, saw the Russian Empire return land to the Ottoman Empire, and relinquish all claims to the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which became independent. France won authority over the Christian peoples of the Holy Land. Crimea – which had been devastated, and seen the departure of much of its population – was restored to Russian control, but the Black Sea was declared a neutral territory, diminishing the Russian Empire as a military force. The failed war effort had also hurt the Empire economically, and the practical and psychological ramifications had far-reaching consequences: they encouraged the Alexander reforms of the 1860s, where Alexander II – Nicholas I’s son and successor – emancipated the serfs, and later reformed the Russian judiciary and military; and they impelled the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, with Russia struggling for funds and fearing they may lose the region without recompense in future military engagement.

Tolstoy had travelled to the Caucasus in 1851, and was motivated to sign up for the Russian army, serving in the same artillery regiment as his brother Nikolay. For two and a half years he participated in the Caucasian War; he was based in modern-day Chechnya. It was during this period that he began in earnest his artistic career: he completed, and saw published in The Contemporary, his first novel Childhood; wrote and published his second novel Boyhood; and in between published his first short story, ‘The Raid’, a realistic portrayal drawing upon his experiences in the region. In 1853, he attempted to resign from the army, but as an officer, his resignation was refused owing to the onset of the Crimean War.

So Tolstoy became an active participant in the Crimean War, serving in Bucharest from March 1854, then in November travelling to Odessa, then on to Sevastopol, where he was to be based for the next year. He began work on Youth, the final novel in his autobiographical trilogy; and wrote three reports on the war, ‘Sevastopol in December’, ‘Sevastopol in May’, and ‘Sevastopol in August’. ‘Sevastopol in December’ was published in June in The Contemporary. While his first two novels had resulted in literary acclaim, this first piece of war reportage brought Tolstoy a wider reputation across Russia. ‘Sevastopol in May’, a harsher, bleaker, and anti-militaristic depiction of the war, was butchered by the censor. The three texts would be published as the Sevastopol Sketches after the war had ended; together, they comprise Tolstoy’s claim to being the first modern war correspondent (an accolade often bestowed upon William Howard Russell, who covered the Crimean War for The Times). The Siege of Sevastopol would provide another first within the realm of Russian art and letters: Defence of Sevastopol was the Russian Empire’s first feature film, premiering at the Livadia Palace in Crimea in October 1911. The Livadia Palace near Yalta, a summer estate of the Russian Emperors from the 1860s, rebuilt by Nicholas II, would host the Yalta Conference towards the close of World War II.

Numerous biographers depict Tolstoy’s year in Sevastopol as decisive for his personal and artistic development. Both Henri Troyat and Rosamund Bartlett cite a diary entry he made in March:

‘Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.‘

Bartlett comments that, ‘In a sense all of Tolstoy’s future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist’. Troyat writes, ‘The whole of Tolstoy’s future doctrine is summed up in these few lines scribbled in his notebook: refusal to submit to Church dogma, return to early Christianity based on the Gospels, simultaneous search for physical well-being and moral-perfection…The time was undoubtedly not yet ripe for a full spiritual flowering. But a slow process of fermentation had begun, deep within this unquiet soul, a subterranean and painful preparation for apostolate…in the state of perpetual mental upheaval which he lived, one idea remained constant: write’.

Tolstoy’s perspective on ‘the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery’ reverberates in the works of Dostoevsky, particularly in the Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamozov. Tolstoy’s religious and ethical views, his Christian anarchism, his pacifism, and his focus on man’s relationship with the land, would also profoundly influence foreign thinkers, including Wittgenstein and James Joyce. Still, other historians view the decisive impact of Sevastopol upon Tolstoy in material rather than spiritual-artistic terms.

Tolstoy remained at this point in his life a fervent gambler and womaniser. Orlando Figes recounts, ‘In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he confessed to his diary ‘the loss of everything – the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there’s no point writing – I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget about my existence’. Much of Tolstoy’s life can be explained by that game of cards. This, after all, was no ordinary house, but the place where he was born, the home where he had spent his first nine years, and the sacred legacy of his beloved mother which had been passed down to him’. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana towards the end of May 1856, after several months in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. With the family house sold and dismantled to pay his debts, he lived in one of the remaining wings and, ‘as if to atone for his sordid game of cards, he set about the task of restoring the estate to a model farm’. Tolstoy would continue at Yasnaya Polyana for the remainder of his life, leaving just over a week before his death in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo; he was buried at Yasnaya Polyana, amid thousands of mourners, in a treasured spot of the woods by his home.

The Crimean War had also seen the allied forces lay siege to Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov, in the Rostov region of Russia which borders modern Ukraine. Taganrog withstood the siege by British and French forces between June and August 1855, though it suffered significant damage; consequently, the city was exempted from taxes in 1857. In 1860, Chekhov was born in Taganrog. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1897, he was required to seek warmer climes than those of Moscow or Melikhovo, the estate twenty miles south of Moscow where he had lived since 1892. So at the end of August 1899, Chekhov sold Melikhovo and moved to Yalta, where he had built a villa. East of Sevastopol and overlooking the Black Sea, since the Crimean War Yalta had emerged as the most popular resort within the Russian Empire. Chekhov was not overly fond of Yalta, which he called a ‘hot Siberia…there is nothing here to interest me’; and he bemoaned the tendency of Russian doctors to proscribe time in Crimea for anyone suffering the slightest cough. He would have preferred to return to Taganrog, but the city did not have an adequate water supply. Still, Chekhov lived in Yalta until June 1904 when, his health deteriorating, he travelled to the spa town of Badenweiler in Germany, dying there the following month.

In Yalta – aside from receiving visitors, and spending some time with Tolstoy, who stayed at nearby Gaspra between 1901 and 1902 – Chekhov wrote his two final plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Both were written for the Moscow Art Theatre, who produced them under the direction of Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov wrote the part of Masha in Three Sisters specifically for Olga Knipper, a leading actress with whom Chekhov had corresponded since she appeared in The Seagull in 1896. The pair would marry in May 1901. Also in Yalta, Chekhov wrote some of his greatest short stories, including ‘In the Ravine’ and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. The latter begins in Yalta: a middle-aged man and a young woman, both married but visiting alone, meet there and become lovers. They return to their different lives, but eventually begin meeting secretly in Moscow. They talk to each other, they feel that they are in love, and the story ends:

‘And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.‘

Nabokov described Chekhov’s story: ‘All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written’.

Nabokov’s father would be a key figure during the next tumultuous period in Crimea’s history, as the Russian Empire succumbed to revolution and civil war. The February Revolution of 1917, centred on Saint Petersburg – which had been rechristened Petrograd during World War I, an attempt to remove all vestiges of German from the name – and in fact emerging out of protests to mark International Women’s Day, resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II, who had lost popular, political, and military support. He named the Grand Duke Michael, his brother, as his successor, but the political situation was not conducive for any succession, and Michael declined to accept until the formation of an elected Constituent Assembly, which could approve his role. It was Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, who wrote Michael’s abdication letter; and in the Provisional Government which formed under Alexander Kerensky in the absence of a ruler, Vladimir Dmitrievich served as secretary.

Kerensky’s government was progressive, but struggled to assert a new political structure. It made numerous missteps of its own; angered the populace by refusing to withdraw from the war; and suffered fierce opposition, from the Petrograd Soviet within the capital, and from the Bolsheviks further afield. It fell in the October Revolution of 1917 which saw the Bolsheviks seize power. Vladimir Dmitrievich would later write an important memoir of this period, entitled The Provisional Government. More immediately, Nabokov’s family were forced to hurry from Petersburg, and they moved to Crimea. Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, summarises the political climate:

‘Three main political currents swirled around the Crimea late in 1917: the Socialist Revolutionary influence dominant in the countryside and in the local zemstvos; the nationalism of the Tatars, one-third of the population, who during the power vacuum of 1917 had set up their own parliament to administer Tatar affairs; and the anarchism of the sailors and soldiers in the port cities, especially Sebastapol, headquarters of the Black Sea fleet. While most of the unruly sailors at Sebastapol felt themselves full of revolutionary spirit, they had little inclination to Bolshevism until heavily armed Baltic sailors were dispatched from Petrograd late in the year. A takeover of the Sebastapol Soviet in December gave Bolsheviks power in the city and set in motion the first of the region’s massacres (more than a hundred officers killed). Elsewhere the Crimea was calm, with Tatar military detachments holding the area around Simferopol.‘

It was these Tatars, making up around a third of the population in late 1917, and setting up their own government – the Crimean People’s Republic, which lasted for only one month between December 1917 and January 1918, but may be considered an attempt to form the first secular Muslim state – who would be forcibly deported from the region during World War II. The Soviet Union under Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis, and the population of 200,000 were deported, the vast majority to the Uzbek SSR. It is thought that 46% of these people died during deportation. The Tatars only began returning to Crimea during the 1980s; today, they comprise around 250,000 of the region’s population of just over two million.

Staying at Gaspra, the Nabokov family initially sought to stay out of current affairs, Vladimir Dmitrievich’s political past making him vulnerable to arrest or worse. As the Russian Civil War progressed and the Bolsheviks endeavoured to assert themselves in Crimea, World War I continued, German troops advanced and, in late April 1918, occupied the region. This was a welcome relief for much of the populace, a respite from the tension and potential bloodshed of the Bolsheviks clashing with their opponents. Crimea became a relative stronghold of the opposition, and authority in the region would pass between the Bolsheviks and their opponents over the next few years.

When the Germans withdrew from Crimea and the puppet government they had installed fell in November 1918, the Crimean Regional Government formed under Solomon Krym. This Crimean Regional Government was opposed to the Bolsheviks, but was not closely allied to the White Army, drawing its members from both socialists and non-socialists, and concerned with the specifics of the local situation. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov became the government’s minister of justice, and served until April 1919 when, weakened by its differences with the White Army, the Bolsheviks again seized power. Nabokov’s family were again forced to depart, and they eventually made their way, through Greece, to England, where Nabokov would study at Cambridge. Crimea would become the site of the last stand of the White Army: the defeat of the White Army, under the command of General Wrangel, in November 1920 effectively marked the end of the Russian Civil War. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formed a year later, and converted to the Crimean Oblast, fully part of Soviet Russia, in 1945. Nabokov’s father Vladimir Dmitrievich died in Berlin in March 1922, shot in the process of defending one of his liberal political rivals from far-right gunmen.

————————

For the political overview of this piece, I have used a variety of news sources – including Reuters, the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Slate, and RT; online encyclopedias, notably Wikepedia; and each of the books listed below.

A selection of sources:

The BBC’s timeline of the Ukrainian crisis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26248275

A depiction of the role of the far-right in the protest movement: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26468720

A New York Times piece on the fall of Yanukovych: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/world/europe/as-his-fortunes-fell-in-ukraine-a-president-clung-to-illusions.html

RT’s response to the interim Ukrainian government’s cancellation of the minority languages law: http://rt.com/news/minority-language-law-ukraine-035/

‘Facts you may not know about Crimea’: http://rt.com/news/russian-troops-crimea-ukraine-816/

On the arrest of Keystone pipeline protesters in Washington: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/03/us-usa-keystone-protest-idUSBREA210RI20140303

A study suggesting that chemical weapons used in Syria could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/01/15/214656/new-analysis-of-rocket-used-in.html

An opposing perspective: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/06/sarin-gas-attack-civilians-syria-government-un

Literature:

Rosamund Bartlett Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (Free Press, 2005)

Rosamund Bartlett Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Profile Books, 2010)

T. J. Binyon Pushkin: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2002)

Brian Boyd Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (London: Vintage, 1993)

Anton Chekhov Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (trans. R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky) (Modern Library, 2000)

R. F. Christian (ed.) Tolstoy’s Diaries (London: Flamingo, 1994)

Norman Davies Europe: A History (Pimlico, 1997)

Orlando Figes Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin, 2003)

D. S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Russian Literature (Harcourt, 1981)

Henri Troyat Tolstoy (Penguin, 1980)

In Literature, News & Politics 1654, 1783, Alaska Purchase, Aleksandr Pushkin, Alexander Kerensky, Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Reforms, Analysing Ukraine, Annexation, Anton Chekhov, Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Autonomy, Azarov, Battle of Sinop, Berkut, Black Sea, Black Sea Fleet, Bolsheviks, Chekhov, Chekhov in Yalta, Christian Anarchism, Cossack Hetmanate, Crimea, Crimean Autonomy, Crimean Constitution, Crimean Crisis, Crimean History, Crimean Khanate, Crimean Oblast, Crimean parliament, Crimean President, Crimean Referendum, Crimean Tatars, Crimean War, Current Affairs, D.S. Mirsky, De Tocqueville, Defence of Sevastopol, Democracy, Deportation of Crimean Tatars, Diplomacy, East-West, Eastern Orthodox Church, EU, Eugene Onegin, Euromaidan, Europe, February Revolution, First War Correspondent, Gaspra, History, History of Crimea, History of Ukraine, International Relations, Kerch Peninsula, Kiev, Kievan Rus, Leo Tolstoy, Lermontov, Lev Tolstoy, Life of Chekhov, Life of Nabokov, Life of Pushkin, Life of Tolstoy, Literary History, Literature, Livadia Palace, Melikhovo, Mikhailovskoe, Moscow, Nabokov, Nabokov's Exile, Nabokov's Father, News, October Revolution, Odessa, Orlando Figes, Ottoman Empire, Pacifism, Palestine, Paulism, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Political Summary, Politics, Ports, Protest, Protest Movement, Provisional Government, Pushkin, Putin, Rosamund Bartlett, Russia, Russian Civil War, Russian Emperors, Russian Empire, Russian literature, Russian Navy, Russian Revolution, Russo-Polish War, Russo-Turkish War, Russo-Turkish War 1768-1774, Sebastopol Sketches, Sevastopol, Sevastopol in December, Sevastopol Sketches, Siege of Sevastopol, Soft Despotism, Solomon Krym, Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, Tatars, The Contemporary, The Crimea, The Crimean War, The Lady with the Dog, The Lady with the Small Dog, The Lady with the Toy Dog, The Ukraine, Tolstoy, Tolstoy as an officer, Tolstoy Gambling, Tolstoy in Sevestopol, Tolstoy's Spiritual Development, Tolstoy's Youth, Tymoshenko, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia, Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian Navy, United States, V. D. Nabokov, Verkhovna Rada, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Warfare, White Army, William Howard Russell, Yalta, Yanukovych, Yasnaya Polyana, Yatsenyuk, Zakharchenko

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