Constantine Pleshakov: The Crimean Nexus

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

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

Two devastating wars of the twentieth century—the Russian civil war of 1917–1920 and World War II—brought massacres, deportation, and emigration so massive that today just 10 percent of Crimean families can claim uninterrupted presence on the peninsula going back farther than three generations. Out of today’s population of two million, 58 percent identify as Russian, 24 percent as Ukrainian, and 12 percent as Tatar, the remaining 6 percent split among Jews, Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Byelorussians. [6] “Crimea Profile—Overview,” BBC, March 13, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18287223 (retrieved August 11, 2015).

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

What is Crimea?

Climatically, the peninsula is a shard of the Mediterranean, the northernmost subtropics, a Côte d’Azur on the edge of snow and ice. Tatars called it Green Isle; Catherine the Great called it Eden; an early American visitor said it was “an emerald in a sea of sapphire.” [7] Harry de Windt, Russia as I Know It (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1917), 184.

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

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

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

The conflict has been in the making for a very long time. Neal Ascherson wrote in 1996 that the Black Sea coasts belonged “to all their people, but also to none of them”; when “some fantasy of national unity” arrives, the “apparent solidarity of centuries can dissolve within days or hours.” A territory traditionally prized and contested, a place with no permanent ethnic core, a national fetish for Russians, Ukrainians, and Tatars, Crimea has long been a time bomb. When the bomb went off in 2014, it jump-started the separatists’ insurgency in eastern Ukraine and sent waves of foreboding throughout Eastern Europe. [8] Ascherson, Black Sea , 9–10.

In his World War II memoir Lost Victories , the German field marshal Erich von Manstein recalls the funeral of his “truest comrade of all,” the driver Fritz Nagel, a man with “frank brown eyes” who was killed in an air raid in the summer of 1942. “We buried him,” Manstein writes, “alongside all our other German and Italian comrades in the Yalta cemetery high above the sea—perhaps one of the most lovely spots on the whole of that glorious coastline.” [9] Erich Manstein, Lost Victories (St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith, 2004), 247. Five years later, my grandfather died in Yalta, and in all honesty, I cannot be sure that the 1947 graves were not dug on top of the graves of the Axis soldiers. Three years after the occupation, enemy burials were not something people in Eastern Europe respected or honored.

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

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

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

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

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