Constantine Pleshakov - The Crimean Nexus

Chekhov’s iconic Yalta story, “The Lady With the Dog,” portrays Yalta as a place of one-night stands, a banal seaside resort where people shed their inhibitions with the full knowledge that this would have no consequences for their real life up north. When Anna Sergeevna tells Gurov that he will stop respecting her now, he finds this so obvious that he just keeps eating a watermelon. There are several shockers in the story, and one is that a trite vacation dalliance inexplicably grows into something more consequential. When this realization hits him, Gurov blurts out to an acquaintance, If you only knew what a remarkable woman I met in Yalta! The acquaintance replies: You were right about the fish they served today—it was not fresh. He knows exactly what kind of encounters occur in Yalta and dismisses Gurov’s exclamation as a bout of sentimentality brought on by excessive drinking (and possibly by the bad fish). [31] “The Lady with the Dog”: Anton Chekhov, Stories (New York: Bantam, 2000), 361–376.

In a less famous story, Chekhov identifies Crimea, and Yalta in particular, as a destination for Russian middle-class female sex tourists, hiring Tatar escorts for the duration of their stay so as to brag about the adventures back home. A contemporary conservative Russian journalist lamented the “loose” morals of women vacationers in Yalta, the town “not a resort, but a school of seduction.” [32] “Big Mouth” (“ Dlinnyi yazyk ”): A. P. Chekhov, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1979–1982), vol. 5, 313–316; Vladimir V. Svyatlovsky, Yuzhnyi bereg Kryma i Riviera (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1902), 119–121.

Chekhov would have been annoyed to learn that for more than a century, Yalta has been his shrine, with a museum, conferences, readings, and theater festivals. Meeting in Yalta in 2009 to negotiate an energy deal amid an atmosphere of bonhomie and flirtation, Vladimir Putin and the then Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced they would be having a tête-à-tête dinner. “We will be discussing Chekhov,” Putin playfully told the reporters. [33] “Putin i Timoshenko uzhinali u Rotaru i smeyalis’ nad Yushchenko i galstukami Mikho,” Segodnya.ua, November 20, 2009, www.segodnya.ua/ukraine/putin-i-timoshenko-uzhinali-u-rotaru-i-cmejalic-nad-jushchenko-i-halctukamimikho.html (retrieved May 2, 2015).

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

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

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

In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans—founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person). Yet the book’s message lives: Sevastopol is the City of Russian Glory. What also likely played a role was that nineteenth-century Russians needed to put an ethnic stamp on the still somewhat alien Crimean shore. [35] L. N. Tolstoy, Dnevniki i zapisnye knizhki, 1854–1857: Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1937), vol. 47, 37, 48, 56–57; Tolstoy, The Sebastopol Sketches .

Twelve years after the siege, Mark Twain noted that “Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sevastopol. Here, you may look in whatsoever direction you please, and your eye encounters scarcely any thing but ruin, ruin, ruin!” Two years later, an Englishwoman reported: “Not a single ship in the harbor, and all the forts and fortifications—indeed, the whole town on the south side—almost one mass of ruins. The débris of houses, forts, and barracks remain just as they were left in 1856, and a population which then amounted, it is said, to 60,000, has been reduced to 5,500!” [36] Twain, The Innocents Abroad , 279; Grey, Journal of a Visit to Egypt , 173.

The poet Anna Akhmatova spent her childhood summers in the vicinity. The narrator of her poem about Sevastopol picks “French bullets, like others pick mushrooms.” Imagining herself a tsarina, the girl dispatches “six battleships and six gunboats” to protect the area’s bays. [37] Akhmatova, “U samogo morya…” (“On the sea coast…”): Anna Akhmatova, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1977), 339–340.

During World War II, history repeated itself: Sevastopol was put through another siege. On June 22, 1941, it became the first Soviet city bombed by the Germans, and it was the call from the commander of the Black Sea Fleet that alerted Moscow to the catastrophe. In November, after the Red Army evacuated the rest of the peninsula, the siege of Sevastopol continued for eight more months. A German soldier remembered: “Numerous Russians lay wounded, scattered among the vineyards under a merciless, scorching sun. There was no water available to them where they lay, and they were quickly overcome with a sense of apathy as they lay waiting to die on the open ground.” [38] G. K. Zhukov, Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2002), vol. 1, 263–264; A. M. Vasilevsky, Delo vsei zhizni (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2002), 371; Bidermann, In Deadly Combat , 142.

Soviet generals seem to have been touched by the tragic continuity, sort of a deadly noblesse oblige. In 1941–1942, Sevastopol “fought heroically,” “true to its military heritage,” Stalin’s chief of general staff wrote. The minister of the navy reported that the city stood like an “invincible rock” where “real life heroes shed blood for the Fatherland” next to the ghosts of Tolstoy’s “no less dear and familiar heroes.” [39] Vasilevsky, Delo vsei zhizni , 371; N. G. Kuznetsov, Kursom k pobede (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2003), 189.

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