Constantine Pleshakov - The Crimean Nexus

There is evidence that some Crimean Tatars have gone to Syria to join ISIS. As early as May 2014, a Crimean Tatar military commander in Syria, Andul Karim Krymsky [of Krym], addressed compatriots on the peninsula in a video, arguing that the West was not going to save them and advocating armed struggle against Russians instead. Yet when the pro-Russian mufti Ruslan Saitvaliev announced at a press conference that five hundred Crimean Tatars were already fighting for ISIS, that was most likely a gross exaggeration. Meanwhile, for the authorities, the ISIS specter became the pretext to arrest Tatar activists indiscriminately. [13] “Concerns Raised over Crimean Tatars Fighting with IS,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 19, 2014, www.rferl.org/content/concerns-raised-over-crimean-tatars-fighting-with-is/26699848.html (retrieved November 19, 2014); “Na storone islamskogo gosudarstva voyuyut okolo 500 krymchan,” Novosti Kryma , November 18, 2014, http://news.allcrimea.net/news/2014/11/18/na-storone-islamskogo-gosudarstva-vojujut-okolo-500-krymchan-25692 (retrieved November 18, 2014).

In Crimea, ISIS is more or less an imagined influence. In Turkey, not so. Crimea used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey is now a staunch supporter of Crimean Tatars. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development party), Turkey is redefining its cultural identity and regional role. Shunned by the European Union and feeling used by NATO, it is moving away from Europe. Crimea is part of its legacy, and some Tatar communities in Anatolia formed by nineteenth-century Crimean exiles are still in place.

The Russian annexation brought Crimea back on to Turkey’s national agenda; in 2015–2016, Russian bombings of Syria, a country Turkey considers its backyard, made Turkish mainstream opinion firmly anti-Russian.

A rose is a rose under any other name, but a nation is not. To claim nationhood, the group has to shed its dual identity—“Crimean” and “Tatar”—and forge a single unambiguous face. “Crimean Tatar” implies the existence of a bigger Tatar nation, linking Crimean Tatars to the Tatars of Volga, Central Asia, and Siberia. Clearly, this reading undermines their claim on Crimea. It makes them another part of the peninsula’s population, like Crimean Russians or Crimean Greeks.

As a centerpiece of their nation-building, Dzhemilev and his fellow leaders emphasize that “Crimean Tatars” are not a branch of the general Tatar population but a unique people, a merging of Mongol, Kipchak, Goth, Greek and other groups, the sum of the peninsula’s history, not a mere particle of it. [14] Williams, The Crimean Tatars , 2.

That this reading of history is a recent construct does not undermine its validity. The tricky (and dangerous) part is defining the endgame. Let’s assume that the Kirim concept gets accepted by the Tatars and their neighbors: the Kirim are the sum of every indigenous people of Crimea of the past two or three millennia. Where do they go from there? An independent Kirim state is not a realistic option. The majority of the Crimean Tatar diaspora remains in Central Asia, Turkey, and the Balkans, with no plans of ever resettling in Crimea. Even if the entire diaspora moved back (and such a move were economically sustainable), they would still be a minority in today’s Crimea.

If Tatars ever develop a true national liberation movement, it will be a disaster for all involved. Crimea would turn into another Bosnia, except that instead of fighting a small, weak state like Serbia, the Crimean Tatars would be up against the much more powerful Russia.

Another dangerous scenario would be Ukraine trying to reclaim the peninsula by force. This would be a foolish move. Strategically, Crimea is an island, and thus difficult to seize; a Russian retaliatory strike would most likely take their troops to Nikolayev and Odessa; and the crisis could end with the whole Ukrainian Black Sea coast becoming another “people’s republic” under Moscow’s patronage. Nor is there much reason to believe that the majority of Crimeans would support reunification with Ukraine. Yet “restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea” has found its way on the agenda of some powerful private foreign policy institutions in the United States, such as the Atlantic Council and Freedom House. [15] David J. Kramer, President, Freedom House, Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Freedom House , May 6, 2014, https://freedomhouse.org/article/ukraine-countering-russian-intervention-and-supporting-democratic-state#.Vdc3_CxViko (retrieved August 21, 2015).

In 1786, the British socialite and writer Elizabeth Craven reported: “The Crimea might with great ease be made an island.” In 1979, the Soviet writer Vasily Aksyonov wrote a novel called The Island of Crimea that became an instant samizdat bestseller. It took a counterfactual approach to history, exploiting a real occurrence: during the Civil War, in 1920, Crimea became the last stronghold of the Whites. Had Britain, France, and the United States provided the support the White commanders begged for, Crimea could have seceded and become an alternative to the Soviet Union, a Russian Taiwan. In the novel, a twenty-two-year old British lieutenant, Richard Bayley-Land, aboard the dreadnaught Liverpool opens artillery fire on the Reds storming the Perekop, triggering a chain of events that leads to victory for the Whites. (Interviewed by the reporters, the sly, aristocratic, and hard-drinking Bayley-Land insists he did it “just for fun.”) [16] Craven, A Journey Through the Crimea , 162; Vasily Aksyonov, Ostrov Krym (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), 270–272.

Aksyonov’s novel articulated a historically Crimean trend: the peninsula’s tendency to break away from bigger entities. The Crimean independence movement is not exactly around the corner, but it is in the making. There is, for example, a concept of Crimea as “testing grounds of a new common Eurasian culture.” And the peninsula is becoming multicultural again. As early as the 1990s, minority groups included 2,794 Armenians; 2,166 Bulgarians, 3,000 Greeks, 17,000 Jews, 898 Karaims, 900 Krymchaks, and 3,000 Germans. [17] Potekhin and Potekhin, Kultura narodov Kryma , 6–30, 42.

The “reunification” with Russia has brought the people of Crimea nothing but grief. By 2016, power supplies from Ukraine had stopped completely, and blackouts became the new norm. Schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, cinemas, government offices—all got electricity and heating only sporadically. With streetlights off, driving turned hazardous. The most expensive restaurants in Yalta advertised as places where one could get warm (they had reserve generators, or so the ads claimed).

Destitution of such magnitude hadn’t been seen on the peninsula since World War II. Wolves, extinct in Crimea in the twentieth century, returned (they had crossed the Sea of Azov on ice), and were spotted in towns foraging for food. As I am writing this, the City of Russian Glory, Sevastopol, is considering ordering pharmacies to start selling medications by the pill .

In two years since the annexation, the Kremlin had done nothing for the population. Only when the blackouts peaked at the end of 2015 did Moscow order the construction of the so-called “energy bridge”—simply put, an underwater cable bringing electricity to Crimea from the mainland across the Kerch Strait. Incidentally, no Russian company was ready to build at such short notice, and the Kremlin had to hire a Chinese contractor. A real bridge across the Kerch Strait, promised to Crimeans since day one of the annexation, is still in its prenatal stage.

All of this—sudden deprivation, Moscow’s indifference, inept, corrupt local government—breed new political activism on the peninsula. It must be said that returning to Ukraine is not a realistic option—at least not until the Ukrainian state is strong enough to curtail the power of the right-wing paramilitary forces, which would be only too happy to descend on Crimea looking for violent revenge.