Crimean legend

It is easy to look at Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and say that Russia has liberated Crimea, brought it back into the Russian fold, and rescued Russian citizens living there. The audience cheers. But there are too many lies inherent in this interpretation of events. Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Crimea is an essentially Russian territory, though he knows that Vladimir I, who converted to Christianity in Crimea, was Grand Prince of Kiev. The Tale of Bygone Years (Povest Vremennykh Let) and other literary works of the 12^th century have to be translated into Russian because they were written in an ancient language that was the common ancestor of both the Russian and Ukrainian languages. However, neither Kiev, the mother of all Russian cities, nor her successful daughter, Great Russian Moscow, controlled Crimea, and this territory did not join the Russian Empire until 1783, when Catherine the Great was ruling in Petersburg. And even then, Crimea did not become Russian. Many different nations used to live on this territory, and the Soviet government acknowledged the right of the largest ethnic group among them to form an autonomous republic. Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Karaites, and Jews had been living there for a long time, and the Russian population had been growing as well. Under Russian rule, they spoke Russian to each other, which could lead visitors to believe that Russians constituted the majority of the population on the peninsula. But this only became true much later.

By 1944, as a result of Nazi Germany’s activity, there were obviously no Jews left in Crimea, and the Karaite population decreased. The rest of the population was banished by the Soviets. The Crimean Tatars were banished for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. The autonomous republic was renamed into a region, and Russians took over the territory. They moved into houses abandoned by Tatars, which were different from the houses in which they were used to living in Russia.

Unlike other banished ethnic groups, Crimean Tatars were “rehabilitated” not after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but in 1967, and then only technically. I once visited a small residential settlement in the Caucasus that had been built for Balkarians at the foot of a mountain, on which there were gutted houses, abandoned during the deportation. Far from building new settlements for Tatars, the Soviet government complicated their repatriation. Life only became easier in independent Ukraine. During the dissolution of the USSR, President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin failed to remember this unacknowledged genocide, and did not offer his support to those willing to go back to their native land, if not to their houses that had been occupied by Russians. Under Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, the Federal Republic of Germany, though hardly prosperous at the time, recalled the Holocaust and helped Israel in a way that Russia did not help Crimean Tatars. Moreover, Russians living on the peninsula today have recently started talking about banishing Tatars again, and now that Russia has annexed Crimea, Tatars are beginning to wonder what they should do. During annexation of Crimea Putin called Mustafa Dzhemilev, as if he had nothing to do with the current situation.

The lies surrounding Russia’s historical relationship with Crimea are concocted not only to shield the former Soviet regime, but also for the convenience of the current Russian government. It is amazing what nonsense is offered to the public as an explanation of how General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev made a present of Crimea to Ukraine. He could not give Ukraine much, however, because Crimea was only technically independent. He made Ukraine responsible for supplying water and electricity to Crimea. Thus he gave Ukraine the gift of new responsibilities. People in Crimea will now probably be forced to remember how life was on the peninsula without water and electricity.

One should not forget, however, that Soviet Crimea was made Russian against its will by malevolently depriving its major ethnic group of their right to return to this region. Had the government treated Tatars as Balkarians, for instance, had it encouraged their repatriation and restored the republic of Crimean Tatars, Tatars would probably not have been holding on to Ukraine. They could have even returned to Russia after deciding that it was the Soviet government, and not the Soviet people, that had done them wrong. Putin pretends that his regime has nothing to do with the Soviet one, but the government’s attitude toward Tatars remains the same. Consequently, the Tatars’ feelings of distrust toward the Russian government remain as well. Putin and his elite do not need Crimea itself; rather, they need the legend about a Russian territory that had been occupied until Putin brought it back. In the context of such a legend, it will be easier to occupy Ukraine, which was once made responsible for saving Crimea. Instead of putting the historical record straight, Russia is actually defying it in Crimea.

 

Ukrainian history

Moscow has declared Ukraine a failed state. This statement demonstrates self-complacency as it suggests that it is Russia that determines the future of Ukraine and can prevent Ukraine from succeeding. Putin is not the first; let us not lay all the blame on him, since his attitude is based on a longstanding tradition. Ukrainians and Russians used to be fraternal peoples. But during the era of feudal disunity (ninth to thirteenth centuries), the Mongolian invasion fractured, if not shattered this fraternity. The invasion in the first half of the thirteenth century dealt an especially hard blow to the old Kiev Russia territories that at the time had already been fragmented for a century. Although newer Russian north-eastern cities such as Rostov, Suzdal, and Vladimir did not avoid the invasion, they suffered less. Since the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, the formation of Ukraine’s and Russia’s national identities have been occurring separately. The people of the young Russia have proven to be more successful. In 1381, Russia stood up to invaders during the Kulikovskaya battle, and after the November 1480 Great Stand on the Ugra River, Moscovia became independent. Old Ukrainian territories, including the lands of Kiev, Chernigov, and Galicia-Volhynia, drifted together, and in the fourteenth century, joined the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, after which these territories, along with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, united with Poland into Rzeczpospolita, which made their situation worse than when they were in alliance with Lithuania.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Bogdan Khmelnitsky (the Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) asked permission to join the Tsardom of Russia, which later broke all the promises it had initially made to him. The 500 years of separate existence had left their mark, and the following 300 years that these two peoples spent as one state did not blur the differences between them. Russian authorities deprived Ukrainians of their privileges, and Catherine the Great enserfed them. These events left their mark as well, and in light of such a history, Ukrainians’ right to a separate, independent existence is unquestionable. By ignoring the difference between these two peoples, one only risks aggravating Ukraine’s animosity toward Russia—a result the Russian authorities are successfully achieving. The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (a short-lived secret political society formed in Kiev with a goal to revive Ukrainian independence) emerged in the nineteenth century for a reason, and the fight for Ukraine’s independence in 1917 was not unfounded.

Even many Ukrainian communists wanted to see Soviet Ukraine being more Ukrainian (many of them were later executed). Yet we are told that Russians and Ukrainians, as historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, are but one people. But Italians and French are not one people, though France has adopted as many things from Italy as Moscow has from Kiev. Serbians and Croats, who share one language, are nevertheless two distinct peoples. Russians and Ukrainians even use different languages. Ukrainians might be wrong in their politics, but it is up to them to sort this out. Russians have no right to impose their advice on and give orders to a sovereign state.

 

The Russian truth

These facts do not only concern Crimea and Ukraine; they constitute a global issue. To the direct question “Do you want a war?” the Russian authorities are responding in the negative. And they are not lying. What they want is not a war but absolute obedience. They cannot achieve this, however, without using military force. Russian philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky believed that Russia was a land of slaves. Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov expressed this idea even better, saying Russia is “the land of slaves, the land of lords.” Russia’s seignorial habits are more ruthless and brutal than those of slaves. Its craving for domination is stronger than its craving for vodka. Russians firmly believe that success is achieved not through concern, responsibility, and commitment, but through following orders from above.

Under the Soviet regime, Russia was dominated by party spirit and the one-party regime. Before Soviet times, such a system had been called autocracy. All aspects of Vladimir Lenin’s ideology were quite correct. Before Lenin, such an ideology had been called Orthodoxy. The unity of all and in everything was indissoluble. Before, this unity had been called nationality. After Yeltsin rejected the Communist party and ideology, what remained were autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality, which have been defining the country’s life since. And it makes no difference whether Russia’s masters are called people’s commissars, ministers, or oligarchs, comrades or lords, because their essence remains the same. But in order to rule in Crimea, Ukraine, or anywhere else, Russia’s rule over itself must be strong. The authorities realized that, having masked Communism as Gaidarism and Putinism, they still had not managed to put the country back on track and strengthen Russia’s influence over the world.

There are several possible starting points for assessing Russia’s economic failure. One could start with late 2013, when the Ruble was devaluing, prices were rising, and gas customers were seeking other sources of energy. One could start with Russia’s particularly difficult attempts to overcome the recent global crisis. The critical line, however, was drawn not in 1991, but in 1917, when Lenin wrote his most significant work, The State and Revolution, which still defines life in Russia today. In this book, Lenin, being a pragmatist, described Karl Marx as a utopianist. Although Marx himself did not press for the dying away of the state, as a philosopher and as an individual, he could not ignore the fact that revolutions disagree with states. Lenin, on the other hand, reasoned as a genius of political technology and, after toppling one state, created another one to become the manager of a syndicate, integrating the country’s economy under consolidated leadership.

Twelve years later, the project was fully implemented. Russia had been following this scheme under Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev. Factors such as current events, the violence of collectivization, the change of destructive leadership, war losses, and Khrushchev’s “voluntarism” that was used to justify poor policies. But even during the better days of the 1970s, when, after bringing Czech troublemakers to heel, the Soviet syndicate was being nourished by the selling of mineral products, it still could not make ends meet.

Yeltsin’s economists introduced capitalism but forgot to dissolve the unified syndicate and failed to consider the fact that the market is an element and “no czar, ’tis sure, is master over God’s elements!” (The Bronze Horseman by Alexander Pushkin). They wanted both to remain at home and to be married off, expected both to hold all the aces and to have those they were supposed to lead self-direct efficiently. This is why the 1990s reforms of Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais did not result in a wave of initiatives as had happened in 1921 after the enunciation of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Only the Potanins and the Abramovichs—so-called oligarchs—emerged, ready to serve the government. The country did not make any industrial or market breakthrough. It continued to survive by selling raw materials that were rising in price. The nomenklatura wanted to have capitalism without justice and economic freedom, which make it possible for them to lose in the course of fair competition. The authorities wanted to enjoy a Western way of life, while continuing to allow the government to call all the shots.

 

 

It is unsurprising that under this contradictory system, the attitudes of the Russian people changed drastically. On August 19, 1991, around a million unarmed people took to the streets of Moscow, despite the large number of armored vehicles present and the fact that they could get killed. They simply did not want the Soviet system anymore. President Mikhail Gorbachev, although with reservations, gave the people a weak hope of getting rid of the Soviet Union—a hope that the GKChP then tried to take away, with Gorbachev’s consent. Those happy days turned out to be but a lie, as had happened before, on October 25, 1917.

In 1917, there was a revolution, and although the situation appeared to be different in 1991—since instead of grand princes, Russia had Politburo members—the nomenklatura was not, in fact, changed, but rather rearranged. Passed on to oligarchs, factories were no longer state facilities. Having believed that the capitalism they’d been promised was supposed to be like this, ordinary people were left with nothing and remembered that in Soviet times, they could always count on a living minimum wage in exchange for political silence. They did not really know how the economy had been managed in the USSR. Newspapers said nothing about the crisis of the late 1970s. Those who were born after the dissolution of the Soviet Union might even feel that the USSR could have remained a superpower. This, compounded with the government’s growing impotence in management and its desire to remain in power despite increasing mass poverty, meant that both the authorities and the population were gravitating toward the restoration that was, in the end, accomplished by Putin. A new era has begun.

 

Declaration of intent

Soviet totalitarianism opposed the 1848 ideological concepts of bourgeois democracy, as if nobody knew about modern capitalism and the living standards of European workers. Now, it is not a battle of ideas but of parties that is currently underway—“loyal” parties vs. “enemy” ones that are unwilling to obey the regime in power. This is why the invasion of Crimea and threats against Ukraine, such as the declaration of a new “cold war,” are not based on ideology. The authorities are just declaring Russians’ right to do what they wish abroad, as well as Russia’s disengagement from legal and moral responsibilities. Putin ignored the Budapest Memorandum because there was a revolution in Ukraine. According to the memorandum, in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. By breaking this promise, presidents Putin and Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron demonstrated to the world that their guarantees cannot be trusted.

Referring to the Ukrainian revolution, Putin declared that the Ukrainian government was self-appointed, as if nobody had told him that in response to the unrest in the country, the legitimate parliament, formed under the former regime established a temporary government, just as Russia had in 1917. The difference is that, unlike the Russian czar, the Ukrainian president did not abdicate, but fled abroad. Putin declared his right to protect Russians wherever they live and to annex the territory they live on according to the right to self-determination, just as he did in Crimea. Only native people, however, possess such a right. The fact that a large number of Tajiks live on a Moscow street does not give them the right to demand that this street be annexed by Tajikistan. By encouraging demonstrations in support of the annexation of Crimea, Putin brought suspicion upon millions of honest Russians living abroad who remain unwilling to betray the country that has become their home, despite their love for Russia, Russian culture, and Russian language. This is exactly what the Russian government is pushing them to.

The Soviet government tried to convince the world that Communism could make humankind happy in an improved Gulag, which people believed before they were faced with the reality. The current regime claims that Russia is different from other countries, that it has special rights, and that other countries should go along with it. Not “Germany above all,” as Hoffman von Fallersleben (who believed that German states should be unified), wrote in the nineteenth century, but Russia above all other countries and nations.

The recent events in Crimea and Ukraine are on par with such declarations. As tragic as they are, it is naive to believe that these were just localized events. Russia can invade Lugansk, Donetsk, Odessa, Kiev, and Lvov and can even return Crimea while keeping Sebastopol. It is, after all, not a coincidence that Russia annexed Crimea and Sebastopol as two separate federal subjects. Russia will do everything the world will tolerate in order to establish Moscow’s new position—one that duplicates the position of the USSR. It is important to realize how this position is changing Russia. It reminds many of the Nazis’ behavior toward the rest of the world. There is much talk of the Anschluss and Munich, and comparisons of Obama to Chamberlain and Putin to Hitler. Yet, few remember how twelve years of Nazism disfigured Germany and how difficult the cleansing process was that was carried out by Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Karl Jaspers, and others in order to reconstruct the western part of the country. It was even harder to eradicate Nazism in the country’s eastern part because of its similarity to the Communism that came to replace it.

After seventy years of Communism, Russia wound down the cleansing process that had barely been initiated under Gorbachev by allegedly “raising the country from its knees.” Russia, however, has never dropped to its knees—unlike Willy Brandt, who did so at the monument to victims of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The tendency to hide Soviet crimes behind space flights is still present in Russia today. The ruling elite hopes to keep the ball of the past rolling. But the past is not the past by accident. Under Brezhnev, the country was short of everything but arms, but the party that was leading the people toward a bright future through the blood of Afghans was feeding the people with promises of greatness. Yeltsin rejected the notion of a Communist utopia and allowed conditional private property, but he managed to retain more control than general secretaries of the Communist party. His was still a totalitarian regime that was bashfully calling itself authoritarian. And blood continued to flow in Chechnya, Georgia, and now in Ukraine.

The trouble is not that members of the Soviet Union fell apart but that the dissolution was kept secret from the people, and the tragedy was only revealed when it came to bringing in troops. In Tbilisi, entrenching tools were used, in Vilnius, firearms. Having approved the Belavezha Accords, officially dissolving the Soviet Union, Russia failed to consider the fact that it contained numerous ethnic groups—many of them quite populous—that could themselves seek secession from Russia. Russia’s leaders failed to think about the Russian people and did not unite ethnic Russian regions into a separate Russian Republic within the Federation that could have its own voice. And so Russia still cannot decide whether it is a smaller version of the Soviet Union or a Russian nation state—that includes Chechens, Tatars, Chuvashs, and Buryats—in which it has become a criminal offense to think of oneself as a non-Russian. Putin has declared that Ukraine left the Soviet Union in an incorrect fashion. But Russia and Ukraine left the union together—so did Russia also leave incorrectly? Why didn’t the president worry about this before? Because he believes, as he has always believed, that the republics did not leave the Soviet Union, but rather walked away from Russia. And he, Putin, is now reuniting them.

 

When should we worry?

It could be that for Russia, a return to the Soviet Union would be fatal; that Russia’s existence as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (within the USSR) prevented it from getting its economy into shape. Many people write about this—but they don’t take into account the fact that Russia’s renewed nomenklatura, which is clinging to power, is not concerned with the future of the Russian people or other peoples, but only cares about preserving its own hold on the country. This can best be achieved—as it was in the USSR—by maintaining a mobilized patriotic spirit and constantly talking about a perceived threat, even if it is a fictional one. This was what led to the 2008 war with Georgia—but a speedy capitulation by the West prevented a mobilization of Russia. The Crimean story was played somewhat better, but the takeover of Ukraine will show that the fighting spirit with which the Soviets entered Afghanistan has not gone away. Without it, the population cannot be led away from reality.

The reality, meanwhile, consists in the fact that Russia, which wants to be a developed country, can no longer live in accordance with Lenin’s commitment to party unity. As a country’s society and economy become more complex, a forced unity, like the one with which Egyptian pyramids were built, must give way to a voluntary accommodation between different opinions. In Russia today, these different voices are never really heard—be it in elections or in everyday life. Russia’s territories that are populated by different ethnic groups are formally called autonomies, but they cannot elect their own presidents, who are instead selected by the president of Russia.

Every society, including Russia’s, is marked not only by ethnic strife, but also by even more active class conflicts. In order for a society to be productive, different voices must be heard at least in legislative assemblies, and must seek compromises that would allow people to live together. Different voices seeking compromise—this is the essence of democracy. Democracy consists of horizontal structures that solve different issues at different levels, and of vertical structures that do not merge into a single power. One group of people should govern; another group of people should write laws; and a third group of people should deliver justice. Otherwise the system becomes autocratic, absolutist, dictatorial.

But when the people stay silent, the masters—who have shut off all channels of communication with society—do not see the reality. Hence Russia’s problems: its population is dwindling; its development is slowing; its industry is falling behind; its culture is growing poorer. Descending deeper into a nationalist frenzy, Russia’s leaders are persistently depriving the Russian people of their own voice, and are increasingly cracking down on others, in the name of the Russian people, thus provoking Russophobia.

The Russian government is unsure of itself and is breaking the rules abroad because it needs to tighten the screws at home—and this is best done during a war. But we must not fear Dmitri Kiselev or Dmitri Rogozin (the Russian TV commentator and ambassador, respectively). Before pushing the nuclear button and turning the United States into radioactive waste, Putin will realize that such suicide does not make sense. He needs war for domestic purposes. He sends his troops into places where there is no resistance. He seized Crimea—and the West shook its head. He is moving troops closer to Ukraine—and the West is wagging its finger. They say that Paris is far from Simferopol—but Volga was also far from the Saarland. Those who do not want to die should resist. Today it is dangerous to postpone this resistance.