Kost Elisevich

As might be self-evident to most sentient beings, Crimea remains geographically contiguous with the territory of Ukraine, enough so that all but a Russian ultranationalist would understand the implacable logic of a situation that Putin chooses to ignore. Crimea is vital to the interests of Russia as a military stronghold providing access to the Mediterranean and, to a degree, still a favored nearby vacation destination that Russians would very much like to call their own.

A plausible reason for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one that was voiced eight years ago by Senator John McCain, amounts to securing a land corridor through eastern Ukraine to Crimea, one that Putin could annex in a manner similar to his illegitimate annexation of Crimea itself in 2014. This peninsula jutting out within the Black Sea has had a distinctly convoluted history which has been further clouded by Russian rhetoric that has attempted to reframe its story as part of an irredentist scenario.

Vladimir Putin’s grievance has to do with the 1954 decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) transferring Crimea to the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The occasion marked the 300^th anniversary of the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement, a military and political alliance, between the Ukrainian Cossack state under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Tsar Alexis of Russia. In exchange for their autonomy and retention of their faith within a contentious territory bounded by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the west and the Ottoman Empire to the south, the Ukrainian Cossack cavalry would provide security against an expanding Ottoman Empire and could be called upon for support in dealing with the neighboring Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The particular danger, at the time, existed in Crimea and its ties with the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean Tatars, the remnants of the Golden Horde of Mongols that had invaded Ukraine in the 13^th century, had dominated the peninsula for centuries. In the 16^th century, the Crimean Khanate united with their Islamic contemporaries to the south, the Ottomans. They conducted trade relations and collaborated in military incursions mostly within the southern steppes of present-day Ukraine.

Over the following 150 years, with the growth of tsarist Russia, weakening of the Cossack state and decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, much of the present-day Ukrainian territory was overtaken by the Russian Empire. By 1783, in the reign of Catherine II, the Crimean Khanate, was brought into the Empire with the final defeat of the Ottomans and the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzha.

The Russian Empire continued its territorial expansion westward and eastward during the first half of the 19^th century. Realizing the weakening state of the Ottoman Empire, Tsar Nicholas I attempted to overtake the Balkan lands in the southeast to gain free access through the Bosporan straits to the Mediterranean Sea. Consequently, economic concerns were raised for Britain, France and Sardinia-Piedmont over their commercial interests in the Near East. When Russian gunships attacked an Ottoman naval force at port in the Black Sea with incendiary ordinance, setting it ablaze and killing upwards of 2,000 naval personnel, the western countries took to action launching the Crimean War which would last until 1856. Russia was roundly defeated suffering more than 450,000 casualties, its Black Sea Fleet destroyed along with its major Crimean naval port, Sevastopol. The Treaty of Paris that followed demilitarized the Black Sea leaving the Russian Empire’s southern coast entirely vulnerable. Historian Shepard B. Clough identified Tsar Nicholas’ overreach in his quest for control of the Black Sea and beyond and his misjudgment of Western European reaction as two of the underlying causes for the war and Russia’s ultimate humiliation.

The Tatars remained a majority of the population in Crimea until the mid-19^th century. A discriminatory policy toward the Tatars existed throughout the time of the Romanov dynasty and began to reflect itself in the decline of its population. Cultural intimidation with destruction of monuments and mosques, forced resettlement and violence carried forward into the 20^th century. The Tatar peasantry was enserfed after 1796, remaining so until 1861 when serfdom under landowners was replaced by an economic serfdom. Within the first 100 years of Crimea’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, census counts indicated a dramatic fall in Tatar representation from 87.6% to 35.6% by the start of the 20^th century. Between 1820 and 1860, Russian, Ukrainian, German and other colonists were intentionally introduced into Crimea diluting the Tatar population in the process.

Both World War I and Russia’s February Revolution of 1917 brought a sudden change in Crimea’s fate. The dramatic shift in political circumstances allowed a number of Tatar nationalists to return from exile and create a Crimean Tatar Nationalist party that demanded territorial autonomy.  A constituent assembly followed with its own government. This was supported by Ukrainian leadership at the time but, with the Bolshevik’s brief accession to power, the drive toward autonomy was short-lived. A Soviet government quickly replaced the latter but was, in turn, supplanted by the arrival of German troops who proceeded to oust the Bolsheviks. The defeat of Germany in 1918 brought Crimea back under Russian control at a time when the country was engaged in civil war. The war largely pitted the Bolshevik Red Army against the anti-Soviet White Army although, in truth, several additional disparate national elements had become involved. Toward the end of the war, the White Army retreated into Crimea where it made its last stand and was finally defeated in October 1920.

With the conclusion of the civil war, Vladimir Lenin was confronted with a nationality problem arising from the dissolution of the Russian Empire. In order to maintain its territorial integrity, he argued for a union of recognized nationalist republics, each afforded its own autonomy but under a centralized authority in a representative government that guaranteed their security and economic welfare. Lenin also realized the need to subdue a rather universal Russian sentiment of superiority over other nationalities of the old Russian Empire as this did not align with the new ideology of communist egalitarianism he was promoting. As a consequence, in October 1921, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) became an integral part of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) along with several other entities including the Ukrainian SSR all, in effect, ruled from Moscow. Russian chauvinism, however, so deeply rooted and ingrained in the past, would continue as a trait difficult to contain even to the present day.

Lenin died in 1924 and was succeeded by Josef Stalin who would lead the Soviet Union until his death in 1953. By the late 1920s, Stalin abandoned the pretense of the egalitarian ideal embodied in the revolution and assumed the role of a dictator of a regime that now operated as a purveyor of fear. Crimea’s Tatars in the mid-1920s made up only a quarter of the peninsula’s population as the arrival of new Russians had swelled to comprise 42.2% of that population. Stalin’s New Economic Policy with its forced collectivization and grain requisitioning produced widespread famine in 1931-32 throughout most of Ukraine and Crimea with the loss of 100,000 lives within the peninsula alone. Stalin’s terror continued with the arrest of Tatar political figures, academics, journalists and professionals followed by execution or exile to remote areas of the Union. By the 1939 census, Crimean Tatars made up 19.4% of the population, their culture and language had become marginalized, and their identity subsumed by the further arrival of Russians. An ethnic cleansing had begun with the removal of Tatars and several other minorities.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II included an occupation of Crimea where 40,000 Jews were apprehended and killed. About 3,500 Crimean Tatars, who opposed Stalinist repressions and persecution, joined with German forces to oppose the Russians. When Russian forces recaptured Crimea in 1944, Stalin undertook a retaliatory cultural genocide of Tatars with the deportation of almost 240,000 predominantly women, children and elderly mainly to the Uzbek SSR and other Central Asian countries. Within the first 18 months of the forced exile, almost half had died from exposure and deprivation with as many as 8,000 actually succumbing in transport. The 1979 census revealed that the Tatar population had dwindled to 5,422 representing only 0.2% of the population. After an exile of 45 years, 260,000 Tatars returned to Crimea during the time of Gorbachev’s perestroika in the late 1980s. No reparations were offered. The 80,000 households and 360,000 acres of land that had been abandoned previously were now in the possession of others. The Crimean ASSR was abolished in 1945, no longer an autonomous state but an oblast, another administrative region within the RSFSR.

In 1991, Ukraine gained its independence as a sovereign nation of which Crimea was now a part. A December referendum returned a vote of 92% of the general population in favor with 54% of the population of Crimea which, by this time, was 60% Russian in composition, voting the same. Between the censuses of 1989 and 2014, the percentage composition of Tatars within the Crimean population climbed from 1.6% to 12.6%. They were rightfully recognized by Ukraine and the European Union as an indigenous people in contrast to that of a “national minority” by the Russians. 

The transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 was proclaimed as a recognition of “the great fraternal love and trust of the Russian people for Ukraine” and was meant to exemplify the Marxist-Leninist proletarian attitude of universal fraternity. A more complete picture of the circumstances of that time indicates that political expediency may have played a more significant part in the decision as noted in an essay by Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and Senior Fellow of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Khrushchev’s ascendency to power in 1953-54 was not a smooth one. A post-Stalin power struggle with then Soviet Prime Minister Georgi Malenkov threatened his ambitions. Khrushchev consequently sought to secure support of other elites within the party including Oleksi Kyrychenko, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and member of the Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The land transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR would provide the sort of political backing that was needed. Additionally, the move would seemingly enhance general public opinion in Ukraine toward Russia with the inclusion of a Russian majority in Crimea into the nation’s voting populace.

There is little to say regarding further political and economic development within Crimea throughout the remaining Soviet era as its fate was tied to the Ukrainian SSR and perhaps more to the remainder of the USSR. It was granted autonomous status once more in 1991, now by the Ukrainian SSR. Shortly following collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoy, by 1992, was already calling for secession of Crimea from Ukraine. The fruits of ethnic cleansing of Crimea and its gradual occupation by Russians, largely through creation of a military presence, began to take effect with the election of a pro-Russian separatist leader, Yuri Meshkov, who secured a greater than 70% vote in the 1994 run-off presidential elections. A referendum recorded 80% approval for greater autonomy from Ukraine and dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship. However, Crimea’s economy was shifting toward greater dependence on Ukraine for trade with 80% of its manufactured goods sold there. Disenchantment with Meshkov and political strife within the pro-Russian political faction led to a breakdown in leadership. Finally, the Ukrainian Parliament interceded in 1995 and rescinded Crimea’s constitution abolishing the post of President. A prevailing Russian sentiment continued as would be expected among a population in 2014 numbering 2.3M people in which 68% were Russian, 16% Ukrainian and 13% Tatar.

The 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine brought about the ouster of the pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych who fled to Russia for protection. Within a remarkably brief couple of weeks from late February to early March, in an undoubtedly preplanned manner, Russian troops had secured all of Crimea and a vote by the Crimean Supreme Council declared union with Russia. A referendum laughably executed within 10 days after the declaration offered the options of either joining with Russia or a return to the past state-of-affairs as an autonomous integral part of Ukraine. An 83% turnout was reported with a 96.7% vote favoring union with Russia, a result that seemed implausible given that almost 30% of the population was comprised of ethnic Ukrainians, Tatars and other marginalized minorities. Not surprisingly, a leaked report from Russia’s Human Rights Council identified that turnout was actually 30% with only half voting to join Russia. Moreover, certification by a recognized international authority was not a consideration and so the event was seen by most of the world as the sham it was.

The questionable outcome, however, did not concern the Russian populace which appeared to revel in the idea of reclaiming a territory that they perceived as theirs despite the dubious past of their own making. The preservation of national borders and the sovereignty of duly elected states set forth in the UN Charter, The Helsinki Act, The Almaty Accord, The Budapest Memorandum and, particularly, the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Ukraine would seem sufficient protection in a civil world against the sort of blatant transgression committed here but these agreements offered no such thing. All this has shown now that Russia is a nation whose trust cannot be relied upon.

The long history of abuses perpetrated upon Crimea mounted upon the current war that has engulfed all of Ukraine, particularly its eastern region, will reach an end before too long. Russia’s military loss of armament and personnel which continue to mount, its difficulty in maintaining supplies and replacement parts and its inevitable economic collapse through sanction and the necessary seizure of assets do not bode well for a country so isolated. Worse, the loss of confidence among those of its younger generation who see through its disinformation rhetoric and who are abandoning their country to recover a future in which they are free to exert their intellect elsewhere will cripple its society. Crimea’s fate in the end, whatever its demographic may ultimately be, will be dictated by where it will see its future. Russia is yet to see an endpoint in its downward spiral and will also have its day in court for the terror it has brought about.

Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2022. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.