It’ll be 24 years ago in August since wife Marcia and I, now retired from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, spent a day ashore in the Crimea during a cruise that ventured into the Black Sea.
That gives me only the remotest of perspectives on Vladimir Putin’s declared annexation of that peninsula, which has the United States and the rest of the Western world in high dudgeon. It’s true that Putin is a geopolitical thug and bully. However, the whole imbroglio is far from being just a black-and-white affair. We should remember that the Crimea has been traditionally a Russian enclave rather than part of Ukraine. And the great majority of its residents did vote last weekend to rejoin Russia.
A fraction of a single day spent anywhere at any time can leave only the most superficial of impressions. And our 1990 visit came during what turned out to be the twilight time of the Soviet Union, which would be shut down by Boris Yeltsin some 16 months later.
Our guide for a swing around the Crimean resort town was a young man named Igor, who described himself as a self-taught linguist from Lvov. (Spelled Lviv in Ukrainian, it’s now a city at the western edge of Ukraine in solid support of that beleaguered nation’s sovereignty.) At the time, there didn’t seem a reason to ask Igor whether he felt more Ukrainian or Russian.
We visited the site for which Yalta is best known from recent times. This is Lividia Palace, site of the famous (or, to some American minds, infamous) Yalta Conference of February 1945, when Josef Stalin hosted Allied heads of state Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
The palace’s billiards room, where the Yalta agreements (seen by some as a Western abandonment of Poland and other unwonted concessions) were signed, looked out onto the courtyard where the often-reproduced photograph of the Big Three was taken. A copy of the photo served as reminder that Roosevelt looked to be at death’s door, which closed on him two months later.
Other than Lividia Palace and a couple of other Czarist-era palaces, the sight I most remember speaks to the ethnic challenges following the current Russian annexation. There was a sizable tent city near Yalta’s central market of protesting Crimean Tatars, who had been shipped to Siberia toward the end of World War II for alleged collaboration with Hitler’s invading German armies. (Still suspicious of Russian intentions, the Tatars boycotted the recent referendum.)
On our way back to the Princess Cruises ship that had brought us into the Black Sea, I bought two small watermelons for the equivalent of 60 U.S. cents. Why I felt the need to purchase them, on the way back to a cruise vessel loaded with food, is a mystery beyond recall. Perhaps the Alice in Wonderland ambiance of the visit inspired me.
That single day ashore leaves me even less qualified to theorize about what’s going on with Crimea and the rest of Ukraine right now than the gabbling experts rounded up by CNN and the other cable TV networks to pontificate and moralize at exhaustive length.
At the risk of being branded an appeaser of Putin’s aggressive policy, I believe that the main blame for this crisis rests with the late Nikita Khrushchev, who transferred the Crimea from its longtime Russian status to Ukrainian rule in the late 1950s.
Evidently, as indicated by their nearly unanimous vote, most Crimeans still think of themselves as Russians. This is not surprising, given how deeply the Crimea is embedded in Russia’s history.
It was the site of intensive fighting during the Crimean War of the 1850s, when a foolhardy British cavalry commander led the legendary Charge of the Light Brigade. Sevastopol, site of a major Russian naval base, was a Soviet “hero city” for its valiant and prolonged resistance to Nazi German forces in 1942. Well-off Russians, in Czarist and Soviet as well as present times, vacationed regularly there.
The fact that a great majority of Crimeans prefer to return to Russian sovereignty does not make it OK, but it’s no clear-cut case.
Most Germans living in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in 1938 clearly wanted to become citizens of Hitler’s Third Reich. However, that borderland territory had never previously been part of Germany. It lay within the Austro-Hungarian empire until World War I ended in 1918. Hitler’s claims were newly concocted ones.
More recently, the international community approved Kosovo’s decision to break away from Serbia in 2008, as well as endorsing South Sudan’s split from the larger Sudan in 2011. Since overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003, the United States has allowed Iraq’s northern Kurdish region to operate de facto as a separate nation.
So what to make of the present circumstance, in which most residents of Crimea evidently would rather be part of Russia, as they were before Khrushchev’s action a half-century ago?
It’s not as obvious or simple as the situation may have been during the Cold War that extended from 1945 to the Soviet Union’s dissolution at the end of 1991. This is a time to hold our breath-and to hold Putin to his word that he has no further territorial designs on Ukraine.
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Jack Schnedler retired in August 2011 as deputy managing editor/Features of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. As Travel editor of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1982 until 1994, Jack made it to all seven continents and more than 100 countries.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 03/21/2014