So far we've looked at the 300 years of slave raids by the Crimean Tatars into Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania; the deep, almost subconscious cultural memory of these depredations; Catherine the Great's annexation of Crimea as part of the Russian - Turkish wars and the Soviet expulsion of the Crimean Tatars.
And from Slate magazine, February 25, 2014:
Khrushchev’s Gift
It seems as if the center of the action in Ukraine may be shifting from Kiev to Crimea, where ousted President Viktor Yanukovych is believed to be hiding. There’s now widespread speculation that Russia could target the region to stoke secessionist sentiments, or even pave the way for annexation.
Crimea is the only region of Ukraine with a majority ethnic Russian population, and there’s been deep hostility to the pro-EU protesters in the capital. Russia also maintains a naval base in Sevastopol, where Yanukovych may now have taken refuge.
The Russian flag has been raised over city hall in the city. The Russian government has also discussed new legislation to make it easier for Russians in the region to obtain Russian passports, and has begun warning of the need to protect the rights of ethnic Russians amid Ukraine’s chaos—a similar strategy to the one it deployed in the breakaway region of Abkhazia prior to the 2008 war with Georgia.
In light of this situation, it’s worth considering how Crimea became part of Ukraine in the first place. Moscow transferred the peninsula—which is connected to the Ukrainian mainland by a narrow isthmus—to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.
It’s often said that Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea as a “gift” to his adopted country. Khruschev’s relationship with Ukraine is a complex one: He was an ethnic Russian from a town that is now part of Russia, but he rose through the ranks of the Ukrainian communist party and led the region as head of the the party during the worst years of Stalin’s purges.
The initial reasons for the transfer of Crimea may have had less to do with generosity than demographics. Before World War II, Crimea had been home to at least 300,000 Tatars. Because a number of members of the group collaborated with the occupying Nazis during the war, Stalin had the entire community deported in 1944.
As William Taubman writes in his biography of Khrushchev, that same year, Khrushchev—who had always had an eye on expanding Ukrainian territory—began discussing a plan to replace the deported Tatars with peasants from devastated Ukraine. A decade later, after he had succeeded Stalin in Moscow, he was able to finally accomplish the goal.
The transfer of Crimea was framed as a goodwill gesture to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's merger with tsarist Russia. The announcement of the merger in Pravda noted "the economic commonalities, territorial closeness, and communication and cultural links," though as Michigan State historian Lewis Siegelbaum notes, Crimea’s cultural links had always been closer to Russia. At the time, there were about 268,000 Ukrainians and 858,000 ethnic Russians living in the area....
....MUCH MORE
Coming up, either blue-eyed Circassian women, or Victoria Nuland.
