With the situation in the Crimea dominating headlines for the past fortnight, and with the affair remaining very tense and unresolved, I thought I’d bother putting an International Relations/History double major to a bit of use and try to explain some of what is a very complex situation. As with most things in International Relations, history is the key to explaining exactly how and why this issue came to be.
No Stranger to Invasion
First and foremost, Crimean history is one defined by invasion, ethnic cleansing, and conflict. One can boil a lot of European history down to this, but it’s especially telling in the case of the Crimea. It has been host to rulers from the Thracians, a Greco-Celtic culture in the 5th century BC, to Classical Greek settlers, the Romans, Goths, the Mongols, the Byzantine Empire, the Kievan Rus, Venice, Genoa, and ultimately the Ottoman Turks, Russia, a small blip under Anglo-French control, and finally, the Ukrainians. Indeed, of this 2,500 year history, only 200 have been under the rule of Kiev, and scantly 60 of this is vaguely modern.
It is, however, the relatively modern history that is most important in this situation. After a period of Venetian and Genoese domination in the 13th and 14th century, in which the Black Plague most likely found its way into Europe through a port in the Crimea, Tamerlane defeated the Mongol Golden Horde and founded the Crimean Khanate. The Khanate was inhabited by Muslim Turkic peoples of differing backgrounds, who all became known collectively as Tatars. It was through diplomacy that the Khanate become an associated, if largely, autonomous area of the Ottoman Empire.
In this time, the Kievan Rus had evolved from its roots in the Ukraine, merged with the now much more powerful city of Moscow, to become a unified Russia – a conglomeration of all the Eastern Slavic peoples of the Rus. And it is this relationship between the Crimean peninsular and Russia that dominates the last 400 years of its history.
Russia – A Complicated Relationship
The importance that the Crimea has can be hard to describe, but one of the greatest reasons for it is based on mentality. From the times of Tsar Peter the Great and Catherine, Russian leaders became obsessed with the creation of a fleet. Though the largest country on Earth by a far way – the lack of a Baltic and Black Sea ports meant that it was, in effect, landlocked. Without a way to project power besides a rather cumbersome, if terrifyingly large, land army, and essentially cut off from direct Western European trade, Russia remained a backwards power in the East whose only real connection to Europe was through sporadic conflicts with the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth or a heavy-handed invasion. Peter the Great, himself a skilled shipbuilder and child of the Enlightenment, embarked on a 20 year series of wars with Sweden, then the power in the North, which culminated in the founding of the port of Saint Petersburg and a grand navy in the North. But it was to be another 60 years of single-minded determination until Catherine the Great managed to wrest the Crimea off the Tatars and Ottoman Empire in 1783, and establish a navy based in the Crimean peninsular.
After this there was an influx of primarily Russian, but also Ukrainian, settlers into the area in order to establish the ports and bases necessary for this new Russian fleet in the Black Sea. Sporadic uprisings by the now heavily marginalised Tatars were put down heavily, and bloodily, eventually seeing the Russians become the majority in the area. As the Ottoman Empire gradually declined, and using a pretext of persecution to Christians in the Holy Lands, Russia decided to push its claims and secure the entirety of the Black Sea, to which the British Empire and France wholeheartedly disagreed. In 1853, what became known as the Crimean War kicked off, and this is where the other mentality that is important to Russians began – that of the siege.
For a year, a Russian force was besieged by several hundred thousand British, Turkish and French troops, in a conflict that gave rise to modern military medical services and served as the inspiration for a young Leo Tolstoy to write his epic War and Peace. Valiantly, the garrison held out to the last against a tremendous and constant bombardment which made both sides suffer horridly – but eventually, it fell. This siege mentality shouldn’t really be discounted in the Russian national consciousness, as the soldiers of the Crimean War became touted as heroes, who withstood against all odds to overwhelming foreign invaders. It was a narrative that was reinforced further by the First, and especially Second World Wars, in particular the three year siege of Leningrad (if you’ll remember, the renamed Saint Petersburg, the other city created by a Russian lust for naval power). It is the same vein of national consciousness that was used by the Soviet Union to maintain power through the Cold War narrative, and it’s one of the things that Putin plays upon heavily in his current plutocracy. It’s us against them, and though the underdog, we will win. Though this is certainly not a phenomenon that is purely Russian, its history has reinforced it time and time again, through massive military conflicts.
Franz Roubaud’s impression of the siege
Recent Times – Recent Measures
After a short time as a demilitarised zone following the loss in the Crimean War, which saw Sevastopol’s port facilities destroyed and the Black Sea fleet sunk, Russia returned it to its position of power. In the Russian Civil War which followed its exit from World War One, it temporarily became part of the breakaway Ukrainian Republic, but was forcefully and totally reincorporated by the victorious Red Army. As a stronghold of the losing White side, it was the site of a massacre of more than 50,000 prisoners, and civilians. The Flagpiece of Soviet power in the South, it was rebuilt and retooled for an extensive naval buildup. Russian fears of separatism and the Communist regime’s distrust of religion saw many of the region’s Tatars killed, though worse was to come. When the Germans invaded in 1941, Sevastopol once again became the site of another epic siege, which eventually ended in a German victory. For six months, against an army twice the size of the garrison, Sevastopol held out. When it eventually fell in July 1942, the closest Soviet territory to it was more than 400km to the East. 75,000 soldiers were killed or taken prisoner, most of whom wouldn’t survive the war. Due to Stalin’s paranoia following the initial German invasion, and his fear that the Tatars, who were certainly not fond of Russian rule, would rise up as a fifth column, almost all Tatars were forcibly relocated to Central Asian parts of the Soviet Union, and were not allowed to return until the fall of the Soviet Union.
One of the 1,350 tonne monster guns used to pummel Sevastopol into submission.
In 1954, almost as a fluke of history, the Crimean Peninsular was given from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR (the ‘states’ per se of the Soviet Union) by the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as part of the 300th anniversary celebrations of Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia. And it is here where today’s problems really start.
With the Black Sea Fleet only able to be based in three ports, Odessa, Sevastopol and Poti, the dissolution of the Soviet Union created several major geopolitical headaches. The vast majority of the Soviet Navy, and virtually all of its heavy ships and naval aviation, were taken over by the Russian successor state. But with the secession of the Ukraine and Georgia, Russia no longer had a port in which it could base that fleet. Sevastopol was the only port the USSR owned capable of being ice-free all year round, and the only way the Russian fleets could have a direct impact in the Mediterranean Sea. As part of a deal, the Ukrainians agreed to lease the base to Russia until 2017, a deal which was renewed until the mid 2040s following severe Russian pressure several years ago. The Crimean peninsular experienced a return of the Tatars as well, of whom almost all hold deep seated anti-Russian views. It leaves the present day ethnic make-up at roughly 60% Russian, 25% Ukrainian, and 13% Tatar.
Understandably, Russia feels that having to maintain an important part of its military based in and at the whim of a foreign nation is an unpalatable and ultimately untenable situation. Especially so when, in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the Ukraine refused the Black Sea fleet re-entry into the base after military action against the Georgian coast, and it created a severe diplomatic incident which led to Russian gas exports to the Ukraine being temporarily cut off and an eventual Ukrainian concession. To a resurgent Russia, flushed with money from its natural resources boom, investing heavily in a military renaissance, and beginning to flex its muscle again, I would imagine this is the point at which Russia decided the situation had to change. That the Crimea was indeed Russian, that it needed its port on the Black Sea again as those great Russian leaders of the past did, and that it was time for Sevastopol to endure yet another siege. I doubt they’d have guessed the opportunity would come so soon, but when it did they’ve acted quickly, and decisively.
More on that, and the current situation as it’s happened and where it develops, tomorrow.