Will Ukraine Crisis Become Second Crimean War? Tatars and Russian Nationalists Take Sides

RT photo

The Crimean War of the 1850s is a murky phrase for most in the West.  Something to do with Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade, right?  But for Russian nationalists, it is a stinging memory.  As the larger geopolitical goals of the United States and western Europe in the early 21st century seem to be focused on containing Russia, the grievance-nursing, revanchist followers of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, are having flashbacks to this pivotal mid-19th-century war, when Czarist Russia, already finding the Ottoman Empire blocking its expansion southward, also found that western European powers such as Britain and France were willing to block turn back its expansion toward Central Europe as well.  Then, as now, attention zeroed in on Ukraine, and in particular the Crimean Peninsula, as a place where Russia feels asked to take a stand.  This time, unlike the humiliations of the Treaty of Paris, the Russian nationalists hope to win.

As we all know, Ukraine has been torn by a street-politics movement over the past several weeks.  In November 2013, Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, reneged on a promise to sign a largely symbolic “association agreement” with the European Union (E.U.).  This infuriated Ukrainians who saw Yanukovych’s betrayal as a capitulation to Putin, who has long said that Ukraine is where he draws a line in the sand; he will not allow it to be swallowed up by “the West.”  Already, since the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the three Baltic State of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have joined the E.U. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Georgia and Moldova have been increasingly embraced by the United States and western Europe as allies, and even far-off Uzbekistan has hosted U.S. and NATO militaries during the Afghanistan War.  Putin had been trying to woo Ukraine into eschewing E.U. aspirations in favor of a nascent customs union with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and maybe Armenia.

Yulia Tymoshenko

Opinion on this issue tends to be split between the ethnic-Ukrainian majority and the 30% or so of the country who are culturally and linguistically Russian, especially in the east and south of the country and in and around Odessa and the capital, Kiev.  It is these ethnic Russians who are the main supporters of Yanukovych, who is himself not ethnically Ukrainian but of mixed Russian, Polish, and Belarussian ancestry.  Under the Party of Regions banner, Yanukovych came out ahead with a mere third or so of the national vote in the first round of the 2010 elections and in the runoff still fell short of a majority but squeaked past the pro-Western, pro-democracy opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko with a three-point margin to become president.  Fearing her resurgence, Yanukovych then had Tymoshenko arrested on a variety of charges, including corruption and murder—charges which most of the international community, including the Council of Europe, regards as trumped up and politically motivated.  She remains in prison and may even have been tortured.

Last month, I listed Ukraine’s ethnolinguistic fault lines as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014.”  Although there is nothing like a formal secession movement yet on the part of the eastern Donbas and Novorossiya (“New Russia”) regions that produced Yanukovych and most of his followers, there are other fault lines likely to emerge.  Primary among these is Crimea.

In much of Ukraine, the linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and historical boundaries between Russians and Ukrainians have been blurry.  Both nations claim as their patrimony the ancient monarchy of Kievan Rus’, with its capital at Kiev (Kyiv).  This is why Russian nationalists regard Ukraine as part of their heartland, and this is why Ukrainians chafe at Russians who regard their nation as the mere borderlands (that is what the term Ukraine literally means) of a Russian empire.  When Josef Stalin declared the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to be nominally sovereign, it was a mere accounting trick to secure him an extra seat at the United Nations; in reality, the Ukraine was under the thumb of the party dictatorship in Moscow, like every other part of the Soviet Union.  But in 1991, its status as a republic made it automatically a truly independent state.  With it was Crimea, but after Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Khrushchev transfer that territory from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.) to Ukraine the following year.  This meant that many residents of the Crimea, who are about 58% self-identified ethnic Russians, now feel that they have landed on the wrong side of an international border when the dust settled from the end of Communism.  Only about 24% of Crimean citizens are ethnically and linguistically Ukrainian.

A further 12% are Crimean Tatars, members of a Turkic-speaking, predominantly-Muslim ethnic group.  (They are only tangentially related to the Tatars of Russia’s distant landlocked Republic of Tatarstan; in traditional usage, Russians called any Muslims, especially any Turkic-speaking ones, Tatars.)  Crimean Tatars, who ruled the peninsula and much of today’s southern Ukraine in a medieval khanate, still dominated the peninsula demographically after absorption by the Czars, until two disasters: first, the Crimean War sent many Tatars fleeing to parts of the Ottoman Empire such as Anatolia (modern Turkey).  Second, Crimea was a battleground in the Second World War, and after the war—and after the map-redrawing victors’ summit at Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula—Stalin deported thousands of Tatars to Central Asia, mostly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as punishment for supposed collaboration with Nazi Germany.  In the 1950s, when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, allowed many deported peoples from that era to return to their homelands, the looked-down-upon Tatars were left off the resettlement list.  Their slow return to Crimea since the fall of Communism has been difficult and only partial.

Modern Crimean Tatars with their flag (photo: Andriy Ignatov)

The newly independent Ukraine in 1991 made Crimea an autonomous republic within Ukraine, the only such example.  This happened only after Crimea held an unofficial referendum on independence in 1991, with 54% wanting full independence for the peninsula.  Russian-speaking Crimeans assembled their own government in 1992 and agreed to “rejoin” Ukraine only with the promise of their own autonomous republic.  A further agreement between Moscow and Kiev made sure that Russia’s—formerly the Soviet Union’s—Black Sea Fleet could stay in Sevastopol harbor at least into the 2040s.

The Black Sea Fleet, in Crimea

But in a sense Crimea is two autonomous republics: first, there is the Autonomous Republic of Crimea itself, which, because it is democratic, is politically dominated by the ethnic-Russian majority.  Second, there is the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar nation, a talking club which serves as the official voice of the Crimean Tatar people.  As Maidan Square in Kiev has become the scene of larger and ever tenser demonstrations—in recent days turning lethal see photo at the top of this article)—and as Yanukovych’s pro-Russian, anti-Western police forces are using more and more violent tactics to suppress dissent, the Mejlis has come out in favor of the pro-European demonstrators.  For Russians in Crimea, it is another story.

Very worrying has been the confrontational language used by Russian nationalists in the autonomous republic.  Crimea’s Supreme Council, its parliament, is dominated by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, which has 80 out of 100 seats in the body.  (The second most powerful party is the Communist Party of Ukraine, with five seats.  Tymoshenko’s pro-Western, pro-democratic Fatherland (Batkivshchyna) party got less than 3% in the last elections in Crimea and and holds no parliamentary seats.)  In a resolution adopted on January 22nd in Simferopol, the Crimean capital, the Council said that the protesters in Kiev were trying to “deprive the Autonomous Republic of Crimea of its future”—planning to strip it of its autonomy and “force Crimeans to forget the Russian language.”  “We will not give Crimea to the extremists and neo-Nazis,” the statement said.  Some of the strongest language came from the extremist-right-wing Union Party (Partia Soyuz), which warned even the blustery, pro-Yanukovych Party of the Regions against complacency and compromise, saying Crimeans (i.e. ethnic Russians in Crimea) need to be “ready for anything.”

A Partia Soyuz banner

One Soyuz deputy, Svetlana Savchenko, said, “If the national extremists [i.e., the pro-Western protest movement] seizes power, we reserve the right to decide on the determination of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.  We will have nothing to do with these guys in the same country, so let them go and join Europe.”  Vladimir Klychnykov, of the Party of Regions, spoke, demanding a fully federal system for Ukraine, devolving powers from Kiev to the regions.  Refat Chubarov, leader of the Mejlis and one of 14 Crimean Tatar deputies in the Supreme Council, representing the tiny minority party People’s Movement of Ukraine (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrayiny), which has only five seats, accused the majority of separatism and stormed out of the chamber.

Refat Chubarov, leader of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis

In a sense, we have been here before.  In 2008, nearly simultaneous with Russia’s invasion of the Republic of Georgia, meant to “liberate” the secessionist Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, there was a suspiciously groundless sudden declaration of independence by the small community of Transcarpathian Ruthenians in far-western Ukraine.  At the time, Tymoshenko was prime minister and her government decried the Ruthenians’ declaration of independence a Kremlin plot—probably correctly, since it quickly evaporated.  Putin’s moles were probably just testing the waters.

The political divide in Ukraine in 2009.  Transcarpathian Ruthenia (Zakarpattia) is shown in orange.

But it is not merely more autonomy for itself that Crimea is worried about.  It is also worried that the rest of Ukraine is too autonomous.  In a bizarre turn of events on the occasion of the 350th anniversary, on January 18th, of a territorial accord between Czarist Russia and the Cossacks of Zaporizhia, the Crimean parliament invoked Medieval law to claim that the independence Ukraine achieved in 1991 is somehow artificial and illegal.  This agreement, the 1654 Treaty of Pereyeslav, guaranteed the territorial integrity of the Zaporizhian Hetmanate (Host) of Cossacks, a quasi-state loyal to Czar Alexey I and covering roughly contemporary Ukraine—minus Crimea.  The Council’s resolution proclaimed, “Reunification with Russia protected Ukraine from the national, economic, and spiritual oppression of the Catholic Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and other seekers of Ukrainian lands.  That kind of ‘Europeanization’ would have meant enslavement and loss of the Orthodox faith and cultural identity to our people.  Unfortunately, political gamblers who are holding forth today on the civilizational choice of Ukraine forget that such a choice has already been taken, that it was made by our ancestors many centuries ago and is based on the perennial desire of the eastern Slavonic peoples, which have the same roots, close historical ties, similar cultures and spiritual values, for unification.  This choice is not revisable! We Crimeans are fully aware of the momentous significance of the Council of Pereyaslav, an event that should set an example to our contemporaries and our descendants for all time.  May the day of January 18 become a symbol of peace and inseparable friendship between the brother peoples of Ukraine and Russia!”

The Zaporizhian Hetmanate of Cossacks in 1654

Vladimir Konstantinov, speaker of the Crimean Supreme Council, added: “Attempts are being made now to make us choose our vector of integration though such a choice was taken once and for all as far back as 360 years ago at the Council of Pereyaslav.  Attempts are being made today to force an artificial civilizational choice on us.  Such a choice has already been taken!  We are part of the Russian world.  ...  We—Ukraine and the Russian Federation—are parts of the same cultural and economic space.  ...  And no matter how hard they try to pull us apart and drag us into various ‘unions’ and ‘spaces,’ we will keep being drawn toward each other and support each other in difficult moments.  If we are together we will overcome anything.”

Vladimir Konstantinov, speaker of the Crimean parliament

The long arc of history is probably in favor of those in Maidan Square demanding democracy and integration with the open societies of western Europe.  But with every gain they make, the pro-Moscow jingoists in Simferopol will dig in their heels and delivery more and more fiery, Medieval-tinged demands for a restoration of the Czarist subjugation of Ukrainian people and the splitting of their peninsula from the Ukrainian republic.  Eventually, it seems, something will have to give.  Ukraine may yet fracture, and the battle to sort out the border between West and East may once again, 150 years later, be waged in Crimea.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Update on the “Russian Democratic Republic” in Domodedovo

More information emerged this week about the declaration of independence in the Moscow suburb of Domodedovo, where opponents of a road project say they are seceding from Russia (as reported on in detail last week in this blog).

Despite earlier references to names like Domodedovo Republic and Democratic Republic of Rus, a Russian interview with the human-rights lawyer who is the public face of the movement, Yevgeni Arkhipov, just uses the name Russian Democratic Republic.  “There are fifty people in the leadership group,” Arkhipov says, “and we have already gathered around 500 signatures.  But when we started collecting signatures, it turned out that everyone supported us right away.  So we stopped, because there’s no sense in continuing.  Our activists have more important things to do.”  Arkhipov also said that the new state “will be an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation, but with a special status”—presumably even more autonomous than so-called autonomous republics like Tatarstan that have become steadily less autonomous under Vladimir Putin’s rule than under Boris Yeltsin’s, but the fact that Domodedovo also wants to join the European Union (E.U.) reflects a real misunderstanding of international politics.

The article also stressed that the original complaint is serious: “Forced demolitions and government land seizures have reached epidemic proportions both in Sochi”—site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, in the North Caucasus—“and in Eastern Russia near Vladivostok ahead of the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that took place there recently,” and the Domodedovo road dispute in 2009 even led to human-rights concerns raised by Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France.  Arkhipov also continued to blame an ethnic-Azeri mafia for enforcing the property seizures.

Finally, the article also describes the aspirant republic’s flag: “red and black, with a white symbol in the middle. The symbol was used by Russian princes during their wars against the Mongols.”  Well, yes.  This is indeed (see photo above, and discussion in my original article) the symbol of Kievan Rus’, a precursor to the Russian Empire with its capital at modern Kiev (Kyiv), Ukraine, which both Ukrainian and Russian nationalists regard as an ancestor state.  What the article fails to mention is that the red and black colors make it the exact flag used by the pro-Nazi fascist faction of the Ukrainian resistance during the Second World War.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Road Dispute Pushes Town near Moscow to Declare Independence from Russia—but with Dusted-Off Fascist Ukrainian Flags, Oddly Enough

A group of citizens in the exurbs of Moscow on October 3rd notified Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, that they intended to hold a referendum on independence for what is being called, variously, either the Domodedovo Republic (after the main city in the area) or the Russian Democratic Republic, also translated as the Democratic Republic of Rus.  In a movement initially reported on this week by the Association for Russian Human-Rights Lawyers, the activists were pushed to secession by a long-simmering dispute over a toll-road project, rejected by 95% (or 98%, depending on whom you believe) of local residents in a 2007 referendum, though the road was put through anyway two years later.  The road will link Moscow to Sochi, the Black Sea resort in the region of Circassia which will host the 2014 Winter Olympics.  One attorney for the movement, Yevgeny Arkhipov, cited residents being forced off their land and some being forced to pay fees for gathering mushrooms and berries in what had once been land for public use.  Another activist, Marina Zlotnikova, put the blame on ethnic-Azeri criminal syndicates in league with developers, who are thought to be in league with Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev.  (In the working-class Russian imagination, all bad things in the world can eventually be blamed on some minority group from the Caucasus.)

The Domodedovo separatists have also written to the European Union (E.U.) declaring their intention of being a member-state, while still being apparently—the phrasing is vague—a constituent autonomous unit within the Russian Federation.  Other statements, however, refer to full independence.

Map showing the locations of Domodedovo and Podolsk, near Moscow

The area in question includes not just Domodedovo (population: 96,000) and Podolsk (188,000), in Moscow Oblast, but also, according to one source, the smaller community of Shebantsevo (?).  But there is still confusion as reports, some of them hastily translated, trickle into the English-language media.  The story was pounced on gleefully by the often-inaccurate Kavkaz Center website, run by the Caucasus Emirate movement, a radical-Islamist terrorist network which aims to carve out an independent theocratic caliphate in what is now Russia’s predominantly-Muslim southwestern rim.  The site celebrates any thumb anyone sticks in Moscow’s eye, with constant reference to “Czarist” “minions” and “puppets.”  The Islamists’ article on the subject connects the Domodedovo separatists with the medieval state of “Przemysl,” meaning perhaps one of the 14th- and 15th-century Upper Oka Principalities around Muscovy, one of which had its capital at Peremyshl (Перемы́шль), now a village of 3,000 or so in Kaluga Oblast, to Moscow Oblast’s southwest.  I am not sure at this point, however, if its territory included Domodedovo and Podolsk.  Nor have I seen a source directly quoting a member of the separatist movement itself invoking the Paremyshl principality.  (The C.E. site adds to the confusion by referring to it as a Polish principality, but I think, after comparing a lot of sources, that they are in their haste confusing it with a much earlier, similarly but not identically named Principality of Peremyshl, an imperial subject of Kievan Rus’ centered on what is now Przemyśl (that’s the modern Polish spelling; in Ukrainian Cyrillic, it is Перемишль), a town in southeast Poland at the border with Belarus.)

This, of course, takes us to the important question of what this new republic’s (or revived prinicipality’s??) flag will be.  If there is truly a push to restore the Peremyshl Principality, then I have not found a specific flag for this polity, but its ruling Gorkachov dynasty used this rather shabby-genteel-looking sepia coat of arms:

Certainly, not very modern looking.  At the other extreme is the modern, Soviet-designed coat of arms for the Domodedovo Urban Okrug (not all Russian municipalities have flags but nearly all have coats of arms or seals):

This seems to be a tribute to the glorious liberated workers whose job is to stack oddly-shaped crates on pallets at the Domodedovo airport—with an eye-strainingly minuscule St.-George-slaying-the-dragon squeezed into the top left just to relieve the drabness.  Those boxes look even slightly sinister to me, like some debased version of the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  No, this will not do at all either.

I much prefer the Premeshyl (Russia) coat of arms created for the town during the Czarist period:

This shows a river flanked by two sheaves of wheat.  The best so far.  However, the one image I’ve seen of the Domodedovo separatists themselves waving a clearly visible flag is from the Euronews video clip on the movement.  Here it is (alongside the E.U. flag):

I had never seen this flag before.  (Using the wickedly useful online flag-identifier tool at http://www.flagid.org/, I came up with only two red-above-black bicolors—the Republic of Angola and the Republic of Colombia’s Department of Norte de Santander, and both those use very different emblems.)  Then, it seemed, some avocational Russophilic vexillologists were way ahead of me (you gotta love the World Wide Web): the article on the Domodedovo movement on http://www.russiaslam.com, a website featuring translations of Russian news articles, presents a very Czarist-nostalgic news story from Russia which describes the movement thus: “The founding of the [Domodedovo] Republican Committee is as a result of the interests of local residents and history, we are in fact talking about a revival of the Russian state that had its roots in Kiev Rus’, the first national revival of Rus’ in 800 years, after the occupation by the Golden Horde.”  This source calls the new entity the Domodedovo Slavic Democratic Republic (S.D.R.) (in Russian: Домодедово Славянской Демократической Республики (СДР)).  The flag from the image above is reproduced, here shown:

This essentially reproduces the coat of arms of Ukraine—Kievan Rus’ being the connection here, because in the Middle Ages what is now Muscovy was ruled from Kiev (Kyiv), in modern Ukraine—using the (how ancient?) Ukrainian trident—

—and changes the colors from blue and yellow to red and black.  One reader, “Retif100,” comments: “Such a flag was adopted by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, a variation on the theme of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, and UNA-UNSO.  Now, that flag hangs at the City Council in Ivano-Frankivsk” (in western Ukraine).  But not just any O.U.N. flag, Retif100 fails to add, but the right-wing fascist “O.U.N.–B” faction that pushed for an independent anti-Communist Ukraine during the Second World War.  The O.U.N.–B’s armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, used this flag:

There it is—red and black.  And the O.U.N.–B itself used this rather creepy, vaguely-swastika-like emblem:

Yuck, right?  I feel like taking a shower after looking at that logo.  (The more moderate O.U.N. faction used a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian trident stylized into a sword.)  [For more on red-and-black Ukrainian flags, see my more recent article on the Euro-Maydan protests from this blog.]

These Domodedovo secessionists may be worried about Azeri influence in their region, but they might also want to examine the Ukrainian fascist heraldry being revived in their own ranks.

Oh, and as to the question of whether the movement can succeed.  Um, no.  One possible obstacle is that the territory claimed also includes Domodedovo International Airport, which serves Moscow and is Russia’s busiest hub.  They can wave their Nazi-style flags for the moment, but mark my words: if they ever try to disrupt the economy, old Vlad will go all Second Chechen War on their asses and the cobblestone streets of Domodedovo will run with blood.

[Note: This version of the article corrects an earlier version which mischaracterized the “russiaSLAM” website, which is indeed a news portal featuring translation, not a source with its own perspective.  Thanks to russiaSLAm for taking the time to clarify this.]

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]