Cold war jitters are with us again. Russia’s “annexation” of Crimea last Tuesday sparked talk of whether we are about to witness a revival of that period between 1945 and 1990, a period in modern history defined by a confrontation between two ideological blocs, each led by a superpower, which touched all parts of the globe and during which both sides came within a hair of mutual annihilation.
First the facts, for the sake of facts: Russia did not annex Crimea — Russia simply reclaimed it. Vladimir Putin may head a totalitarian state that, 23 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, continues to be imbued with nostalgia for the absolutes of its lost imperium, but the Russian president’s move to make Crimea a part of Russia is not as provocative or as dangerous, let alone as unlawful, as we have been led to believe.
To start with, Crimea — a rugged peninsula that juts into the Black Sea, narrowly attached to the Ukranian mainland and almost touching Russia to the east — became part of Russia in the late 18th century. In 1954, Nikita Krushchev gave it to Ukraine, well, as a gift. What motivated such generosity?
Officially, it was ceded to Ukraine (which the Soviets had never taken seriously as an independent “republic”) to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine’s merger with the Russian Empire. Then there was the affecting fact that Krushchev, who was married to a Ukranian woman, never entertained the possibility (perish the thought!) that the communist order would be gone a few decades on. Yes, even as an autonomous part of Ukraine, Crimea retained strong emotional, cultural and historical significance for Russia. The port city of Sevastopol, home to the Russian — formerly Soviet — Black Sea naval fleet, was to Russian intellectuals, novelists and artists what Paris was to their counterparts in the West. Indeed, 19th century Russian literature is full of scenes set in Sevastopol and other parts of Crimea. And, yes, there are today three Russians in Crimea for each Ukranian.
All well and good. But before it came under the sway of Romanov tzars, Communist Commissars and last week Putinist muscle, Crimea had been home and homeland to the Turkic speaking, Sunni Muslim Tatars, who had lived there since 1214. In 1944, Crimea’s entire population of Tatars, comprising 200,000 souls, were rounded up on Joseph Stalin’s orders, loaded onto cattle cars, and sent to the deserts of Central Asia, having been accused of collaborating with the Nazis, who had occupied the peninsula during World War II.
Nearly half died en route from the cold, hunger and fatigue. The survivors were not allowed to return till the 1980s. (Today’s Tatars in Crimea number 300,000, roughly 12 percent of the population.)
From Stalin’s perspective, that was business as usual. Uprooting ethnic nationalities from their historic homelands was never considered an event of great consequence. All in a day’s work, as it were. That same year, for example, Stalin had his troops launch Operation Chechevista, where they expelled the whole Chechen and Ingush population, literally every man, woman and child, from their ancestral lands in the Caucasus. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands died during the roundup and transportation in the middle of winter to Central Asia. And again the survivors languished in exile for years before they were allowed to return home in 1957, harrowed and beaten, full of hatred for Russia and with the memory of their ordeal forming a major galvanizing ethnic trauma in their minds. For the rest of the world, the tragedy is already encoded in the history books.
At the time, Arab Communists, who did not know Communism from a hole in the wall, or who espoused an anemic version of it, either turned a blind eye to these atrocities or were ignorant of their occurrence, busy as they were reading Leninist tracts about the “solidarity of the working classes” and “dialectical materialism.”
The fact of the matter is that Russian communism was always brutal and totalitarian, reflecting — I regret putting it so bluntly — the sensibility of the Russian people themselves. They still yearn for communism today, and they still bemoan the absence of the image of Stalin in their lives, with his benign, mustachioed smile looking down on them from countless billboards.
And like Vladimir Putin himself, they are convinced that the loss of the Soviet Union was a “great catastrophe for Russia.” Socialized for centuries under totalitarianism, which colonized all modes of thought, determining the way the individual saw objective reality, most Russians sincerely believed that they were living (even when they stood in bread lines outside bakeries and their intellectuals were summarily executed after “show trials”) in a more just society than any to be found in the West. At least theirs, they were convinced, was a society that had lofty “Socialist ideals.” The liberal or quasi-liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia never took place simply because — again my regrets — the Russian mind was not responsive to them. No, the West is not about to start a new Cold War with Russia. Swapping sanctions and boycotting each other’s trade conferences hardly constitutes a war of any kind. The West knows, as do the rest of us around the world, that Russia is doing what it has always done throughout its history: The ready exercise of terror, violence and coercion.
