Crimea

by Maria on March 2, 2022

I visited Crimea in 2005, and just this morning found a half-written piece about it from ten years later. There was a whole strange adventure that followed in the fragrant midnight streets of Yalta. Maybe I’ll finish it some day. It’s not like any of us is ever going back there.

Yalta

The official story is that Kruschev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 to commemorate three hundred years of Russian and Ukrainian togetherness. But I heard he was drunk and sentimental one night and got carried away with a grand gesture. The story is better than the truth.

We were a group of academics, journalists, teachers and policy wonks traveling Ukraine the autumn after the Orange Revolution. In Kyiv, we met the student-leaders of Maidan Square, now focusing at their studies. They spoke MBA-accented English and fluent Powerpoint. They planned a bright future in a prosperous and west-facing Ukraine.

Breakfast in Kyiv cafes was cream with cream. Sometimes cream with pastry. But mostly cream. Kiev was like Petersburg, but smaller and more charming, with cobbled streets, markets stalls selling country produce and Soviet memorabilia, whimsical Orthodox architecture in primrose yellow. In city bars we skipped dinner and ate garlic-infused lard laid a centimetre thick on black rye bread, sliding it down with neat vodka.

I got chatted up at a reception by an attractive, louche man. His side line – everyone had one – was starting political parties in the north east of the country, around Donetsk. That was where votes were cheapest. Once they had enough support to elect a couple of MPs, He would sell them, just like Twitter farms raise and sell puppet accounts. The going rate for a political party was about a million US dollars, which seemed expensive if you thought of it as a way to buy influence. It was mostly a way to become and MP and buy immunity from prosecution. I asked him what his day-job was. Official at the Ministry of Justice, it turned out. It was all a great joke that everyone seemed to be in on. The only person not laughing was our guide, Valentin, a somewhat forlorn pro-Russian professor.

Come on, I told him a few days later in Crimea, These are just teething problems. Democracy will flourish. The Kremlin’s ‘political technologists’ have been sent packing. We were walking on a raised path decked in early autumn wildflower, by the deep and curved strait from the Black Sea into Balaklava. From the 1950s till the fall of the Soviet Union, submarines had coursed silently down the strait from a vast underground facility. They would lurk in the Black Sea, nuclear missiles armed and pointed silently at Europe’s capitals. Valentin gestured across the grassy hill that hid the underground caverns the subs had slept in, though the base had long since had its copper ripped out and sold to the new telecoms companies.

This won’t end well, he said. It never does. [click to continue…]