Crimea’s Bloody Past Is a Key to Its PresentOn Thursday, masked gunmen vowing loyalty to
Russia seized the Parliament building in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea.
The simple explanation was that pro-Russian demonstrators in Crimea, a peninsula of
Ukraine that juts into the Black Sea, were unhappy with the political developments here in Kiev, where three months of civic unrest led to the
ouster on Saturday of President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
In a historic sense, however, Thursday’s events were as much about Russia’s relationship with Ukraine as they were about Crimea’s relationship with Ukraine. Crimea, a multiethnic region populated by Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars, has been the focus of territorial disputes for centuries, and in recent decades it has frequently been a source of tension between Ukraine and Russia.
Before this week, the most recent of these disputes occurred in May 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Crimean Parliament
declared independence from Ukraine. And there has always been an expectation that
when things become tense between Russia and Ukraine, that tension is likely to be felt must acutely in Crimea.
“The Crimean peninsula has become an arena for the duel between Kiev and Moscow on political, economic, military and territorial disputes,” Victor Zaborsky, an expert on the region, wrote in
a 1995 paper for the
Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
The 1992 dispute was resolved with an agreement known as the Act on Division of Power Between Authorities of Ukraine and Republic of Crimea, which granted Crimea autonomous status within Ukraine.
In that sense, it is similar to the status of Chechnya within Russia. Chechnya’s autonomy nods to that region’s distinct Chechen language and Muslim religion, while in Crimea, such autonomy acknowledges that the political and cultural identity is often more Russian than Ukrainian.
Historically, Crimea has been a crossroads for stampeding empires, and it has been occupied or overrun by Greeks, Huns, Russians, Byzantines, Ottoman Turks, Golden Horde Tatars, Mongols and others. It became part of Ukraine in 1954, when the Soviet ruler Nikita S. Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, as a gift to mark the fraternal bond between Ukraine and Russia.
As part of the 1992 dispute, Russia’s Parliament voted symbolically to rescind the gift.
Crimea is home to the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, and
also beach resorts that have long been favored by Russian and Ukrainian rulers. Russia now leases the naval installations, under
a controversial deal that Mr. Yanukovych agreed in 2010 to extend by 25 years, until 2042, in an arrangement that includes discounts for Ukraine on Russian natural gas.
The worst of the conflicts over Crimea was the
Crimean War of 1853-56. At least 750,000 people were killed.
Nominally a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over a territorial dispute, it also ensnared France, Britain and the Italian kingdom of Sardinia, and the battlefield stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.
According to the most recent Ukrainian census, Crimea is home to about two million people, with nearly 60 percent identifying as Russian, nearly 25 percent as Ukrainian, and about 12 percent as Crimean Tatar, which gives the peninsula a sizable Muslim population.
The Tatars, who in 1944 were deported en masse by Stalin to Central Asia and have since returned to their homeland, have little affection for Moscow.
This week some members of the Muslim population in Simferopol
demonstrated against the pro-Russia activists who, in denouncing the political developments in Kiev, have raised Russian flags and in some cases called for seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia.
Russia’s deep historical ties to Crimea and especially its military interests in the naval bases help explain why President
Vladimir V. Putin and the Kremlin were so adamantly opposed to efforts by Europe to tighten ties with Ukraine. The unrest in Kiev
began last November when Mr. Yanukovych, under pressure from Russia, backed away from political and free trade agreements with the European Union that he had previously said he would sign.
While Russia has major economic interests in eastern Ukraine, its military-strategic interest is greatest in Crimea.
