Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 1 – “Crimea
never was pro-Russian – it did not know and could not know post-Soviet Russia,”
Pavel Kazarin says. “Instead, over the course of the last quarter of a century,”
the Ukrainian peninsula was “pro-Soviet,” something that is going to create
problems for Moscow there in the near term.
And that confusion is mirrored, the “Novaya
gazeta” commentator says today, by one in Moscow. “For Russia,” he continues, “Crimea
is not valuable in and of itself” but rather because of the sense it gives
Russians” that they are still an empire. Indeed, it is the only marker most of
them now see for that status (novayagazeta.ru/comments/65060.html).
The Russians of Crimea were never
entirely happy to be part of “the Ukrainian periphery,” and the support some
but far from all of them have offered for Putin’s Anschluss of the region is an
effort to reverse 1991 and to allow “the current generations to live under
developed socialism.”
But that isn’t necessarily what
Moscow wants from Crimea, Kazarin says. For it, Crimea is “the unique indicator
of the imperial status of Russia.” But “for the peninsula to become in reality
what it sees itself as being, one small thing is needed – the Soviet
Union. And it doesn’t exist.”
For Crimea’s Russians, “Soviet
reality is 350 enterprises, tens of thousands of sailors of the Black Sea
Fleet, a resort behind an iron curtain which is filled to capacity … and along
with all of those factors,” the “Novaya” writer continues, “it is social
justice,” as defined at the end of Soviet times.
In point of fact, he continues, “the
only [currently existing] country in which Crimea would feel itself at home is
Belarus … the last preserve of the USSR” that has been maintained by Moscow’s
money but that is fundamentally different from the Russia that has emerged
since 1991.
“What will Moscow offer Crimea
tomorrow? What reality will be built in a region which dreams about a new wave
of industrialization? What long-term strategy will Moscow choose if even today
it cannot force its own major banks and net operators to go to work on the
peninsula?” These are all questions
without answers.
To a large extent, Kazarin writes, “Crimea
is like the ring in Tolkien.” If it is not put on the right finger, “it will
destroy” the one who attempts to wear it. Moscow today may see the USSR in the
Crimean “mirror” into which it is looking, he says, “but to imagine oneself as
the Soviet Union and to be it are two totally different things.”
“Crimean awaits from Moscow not so
much money as a sense of subjectness. It wants everything which it read about
in the early novels of Strugatsky where progress, new horizons, and where money
begins on Saturday,” he writes. “What will happen when [Crimea] understands
that it has turned out to have been included in ‘The City of the Condemned’?”
Crimeans will resist drawing that
conclusion. But however much they try to ignore reality, they won’t be able to “repeal”
it. Its Russian residents are dreaming
of going back to 1961 with the flight of Gagarin and Komsomol construction
projects. But they may discover that they in fact have returned to 1988 and are
along with Russia, “at the brink of a new collapse.”
Meanwhile, in an action that
combines “The Commissar Vanishes” and Costa-Gavras’ 1969 film “Z,” the Russian
occupation authorities have begun confiscating books about Mustafa Cemilev, the
Crimean Tatar leader earlier banned from returning to his homeland for five
years (nvua.net/ukraine/v-krymu-izyali-iz-prodazhi-zapreshchennye-knigi-o-mustafe-dzhemileve-9801.html).
In reporting this latest horror,
Refat Chubarov, head of the Mejlis who has also been banned from the Ukrainian
peninsula, said that “in Crimea they are not yet publicly burning books. But
judging from the last reports out of Crimea, they are preparing to do just
that.” This parallels what the Nazis did in Germany.
As Chubarov recalls, the infamous
burning of books on May 10, 1933, was preceded by efforts to confiscate books
whose authors and content the Nazis did not approve of.
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