Here is the conclusion to the post I linked at the end of the previous post, the most relevant part of the article to the current Crimean-Russian-Ukrainian dance. In case people don't want to read the whole thing.
If you’ve lived in Russia, it’s not hard to see why a place like Crimea makes the average Muscovite drool. Most of Russia is flat, freezing, and land-locked. Crimea, a peninsula full of Mediterranean forests and rocky hills, surrounded by warm blue water, was the kind of landscape most Russians dream of—the closest thing Russia had to the Greek Islands.
Russians do, in fact, value Crimea very highly. But try telling that to American pundits, like Peter Tchir does on this video, and you get the full frontal assault of that Anglo-American specialty, moralized jingoism.
Crimea, a peninsula almost detached from the wide grasslands of Ukraine proper, has been a very distinct—and distinctly Russian—region for more than a century.
Unlike many Eastern Ukrainians, who speak Russian and consider themselves culturally but not politically Russian, Crimeans identify strongly as Russians, politically and culturally. They were very unhappy when Yeltsin let Crimea go to Ukraine after the breakup of the USSR. Nobody’s mentioning it, but the fact is that there was already a referendum in Crimea on staying with Ukraine or rejoining Russia.
On January 20, 1991, Crimeans voted to restore their ties with Russia by almost the same percentage (93.2%) we saw in today’s election—where, according to the BBC, 93% of Crimean voters once again voted Russian.
That’s a remarkably consistent vote, considering what a lot of chaos and poverty have encompassed the region since 1991. Back then, of course, no one in the West took the results seriously, because everyone knew the USSR was evil and anyone defecting from it was good. But it might be worth remembering that election now–because with Russian economic and military power backing them, the Crimeans’ vote might actually count.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Crimea voted to return to Russia. Even the demographics made that an easy one to predict. According to Ukraine’s own 2001 Census, 58.3% of Crimeans consider themselves Russian, with only 24.3% identifying as Ukranian.
On Sunday, the Crimeans voted to join Russia in huge numbers—80% turnout, 95% for joining Russia according to reports. That result tracked with the BBC exit polls, which took into account the fact that most of the peninsula’s ethnic Tartars—about 14% of the population—boycotted the vote. That means a lot of ethnic Ukrainians (and maybe even a few ethnic Tartars) voted with the Russian bloc, and it’s not likely they did so because they’re rabid Russian nationalists. More likely, it reflects the fact that Ukraine is a very poor country, while Russia seems to be doing pretty well, for a “gas station masquerading as a country.” Ukraine is sort of the opposite: A country without the money to buy a tank of gas. The history of Ukraine in the 20th century is so horrific, such a non-stop nightmare, that it’s impossible to blame anyone who wants out.
When I meet Canadians whose last names end in ‘-enko,” I always think they should get down on their knees every night and say a prayer: “Thank you, God, for giving me great-grandparents smart enough to get out of Ukraine.” It’s useless assigning blame; the point is that it makes sense to vote for a country that can, at least in theory, protect you and give you a pittance, instead of one that has seen nothing but mass murder, artificial famine, pogrom and counter-pogrom, and endless ethnic hatred for as long as anyone can remember. The worst of it, for many quietly embittered Ukrainian intellectuals, is that no one even remembers the huge artificial famine Stalin used to annihilate the Ukrainian peasantry.
Nobody but the poor Armenians has had to live so long with a genocide that never makes the media.
And while the Ukrainian peasantry was being wiped out, the New York Times’s correspondent, Walter Duranty, was feasting with Stalin’s nervous cronies and denying that there was any famine at all. Those who survived the Holodomor (“Death by Hunger”) were just in time for the German invasion, the Soviet counterattack, and the pogroms accompanying every back-and-forth as the two most powerful, merciless armies in modern history pushed each other back and forth over those grassy plains.
So, yeah: I don’t blame any Ukrainian for hating Russia, or the West, or the whole damn world; they’ve got a right, if anyone does. But you can’t blame the Crimeans, either, for wanting to opt out of a terrible history.
The only people who deserve real blame are the ones Walter Sobchak would call “fuckin’ amateurs”—the D.C. wonks suddenly pronouncing moral judgment on one or another faction in this Ukraine quarrel. Maybe there should be a quiz before you get to mouth off about topics as grim and complex as this one, or at least a little compulsory outside reading. They could start with Limonov’s Podrostok Savenko, (“The Adolescent Savenko” [“Savenko” being Limonov’s real, and very Ukrainian-sounding, last name]) mistranslated as “ Memoir of A Russian Punk” —a magnificent memoir of growing up as a Russian/Ukrainian in Kharkov/Kharkiv, in the northeastern part of the country.
Limonov and his friends consider themselves Russians, because to them, Ukrainian is a “village tongue,” a peasant language, and its most vivid expressions are of the endless hatred that filled every one of the many tribes on the grasslands, like this one: “Into Muscovite, Polack, and Jew/Take your knife and stick it through.” That doesn’t mean that any of those other groups were any saintlier than the Ukrainians; on the contrary, they were all caught up in fear and hate. But it does damn well mean that Ukraine has not been a healthy place for children or other living things, not in the memory of anyone alive—or their grandparents. Remember that before you blame anybody wanting to sign up with a bigger, stronger gang with more loot, even one as sleazy as Putin’s Russia.
The other book would-be Ukraine wonks should read carefully is Bulgakov’s 1924 novel, The White Guard. It’s one of the grimmest stories you’ll ever read, the miserable tale of how a kind, intelligent, well-educated Kiev family is ground down by the feral violence of post-1917 Russia. There are no good factions in Bulgakov’s novel. There are good people, lots of them, but their goodness finds no voice in the groups contending for Ukraine. The Whites are inept, lazy, and selfish; Petlyura’s army is full of vicious soldiers of fortune who have a bad habit of disemboweling any Jew they find on the road; and in the background are the Bolsheviks, always closer—not corrupt at all, which makes them the most efficient gang of murderers in the whole accursed landscape. Bulgakov’s thesis in this novel is very simple: Nothing good can happen here.
So if you had the opportunity to declare yourself a Russian, with the security of living on a highly-defensible diamond-shaped peninsula with only two narrow access points, you might well decide to sign up with Putin’s Russia rather than whoever has declared him- or herself Hetman in Kiev.
pando.com |
