“No, thanks.”
Silence. Secretly I wish he’d start talking about tits again.
Ahead of us the lights of a city become visible. Sevastopol. A triumphal arch with the inscription 1783–1983 commemorates the two hundredth anniversary of the penultimate Russian annexation of Crimea. At that time Catherine the Great tricked the Ottoman Empire out of the region. In front of the entrance to the Grand Hotel Ukraina there are billboards advertising a table-dance bar. We pass sinister-looking memorials for some war heroes or another, and a striking number of trees by the roadside; we can smell the sea. Until 1991 the city was barred to foreigners as the Black Sea fleet was stationed here. The driver puts his foot down as the front-seat passenger gives directions to the place she wants to be dropped. He stops, she pays, and they say their goodbyes.
There’s no longer an obtrusive witness. We cross the whole city, reaching a kind of industrial zone. The street is no longer asphalted, and the last lamppost is far behind us; to the right is a huge parking area full of military trucks.
Some five minutes later we reach a barrier. A guard lifts it and once again we are in a residential area. Expensive houses with high walls and SUVs parked outside, but the street remains an uneven dirt track. Alex directs the driver through a labyrinth of small alleys.
We stop; Alex wishes me a nice trip and bows out with a handshake that lasts slightly longer than necessary.
I exhale in relief. Not kidnapped, then. “Come and sit in the front, my friend,” says the driver. “My name is Yuri. Poyekhali—let’s go!” He looks at me critically to see whether I understood the reference. His namesake, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, said this single word just before takeoff.
“Poyekhali,” I agree tiredly. He then drives me to my destination at rocket speed.
WARSHIPS
AFTER A SHORT night in Simferopol with a host who was surprisingly understanding about my late arrival, I travel by bus the next day past the elephant gas station again. My next destination is a village near Bakhchysarai, where Alisa, her husband, Konstantin, and their three children await me in a cozy wooden house that looks like somewhere Pippi Longstocking would have lived.
I stow my luggage. “Do you want to do a tour around Sevastopol?” asks Alisa. Her neighbor is going there for shopping in her pickup and has some spare seats. “Sounds great,” I reply. Alisa has dark, serious eyes, long black hair, and the quiet, refined manners of an introverted artist who would rather let her work do the speaking than stand in the foreground. She wrote a children’s book about Crimea and illustrated it with watercolors. Some of her illustrations are being shown in an exhibition at the moment. She also works as a translator to earn money.
We drive past impressive table mountains with vertical cliff faces, on which proficient rock climbers could have a lot of fun. The rocks gleam almost white in the harsh midday sun and trees cling to the not-too-steep areas.
The news messages on my cell phone are less appealing than the landscape: “Russia’s security agency, the FSB, thwarted a terrorist attack in Crimea planned by Ukrainian agents,” writes RT. “The objective of the foiled attack in Crimea—‘the death of tourism,’” writes Sputnik. “Crimean crisis: worries about a new war,” writes Spiegel Online. Well, I’ve really chosen a good time to visit. A group of Ukrainians carrying ninety pounds of explosives are said to have tried to reach Crimea. According to the Russians they were stopped at the border, and two border guards were killed in the exchange of fire. The information couldn’t be verified independently. What is certain is that this incident will intensify the crisis between Ukraine and Russia. I ask Alisa if she is worried and she answers: “I don’t follow the news, it’s just too depressing.”
There are enough other things to read, anyway. For example, the quotes on the Putin posters on the side of the main road: “The opening of the highway and train bridge between Crimea and the Caucasus is planned for December 18, 2018. We have to fulfill this historic mission,” “… the program for the development of Sevastopol’s military base and the Black Sea fleet will be implemented,” “Our aim is to make Crimea and Sevastopol the most modern and dynamic development regions in Russia.” A lot of time will pass, particularly in the case of the latter promise, until all this is realized; you can see that on every street corner. But Sevastopol, despite its dilapidated buildings, has not lost its atmosphere of a fashionable coastal city. The “White City” on the Black Sea sparkles even though its plaster is crumbling. Should the situation ease, the property developers will come flocking back.
We get out at the covered market in the city center. Oranges and apples, lettuce, dried fruits, and nuts are all presented in opulent displays. And Yalta onions, slightly sweet, red, and shaped like a flattened mini squash. Even more interesting are the T-shirt stores at the entrance. “Not as many Putin designs as I thought,” says Alisa. But the president does appear a few times, once holding a puppy in his arms and once with 007 sunglasses.
More unusual is the shirt printed with “Politeness can conquer a city” next to a screened photo of a soldier in a green helmet and goggles, his arms cradling a terrifying weapon. On his back he appears at first to have angel wings, but on closer inspection they turn out to be the spread-eagle wings of the Russian crest.
At the beginning of 2014 such soldiers (okay, minus the wings) suddenly appeared everywhere in Crimea, without emblems on their uniforms. Soon they were being referred to as the “polite people” because these seemingly military-looking men stressed unaggressive behavior; they didn’t steal fruit from strangers’ gardens and were perfectly willing to pose for souvenir photos.
On the basis of their other nickname you could say that Crimea, for the first time in human history, was the scene of an invasion of “little green men,” but that would be badly downplaying the situation at the time. Their origins were eventually clarified. President Putin admitted at an annual televised press conference that in some instances there was some sort of involvement of soldiers coming from Russia.
At that time Alisa hardly noticed the “little green men” as her village is so remote that they never appeared there. “But suddenly a couple of strangers who none of us had ever seen came to inspect the village. I think they were just saying: we are now your new friends and we’re here to protect you.”
What has changed since the annexation by Russia?
“Life has become more expensive. And many popular products from Ukraine are no longer available. Sunflower oil, dairy products, vegetables.” Also, eBay and Amazon don’t work anymore. And to cross the mainland border—Alisa originally comes from Minsk in Belarus—she needs a verifiable reason, such as the funeral of a relative. Otherwise the only option is a circuitous flight via Moscow; even then there are snags when booking. Credit cards are often rejected when an online portal has an IP address from Crimea. I have similar problems when trying to arrange my flight to Saint Petersburg; I’m unable to pay and have to ask a friend in Hamburg to make the reservation.
“And then the whole annexation was nothing but a huge misunderstanding, well, at least partially.” I ask what she means. “The most important reason that many voted in the referendum for affiliation with Russia was language. On the Crimean Peninsula, the majority of people speak Russian. But the Ukrainian government wanted to declare Ukrainian as the official language,” she says. Meaning: all official documents would be drafted in Ukrainian. “But everyone thought that in the future they would end up in prison if they spoke Russian, which, of course, was never under consideration. Besides this, everyone saw the Russian propaganda promises: many tourists would come and people would be lining up to buy Crimean products.” Higher pensions were announced. “They were actually implemented, only to be stopped exactly two months later.”