Sophia believed Russia could ally with Catholic Europe against the Ottomans and reclaim her ancestral Constantinople for her children. The concept of Rome as a wandering imperial capital had been the foundation of Constantinople (Anna Komnene mentions in passing that “power was transferred from Rome to our country and the Queen of Cities”). Though centered in the east, the empire still called itself “Roman”; the misleading term “Byzantium” did not come into general use in European languages until the nineteenth century.[28]
The Third Rome was part of Sophia’s dowry, and came from the Byzantine ecclesiastical tradition, yet Moscow had little sway in the Greek-speaking parts of Christendom. However, all Slavic Orthodox territories, such as Serbia, Bulgaria, and of course Ukraine, shared a sacred language with Russians—the Church Slavonic, adapted from the ninth-century Macedonian dialect. That made the Third Rome transnational community possible—“imaginable,” in Benedict Anderson’s words. To use another term from Anderson, the Third Rome concept was nothing but “territorialization of faith.”[29]
In later centuries, the idea became Russia’s damnation. Peter the Great, an adept of realpolitik, saw little value in waging war against the Ottomans when a shorter way to Europe lay in the north. But for later Romanovs, “returning the cross” to the top of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople became an obligation. Pursuing the mirage of the Third Rome, they dragged Russia into one war after another in the Black Sea area and in the Balkans. As late as World War I, to keep Russia as an ally, Britain and France promised Tsar Nicholas II Constantinople, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. After World War II, Stalin demanded that Turkey hand over control of the straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles), a push that made the White House respond with the Truman Doctrine, explicitly protecting Turkey and Greece from Russian aggression.
For Russians, the road to Constantinople started in Crimea. Russian troops stormed Perekop in 1736 and sacked most of the peninsula before being forced to withdraw. The next generation of generals was more successful. In 1771, Russians again occupied the peninsula; this time, the Ottoman government in Kaffa evacuated to Istanbul.
Russia’s ruler at the time was Catherine the Great. Far ahead of her time, extraordinarily successful in her conquests and diplomacy, she and her inner circle of advisers made the grandiose decision that Crimea would be a stepping-stone in the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean. Catherine was certain that the Ottoman Empire was ready to crumble. Having named her eldest grandson after Alexander the Great, she named the second Constantine, as he was destined to be the king of Constantinople, the capital of a “Greek monarchy.” Her lover, Grigory Potemkin, would become king of “Dacia”—an imagined country roughly contiguous with modern Romania. She modestly referred to this entire plan as her “Greek Project.”[30]
Catherine’s conquests on the Black Sea met with widespread approval in Europe. The Ottoman Empire was a traditional foe that had last laid siege to Vienna just a century earlier. Feeling very secure, Catherine started with an experiment: in 1774, Russia and Turkey signed a treaty establishing Crimea as an independent state. For the Ottomans, the khanate would be a buffer zone, and for Catherine a test site for what would centuries later be called “nation-building.” Her Greek monarchy and Dacia would have to be built from the Ottoman bureaucratic and social fabric. She thought Crimea was perfect for trying this out.
Khan Shagin Giray, whom she supported in Bakhchisaray, saw himself as a Crimean Peter the Great—a modernizer who would borrow technology and governmental structures from Europe. Catherine returned the littoral to the khanate and took care of its bursary. As an attempt at social engineering, Catherine’s Crimean project anticipated later Western efforts in the non-Western world. While its stated good intentions, such as social reform and modernization, are impossible to prove or disprove, the pragmatism of the strategy is as valid now as it was in Catherine’s day: to raise a junior ally whose new (Westernized) elites would be completely dependent on the creator.[31]
And not unlike the twenty-first-century attempts at nation-building, Catherine’s Crimea project collapsed. The experiment had a bloody ending—civil war—unsurprisingly so because the khan was rightly seen as a puppet of an alien power. In 1783, Russia squashed the rebellion and annexed Crimea.
Catherine dismissed the failed experiment in Crimea as a freak loss, still sure that the Greek monarchy and Dacia would succeed. To demonstrate her commitment to the development of the conquered Ottoman lands and to celebrate her victory in the clash of civilizations, in 1787 she put herself through the terrible inconvenience of visiting Crimea in person, with European ambassadors and the emperor of Austria in tow.
The six-month journey proved monumental, belonging among the top PR campaigns in history. Catherine was delighted by what she saw and proclaimed Crimea the “Garden of Eden.” Having failed to engineer change on the peninsula through its government, she now launched a massive campaign of colonization.[32]
Catherine reimagined Crimea as a Russian Greece to exist alongside Moscow, the Third Rome. The territories of the khanate were divided into three provinces: Kherson and Yekaterinoslav on the mainland steppe, and Taurida as the Crimean peninsula per se. The name Taurida reflected Catherine’s Greek pretensions for the place, as did the names of two major cities she started on the peninsula—Sevastopol and Simferopol. Kaffa and Goezleve had their ancient Greek names restored: Feodosia and Yevpatoria, respectively.
Tellingly, the rest of the toponyms were kept Turkic, with su for “river,” dahg for “mountain,” and gol for “lake.” Catherine ruled by corruption, not coercion. Tatar nobles were given Russian nobility, land grants, and power over the previously free peasantry. With the aristocracy thus brought over to her side, revolts on the peninsula remained few and insignificant. Catherine also brought in new settlers: the steppes had hardly any tradition of agriculture.
Although international trade was considerable (the port of Yevpatoria alone received 170 foreign ships a year), the peninsula’s export-import structure did not look satisfactory. Crimea exported salt from the Perekop marshes, wool, and sheepskin—both products of semi-nomadic Tatar shepherds. From the Mediterranean, it imported silk and cotton cloth, wine, lemons, oranges, chestnuts, olives, apples, dates, coffee, and tobacco. From mainland Russia, wheat, butter, and linen came, and also one telling item, locks, exceeding eighteen thousand a year—clear evidence of the redistribution of property. Importing items like oranges and coffee was unavoidable, but the Garden of Eden was certainly capable of producing more domestically. The list the colonizers came up with included wheat, wine, silk, raisins, almonds, figs, prunes, olives, capers, herring, anchovies, and oysters. Having little regard for Russian and Ukrainian peasantry, the empress invited farmers from abroad, starting with her home country, Germany.[33]
28
Madariaga,
30
Alexander,
32
Ibid., 363–381; Henri Troyat,
33
Pavel I. Sumarokov,