Within two decades, Crimea’s South Shore became popular with the imperial aristocracy. Some built summer retreats, others moved to the littoral permanently—a quaint community consisting of devoted agriculturalists excited by the opportunities the subtropical climate offered, retirees disenchanted with the metropolitan glamour, spiritualists seeking seclusion, and former courtiers marred by scandal.[34]
Mary Holderness, an intrepid British traveler who spent four years in the village of Karagoz in eastern Crimea between 1816 and 1820, left a detailed account of her sojourn on the peninsula. I am unable to find a good explanation for why a British woman would move to a very basic settlement in the wooded hills, easily a day’s journey from the nearest town. But others did the same thing; something about Crimea appealed to restive spirits, the kind of people who in later centuries would move to Tangier or Bali.
Mary Holderness caught Crimean diversity at its peak: all the people of the khanate were still there, and the government’s resettlement campaign had added newcomers. In the towns of Crimea, Holderness reported, one could find the “descendants of more than fifteen different nations.”[35] Like most travelers, Holderness had carried her prejudices with her and brought them back home unchanged; the classification of Crimeans she suggests tells us at least as much about a colonizer’s mindset as about the people she was observing.
She found the “habits and modes of agriculture” of the Tatars “rude and simple,” their wealth still consisting “in flocks and herds.” The Nogai Tatars, she thought, had fared especially poorly, despite the Russian government’s efforts to conquer the “inveterate prejudices of this wandering horde” and induce them to take up farming. “They are, however, of all the colonists, far the worst cultivators; and are still much addicted to grazing large flocks and herds, and numerous studs of mares.”[36]
According to Holderness, the largest minorities were Greeks and Germans, each constituting about 10 percent of the population. “The occupations of the Greeks are perhaps more various than those of most of the settlers. In the towns they are found as respectable merchants, as small shopkeepers. …The Greeks also are the only fishers who adventure far for the purpose of fishing.”[37]
The German Mennonites, or Moravians, in the steppes “came over with plenty of money, knowledge of business, and superior industry, and are at present a wealthy race; having built large farm-houses and offices, planted extensive orchards, and laid out great gardens, possessing the finest breed of cows in the country, and growing a great abundance of corn.” But a different group of Germans, the Swabians, she found low and brutal in their manners, “the least civilized inhabitants of the Crimea.”[38]
“The Bulgarians, though ranking low in point of numbers amongst the other colonists of New Russia, are perhaps deserving the first notice, from the high character they bear, as a sober, industrious, and meritorious class. …As agriculturalists, the Bulgarians hold also pre-eminence amongst their neighbours.”
The Armenians were “universally resident in the towns, either as merchants or burghers; and the application so contemptuously bestowed by Buonaparte on the English, seems, in truth, perfectly applicable to these people—they are really a nation of shopkeepers.”[39]
“The Jews are very numerous indeed in all the colonies, composing from one-fifth to one-tenth of the whole population. But they are, with very few exceptions, fixed in the class of burghers and shopkeepers, in every one of the towns of New Russia.” The Karaites, a Jewish group speaking a Turkic language and not recognizing rabbinical authority or the Talmud, were “commonly the most wealthy, and are on all accounts the most respectable. They hold themselves very distinct from their Polish brethren.” They “aver that they were no way concerned in, or consenting to,” Jesus Christ’s death, and “thus reject the dreadful responsibility entailed on them by the declaration of their forefathers—‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’”[40]
A few French and Swiss; some Poles (“tall, and finely formed: even the servants are superior in their manners to any other of the peasantry”). “The gypsies of the Crimea, called Tsigans, resemble in habits and appearance those of England, and, like them, exist chiefly by plunder. They are commonly the musicians at weddings, profess fortune-telling, and have all the tricks and cant of begging.”[41]
Among the minorities Holderness described, three groups had been on the peninsula before the Russian conquest and even before the Tatars: Greeks, Armenians, and Karaites. Their salad bowl coexistence encouraged a niche economy: Armenians controlled exports of salt, with a town in the salt-producing area bearing the name Armenian Bazar; a thriving community of Karaites in Yevpatoria carried on commerce with Constantinople and the Levant.[42]
Theoretically, in Crimea, Catherine practiced something we might call laissez-faire multiculturalism, yet in the process, the Tatar community got severely undermined. The Russians prided themselves on letting Crimean Muslims practice their faith, but at the same time, with the arrogance typical of a “civilizing” nation, they forced the Nogai Tatars to take up agriculture, eradicating the nomadic economy of the steppes and damaging the old social fabric.
The Crimean Tatar concept of land and property was based on the interpretation of shariat, or Islamic law, and the nomadic tradition. No one could claim ownership over forests, steppes, wells, and pastures belonging to the whole umma. Twenty-five percent of Crimean lands were vakif—endowments donated to religious institutions. After a short period of accommodation, the Russian government started confiscating the vakif lands. A mass exodus of Tatars began. By the end of the eighteenth century, around 120,000 out of the population of 300,000 had left for the Ottoman Empire. In mystical terms, this was a hijra, religious repatriation from the land of unbelievers to the Dar al-Islam. That left their economic niches and property up for grabs, enticing more settlers to come: Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians from the Ottoman Empire, and Rabbinite Jews from Poland.[43]
The Romanov who revived Catherine’s Greek Project was her grandson, Nicholas I. His push onto Ottoman lands culminated in the invasion of the two Danube principalities—Moldavia and Wallachia—in 1853. For Nicholas, this was a crusade, an effort to retake Muslim-controlled lands and restore them to Christian rule. But the days when the Russian victories over the sultan’s armies were trumpeted in Europe as a triumph of “Christianity” against “Islam” were gone. Russo-European solidarity had been short-lived and opportunistic. The great powers of Europe had stopped viewing Turkey as a threat to their interests and were now worried about a new challenger—none other than Nicholas’s empire. The leading Western power at the time, Britain, found itself confronted by a Russian onslaught on two fronts—in the Balkans and Central Asia. The latter clash had come to be known as the Great Game. It was not an actual war, as it was not feasible strategically to fight a meaningful campaign on the fringes of Afghanistan and Tibet. The Black Sea was a different matter. Responding to the Russian invasion, a British-French force landed in Crimea with support from the Ottomans and the Italian kingdom of Piedmont. The goal was to intimidate Russia enough to ensure Turkey’s continued existence.[44]
34
N. S. Vsevolozhskii,
35
Mary Holderness,
42
Henderson,
44
Figes,