In 1954, the year of the three hundredth anniversary of the “reunification” of Russia and Ukraine, the then leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, transferred Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian SSR. To Russophiles in Crimea and Russians in general, the transfer was infuriating, yet the insult was not monumental. Khrushchev was not strengthening Ukraine at Russia’s expense, he was simply gerrymandering. With the Kremlin power struggle following Stalin’s death far from over, he hoped to solidify his power base among the influential Ukrainian apparatchiks who commanded at least 30 percent of the Party Central Committee vote. He also had a soft spot for Ukraine: though not Ukrainian himself, he had been Moscow’s viceroy in Kiev. Khrushchev had tried to secure Crimea for Ukraine once before, in 1944 (“Ukraine is in ruins—what if it received Crimea?”). Still, for Russians and Russophiles in Crimea, being transferred to a different republic was not persecution, but it was a degrading objectification. That is how it went down in Russians’ memory.[67]
Unlike other Muslim people purged by Stalin in 1944—Chechens, for example—Tatars were never allowed to return: not under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or Gorbachev. The reason was simple: Crimea’s South Shore had become the resort of the dominant Soviet minority, and repatriation of a purged group was a security risk.
As the “All-Union resort,” the Black Sea Fleet base, and the vacation spot, the peninsula was in many ways governed directly from Moscow. The umbilical cord was cut only when the Soviet Union unexpectedly fell apart in 1991, and Crimea, by default, remained with Ukraine.
FIVE
Fetish
As I have mentioned, no Crimean product has ever been big internationally, except for the place itself, which is a fetish in several cultures.
The word “fetish” belongs to different narratives—anthropological, sociopolitical, erotic. Definitions vary, but generally speaking, a fetish is something that is assigned a value disconnected from its physical usefulness (a pearl is a good example), but having no inflated meaning outside a certain group of people. Karl Marx, one of the first scholars to start using the term, called the fetishized object a “social hieroglyphic” abounding in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” It is not possible to understand Russian aggression in Crimea without delving into Crimea’s status as a fetish.[1]
“To South, to South!”
The famous refrain of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, from 1900, is “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!”—the groan of a person stifled by a dull, small-town existence, childishly trusting that a move to the capital will mend broken hearts and restore her sense of purpose. The tension between center and periphery is widely acknowledged as pivotal to Russians; examples, alongside The Three Sisters, include Nikolai Nekrasov’s canonic juxtaposition of capitals “rocked with thunder / Of orators in wordy feuds” against the “depths of Russia” with its “age-long silence.”[2] But another powerful cultural dichotomy, between north and south, is not necessarily noticed.
At around the same time Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters, a young Muscovite made an entry in his diary, just as representative as the three sisters’ pitiful cry: “Farewell, Moscow!” the boy wrote. “Now to South, to South! To that bright, ever young, ever blooming, beautiful, wondrous South!” Unsurprisingly, he was heading to Crimea—“the sun, the sea,” away from “Moscow’s mud, cold, and sleet.” Since the end of the nineteenth century, numerous texts have echoed the feeling. “Assailed by winter, I withdrew to South,” Joseph Brodsky’s poem says, his destination “Crimea in January.”[3]
On some level, the longing for Crimea of a person living in Russia’s hinterlands is not unlike a New Englander’s midwinter dream of moving to Florida. In January, the average daytime high temperature in Moscow is eighteen degrees Fahrenheit; in Kiev it is thirty, while in Yalta it is fifty.[4] The only fruit that can be reliably grown around Moscow is an apple the size of a golf ball; in Crimea, mulberries, apricot trees, and grapevines line the streets. Even in the dead of winter, something is in bloom there; the only vegetation thriving at that time of year in Moscow is frost flowers on frozen windows.
But there is more to the Russian fascination with Crimea than a comfortable climate and fresh fruit.
In Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov notes that “Crimea in general, and Yalta in particular, are very beautiful places.” Commenting on a line in Chekhov’s short story “The Lady with a Dog,” set in Yalta, “the sea was of a warm lilac hue with a golden path for the moon,” he wistfully writes: “Whoever has lived in Yalta knows how exactly this conveys the impression of a summer evening there.” The essay was started twenty years after Nabokov’s brief teenage sojourn on Crimea’s South Shore, before he was exiled following the revolution, and since then he had traveled extensively along the coasts of France and Italy, in ecosystems similar to southern Crimea and at least as beautiful. For the title of one of the short stories, he nostalgically referenced Crimea as Eden lost, crafting a mesmerizing alliteration “Spring in Fialta”–merging “violet” (fialka in Russian) with “Yalta.”[5]
There can be little doubt that beauty is a construct. It took our species thousands of years to generally agree that a “warm lilac hue” is more attractive than gray and that the “golden path” of the moon has value beyond the volume of light it adds to navigation, fishing, and war. But again, there is more to the Crimea myth than beauty.
Crimea as a Russian national fetish has layers ranging from spiritual—imperial pride, accumulated sacrifice, accrued effort—to physical. In a materially and emotionally poor country, the physicality of Crimean products carried the whiff of the dolce vita: peaches tender to the touch, sweet tomatoes, fragrant wines—sherry (called by its original Spanish name, jerez); madeira; port; moscato; champagne (infringement of the French trademark nonchalantly dismissed). The famously aromatic Sinap apples started to be brought by land-carriage to Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1790s; two centuries later, people still bring them home from their Crimean vacations. Yet nothing exemplifies the fetishization of Crimea more than the “Koktebel rocks.”[6]
Koktebel is a seaside location in eastern Crimea. At the end of the nineteenth century, before the Russian literati colonized it, it was a simple Bulgarian village on a picturesque but not exactly breathtaking bay. Many are deceived by its French-sounding name (côte de bel? coq de belle?), but only because they want to be. “Koktebel” comes from Tatar and means Gray Hills. The exact path of the transformation that made Koktebel a cult destination is a separate subject; here, let’s look at the end product.[7]
2
Nikolai Nekrasov, “The Capitals Are Rocked with Thunder…,” in
3
V. P. Kupchenko,
4
As on January 26, 2015: Timeanddate.com, January 26, 2015, www.timeanddate.com/weather (retrieved January 27, 2015).
5
Vladimir Nabokov,
6
P. S. Pallas,