In Chekhov’s time, Autka, as our neighborhood was called, had been largely Tatar and Greek, but in 1944 Stalin ordered the minorities deported, and the only reason our family did not live in somebody else’s home was that our apartment building was recent. In Crimea, we resembled what the French people call pieds-noirs, referring to the generations of Europeans living in colonized North Africa and calling it home.
I first met an American forty years ago on the Yalta promenade. She was a passenger from a cruise ship that had docked in our little port that morning; I was fourteen or fifteen at the time. The conversation had little substance, yet the encounter made me the first person in our family ever to speak to an American. We read that as a sign of hope: a better world seemed to be hatching. Western cruise ships were becoming a familiar sight, Americans were allowed to explore the town unchaperoned, and in Yalta’s western cove, Soviet leaders entertained Richard Nixon.
Things were going so well that, forty years later, we thought, Americans would be buying properties along Crimea’s coast and travel agencies would sell packages to the “Black Sea Riviera.” A better world could have hatched, but it did not. Instead, America and Russia have sleepwalked into another cold war.
The clash is again ideological, only instead of Communism, Russia now promotes a pure and holy “special Russian way.” As before, Moscow is building an international coalition of anti-American underdogs. The fight for spheres of influence is back, along with another staple Cold War feature—proxy wars. For all intents and purposes, in 2014–2016 in Ukraine, the insurgents fought for Putin, and the Kiev government forces for NATO.
It is as if we have been struck by the Tower of Babel curse again. The story told in Genesis starts with the whole world speaking a single language and dreaming of greatness. “Come,” people said, “let’s make great piles of burnt brick and collect natural asphalt to use as mortar. Let’s build a great city with a tower that reaches to the skies—a monument to our greatness! This will bring us together and keep us from scattering all over the world.” As we know, the project was not finished: alarmed by the new power of humans, God gave them “different languages,” and that proved enough to rekindle discord.[10]
The early 1990s were the time when the world probably came closest to speaking a single language. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, according to the political theorist Samuel Huntington, had generated the “belief that a global democratic revolution was underway and that in short order Western concepts of human rights and Western forms of political democracy would prevail throughout the world.” Francis Fukuyama announced that history, as a contest of ideas, had ended and that liberal democracy had proved itself the fittest. Yet since then, we have somehow lost the shared language, and now the same word—“democracy,” “progress,” or “nationalism”—carries different meanings depending on who utters it.[11]
Today, writes Robert Kagan in the New Republic, “the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us.” Twenty-five years after we buried the Cold War, the BBC news site finds it acceptable to publish a plane spotter’s article called “How to tell if a Russian bomber is flying overhead.”[12]
In a book published in 1995, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, William Miller, wrote: “Inclusion, consensus, and the absence of violence have been hallmarks of Ukrainian politics, producing an atmosphere of political stability in which extremism has been all but avoided.”[13] On a chance visit to the American embassy in Kiev a year later, that was what I heard from Ambassador Miller and other diplomats. At the time, it was hard to disagree with that optimistic assessment. Two decades later, it sounds like the description of a different country.
On the same trip in 1996 I revisited Crimea. The people I met were preoccupied with two ills: sudden impoverishment and organized crime. People I had grown up with were now selling rubbish in a flea market. The Ukrainian currency was so weak that cashiers, forced to accept wads of cash, did not even bother to count the bills, let alone check them for (numerous) forgeries; they just dumped them into the register with the look of tired resignation.
Mobsters from every corner of the diseased state had descended upon Crimea’s South Shore like hungry scavengers. In Yalta, we were the only customers in our hotel because the manager had been gunned down in the lobby two days before. The only antique dealership in town had been bombed into dust. Better restaurants were closed for “private parties,” and in all the lesser food joints stray dogs, begging for food, kept you company. The favorite café of my childhood, Little Bee, was now a casino called Third Rome. All but three of the former Romanov palaces on the coast had been appropriated by the mob. One had a sign on the gate: “Don’t stop. Guards open fire without warning.” Mobsters had designated one particular stretch of the coastal highway as a meeting place, and when their BMWs stopped there right in the middle of the road for chitchat, traffic in both directions froze—no honking, no arguing, not a peep, not even from the habitually short-fused truck drivers.
That free-for-all had a strange feeling of timelessness to it. A lost island, a pirates’ republic, a territory off the maps, forgetting the world, and seemingly already forgotten by it.
In restaurants, scantily dressed women sold rare Alpine flowers. Fresh fish was back on the menu because industry along the coast remained shut down, and the species had recuperated. Old panting steamboats ferried peddlers to Istanbul and back; the family now occupying our old apartment had turned it into a warehouse for contraband goods. The only person to bring up reunification with Russia was the cemetery worker I had hired to fix my grandfather’s tomb. For gravediggers, being a maverick comes with the territory, and I paid little attention to the old man’s rumblings.
What I saw made me very angry, because that had been my home. Yet Russia at the time was not faring much better, and as all the ex-Soviets had learned the hard way, transition to a market economy is painful and ugly. Its pains, I thought, were not something Crimea, the rest of Ukraine, or Russia would be unable to outgrow. I don’t think anyone believed war would come next.
PART I
Terrain
ONE
Tower of Babel
There seems to be a growing international consensus regarding the origins of the crisis in the east: the involved parties sleepwalked into it, having misinterpreted each other’s agendas. Miscommunication that persistent must have had a method to it. To deconstruct it, we shall look at both the approximations—half-truths and honest mistakes—and controversies surrounding basic concepts of international relations, such as spheres of influence.[1]
Approximations
Possibly the biggest approximation fueling the conflict in the east has been a dichotomous approach to almost every aspect: historical, political, cultural, personal. The “us versus them” outlook that prevails in Ukraine, Russia, and the United States turns amorphousness into concrete, gray areas into black-and-white, a quilt into brick.
10
Genesis, 2:11, in
11
Samuel P. Huntington,
12
Robert Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,”
13
William Green Miller, “Foreword,” in
1
“Ukraine: UK and EU Badly Misread Russia,” BBC, February 20, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/uk-31545744 (retrieved February 20, 2015).