The selections in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review explore a series of separate but related topics.
We open with an article on Vladimir Putin’s oft-reiterated interpretation of Russian history with its emphasis on the shared experience of the Great Patriotic War and the essential role of the state and the leader in Russia’s survival. This construction, designed to serve as a unifying frame for public life and the people of post-Soviet Russia, expansively defined, is propagated both affirmatively and through the removal of competing perspectives. Ivan Kurilla’s close study of the ways a new ritual commemoration of the war dead has been turned to political purposes shows how this works.
A high-visibility example of the war memory being used to give context to a policy decision came in March 2014. At the culmination of the popular uprising that drove Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych into exile in Russia, the Russian Federation annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Among Russians, the stealthy, rapid, and effective takeover of Crimea was widely seen as a righting of the historical wrong of Crimea’s transfer to Ukraine in 1954, a satisfying blow to Ukraine and its Western supporters, and a dazzling success redounding to the credit of President Putin, whose popularity spiked. In “Crimea: The First Step in Russia’s Return to the World,” Mikhail Deliagin, in his signature no-holds-barred manner, justifies the annexation by invoking the multi-layered historical connections between Crimea and Russia and condemning the events in Ukraine as an illegitimate, Nazi-tainted coup. He also spells out his own vision of how the recovery of Crimea could be a turning point for Russia not only internationally but in domestic politics. These aspects are explored more critically by Kirill Rogov in “‘Crimean Syndrome’: Mechanisms of Authoritarian Mobilization” and Leontii L. Byzov in “National Consensus or Social Anomaly? On the Peculiarities of Mass Consciousness in ‘Post-Crimean’ Russia.”
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Since the time of Peter I, founder of the Imperial Russian Navy, no less than in Putin’s day, access to the seas has been a critical element of Russia’s defense strategy. Little wonder that control of the Crimean peninsula, with its commanding position on the northern shore of the Black Sea and a coastline replete with natural harbors, should be considered a strategic asset for Russia—and not only Russia, as recounted by Svetlana Oreshkova in “The Ottoman Empire and Russia in Light of Their Geopolitical Demarcation.” Established in 1441 as a self-proclaimed successor of the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate was an Ottoman protectorate. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Ottomans were letting slip their hold on the khanate and the Tatar population was restive. The Russian Empire, meanwhile, was led by the ambitious and eminently capable Catherine II. Seeing opportunity, Prince Grigory Potemkin spearheaded the takeover of Crimea and secured for Russia a stronghold on the Black Sea. He established a naval base at Sevastopol, built up the infrastructure to serve his new Black Sea Fleet, and oversaw an influx of Russian settlers. At this juncture, and after each Russian military engagement up through the 2014 annexation, but especially in the aftermath of the Crimean War and World War II, expulsions and emigration of the Tatar population would ensue.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and France, wary of Russian aspirations, backed the Ottomans against the Russians in the Crimean War. The war is remembered in Russia as a display of vulnerability that led to the Great Reforms, and in the West, for Tennyson’s poem immortalizing the (disastrous) “Charge of the Light Brigade” and for Florence Nightingale’s efforts to stanch the staggering loss of life among the wounded who were succumbing to infection and disease. Our selections by Leonid Gorizontov, Vladislav Grosul, and Valerii Stepanov consider various repercussions of the Russo–Turkish struggles to hold advantage in the Black Sea region.
In the wake of the October Revolution, control of Crimea would pass to local Tatars, then to the Bolsheviks, the Germans, the government of Solomon Krym, the French Navy, the Red Army, and the White generals Denikin and Wrangel, until finally the Bolsheviks prevailed. Soviet Russia would control the peninsula for the next twenty years—years during which terror and famine took their own tremendous toll.
Crimea was bitterly contested territory once again in World War II. The legendary fortress at Sevastopol was the prize of a brutal campaign—a prize that was destroyed in the winning of it by the forces of Field Marshal Manstein. This brings us back to President Putin’s invocations of the experience of the “Great Patriotic War.” No sooner had the Red Army driven out the Wehrmacht than the NKVD marched the entire Crimean Tatar population into cattle cars and transported them to exile in Central Asia, on grounds of collaboration with the Germans. Whether the intention was collective punishment or de facto genocide may be debated, but what is certain is that, even after their right of return was established during perestroika, the peninsula would never again have more than a small (and now declining) Tatar minority population. International law, Western sanctions, and Ukrainian claims notwithstanding, it is unimaginable that Russia would ever again surrender control over the strategically critical, and now thoroughly militarized, Crimean peninsula.
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For insight on the pre-2014 situation in Crimea, see “The Crimean Tatar Question and the Present Ethnopolitical Situation in Crimea” by M.N. Guboglo and S.M. Chervonnaia” (Russian Politics and Law, vol. 33, no. 6) and “Islamic Groups of Crimea: Discourses and Politics” (Russian Social Science Review, vol. 56, no. 6). For more on the larger themes of this issue, see, in this journal, “Civilizational Nationalism: The Russian Version of the ‘Special Path,’” by Aleksandr Verkhovskii and Emil Pain (in an issue titled Identity Issues, vol. 56, no. 4), and “The Historical Memory of Twentieth-Century Wars as an Arena of Ideological, Political, and Psychological Confrontation,” by Aleksandr Seniavskii and Elena S. Seniavskaia (in an issue titled History and the Present, vol. 58, nos. 4–5).