Looking for Partisans in Crimea

How to foment trouble against Russia

by Jozef Banáš*

(6 September 2021) All sensible people of sound mind are following with ever-growing concern the increase in Russophobia and the swirl of disinformation about Russia, her president and Russian activities at home and abroad.

I have just finished my translations of Stefan Zweig’s (1881–1942) book “Vor dem Sturm. Europa zwischen 1900 und 1914”, in which the celebrated Austrian writer describes the reasons for the outbreak of WWI. One of the reasons he pinpointed was wide-spread Russophobia in Western Europe, particularly in an increasingly belligerent Germany. In Austria-Hungary, he who spoke positively about Russians, Serbs and Slavs in general was immediately called a Russophile, a dangerous pan-Slavic conspirator, a propagator of false news, and was publicly shunned. The majority of citizens, however, kept their thoughts to themselves; they just wanted peace and quiet and said nothing, and we all know how that ended…

Crimean inhabitants dislike any occupying force

I am not going to speak about the procedure and technicalities of the referendum of March 2014, but about one basic aspect: did or did not the referendum express the will of the people living in Crimea? Those Crimeans, whose fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had an inherent aversion to any occupying force of whatever origins, following successive invasions of their country in the past. And the history of that peninsula is rich in occupiers – let us just remember the Turks, French, British and Germans. From the moment an occupying force set foot on Crimean soil, the Crimeans immediately began to organize a partisan resistance movement. From all sides, I am hearing that Crimea is occupied. The latest invaders were the German Nazis in 1941, and that occupation lasted until 1944. Today, according to the mainstream currents of opinion in politics and media, Crimea is occupied again. By the Russians. And has been under occupation for five years now.

Integration of Crimea into Russia – an annexation?

Everything began with the referendum of 16 March 2014, which resulted in the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation. For a judgement about whether the integration of Crimea into Russia was an annexation, I think, one has to start with a definition of annexation:

According to International Public Law, annexation is the forcible acquisition of territory by one state at the expense of another state, against the will of the inhabitants of that territory, thereby violating the right to self-determination of peoples.¹ Just to be clear, I repeat: against the will of the people.

Throughout history, many annexations have taken place against the will of the annexed people. Among the most significant are the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and Hitler’s annexation of the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; further, Japan’s annexation of Korea, China’s annexation Tibet, and Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Eritrea’s annexation of Ethiopia led to the war of independence in Eritrea. West Sahara’s annexation by Morocco and Mauretania prompted the foundation of the armed resistance movement Polisario.

All these annexations have one thing in common: the inhabitants defended and are defending themselves against the occupying forces with military resistance. And here, we have the key criterion with regard to labelling Crimea’s integration into Russia an annexation: military resistance or any other form of rejection of the occupying force by the indigenous people. Five years after the referendum, I had not read about one single act of anti-Russian resistance in Crimea, I began to find the phrase “annexation against the will of the people” a bit odd. The only explanation was that, with regard to President Putin, Slovak journalists are tactfully closing their eyes to the anti-Russian resistance in Crimea.

And I was also startled: had I, inattentively, missed the moment, when Washington, Brussels and Berlin changed their minds and declared the referendum legitimate? So far, I have found nothing in the newspapers, and that’s why is said to myself: if our investigative journalists do not go there to a look, I shall go myself. As they say: better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.

History of Crimea

People warned me, tried to dissuade me from going. I have no reason to keep my trip to Crimea secret; on the contrary, I think that any attempt to shine the light of truth on the situation and reduce the adversity helps both wonderful Slavic nations – the Ukrainians and the Russians. I like both; in both countries I have readers and I will never forget the beautiful word of praise two leading writers used about my novel “Zone of Jubilation” (Zona nadšenia): Ukrainian writer Yuri Sherbak and the star of Russian literature Yuri Polyakov, editor-in-chief of Pushkin’s Literature News (Literaturnaya gazeta).

Today, these two men whom I like and appreciate are on opposite sides of the barricades. Who let this happen? When did it happen? Who separated these two fantastic men? Who separated the Russians and Ukrainians? And were they really separated, or does it only seem so, with regard to the speeches of mainstream politicians and journalists?

Now, what happened and what is happening to the poor occupied inhabitants of Crimea? Some say that Crimea belongs to Ukraine, while others hold that it belongs to Russia. Crimea has belonged to many, to the Russians, Ukrainians, but long before them, it belonged to the Cimmerians, Goths, Greeks (Euripides’ drama Iphigenia among the Taurians is in Crimea, Tauri being the Greek name for Crimea), Romans, Byzantines, Italians and the Golden Horde Tatars. In 1243, Ghengis Khan’s hordes conquered the peninsula and occupied it until after the foundation of the Crimean Khanate of 1443. The proto-Bulgarians (predecessors of today’s Bulgaria), Khazars, and Turks followed. From 1783 on, Russians ruled the Crimea almost losing the peninsula and hegemony over the Black Sea in the Crimean War (1853–1856).

Yet, Russian influence on Crimea grew; the peninsula became the summer seat of prominent Russian politicians and royals (the Tsar kept a palace close to Yalta), as well as artists, entrepreneurs and the Russian bohème. The ethnic opposition was always diverse, and sometimes it was also changed by violent means. In the three years of German occupation during WWII, the Germans murdered the majority of Jewish inhabitants, and after the war, Stalin expelled Bulgarians, Tatars, Greeks and Armenians from Crimea, based on the principle of collective guilt. The Tatars suffered the most because of their collaboration with the German occupiers, with thousands of them having fought the Soviet Union on the side of the German Nazis, who renewed the Crimean Khanate.

Inhabitants decide on country they want to belong to

Thus, to state that Crimea has always been Russian is wrong; the peninsula began to be strongly Russified only after WWII. But from 1954 it belonged to Ukraine. In that year the Soviet Union, ruled by Ukrainian Russian Krushchev, gave Crimea to Ukraine as a gift. If I remember correctly, Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. Thus, Crimea belonged equally to Ukrainians, Russians, Estonians and Turkmenes, all citizens of the larger Soviet Union.

One cannot help observing how odd it is that democratic politicians and journalists today are stubbornly defending the decision of the Communist leader Khrushchev … Every normal person surely acknowledges that the most objective factor, which should decide to whom the Crimea belongs, should be her inhabitants. And they did decide. A referendum was held on 16 March 2014. 83,1 % of the inhabitants of Crimea participated, and of those 95,77 % voted for integration into the Russian Federation. In the separate referendum in Sebastopol, 95,6 % of 89,5 % of the populace voted for integration.

I should remind those who doubt the results of the referenda how the United States of America emerged: the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776 was unilateral. To think thus that the Crimea should be returned to Ukraine is as absurd a thought as to think that the USA should be returned to Great Britain … From the time when Catherine the Great ruled Russia, it is obvious that Crimea and especially its port Sebastopol have been of key strategic importance to Russia. Sebastopol, officially called the City of Heroes (gorod geroy) is a strategic Russian port, granting access to the world’s seas through the Bosporus, Dardanelles and the Mediterranean Sea. The Crimean Peninsula is not only a strategic place, but literally a symbol of Russia.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Crimea and the majority of her Russian inhabitants woke up one morning, bereft of direct contact with Russia within the space of night. The various Ukrainian governments were more pre-occupied with plundering the country’s assets that soundly investing in Ukraine’s economic development, let alone developing Crimea, which was dominated by citizens of Russian origin.

In 2005, I met Ukrainian president Victor Yushenko, who offered us his plane for our trip to Sebastopol. Russia and Ukraine had concluded a treaty about the usage of the port of Sebastopol. During the festive lunch with the commander of the Ukrainian fleet on board the destroyer Heytman Zagaidachny, I had the opportunity to speak with the highest officers of the Ukrainian navy. After a while, French senator Pierre Lellouche, the chairman of our delegation and president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, asked me if I spike Ukrainian since I was talking to our partners. I replied no; I was speaking in Russian with the Ukrainian officers. And, with Lellouche, they also communicated in Russian; I translated.

Visiting the Tatars

I have been back to Crimea only recently, with the firm plan to find evidence of the opposition of the inhabitants against integration into Russia. After landing at the reconstructed airport of the capital Simferopol, we headed straight away to Bakhchysaray, the centre of the Crimean Tatars, where, because of the history of the Tatars, I expected to find the most fervent anti-Russian activities and attitudes. The Tatar Ruslan took us on a three-hour excursion to the mountains and places of interest in a jeep. I expected to see partisan hiding places, but saw nothing. Not even around the wildest and most remote of Crimea’s mountains, in Tatar Bakhchysaray, did we find any proof of anti-Russian activities. We then headed to Chansaray, a palace of the Tatar Khans.

Dominant in this complex is the Fountain of Tears, which became famous after Pushkin’s visit in 1820; he praised it in his poem The Fountain of Bakhchysaray. What the powerful Khans did not achieve, Pushkin did. Such can be the power of poetry too.

As I expected, some local Tatars publicly expressed their frustration at being considered a second-class nation of the peninsula. They cannot forgive the Russians for the violent expulsion and death of tens of thousands of Tatars in Stalinist times. But the Crimean Russians too cannot forgive the Tatars for their treasonous collaboration with the German occupation. Many Tatars, however, also fought on the side of the Soviet Union. Among the dozens of citizens we talked to in Crimea, the Tatars were without doubt the most critical. They acknowledged that since Crimea has been Russian again, their salaries have gone up, but also other inhabitants of Crimea are working outside of the peninsula, mainly in Russia, and also in EU countries, primarily in Poland. According to the critical Tatars, mainly companies from Russia win public tenders and bring their employees to the peninsula, thus lowering the locals’ chances of finding work.

They were open and critical, but when we asked would they like to return to Ukraine, their opinions differed. During our discussion, a young Tatar woman burst into laughter, looking at the men: “Mainly, you don’t like that under the Russians you have to prepare budgets, write bills and pay taxes, which was unusual under Ukrainian rule …”

We sat with locals I a beautiful rustic restaurant. At the table beside us, the waiter was pouring wine into the “stakany” (Russian for “glasses”) of some ten men. The Tatars are Muslim, and alcohol is not sold in restaurants. But you can bring your own, and the waiter will readily get glasses for you. Before the enjoyment began, the men stood up and shouted three times “Ura, ura, ura Rossya!” Two of the clinked glasses with tea, so they clearly were Tartans, but they joined in the praise of Russia.

Visiting Sevastopol

Disappointed that we did not find in Tatar Bakhchysary any anti-Russian opposition, we headed for Sevastopol. Statues and memorial plaques remind the visitor at almost every step of the heroism of the defenders of this city: some commemorate the Crimean war, that is, the alliance of the Ottomans, British and French against Russia. But the majority of the war memorials are dedicated to WWII.

Had we not visited this city, we would not have understood why the Russians will never give up Sebastopol and the Crimea. In the battle for the city’s liberation from the Nazis, 170,000 Soviet soldiers died and 40,000 were wounded. Had US diplomat Victoria Nuland visited Sebastopol before she started to organize the Maidan in Kiew, she could have saved herself, her country, but above all, the Ukrainians and Russians, enormous problems.

We continues our journey to the gulf of Balaklava, where we were shown the strategic base of the Soviet submarine fleet, which Russia now plans to renew and enlarge. We walked into those almost forgotten little streets in the hope of finding at least a piece of paper torn from an anti-Russian flyer, or perhaps graffiti with anti-Russian or anti-Putin slogans. Again, there was nothing.

Chekhov’s Yalta – Potemkin villages?

From Sebastopol, where Tolstoy turned from a soldier into the most famous Russian writer of all, we continued to Chekhov’s Yalta, which looked like the French Riviera. Here, the ailing Chekhov wrote his famous “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard”. To sit in Chekhov’s house, in the shade of the trees, most of which he planted himself, was one of the most memorable experiences of my trip to Crimea.

I observed people in restaurants, cafés, and on the beach; I had discussions with them. They were relaxing, eating, drinking and at night, they were dancing and singing in bars, but also on the boulevards, where bands were playing, circus artists performing, and tarot cards being read.

It crossed my mind that all these people who were having a good time and laughing might be specially trained Russian agents, who were performing theatre like the famous Prince Potemkin, who had shown Tsarin Catherine the Great the Façades of beautiful buildings, which, looked at from the rear, were merely wooden constructions, like stage scenery.

That’s why I, to make sure, walked around all these dozens of not yet finished luxury hotels, swimming pools, apartment houses and athletic grounds – they were real. So were the bulldozers and cranes. This made me cease to believe the picture of the unhappy Crimeans under occupation. We stopped at the former Tsarist palace of Livadia, where in February 1945 Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt decided about the fate of the world.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian tourists

From Yalta we continued along the coast to Alushta, and everywhere, we got the same impression. The occupied Crimeans, instead of organizing anti-Russian resistance, were toasting themselves on the beaches. So, we left Alushta and headed north into the mountains, to avoid the suspicion that we were travelling only to the exposed southern part of the peninsula. What almost made me fall over were the Ukrainian tourists we met. Allegedly, more than one million tourists from Ukraine took holiday in Crimea last year.

We relocated to Feodosia, where, in my experience, a special and almost typical surprise awaited us in the historic Grand Hotel Astoria. On the square opposite the hotel, was a large statue of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, staring at the hotel with his sharp eyes; the square is named after him. The façade of the hotel was dominated by a relief dedicated to the visit of Yuri Gagarin; the second relief commemorated the first local meeting of the Bolshevik councils in 1919, and the third recalled 22 March 1920, when Anton Denikin, general of the tsarist White Guards, said goodbye to his troops and staff before leaving for exile. The beautiful café in the hotel is named after Denikin too. I asked at the reception was it not odd that the hotel located on the square that bears the name of the Bolshevik leader displays a plaque, dedicated to Denikin, the very dangerous enemy of the Bolsheviks. The receptionist smiled and said: “They were Russians, all this is our history …”

Memories of Soviets’ invasion of Czechoslovakia

My excitement peaked when we arrive in nearby Koktebel. I described in a chapter of my novel Zone of Jubilation how the famous writer Yevgenii Yevtushenko wrote here on 21 August 1968 a telegram to Brezhnev, in which he protested against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yevtushenko was then on a creative break. The area of the Russian Literary Fund then had twenty-eight houses; today, there is only one house left. But the post office of Koktebel surprised me: it is still the same as in August 1968, when Yevtushenko sent his telegram. When I showed the manager the Russian translation of the novel “Koktebel” and its chapter “Koktebel 1968”, she squealed with surprise and called the local editor, to whom I gave an interview. To imagine that I was in a place, through which in 1968 the history of the Soviet opposition against the invasion walked, filled me with emotion.

From the former house of Soviet Writers, I walked to the coast, to the White House of poet Max Voloshin; there, famous poets of the Russian Silver Age, such as Valery Briusov, Osip Mandelshtam, Nikolay Gumlyov, Marina Tsvetaeva and many more visited him. Alexander Kuprin, Ivan Bunin, Arkady Averchenk, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Paustovsky, Alexander Grin, Vladimier Nabokov, Boris Balter and many more also worked and lived in Crimea.

The Kerch Strait bridge

From Feodosia we travelled to Kerch to the hitherto biggest attraction of Crimea – the Kerch Strait bridge that connects the peninsula on the Russian mainland. The decision to build a bridge was taken not long after Kiew disconnected the Crimea in 2015 from energy and subsequently also from water supplies. Naturally, with this act, Ukraine did not gain the sympathy of her former citizens, about whom she did not care much in the past anyway; on this, Crimea’s Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars agreed. The Crimeans are also unanimous in describing 2015 as the hardest year. The Russians began to build the nineteen-kilometre bridge with four lanes in April 2015, and it was opened exactly three years later. The bridge consists of two parts: a part for car and bus traffic and a part for rail traffic, which is not yet finished.

According to the locals, the Crimean bridge is one of the most closely guarded civilian objects of the Russian Federation. The number of military vessels at the southern border convinced us of this statement. When a pretty policewoman waved me out at the checkpoint, demanding that I open the boot of my car, I shrugged my shoulders. “You don’t know how to open the boot?” “It’s a rental car, we are not Russian.” “And where are you from?” “Czechs and Slovaks.” With a smile, she waved us through, and we drove onto the bridge. On our way back, nobody checked on us. In Feodosia and also in Kerch, people were shopping or sitting on the boulevard, drinking coffee, the children skipping rope and the adults playing chess. These people under occupation began to get on my nerves. Instead of demonstrating their deep aversion to the occupiers, they are sitting on benches and licking ice cream, which is, on top of all that, Russian ice cream!

My last hope was the capital Simferopol. We headed west, criss-crossed the entire peninsula. The 250-kilometre long highway Tavrida is going to be opened next year. We drove basically through a 250 kilometre-long construction site. Upon arrival, I went, full of optimism, to one the city’s most significant historical monuments – the sepulchre of Grand Prince and Saint Alexander Nevsky, erected in the 19th century. In 1930, Stalin had it destroyed, and I was firmly convinced that the Crimeans never forgave the Russians for this. Very soon, however, I was almost bowled over. The sepulchre was restored to its former glory, and on a prominent billboard close by I read: “The construction of the sepulchre has been accomplished under the auspices of the president of the Russian federation Vladimir V. Putin.”

Never again the horrors of war

A nation that experienced war so brutally on its own territory does everything for these horrors never to repeat themselves. In WWII, the Germans killed a significant part of the male Russian reproductive population. It is understandable that the Russians remember, literally at every step, the horrors of the war. The Russians, British, French, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Italians, Serbs, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks, Dutch, Belgians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and further forty nations of the world survived the horrors of the war on their own territory. The Soviet Union had the largest number of victims of WWII: 25 million people, that is 14 % of the Soviet population. Proportionally, Poland suffered the largest loss of life with 5.6 million dead, that is, 16 % of the population; the figure includes 3 million Jewish victims of the holocaust. The USA had 418,500 fallen in WWII, which amount to 0.32 % of the US population.

No evidence whatsoever of anti-Russian activities

Our trip ended successfully, in spite of the fact that I found no evidence at all of anti-Russian activities in Crimea. For that, I apologize to the journalists of the mainstream media. In spite of everything I undertook on my trip, and all that had happened in Crimea in the last five years, we found not one individual who felt occupied. On the contrary, the Crimeans are grateful to the Russians that they did not allow a war to unfold on the peninsula, like in Luhansk and Donets. During my week in Crimea, I talked to more than thirty citizens: Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, highway workers, waiters, shop assistants, tourists, police officers, high-school teachers, journalists, pensioners, tourist guides, lifeguards on the beaches, guests at Crimea’s spas, cooks, soldiers, a wise old lady and finally also to an alcoholic, the only one I met on my trip. I did not deliberately select my conversation partners; I talked to everyone whom I met by chance. All expressed their contentment, some even happiness, about the fact that they now belong to Russia.

Thanking the USA for imposing sanctions…

The Tatar shop assistant was not against integration into Russia, but she was concerned with the lower number of foreign tourists coming to her café. I asked her if she thought that this was a result of Crimea’s integration into Russia or of the sanctions and, particularly, the completely negative and unfounded propaganda of foreign media about Crimea. She immediately explained that the Crimeans are very well aware of the negative propaganda, but the foreign print media are actually uniting them – not only the inhabitants of Crimea, but all citizens of the Russian Federation.

A Russian historian with whom I had a long discussion, expressed his gratitude to the Americans and their allies for imposing the sanctions: «In Russia, there are many conflicting political, societal, national and other currents. In every nation’s history, there is a proven principle that if you have a strong enemy at your gates, domestic differences are disregarded in favour of the country’s unity, and the country unified around its leader. That said, Washington and its satellites could have done nothing better for Vladimir V. Putin than to proclaim sanctions.”

Crimea is living her own life; it is quiet, peaceful and friendly there. I have kept asking myself why, during those five years since the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation, not one of our journalists of TV teams, working for the mass media, went to Crimea. They might not have the financial means to do so. That’s why I offered the report of my trip to Crimea to the four mainstream Slovak media. I am still waiting for their answer.

1 See https//opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1376; accessed 22 August 2019

Source: Moradi, Jabbar; Dall'Agnola, Jasmin (eds.). PC on Earth. The Beginnings of the Totalitarian Mindset. ibidem-Verlag 2020, p. 119–131. Reprinted with kind permission.
https://www.ibidem.eu/de/pc-on-earth-the-beginnings-of-the-totalitarian-mindset.html