Kimitaka Matsuzato. Demokratizatsiya. Volume 24, Issue 2, Spring 2016.
Considering the international impacts of the Crimean Crisis, the academic community’s almost complete ignorance of Crimea’s domestic politics during the last several years seems strange. After Crimea’s separatism in the early and middle 1990s declined, researchers ceased paying serious attention to its domestic politics. For example, The Crimea: Europe’s Next Flashpoint? by Taras Kuzio, published in November 2010, carefully analyzed the Kharkiv agreement between Ukraine and Russia (which extended the Russian navy’s use of Sevastopol in exchange for allegedly cheaper natural gas) in April 2010 and its aftermath. Yet this book has no mention of the Crimean Supreme Rada session held in March of the same year, which established Vladimir Konstantinov’s chairmanship, confirmed Vasily Dzharty’s premiership, and accordingly had great significance for the further history of Crimea. A rare exception are Andrew Wilson’s brief references to Dzharty and Anatoly Mogilev’s governments, described in 2013 in the context of the Crimean Tatar issue. Considering this research tradition, it is hardly surprising that researchers often regard the Crimean elite as no more than the Kremlin’s puppet, who performed their role according to a scenario written by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Disagreeing with this interpretation, this essay argues that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was in fact the result of interactions between the domestic politics of Crimea and the Kremlin’s intentions.
An outline of this essay is as follows. To make Crimea a bastion for his victory in the 2010 presidential election, Viktor Yanukovych dispatched to Crimea a group of Party of Regions (POR) leaders from the city of Makeevka (Makiivka in Ukrainian), which is next door to Donetsk. The Crimeans nicknamed them “Macedonians,” from “Makeevka” and “Donetsk,” ridiculing their colonialist desires. The Crimeans accepted the Macedonians’ leadership, as long as the latter secured Yanukovych’s victory in the presidential election in 2010 and subsequently pumped out abundant subsidies from his administration to develop Crimea. Nevertheless, cultural tensions persisted. In the eyes of the Macedonians, the Crimeans were lazy, corrupted, and patronistic. The Macedonians openly claimed that Crimea was the “Central Asia” of Ukraine. The radicalization of the Euromaidan Revolution brought to the surface this potential tension between the indigenous Crimean elites and the Macedonians. The Macedonians, headed by the Crimean prime minister Anatoly Mogilev, found it possible to cooperate with the newly born Euromaidan government that came to power after Yanukovych’s ouster. The indigenous Crimean elites categorically rejected this idea, fearing the export of violence from the Maidan to Crimea. They removed Mogilev from his post and asked Russia for help.
Crimean separatism is different from Donbass separatism. The Donetsk People’s Republic leaders and ideologues often explain that a culturally polarized Ukraine was a fragile state from the beginning and that when political actors lost the spirit of compromise, it inevitably collapsed. In contrast, the Crimeans tend to maintain that the violence released by the Euromaidan Revolution terrified Crimea and Donbass, which saw no alternative but to escape from Ukraine (a situational interpretation). It is paradoxical that the Donbass ideologues’ view is more primordial than that of the Crimeans, to whom the standard Ukrainian culture was more alien than to the Donbass population. Indeed, having interviewed a number of Crimean politicians and ideologues since 2013, I never heard Eurasianist rhetoric from them, in contrast to DPR leaders’ commitment to this ideology (as described in fn. 6 and also by Marlene Laruelle). What is also impressive is that the discursive richness around Crimea’s territorial status and identity, which Gwendolyn Sasse analyzed in her monograph, played no role in the political struggles in Crimea from December 2013 to March 2014, in contrast to Crimean politics in the first half of the 1990s. The whole debate converged around the single issue of the impending violence and efforts to avoid it. Crimea in 2014 was different not only from Donbass in the same year, but also from Crimea itself in 1994-95.
My ability to collect information for this essay suffered from the elimination in autumn 2015 of the Crimea Supreme Rada (Soviet) web page, which was essential for understanding the intra-elite discussion in Crimea during the fateful months of late 2013 and early 2014. The newly created site of the Crimean State Soviet of Russia publicizes only resolutions and speeches after Crimea’s annexation to Russia, while the Ukrainian archive site of the Crimean Supreme Rada, based in Kyiv, covers only deputies’ decisions and speeches until 2010. Descriptions in this essay, based on the former Crimean Supreme Rada’s homepage, sometimes lack sources because they have disappeared after I had noted them down or quoted them in other essays. Fortunate events for this essay were the publication of an interview with Rustam Temirgaliev in March 20159 and a book by Mikhail Zygar’, the main editor of Russia’s oppositionist TV channel Dozhd’. Temirgaliev, a Volga Tatar born in Ulan-Ude, served as vice prime minister of Crimea from 2013 and was removed from the post on June 11, 2014. His interview reveals that the Crimean indigenous elites tried to involve Moscow in Crimean (Ukraine’s regional) politics in their resistance to the Macedonians even before the crisis in 2013-14. This interview also suggests the power of the Yanukovych myth; even in January 2014, both the Kremlin and the Crimean indigenous elites believed that only if Yanukovych resolutely ordered action, protestors in the Maidan would be wiped out. When they began to notice that Yanukovych was unexpectedly weak, the catastrophe on February 22, 2014 was not far off. Based on internal information, Zygar’ describes that Putin and his closest aides made the decision to annex Crimea immediately after Yanukovych was ousted from power on February 22. Both sources suggest that we should distinguish Russia’s integrated Crimean policy after February 22 from hypothetical simulations and personal proposals that various Crimean and Russian actors made before that date.
Crimea Before 2009
Multiethnic Crimea had a tradition of consociational democracy. Irrespective of election results, each group received a fixed number of public offices and budgetary support. In general, this type of regime is beneficial for interethnic peace, but often disadvantages the bold leadership necessary to transform society. Having lost a large and reliable source of tourists after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Crimea needed to modernize its hospitality industry and prolong the tourist season by developing facilities for winter sports and hunting. Russia hosted the Sochi Olympic Games to achieve this goal in the eastern rim of the Black Sea. It was useless to anticipate a similar initiative from the inactive Crimean elites. Until recently, Crimea did not have a sewage treatment plant and raw sewage was dumped directly into the Black Sea, though nothing was more important than hygienic water for this resort region.
During the second half of the 1990s, the Communist Party of Ukraine under the leadership of Leonid Grach was the most influential political force in Crimea. Yet in the Ukrainian parliamentary elections held in March 2002, which was a “primary” for the 2004 presidential election, the POR, which had been no more than a regional party of Donetsk, began to operate nationwide and terminated the Communist dominance in Crimea. As a result of the Crimean parliamentary elections held simultaneously with the Ukrainian parliamentary elections, the pro-Kuchma electoral bloc For United Ukraine (the main force of which was the POR) gained 39 of the 100 seats, while the Communist Party gained only twenty. Consequently, the post of parliamentary chair was passed from the Communists (Grach) to the POR (Boris Deich). However, the POR’s hegemony was a result of the absorption of the indigenous Crimean elites into this party and, therefore, Crimea’s consociational democracy grew stronger. Both the defeated Communists and the Mejlis (Crimean Tatars’ organization), which had been excluded from the Communist government of Crimea during the 1990s, gained ministerial posts.
After his victory in the presidential elections of 2005, President Viktor Yushchenko deprived the Crimeans of the privilege of using Russian in administrative and judicial procedures. Forced to hire expensive interpreters in court, enraged Russophone Crimeans began to support Yanukovych and the POR even more firmly. At the same time, the continuation of incompetent consociational democracy in Crimea irritated the population, who began to split their preferences in national and regional elections. In the parliamentary elections of 2006, the POR gained 58 percent of Crimea’s eligible vote, while in elections to the Crimean Supreme Rada (regional parliament) held on the same day, the Yanukovych bloc (an alliance of the POR and the Russian Bloc, that is, an ethnic Russian party) gained only 33 percent of the vote and 44 of the 100 available seats. The remainder of the vote was distributed among the Crimean Tatars, the Tymoshenko Bloc, the Communist Party, and other relevant forces almost equally.
During Yushchenko’s presidency, Crimea’s regional clientelism continued to be incorporated into the POR. This party’s curator for Crimea, Anton Prigodsky, who was Renat Akhmetov’s business partner, had close relations with Crimea’s most influential regional clan, headed by Supreme Rada deputy Aleksandr Mel’nik and Anatoly P. Gritsenko (chairman of the Crimean Supreme Rada in 2006-2010). Prigodsky himself treated Crimea as his personal colony, for example, by purchasing an expensive piece of land on the peninsula’s southern shore to build a luxury golf course. Thus, although serving as the ruling party in Crimea since 2002 at least nominally, the POR had not been able to develop tourism, attract domestic and foreign investments, or emancipate resort and real estate businesses from criminal domination. Inter-clan struggles transformed into POR intra-party struggles. In September 2009, Vasily Kiselev, the nominal leader of this party organization in Crimea, resigned the post and denounced Yanukovych for giving Crimea to criminals. Kiselev added that he was constantly under threat of assassination from the Mel’nikGritsenko group. Facing this situation, seven deputies belonging to the Russian Bloc in the Crimean Supreme Rada broke its coalition with the POR. Thus, Crimea became a “suitcase without a grip” for Yanukovych; the peninsula was too inconvenient to carry, but too valuable to abandon. Yanukovych found it impossible to continue to entrust the Crimean POR organization to an oligarch, Prigodsky, and appointed Vasily Dzharty to this post in April 2009. Dzharty was the vice-commander of Yanukovych’s national electoral team, a fact demonstrating how important Crimea was for Yanukovych.
Liquidation of Consociational Democracy in Crimea
Dzharty was born in the countryside of Donetsk (then Stalino) Oblast in 1958 and began to work at a factory when he was seventeen years old. After graduating the Donetsk Polytechnic Institute in 1981, he ran a business in Makeevka City. He became its mayor in 2000, and in 2002, vice-governor of Donetsk Oblast.
After being appointed the curator of the regional electoral headquarters of Crimea, Dzharty did not hide his disdain for Crimea’s indigenous elites. He remarked: “Unfortunately, in Crimea, the POR is associated with the incumbent authorities, the present leadership of Crimea. As a result, people attribute the negative images that they have accumulated to the POR. Had I had the will yesterday, I would have changed the situation. Today, I cannot do it because of the presidential election campaign.” To build an effective government, Dzharty started to liquidate the consociational democracy of Crimea. When the Russian Bloc dissolved its electoral coalition with the POR, he remarked that the coalition with this ethnic Russian party was erroneous from the beginning because it was nothing but a burden (giri) for the POR.
After the 2010 presidential election, even Dzharty’s opponents in Crimea did not doubt that he would become at least deputy prime minister of Ukraine because of his contribution to Yanukovych’s victory. Instead Yanukovych recommended Dzharty to the Crimean parliament as Crimean prime minister. This humiliation made Dzharty a more convinced reformer of Crimea; he wanted to prove that Yanukovych had made a mistake in cadre policy and also to become a truly nationwide leader by transforming the peninsula into “Ukraine’s Pearl.” In my view, Yanukovych was testing a new method of gubernatorial appointments. As was exemplified by Dzharty himself, the POR, being in opposition during 2005-2010, devised a system of regional electoral curators. After his victory, Yanukovych appointed some of them as governors. These people, such as Dzharty and Eduard Matviichuk of Odesa, were not necessarily local. Nevertheless, they were already familiar with the region’s political situation, had built normal relations with the regional elites, and were known among the population. In other words, Yanukovych tried to create a shadow cabinet at the regional level, seeking to overcome Ukraine’s notorious localism in gubernatorial nominations.
Dzharty reentered Simferopol with about fifteen subordinates, with whom he had worked since the Makeevka period. Chief among them was Pavel Burlakov (b. 1963), an efficient administrator and professional election organizer. After his service in the Komsomol and a post-communist youth organization, during 1995-2000 Burlakov worked as the local representative of the Liberal Party of Ukraine (then Donetsk governor Vladimir Shcherban’s party) in Makeevka City, where he became acquainted with Dzharty. Burlakov shifted to the POR when it absorbed the LPU. At approximately the same time, Burlakov had become Dzharty’s everlasting deputy, serving as Makeevka vice-mayor in charge of raising the effectiveness of the city’s executive branch (2000-2002) and then as consultant to Donetsk vice-governor Dzharty (2002-2005). After 2010, he assisted Dzharty as vice prime minister and later minister of regional development and public service of Crimea. Burlakov was the main organizer of the Crimean Rada elections in 2010, which drastically changed Crimea’s elite constellation. As a merciless organizer, he personified the Macedonians and therefore became a focus of the Crimeans’ hatred. Dzharty’s “fifteen” tried to cooperate with indigenous Crimean public officials, but if they found them incompetent, they replaced them with new officers invited from elsewhere, mainly Donetsk Oblast. An extreme example, to which the humiliated Crimeans like to refer, is the replacement of a cemetery manager by a Donetsk man. Yet this example has the opposite connotation; in contrast to the Donetsk people, the Crimeans did not know that cemeteries could make a huge profit if they were managed in the proper manner.
On March 17, 2010, the Supreme Rada of Crimea elected Vladimir Konstantinov (who was to lead Crimea to Russia four years later) as its chairperson and confirmed Yanukovych’s nomination of Dzharty as Crimea’s prime minister. In requesting parliamentary confirmation, Dzharty introduced himself as an ethnic Greek and said therefore that he understood the issue of the Crimean Tatars’ deportation. Dzharty declared that he would cut the number of deputy prime ministers, which had reached nine. This hypertrophy was the result of Crimea’s consociational democracy, under which each influential deputy group had “its own” deputy prime minister and ministerial post(s), while the professional quality of ministerial candidates was rarely questioned. At this moment (March 2010), the POR was still a minority in the Crimean parliament, so Dzharty needed to compromise. He cut the number of deputy premier posts from nine to seven and included two Macedonians in them, while the MejlisRukh coalition and two ethnic Russian deputy groups continued to hold their “reserved seats.” Real government reform became possible only after the Crimean Supreme Rada elections established an overwhelming majority for the POR in October 2010. In 2013, after Dzharty had passed on, the number of Crimean deputy prime ministers had slimmed to five.
After becoming prime minister, Dzharty created the Expert-Analytic Council, inviting local political scientists, sociologists, and other social scientists to become members. Dzharty attended meetings of this Council and adopted the advice of experts to correct his own policies. Paradoxically, in 2014, this Council headed by Aleksandr Formanchuk would become a powerful machine promoting Crimea’s unification with Russia. Dzharty promised Yanukovych to make Crimea a donor region by 2014, and pumped out a huge amount of subsidies for the peninsula. Dzharty restored public transportation and connected Simferopol and Yalta by trolleybus. Yanukovych often visited Crimea, even praising the peninsula as being “Ukraine’s Pearl.” For the first time since Ukraine’s independence, the Crimeans felt that Crimea had become the country leadership’s favorite region, released from the government’s constant suspicion of separatism.
The October 30, 2010 elections to the Crimean Supreme Rada terminated consociational democracy in Crimea. These revised electoral law called for parallel voting, with 50 deputies elected by party lists, while 50 were elected via majoritarian districts, so the nomination of POR candidates for the 50 districts and the order of candidates on the party’s list was of vital significance. Dzharty and Burlakov controlled this process completely. Elena Semichastnaya, then Crimean minister of social policy and Dzharty’s close subordinate, claims that from March to October 2010, they worked sixteen hours every day. The parliamentary elections ceased to be a passive confirmation of the existing elite constellation, though there were no public protests organized by the incumbent parliamentarians who had lost the POR’s favor. As a result of the elections, the POR increased its parliamentary representation from 44 to 81 seats. Even more impressively, the Macedonians radically reshuffled the POR deputies; among the 44 POR deputies of the previous Crimean Supreme Rada, only 15 (34 percent) were reelected. The party’s signboard continued to be the same, but its contents changed radically.
After the elections, Dzharty left for Germany, where he was hospitalized for two months. By the time the notoriously poor post-Soviet medical system diagnosed the source of his ill health, it was too late. A rumor persists in Simferopol that a group of local elites made a last-ditch attempt to overturn the new political configuration when they learned that Dzharty was incurably ill. According to this rumor, the anti-corruption campaign in the first half of 2011 was Dzharty’s last struggle against this fronde. Dzharty died on August 17, 2011, at the age of fifty-three. Yanukovych could not nominate the next prime minister of Crimea for three months. Temirgaliev even calls this period “Crimea’s Renaissance.” The indigenous Crimean elites lobbied Yanukovych to appoint Konstantinov as Dzharty’s successor, while the Macedonians expected Burlakov, Dzharty’s right hand man, to be nominated as prime minister. On November 8, 2011, Yanukovych betrayed both expectations, but chose one of the Macedonians, Anatoly Mogilev, then minister of internal affairs of Ukraine, to fill this post. According to Temirgaliev, this was the moment when the disappointed Crimean indigenous elites began to look for “other options.”
Born in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka in 1955, Mogilev started his professional life as a rural teacher in Crimea. In 1982, Mogilev began to work in the police in Donetsk Oblast and served as head of the Makeevka Office of Internal Affairs from 2000 to 2005, during which time he began to work with Dzharty. In 2009-10, Mogilev headed Yanukovych’s electoral headquarters in Crimea. Mogilev succeeded Dzharty in a difficult situation. The population’s euphoria caused by Yanukovych’s victory had ended, and he could not receive the abundant subsidies that Dzharty had received from Kyiv. Mogilev softened Dzharty’s policy by firing a few non-local ministers who had proved incompetent. A result of this softening cadre policy was the appointment of Rustam Temirgaliev as deputy prime minister in charge of economic affairs, a position that had been occupied by Macedonians since 2010. According to Temirgaliev, Moscow “politely asked” Mogilev to appoint him to this post. Mogilev recruited more local representatives as POR candidates for the 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary elections than Dzharty had in the 2010 Crimean parliamentary elections.
It remains arguable to what extent the Macedonians had been Crimeanized during 2009-13. When I conducted fieldwork in Crimea in August 2013, half a year prior to the crisis, all the interviewees from the indigenous elites had reconciled themselves to the Macedonians’ hegemony because of their strong administrative performance and demonstrative goodwill to be assimilated into Crimea. Revolutions often change people’s memory; revolutionalized actors suddenly find it unbelievable that they had accepted the reality until the recent past. Crimea does not have an indigenous nationality except for the Crimean Tatars; all the others are more or less newcomers. Crimea has strong assimilative power, being a region in which industrial or military veterans from across the entire USSR, from Kamchatka to L’viv, readily made their final homes. I find Temirgaliev’s testimony somewhat retrospective, and would not deny the possibility that the Macedonians could have become “true” Crimeans had Ukraine been blessed with ten more years of peace.
Liquidation of Consociational Democracy in Nationality Politics
In October 1921, the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR announced the establishment of the Crimean ASSR. This autonomous republic was exceptional among the ASSRs in the Soviet Union, since it did not have an explicitly declared titular nationality; according to Sasse, the Crimean Tatars were not officially been defined as Crimea’s titular nation until the abolition of the ASSR. In 1944, the Soviet authorities deported the Crimean Tatars and several North Caucasian nationalities to Central Asia, alleging that they had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. In 1945, the Soviet authorities abolished the Crimean ASSR and downgraded the region to an oblast. A regional referendum held on January 21, 1991, restored Crimea’s republic status “within the USSR” (not within the Ukrainian SSR). The restoration of republic status was the regional Communist Party of the Soviet Union leadership’s attempt not only to “contain the uncertainty over the region’s future within an independent Ukrainian state,” but also to preempt the Crimean Tatars’ demand to make them a titular nation of the new autonomous republic.
The Soviet authorities rehabilitated the deported nationalities from the North Caucasus and allowed them to return to their homelands during Khrushchev’s era. This benevolence was not extended to the Crimean Tatars. Though the Soviet authorities rehabilitated the Crimean Tatars in 1967, the USSR Council of Ministers approved their resettlement program (that is, a return to Crimea) only in August 1991. Earlier, in 1989, seeing the Soviet regime weakening, the Crimean Tatars began to return to Crimea in an unauthorized manner. Independent Ukraine was too poor to offer them legitimate financial support and the Crimean Tatars restarted their life in their historical homeland under their own initiative, from scratch. They built settlements, national schools, theaters, libraries, and museums. In 2001, their demographic weight in Crimea was about 10 percent (245,000 of the 2.5 million). Because of their high birth rate, their population today may have surpassed 300,000.
In June 1991, the Second Kurultai (convention) of the Crimean Tatars established what they called a system of national self-government, with the Mejlis as its executive organ. This institutional innovation was a compensatory measure to counterbalance the unrealized ethnoterritorial autonomy of the Crimean Tatars. In other words, the Mejlis was a protogovernment around which a future Crimean Tatar Republic was to be created. The Mejlis chairman was Mustafa Dzhemilev (b. 1943) from 1991 until 2013, when he passed the chairmanship to Refat Chubarov. To stand against the overwhelming Russophone majority of Crimea, the Mejlis’s natural ally was the Ukrainian national democrats. Dzhemilev was a friend of late V’yacheslav Chornovil, the founder of the Rukh movement. They shared the experience of spending more than 15 years in Soviet prisons. In the Ukrainian era, many Crimean Tatars regarded the Mejlis’s close alliance with the national democrats, including its support for Ukraine’s NATO accession, as excessively politicized behavior for an organization identifying itself as an ethnic self-government. In 1995, the Crimean Tatars restored the Muftiate (Muslim Spiritual Board) of Crimea with the help of Turkey’s Diyanet (Presidency of Religious Affairs). The Turks and Crimean Tatars share not only the Hanafi School of Law, but also Al–Maturidi’s theology. Linguistically, they can understand each other without an interpreter. In 2015, about 340 Muslim communities were functioning and the Muftiate had established five madrasahs in Crimea.
Crimean Prime Minister Dzharty needed to handle three conflictive issues with the Crimean Tatars: occupation of land by the Crimean Tatars, building a Friday mosque in the center of Simferopol, and the Mejlis’s representability. As for the first issue, the Crimean Tatars who had not been provided with sufficient land began to occupy land plots in the mid-2000s, built small cubes (which they called houses) using stones and bricks along the picturesque highways of Crimea, for example, between Simferopol and Yalta. The Crimean Tatars called these landscape scenes “fields of protest.” Foreign investors hate terrorism and ethnic conflicts; after seeing these landscapes, no one would want to invest in Crimea.
In regard to the third issue, the Mejlis did not have legal status in Ukraine because it refused to register as a social organization. The main reason for this was that, as explained above, the Mejlis regarded itself as a protogovernment of a coming ethnoterritorial statehood. Yet it is arguable how seriously the Mejlis leaders continued to believe in their organization’s fundamental cause when more than twenty years had passed after both the Crimean Republic and the Mejlis were born. In August 2013, Chubarov explained to me that had the Mejlis registered itself as a social organization, the authorities could have created the second national representative organ of the Crimean Tatars anytime they wanted, as happened to ethnic Russian organizations. Despite the Mejlis’s lack of a legal status, on May 18, 1999, President Kuchma issued a decree on the Council of Representatives of the Crimean Tatars under the president of Ukraine. From then until 2010, the Mejlis monopolized the right to recommend members of this Presidential Council. Thus, the Mejlis de facto enjoyed the status of a public law (not social) organization.
In the first round of the 2010 presidential election, the Mejlis did not support any candidate. In the second round, though Yanukovych had asked for the Mejlis’s support, the Mejlis backed Yulia Tymoshenko. On the eve of the session of the Crimean Supreme Rada on March 17, 2010, the POR asked the Mejlis to cast their vote to confirm Dzharty’s premiership. The Mejlis again refused. On May 14, 2010, Yanukovych, Dzharty, Dzhemilev, and Chubarov had a serious talk. Yanukovych asked Dzhemilev and Chubarov to join the POR faction in the Crimean parliament. Dzhemilev and Chubarov answered that they should be sincere in their appeal to vote for Tymoshenko in the presidential election, and they did not agree with the POR on many issues, concerning Ukraine’s NATO accession, relations with Russia, and the fate of Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet. In retaliation, Yanukovych changed the procedure for forming the Presidential Council of Crimean Tatars. He appointed eleven Council members from among the Crimean Tatars who opposed the Mejlis, while appointing nine from the Mejlis. The Mejlis subsequently boycotted the Presidential Council, which indeed ceased to function. In contrast to the Mejlis’s conflict with the Yanukovych administration, at the regional level, Dzharty often cooperated with the Mejlis in regard to the Simferopol Friday mosque and land occupation issues to an extent that irritated the Slavic population.
Prime minister since 2011, Mogilev, was a person who had mercilessly cracked down on the Crimean Tatars’ illegal bazars during his previous police service. He even said that the Crimean Tatars’ deportation had not been as serious as was claimed. The appointment of Mogilev as premier post worried the Crimean Tatars, but Mogilev quickly soothed their apprehensions by holding a talk with Dzhemilev. Dzhemilev’s birthday happened to be close, so President Yanukovych sent him a congratulatory telegram for assisting Mogilev’s appeasement. The telegram was bejeweled with praises of Dzhemilev’s contribution to Ukrainian statehood and a prayer for his health. A local newspaper ridiculed the president’s flattery: “The henchmen of Yanukovych seem to suddenly comprehend that the only organizational force in Crimea that is capable of resisting them is the Mejlis.”
By rejecting consociational democracy, Dzharty and Mogilev seem to have improved the Crimean Tatars’ situation. Under a consociational democracy, the Crimean Tatars could automatically share a portion of power at both the national and regional levels. Yet this did not guarantee a solution to their problems because, under a consociational democracy, the Slavic population’s sentiments were to be considered as well. For Dzharty and Mogilev, a balance between various groups of the population was not a goal by itself. They just tried to solve the concrete problems that the Crimean Tatars faced in creating a favorable investment climate for the peninsula. If necessary, they thundered out the Slavic population’s complaints, as was shown in the mosque issue. In contrast, Yanukovych’s Mejlis policy constantly zigzagged between provocation of the Mejlis by raising an anti-Mejlis opposition within the Crimean Tatars and appeasement of the existing Mejlis leadership. Often left high and dry by Yanukovych, the anti-Mejlis opposition lost faith in him.
In contrast to the Mejlis, which enjoyed respect or at least awe among the Crimean Tatars, ethnic Russian parties, which were being torn apart, ran into difficulties as the POR established its hegemony in Crimea. Ethnic Russian parties shared the same electorate with the POR, which therefore regarded the former as rivals and mercilessly repressed them. After Yanukovych’s victory, the POR authorities rarely permitted meetings of ethnic Russian parties and were quite hesitant in giving them the right to participate in elections. In August 2013, an ideologue of the ethnic Russian movement told me that if the Sevastopol authorities under Yushchenko accepted half of the requests for the ethnic Russian movement’s protest actions, then under Yanukovych, the probability of being granted permission diminished to 10 percent. He added that this hopeless situation for the ethnic Russian parties in Eastern Ukraine could possibly change only when the power balance between Eastern and Western Ukraine changed.
On August 30, 2013, Sergei Aksenov, the leader of Russia’s Unity Party, told me the opposite, optimistic perspective. According to him, ethnic Russian parties, which the mass media often described as being torn apart, were closer to social organizations than political parties. Thanks to the introduction of a full proportional electoral system to regional assemblies in 2006 and to the cancelation of the electoral coalition of the POR and the Russian Bloc in 2009, the ethnic Russians at last recognized the need to create a genuine Russian party. Aksenov grasped this chance to reposition himself from businessman to politician and created Russia’s Unity Party to participate in the regional parliamentary elections in October 2010. The Crimean Ministry of Justice under Yanukovych did its best to avoid registering Aksenov’s party as a participant in the elections.
Russia’s Unity Party overcame this repression only 40 days before the election. Aksenov said that his party gained as many as three seats in the Crimean parliament under this disadvantageous situation, which demonstrated how ethnic Russians yearned for a genuine Russian party. The future Crimean prime minister, who would guide Crimea to Russia half a year later, told me that it was useless to chat about the romantic dream of Crimea’s reunification with Russia. What was necessary was to defend the Russophone population’s concrete human rights. The POR repeated Kuchma’s methodology; it won by promising to improve relations with Russia and to make Russian the second state language of Ukraine. Yet the Yanukovych administration was working hard for Ukraine’s EU accession and both Yanukovych and Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov preferred to talk in Ukrainian in their appearances in the mass media. The Crimeans were disappointed with the POR and sought a genuine Russian party. According to Aksenov, his “rating” among Crimean politicians was third after the prime minister (Mogilev) and the parliamentary chair (Konstantinov). In the 2010 Crimean parliamentary elections, his “recognition rate” had been 10 percent, but by the time I interviewed him in August 2013, it had skyrocketed to 70 percent.
Thus, rejection of consociational democracy vis-à-vis ethnic Russian parties apparently endangered the latter. Yet had this rejection made ethnic Russian parties independent from the POR and intensified political competition, it could have benefited the ethnic Russian movement in the long run. In fact, the liquidation of consociational democracy helped Russia’s Unity Party become the most active ethnic Russian party, which would have great significance in the “Crimean Spring.”
The Euromaidan Revolution and Crimea
Differing perceptions of the protest movement in Kyiv brought to the surface the potential tension between the Macedonians and indigenous Crimean elites. On December 2, 2013, the Crimean Supreme Rada requested that President Yanukovych declare a state of emergency to restore order in Ukraine. After this plenary session, Konstantinov was invited to Moscow, where he met Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Federation Security Council. Already then Konstantinov told Patrushev that, in case of subversion of the Yanukovych administration, the Crimean leadership will be ready to “leave [Ukraine] for Russia.” Patrushev was “pleasantly surprised.” Returning to Crimea, Konstantinov became even bolder and began to accuse the Euromaidan movement of Banderovshchina, fascism, and neo-Nazism, and requested the adoption of an emergency law to prohibit its activities.
In January 2014, a “Stop Maidan” movement developed among the Crimean youth, while both the Crimean Supreme Rada and social organizations (such as Aksenov’s) began to organize vigilante groups. On January 22, 2014, the Crimean Supreme Rada denounced the political developments in Kyiv; some deputies even proposed Crimea’s self-determination—a request unheard in Crimean parliament for more than fifteen years. Konstantinov turned down this proposal as a “fantasy” and “provocation” and underscored that Ukraine’s territorial integrity had never been more important. On February 2, the Presidium of the Supreme Rada adopted a resolution to strengthen Crimea’s autonomy to defend it from the Euromaidan’s violence.
In late January, Konstantinov visited Moscow again and actively contacted federal parliamentarians and Russia’s regional leaders, such as the governors of Krasnodar (with whom Crimea was cooperating to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait) and St. Petersburg, and appeared on television. With his provincial and unsophisticated speech, Konstantinov, a builder by profession, had suddenly become a favorite in Russia’s political circles and mass media. In late January and early February 2014, the Kremlin twice tried to contact Prime Minister Mogilev, too. The first attempt was the visit of a delegation including Dmitry Sablin, a member of the Russian Federation Council Defense Security Committee, Konstantin Malofeev, a rich entrepreneur and Russian Orthodox philanthropist, and several Russian Orthodox Church officers, bringing the Gifts of the Magi from Old Athos to Crimea. It is strange if people of this rank represented the Kremlin, but Temirgaliev felt that some “center of management” was standing behind them. Since Mogilev refused to meet the Russian guests, Konstantinov and Temirgaliev dealt with them. Temirgaliev asked Sablin what the Crimeans should do if Kyiv descended into utter chaos. Sablin answered that it was necessary to think about the independence or absolute autonomy of Crimea. Temirgaliev added a question: in this case, how would 20,000 Ukrainian troops stationed in Crimea behave? Konstantinov made a surprise appearance during this conversation. After this event, the Kremlin sent Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s aide, to Simferopol. This time, Mogilev could not refuse to accept the guest, but their conversation was disappointing for both. On about February 10, Konstantinov, Temirgaliev, and Aksenov came to the conclusion that there was no other way but to remove the “Donetsk government.” Without realizing it, the three politicians composed a troika, which would guide the “Crimean Spring” further.
Born in Russia, Mogilev stood against Ukraine’s integration into Europe, but, according to Elena Semichastnaya, who served both Dzharty and Mogilev as minister of social welfare of Crimea, being pro-Russia is one thing, while betraying his own oath to the Ukrainian state is another. An adventurous love of a foreign state at a time of Ukraine’s extreme hardship did not fit the mentality of Mogilev, who was a professional police bureaucrat and convinced statist. We should not be too hasty, because of these dodgy dealings, to think that the Kremlin already had a scenario of what it would later do. Besides the effect of the Yanukovych myth described in the introduction, the Kremlin had only vague knowledge of Crimean politics even in February.
During February 18-20, the Maidan saw a series of violent acts, starting with the “Peaceful March” on February 18 and ending with the “Snipers’ Massacre” on February 20. In addition, the Crimeans suffered the Korsun Pogrom on February 20-21. These three experiences made various ideas to defend Crimea converge on a single plan, which the Kremlin would join after February 22. Three police officers from Crimea were killed as a result of the “Peaceful March.” Stop Maidan activists placed three signboards with the victims’ photographs in Lenin (central) Square of Simferopol. Before long, flowers delivered by citizens lay in heaps in front of these signboards. This was a spontaneous display of popular emotion, which neither the Crimean leaders nor the Stop Maidan activists anticipated. Temirgaliev attended one of the funerals of these police officers. He saw an enormous number of attendees shedding tears, asking, “Why on earth did this happen?” The Crimeans turned to the offensive and Temirgaliev became sure that “the Crimeans are ready, and anything is achievable.”
On February 19, the day following the “Peaceful March,” the Crimean Supreme Rada held an extraordinary session. The session started by praying silently for the three deceased police officers. Representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Security Service of Ukraine in Crimea, present at the session, emphasized that nothing is more dangerous for Crimea than an attempt to cause interethnic and interreligious antagonism. Chubarov declared that the Mejlis would adopt all possible measures to prevent provocation intended to involve the Crimean Tatar community in such antagonism. Yet after this decent remark, Chubarov provoked the deputies’ heckling by saying that law-enforcement organs’ use of weapons and special military devices against Euromaidan activists escalated the confrontation. Temirgaliev replied to Chubarov, saying: “The purpose of the ‘peaceful march’ was to seize the Supreme Rada of Ukraine, while ‘on the way’ they seized the POR office, beat party staff, two of whom to death… I think we do not have any illusion in that we are facing attempts towards the overt bloody seizure of power by unconstitutional methods.” Aksenov remarked that without adopting urgent judicial measures to restore constitutional order, the integrity of Ukraine would be endangered. A member of the Ukrainian Supreme Rada, elected in Crimea from the POR, proposed to raise the question of Crimea’s return to Russia unless Ukraine’s situation stabilized. Chairman Konstantinov “corrected” this proposal by saying that the Crimeans should do their best to defend the Yanukovych administration, because a real war was going on in Kyiv, which “we do not have any right to lose.” The session of the Crimean Supreme Rada confirmed a proposal to hold a referendum to strengthen Crimea’s autonomous status.
After mid-January, Crimea rotationally sent Stop Maidan activists to Kyiv. Since sniping started in and around the Maidan during the early morning of February 20, it was meaningless and dangerous for them to continue to stay in Kiev. About three hundred Crimeans split up and set off in eight buses for their homeland. In Korsun of Cherkasy Oblast, Right Sector and other Maidan activists stopped these buses and tortured the passengers for six hours. The Crimean side, according to accounts in Crimean Pravda newspaper, assumes that seven people were killed and about thirty were lost, though I have not found any identification of the victims provided by the Crimean side. A certain fact is that even by October 2015, we saw many videos on YouTube filmed proudly by Maidan activists to show this cruel incident: policemen stood by the event at a distance when the aggressors were shooting the buses. Passengers were forced to gather bits of broken bus windows by their own hands (to eat them if they wanted to survive, according to the Crimeans’ testimonies).
After the plenary session of the Crimean Supreme Rada on February 19, Konstantinov visited Moscow again and met State Duma Chair Sergei Naryshkin and Federation Council Chair Valentina Matvienko the next day. Perhaps he also met Kremlin leaders to work out a plan to replace Prime Minister Mogilev with someone else. However, as long as the Yanukovych administration existed, this scenario was no more than an option among those which the Kremlin was elaborating then. At midnight of February 22, Yanukovych forsook Kyiv for Kharkiv, where he was to convene a meeting of deputies of all levels of the Southeast and Crimea to repeat the scenario of 2004 to establish a Southeast Ukrainian Autonomous Republic. Mogilev and a number of Crimean deputies left the peninsula for Kharkiv in haste to participate in the convention, but the following day Yanukovych did not show himself in the city.
Putin spent the same, sleepless night in his dacha in Novo-Ogarevo (suburbs of Moscow) with his close aides, defense minister Sergei Shoigu, secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, head of FSB Aleksandr Bortnikov, and head of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov. Putin told his colleagues that the situation in Ukraine had developed in such a manner that urged them to “start the work for the return of Crimea to Russia,” because “we cannot leave the territory and the people to arbitrary fate, under the grinder of nationalists.” Despite the many years of talk, “there was no plan” to annex Crimea, so these leaders decided to “act according to the circumstances.” At the site (Crimea), defense minister Shoigu’s right hand, Oleg Belaventsev, bore responsibility for the operation. Visiting Crimea the next day, February 23, Belaventsev asked Leonid Grach, leader of the Crimean communists in the 1990s, to become the prime minister of Crimea. Surprisingly, this person who was 66 years old and who had left the Crimean political scene more than ten years previously, agreed to this proposal. Before long, both Belavenstev and Shoigu realized that Grach was a “village idiot” in Crimea and forgot about him. Crimean politicians and experts like to refer to the Grach episode as showing how ignorant the Kremlin was of Crimean domestic politics even at this stage.
At midnight of February 24, a delegation composed of four Russian State Duma deputies headed by Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, who served as chairman of the State Duma Committee on the CIS, Eurasian Integration, and Cooperation with Compatriots, visited Simferopol. An official purpose of this visit was to make it easier for Ukrainian citizens to obtain Russian citizenship, but I assume Slutsky participated in the selection of a candidate to replace Prime Minister Mogilev. When he was asked his opinion about the Russian parliamentarians’ visit in a press interview on February 25, Mogilev let his emotion out, which was rare for this person, and said:
I think any official contact with foreign diplomats belongs to the prerogative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. If someone tries to meet someone to talk about something, it goes beyond the legal sphere. So let it be an issue of their conscience. We have many hotheads, who are ready to “boil up” the situation in Crimea even more. Let’s stop playing with populist slogans. This may lead us to such conflicts that we will forget about the resort season for several years.
Mystery on February 26-27
For the Crimean Tatars, February 23, the day following Yanukovych’s escape, was a day of commemoration of Noman Chelebidzhikhan, who was their political leader and first mufti during the Russian Revolution and whom Bolshevik sailors killed on this date in 1918. For the other Crimean citizens, this was the Day of Defenders of the Fatherland (the former Founding Day of the Soviet Army). Both the Mejlis and the Slavic population held meetings in parallel in Lenin Square and in front of the Supreme Rada respectively. The Mejlis meeting requested that the Crimean government be transformed according to the spirit of the Euromaidan Revolution achieved on February 22. The two meetings did not yet conflict with each other. On the same February 23, a meeting with 20,000 participants in Sevastopol made Aleksei Chaly the “people’s governor.” In contrast to the Crimean Republic, Sevastopol’s movement was already targeting its return to Russia.
Almost simultaneously with Slutsky’s visit to Simferopol, in the late evening of February 24, Konstantinov suddenly convoked a session of the Crimean Supreme Rada on February 26. The next day, the Mejlis chairman Chubarov responded to Konstantinov by requesting that the session be postponed until the Mejlis prepared a policy package for transforming the Crimean government, based on the program adopted at their meeting on February 23. At the same time, Chubarov said he shared the position of strengthening Crimea’s autonomy. Konstantinov disagreed and repeatedly proposed to convene the session on February 26 to remove Prime Minister Mogilev. Chubarov said that he, legitimately regarded as Mogilev’s enemy number one in Crimea, agreed to the removal of Mogilev, but that it was meaningless to do so without elaborating how the next Crimean government would function. Konstantinov again refused Chubarov’s request. Konstantinov’s strange stubbornness began to make Chubarov doubt that Konstantinov intended to create a pro-Russian Crimean government to ask Putin for Russia’s military help.
We need serious research to identify with whom in Kyiv or overseas the Mejlis consulted when there was no government in Ukraine on February 23-26, but on February 26 the Mejlis mobilized several thousand activists to the front of the Crimean Rada building to have the session canceled. In contrast to the participants in the Mejlis meeting on February 23, representing various age and gender groups, the participants in this action on February 26 were dominantly tough-looking young men, demonstrating that they came not just for an ordinary meeting. In contrast, the Slavic side had only Aksenov’s vigilante group with about 2,000 members, while the other Slavic participants were women, children, and aged people who did not know what would happen further. At about 2 p.m., 4,000 – 5,000 activists came from Sevastopol to reinforce the Slavic side and the two factions became comparable. Both Chubarov and Aksenov tried to create and maintain a corridor between the Crimean Tatar and Slavic groups to prevent bloodshed, but the crowd became excited and went out of control. Konstantinov exclaimed, standing in front of the parliament building:
In the Crimean parliament [today’s session—K.M.], the agenda does not include the issue of Crimea’s separation from Ukraine. This is a provocation for the purpose of discrediting the Supreme Rada of the [Crimean] autonomy, depriving it of its legitimacy. Unfortunately, this provocation was organized and supported by the Crimean government, which is ready to sacrifice socialpolitical stability in the peninsula to keep its power. For them, this is strangers’ land. The Crimeans! Country folk! Crimea is our common home! Peace be in our home, in our hands!
Thus, after having governed Crimea successfully for five years, Mogilev and the Macedonians were condemned for their foreignness.
The truth is that the troika of Konstantinov, Temirgaliev, and Aksenov intended to put not only Mogilev’s removal, but also Crimea’s “possible” reunification with Russia to the vote at the session on February 26, but it was impossible to do so if they wanted to invite intimidated deputies into the parliamentary building. A Crimean Tatar centurion, who had moved from the Maidan to Simferopol, threatened in his negotiation with the troika that if they raised the issue of unification with Russia, there would be war. As late as 3 p.m., the session was lacking a quorum (fifty-one deputies). It is true that the deputies feared the Mejlis’s violence, but another reason was that Mogilev indeed enjoyed the deputies’ respect because of his administrative effectiveness, while Konstantinov’s method of replacing him appeared hasty and undemocratic. A number of deputies shut themselves in their MP offices to see which way the wind would blow. Chubarov tried to persuade Konstantinov to postpone the session, emphasizing that he could no longer control the crowd. Konstantinov rejected this request. Chubarov felt that Konstantinov, usually an infirm man, was acting not according to his own convictions, but because he had promised something to someone whom he feared. Konstantinov left the assembly hall for his office room on an upper floor, declaring an intermission of the session until four o’clock. Perhaps he did so to call Moscow. The Mejlis-Rukh deputies persuaded the deputies still staying in the assembly hall to leave, asking, “Do you want to adopt a decision that will overturn the world?” Before long, Konstantinov reappeared and declared the session called off for the lack of quorum. The description above is based on my interview with Chubarov on March 19, 2014, but Temirgaliev’s recollection says nothing about these talks among parliamentary leaders. According to his description, the Crimean Tatars just stormed into the building and parliamentary leaders found their lives endangered. Either way, the Mejlis activists went home with a feeling of triumph, though this was no more than a temporary victory.
Two Slavic citizens died in this conflict: one from a heart attack and another by being crushed to death. In the evening of February 26, the whole of Simferopol was thrown into panic. Many believed that interethnic massacre would soon begin and that the only way to be saved and to save one’s family was to drive to Kerch and pass the strait to escape to Russian Krasnodar. The Crimeans interpreted the Maidan forces in Kyiv as using the Crimean Tatars to keep Crimea under control and thus artificially provoked an interethnic conflict followed by casualties. This was the worst operation imaginable for multiethnic Crimea. Local political scientist Vladimir Dzharalla says that even if the Right Sector had sent a punishment corps to Simferopol, it could not have terrified the Crimeans to this extent. No wonder, the next day, when the Russian troops started a military operation, the Crimeans acclaimed it.
On the eve of February 26, the Crimean branch of the POR held a meeting, where Mogilev, branch leader, on the one hand, and Konstantinov and Temirgaliev, on the other, openly denounced each other. Oleg Belaventsev reported what happened in Simferopol to Putin. Possibly, Konstantinov himself talked to Putin by telephone. Even if Putin had the final voice, it is quite improbable that Putin decided to unfold Russian military forces to intervene in Crimea’s domestic politics unless Konstantinov gave his word that the Crimean leaders would be able to form a quorum of the parliament if their personal security was guaranteed. At about 2 a.m. on February 27, the Russian special corps, later ironically nicknamed “Little Green Men” because of their tall stature, occupied the buildings of the Supreme Rada and the Cabinet of Ministers. At 4 a.m. of that day, the head of the Crimean branch of the Ukrainian Security Service called Chubarov and warned him not to cause conflict with the unidentifiable people who had occupied the parliamentary building. The day dawned and the special corps allowed only deputies and parliamentary staff to enter the building. The corps refused Mogilev entry to the building of the Cabinet of Ministers. The Mejlis did not organize any protest action against this unannounced session of the Crimean Supreme Rada.
Fifty-three deputies attended the session of the Crimean Supreme Rada. When Konstantinov recommended Aksenov as a candidate for prime minister, Aleksandr Mel’nik, who had been rivaling Aksenov in business since the 1990s, alternatively proposed Viktor Plakida, representative of the Ukrainian president (Yanukovych) in Crimea since 2010. The troika talked in the next room to work out a single candidate. Konstantinov persuaded Temirgaliev by saying: “Now we need Che Guevara [Aksenov]. A manager [Temirgaliev] will be needed afterwards.” Aksenov won the election.
Mystery on March 6
The session of the Crimean Supreme Rada on February 27, which elected Aksenov as the prime minister of Crimea, adopted a resolution on May 26 to hold a referendum to ask whether to make Crimea’s relations with Ukraine a confederation. On March 3, the Presidium of the Crimean Supreme Rada decided to advance the date of the referendum to March 30, but the question to be asked remained the same. Even on this day, March 3, Konstantinov stated on TV that “we act exclusively within the limits of the Ukrainian Constitution and law.” It was no earlier than a press conference on March 4 that Putin suggested another possibility, by saying that the Crimeans should enjoy the same right to self-determination that the Kosovans had enjoyed. On March 6, a plenary session of the Crimean Supreme Rada drastically changed the questions of the referendum, requesting the Crimean citizens to choose whether to move to Russia or to stay in a federalized Ukraine. These circumspect steps even appear strange if we consider that Putin and his aides decided to annex Crimea on February 22-23. I assume that the Crimean leaders needed Russia’s firm guarantee that the Crimeans would not be left stranded as a decisive condition for changing the question of their referendum. Otherwise, Crimea might have followed the fate of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Donbass, and other unrecognized states. Secondly, the Crimeans needed to confirm whether the Russian government was ready to take on the financial burdens expected to follow its annexation of Crimea. This was a heated issue in Crimean TV debates before the referendum. Overall, Crimea needed to verify Russia’s readiness, but not the opposite. Indeed, the Crimean leaders began to look for a way to reunify with Russia much earlier than Putin agreed to it. Konstantinov disclosed this desire in his talk with Patrushev as early as December 2013 and some Crimean deputies requested Crimea’s self-determination in January 2014. The troika decided to remove Mogilev no later than February 10 and wanted to put Crimea’s reunification with Russia to a parliamentary vote on February 26. If they did not act frankly, it was because they felt their own insecurity.
Since the Central Electoral Commission of Ukraine blocked access to the database of voters from Crimea, the Crimean Electoral Commission needed to reconstruct regional voter lists from the papers used in the 2012 parliamentary elections. In early March, the Crimean Supreme Rada decided to replace Ukrainian terrestrial TV channels, such as Inter, 1+1, and ICTV, with Russian ones, such as Pervyi Kanal and Rossiya-24. Russian TV technicians assisted the Crimean state broadcasting company Krym to improve the quality of its broadcasting, but as far as I observed, the latter continued to disseminate crude propaganda. If the Crimean citizens wanted to know Kyivan views, they watched ATR, a local Crimean Tatar channel, run by Tatar oligarch Linura Islyamov, or cable TV, which the Crimean authorities did not censor. Interestingly, Krym constantly transmitted Tatarstan’s Tatarphone TV programs to demonstrate how Islam and Tatar culture were respected and cherished in Russian Tatarstan. On March 16, 2014, I spent a whole day in Simferopol, visiting polling stations. It is true that citizens queued in front of polling stations before 8 a.m. I did not see people wearing military uniform (even local vigilantes were prohibited from wearing camouflage clothes for fear of harming citizens’ image of the referendum). TV showed Konstantinov immediately after casting his own vote. Unable to repress tears, he said: “The Crimeans are wonderful! If my parents were alive, they would be proud of what the Crimeans have done, and also proud of me.” This is an emotional speech made by a provincial uncle, but this sentimentalism touched the Crimeans’ heartstrings more pleasantly than the Macedonians’ rationalism.
Crimea under Russia’s Rule
As readily expected, Ukrainian banks confiscated the Crimeans’ bank savings after Crimea’s annexation to Russia. The world blockaded Crimea. For example, the Japanese Foreign Ministry included Crimea in its black list of “travel warning” regions immediately after the referendum on March 16. Crimea under Ukraine had about six million tourists every year. In 2011, 63 percent of them came from mainland Ukraine, while 35 percent from Russia, Belarus, and other CIS countries. Since the number of tourists from Ukraine was expected to significantly decrease in 2014, the Russian government organized a campaign to send eight million Russian tourists to Crimea. Although the Russian citizens took this appeal seriously, they did not want to go to Crimea via Ukraine’s mainland by train or car, perhaps fearing for their personal safety in southeast Ukraine and worrying about troubles passing checkpoints on the Ukrainian-Crimean border. There remained two ways of travel, using ferryboats through the Kerch Strait or flying directly from Russia. Crossing on boats became difficult because most ferry owners were from Greece and other sanctioning countries and could no longer provide the service. In summer 2014, long queues of cars snaked on both banks of the Kerch Strait. In the same season, Simferopol Airport had about two hundred departures and landings every day, but that was not enough to improve the situation. Overall, only about two and half million tourists enjoyed the opportunity to visit Crimea by the end of 2014. This drop in the hospitality sector caused serious damage to a Crimea highly dependent on tourism. If most Crimeans did not regret their choice made on March 16, it was mainly because every day Crimean TV broadcasted the civil war and terrors taking place in other eastern parts of Ukraine. A live dog is surely better than a dead lion, but this kind of legitimation cannot last forever.
Towards the tourist season of 2015, the Russian government devoted considerable resources to expanding and reconstructing Simferopol Airport in a very short period. Despite the eventual termination of train transportation for passengers from Moscow to Crimea in December 2014, three and a half million tourists had visited Crimea by mid-September in 2015, thus having broken the record achieved throughout the previous season. In August, Putin and many Russian government officials visited Crimea, had a conference with Crimean government representatives, and publicized a strategy to modernize Russian domestic tourism, exploiting the opportunity whereby a declining ruble made Russians’ foreign travel difficult. Simultaneously, the Russian government started to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait. This bridge is planned to be completed in 2019 and will join Crimea to Russia’s mainland (Krasnodar).
From April to May 2014, the Crimean organization of the Ukrainian POR was transformed into a regional branch of the United Russia Party. However, this was not a simple transfer of former POR leaders and activists to United Russia. The Crimean branch of United Russia emerged as an amalgamation of the former POR, Aksenov’s Russian Unity Party, Cossack organizations, and others, but while the POR regional branch used to have 60,000 members, the number of members of United Russia’s Crimean branch dropped to 15,000. It is obvious that United Russia conducted a serious cleansing of activists to replace the ruling party of Ukrainian Crimea. Former POR politicians who could not be accepted by United Russia entered Just Russia, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and other Russian parties. On September 14, 2014, simultaneously with regional elections in Russia, Crimea held elections to the State Council (renamed from the Supreme Rada). The previous parliament elected in 2010 was supposed to remain in office until 2015, but it decided to hold elections before the expiration of its term to provide reassurance of its legitimacy after the drastic change in Crimea’s status. However, held under the situation that only United Russia, among the participants, had more or less completed party building, the elections generated an undesirable result from the pluralist point of view. United Russia gained seventy of the seventy-five deputy seats. The remaining five deputies belong to the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Neither Just Russia nor the Communists (who were torn apart in Crimea) gained representation in the new Crimean parliament.
In August 2014, Konstantin Bakharev, the first vice chairman of the Crimean State Council, told me that Crimea’s annexation to Russia gave to its governance two merits. First, in contrast to Ukraine, Russia had long since completed discussions around fundamental issues of state building, such as federalism or unitarism and the way of power sharing between president and parliament. Consequently, the Crimean leaders under Russian rule can concentrate on concrete tasks. Secondly, subnational leaders in federal Russia enjoy much more freedom in decision making than in Ukraine. In the Ukrainian period, Bakharev recollects, municipal leaders were requested to visit Kyiv to fill out documents even to repair insignificant streets. This “rosy” description of Russian Crimea is interesting not only as such but also as proof of the metamorphosis of an anti-Donetsk polemist into a fighter for unification with Russia. It was Bakharev who nicknamed leaders coming from Donetsk as the Macedonians, being the editor of newspaper Crimean Pravda in 2009. Bakharev emphasized that the final breach with the Macedonians took place in the morning of February 26, 2014, when Mogilev declared his disagreement with unification with Russia in front of his supporters from the Crimean Supreme Rada. Bakharev said that it was now their (Donetsk leaders’) turn to decide their fate in their own homeland, though this statement sounded to me somewhat cold to the “fate” of the Donbass people, then suffering the peak of a civil war.
Crimean Tatars under Russia’s Rule
The Mejlis called for a boycott of the referendum on March 16, 2014. Immediately before the referendum, Dzhemilev called Putin from Tatarstan’s representative office in Moscow and talked for about forty minutes. Putin promised Dzhemilev that within several months Russia would give the Crimean Tatars more than Ukraine could give during the twenty-five years of its independence. Dzhemilev told Putin that if Russia wished to help the Crimean Tatars, Russia should do so through the legitimate Ukrainian government. For a couple of months, Chubarov tried to adjust Mejlis activities to Russia’s rule, but he eventually followed Dzhemilev’s uncompromising position and left Crimea. In August 2014, the Mejlis in emigration excluded three members who refused to resign high posts in Crimea following Russia’s annexation, including vice parliamentary chair Remzi Il’yasov. Il’yasov was a former Mejlis vice chairman, who rivaled Chubarov for its chairman post at the Kurultai of 2013, when it was to elect Dzhemilev’s successor. Then Chubarov won by a hair (126 vs. 114). Having lost Crimea, the Mejlis needed to shift its foothold to the Diaspora of Crimean Tatars and held the Second World Congress of Crimean Tatars in Ankara from July 31 to August 2, 2015, with the help of Turkish President Recep Erdogan. The Crimean Tatar Diaspora of fourteen countries sent delegates and established a leadership headed by Chubarov. The Congress beseeched the world to intensify sanctions against Russia, even imposing an embargo on Russian oil and gas.
In December 2014, Remzi Il’yasov and other Crimean Tatar leaders who had accepted Russia’s rule created Movement K”yrym by rallying anti-Mejlis minor oppositions to replace the Mejlis. Achieving some results, increasing the portion of Crimean Tatar officers in the government and local administrations for example,87 the authority of the Movement K”yrym has not been comparable with that of the Mejlis. Rather, the rupture with the Crimean Spiritual Board of Muslims, which had constantly been the Mejlis’s closest ally, was more damaging for the Mejlis. The Muftiate did not send delegates to the Second World Congress of Crimean Tatars. The reason for this break was the significant improvement in the treatment of Crimean Muslims in comparison with the Ukrainian period. First, following a strong suggestion from Moscow, the Crimean government terminated its traditional divide-and-rule policy to use the “Spiritual Center” organized by the followers of Al-Ahbash as a counterbalance to the legitimate Muftiate. Secondly, almost all Muslim communities in Crimea have been registered as judicial entities. Thirdly, the quota of Makka pilgrims from Crimea was significantly increased and the travel expenses were halved thanks to government subsidies. While only 60-80 Crimean Muslims performed hajj a year during the Ukrainian period, by 2015 this number had increased to more than 300. As always, Turkey conducts dual diplomacy; the secular government supports Dzhemilev-Chubarov, while the Diyanet continues to help the Crimean Muftiate, which chose to operate in Russian Crimea. Vice Mufti of the Crimean Muftiate Aider Ismailov says:
“They [Dzhemilev and Chubarov] can never overcome their dissident approach. They are fighting for the territorial integrity of Ukraine, not for the Crimean Tatars… The last twenty-five years were a period of stagnation for the Crimean Tatar national movement, only characterized by endless meetings and appeals to every single European institution. The Russian authorities, in contrast to their Ukrainian counterparts, do not allow behavior like a spoiled child (shalost’). They say: if there is a problem, come to me; let’s solve it together. The methodology of the national movement should change from conflict against to cooperation with the authorities… The Diaspora says whatever they want. But the voice of 300,000 Crimean Tatars who live in their historical homeland is more precious than the voice of several million Crimean Tatars in the Diaspora. We are the roots, while they are the branches. When the roots die, the branches die, too.”
Conclusion
By February 2014, the Euromaidan movement had made violence itself the most serious issue in Ukrainian politics. Unless we face up to this fact, it will be difficult to understand the turmoil in southeastern Ukraine in 2014-15. How can the people who escaped from Ukraine for fear of being killed change their mind when the International Advisory Panel, established by the Council of Europe, criticizes the Ukrainian government for not complying with Articles 2 (Right to life) and 3 (Prohibition of torture) of the European Convention on Human Rights?
The hegemony of the POR after the parliamentary elections in 2002 changed inter-regional relations in southeastern Ukraine. Even the Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk regional elites, who were unable to avoid violent conflicts with each other in the 1990s, began to coordinate their interests during 2002-04. The POR began to penetrate into Crimea by incorporating indigenous elites intact. In 2009, when Yanukovych understood that this attitude towards Crimea did not guarantee his victory in the coming presidential election, the Donetsk (particularly Makeevka) leaders began to colonize Crimea. The Macedonians’ iron-arm leadership made Crimea Ukraine’s favorite for the first time since 1991, while frustrated indigenous Crimean leaders started their tacit contact with Moscow after Dzharty’s death in 2011. Yet this was no more than ordinary transnational lobbying, which would not have any historical significance had it not been for the Euromaidan Revolution.
After Yanukovych forsook Kyiv on February 22, 2014, the Donetsk POR organization and the regional Rada were paralyzed and could not rally public opinion for a possible, centrist solution to the conflict, that is, staying in Ukraine by federalizing it – a solution that constantly enjoyed about 40 percent support among the citizens of Donetsk Oblast. Polarization of public opinion gave birth to the Donetsk People’s Republic on April 7. While the Donetsk people can legitimately lament for the lost forty-three days, in Crimea after the Peaceful March on February 18 and the Korsun Pogrom on February 20-21, this centrist solution, on which the Macedonians could have wagered, was barely feasible.