Site of the Yalta Conference, the Crimea is the Miami Beach of the former Soviet Union, a paradise of palm trees, health resorts, and other sybaritic pleasures. You might think this is the reason that Russia recently reconquered the province. But geopolitics and natural resources played a greater role.
Neil Kent has the good sense to avoid taking sides in what is part primer, part traditional history of one of the world’s most contentious regions. An associate at Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute, Kent documents well over 2,500 years of history during which this tiny peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea has played host to one of the most religiously and ethnically diverse—and contentious—populations anywhere on earth. The peninsula’s strategic location between East and West, North and South, as well as its access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean commerce—not to mention its nutrient-rich soil—have made it prized booty. Cimmerian, Scythian, and Taurian tribes roamed these lands as far back as the 7th century b.c., as well as the Amazons of Greek mythology, who were really fierce female Scythian warriors on horseback. Those peoples gave way to Greek, and later Roman, colonists and all manner of Goths and Byzantines.
Then ensued Mongolian invaders under Genghis Khan’s leadership, and their ethnic cousins the Tatars, centered in Bakhchisaray, who imposed a particularly fearsome, centuries-long Muslim domination of the region. At some point late in the 16th century, Khan Gazi Giray II wrote to tell a high Ottoman official that “besieging castles is not the task of the Tatars; it is rather to ravage, to desolate, and ransack the infidels’ country with their raids, and also to collect captives and provisions.”
A whole range of later peoples continued to settle the area well into the 20th century, including Greek, Armenian, and Genoese traders, as well as Krymchak and Ashkenazi Jews, these latter groups all having been particularly adept in developing Crimean commerce. The mysterious Karaite Tatars, who converted wholesale to Judaism for reasons still not completely understood, also dominated the region for several hundred years, as did the Ottomans, who accepted rich tributes from Crimean rulers such as Giray Khan in exchange for granting them nominal independence.
Catherine the Great finally annexed the region for the Russians in 1783 and encouraged fearsome local Cossacks to protect her kingdom’s borders. The Crimean War (1853-56) made the conflicts that preceded it seem like a picnic, with as many soldiers dying as during the American Civil War. The Crimean War was waged by an alliance among several European powers including Great Britain, France, and Piedmont-Sardinia (today’s Italy, more or less), and the Ottoman Turks—a rare example, perhaps, of Christians and Muslims fighting together in order to curtail the Russian Empire’s expansion under Nicholas I. (The war wasn’t a total loss: Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” while the Russian physician Nikolai Pirogov pioneered the use of ether in field amputations and contributed to the development of the system of medical triage still used today.)
At times, Neil Kent’s narrative of one bloody conflict after another will want to make American readers get down on their knees and be thankful that they were born on this side of the Atlantic: Citing their purported ancestors the Goths as justification, the Nazis also laid waste to the region during World War II, briefly occupying Crimea in 1941-42 before the Red Army wrested it back from them. This was long enough, however, for the Germans to exterminate nearly the entire Krymchak Jewish population, which today still numbers under 1,500, as well as the region’s Gypsy population.
Hitler’s troops were aided in this bloodbath by the Tatar Crimeans, and the Soviets retaliated by starving, executing, or deporting to Central Asia close to a quarter-million of them. Many died along the deportation routes in miserable conditions that recall the worst of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.
Still, amidst all the bloodshed, the Crimea has been a rich cultural center as well, the summer home of writers such as Anton Chekhov, Aleksey and Leo Tolstoy, and the poet Maximilian Voloshin, as well as the birthplace of artists such as the seascape painter Ivan Aivazovsky and the landscapist Arkhip Kuindzhi. The originally Tatar palace at Bakhchisaray, as well as estates at Alupka, Livadiya, and Oreanda—built by the great patron of the arts Count Mikhail Vorontsov—are some of the grandest examples of classical and Islamic art, though many of the architects who built them were, in fact, foreigners. Different rulers, including Prince Grigory Potemkin, also developed a thriving viticulture, which produced some excellent wines over the centuries.
Kent is correct in pointing out that the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimean Ukraine was not entirely unjustified, given that the region had been transferred from the Russian to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 and Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovich’s corrupt government had destroyed the economy. This all but invited Vladimir Putin’s inevitable invasion of a region that was majority Russian in population.
Over one span of just four years (1917-21), Crimea had nine governments. These included a Tatar regime, four different Bolshevik governments, a German puppet administration, a Turkish incumbency, a Ukrainian rule, a White Russian tenure, and brief Jewish control. Does Crimea’s story, then, have a greater lesson to teach us? Perhaps it’s this: Snowy empires will go to great lengths to gain authority over their coastal resorts, especially if they offer sandy beaches and palm trees. But their power over them is, by necessity, tenuous as the locals are captives of the weather and often prove resistant to the sustained attractions of religion, politics, and nationality.
Christopher Atamian is a writer in New York.
