I certainly had not intended to be anywhere near a war zone, particularly one involving an irritated Russian Army, having always avoided even being on the same continent as one, fearful that in the heat of battle (or the fog of war), the contestants might not be able to distinguish a Bermuda shorts wearing, camera-toting tourist from the enemy.
Some eight months ago, in an atmosphere egged on by a coquettishly dry Chilean wine in the peaceful Caribbean, my wife and I had booked a trip to the Black Sea. Packing our bags as CNN showed footage that Russo-Georgian hostilities had begun in earnest and had the distinct promise of spreading, we adhered to the itinerary–certainly not trying at our advanced age to break into battlefield reporting–but to see and photograph the urban design and architecture of a few countries not on the regular tourist circuit.
As we went from Istanbul to Bulgaria and Romania, probably because of their remoteness from the action and the unbridgeable language chasm, we only saw families enjoying slow summer days on the beaches of the blue-colored Black Sea, which is almost as big as the Gulf of Mexico.
Odessa, in the western part of the Ukraine, some 600 miles away from the conflict, already calls us back. Its downright beautiful Belle Epoch classical buildings and grand tree-lined boulevards which host an extensive series of outdoor cafes–which themselves host mini-concerts by young violinists–is an impressive celebration of urban delights.
We then traveled east, in the direction of Georgia, to the Crimean home of the Russian Fleet, Sevastopol. Being Russia’s historic warm water port, it has had a long history of conflict. The incredibly stupid Crimean War (1854-1856) was a struggle that Russia lost and is remembered in the west only by Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Florence Nightingale’s work on the wounded that suggested the idea of the Red Cross. Despite that, in 1900, the city constructed a building to hold a stupendous 3-D panoramic painting of its defense which keeps the memory ever fresh. That the memorial was damaged in WWII by the Nazis in another loss conveys the sense of continuous relentless warfare over the critical Russian port.
Wrapped up in the bellicose spirit, I jumped at a chance to take a boat tour of the Russian Fleet in the harbor. Although there were a number of ships, they all seemed equipped with just one small barreled gun turret, so I asked the guide about the whereabouts of the aircraft carriers. “They are not permitted in Black Sea and are located in far east in Vladivostok,” she replied. “And what about the large cruisers?” After some hufffing and puffing, she said “they are probably in operations off Georgia.”
Continuing eastward to Yalta, famous for the eponymous conference, but more famous locally for its magnificent seaside esplanade, which with a little help could be better than Nice or Cannes. What conflict? At the corners of some piers, there were small beaches made up of baseball and larger-sized rocks upon which were standing or laying throngs of bikini-clad Russians.
The conference took place in the Lividia Palace, a huge aesthetic disappointment, which looks like a budget construction of artificial stucco, compared to the 17th and 18th century palaces in Western Europe. The last czar stayed there, then the Soviet leaders after they killed him, followed by the German High Command after it chased the Communists out, and then the three men who carved up Europe after defeating the Germans.
The Crimea is a peninsula about the size of Maryland, which the Ukrainian native Khrushchev gave to the Ukraine in 1954, when he was head of the USSR. Its 2.5 million population comprises the derivation of many nationalities, but 60 percent are ethnic Russian. Ukraine, like Georgia, is western oriented and its president, like Georgia’s, wants to join NATO, which logically alarms Putin’s resurgent Russia. With NATO in Poland and the Baltic States, adding them would naturally make Russia feel a bit surrounded.
The Ossetians have been in Georgia for 600 years and still do not feel Georgian, nor have they been accepted by the Georgians–but they do have a strong affinity to Russia. Crimeans have been technically Ukrainians for only 54 years, but still speak Russian. Ethnic minorities inside artificially-created states, as we learned too well in the Balkans and Iraq, tend to be combustible.
I approached our guide (whose nameplate said “Natalie,” but who admitted that her real name was Natasha), an attractive mid-forties woman with incredibly sad life-weary eyes who was vacuuming up the canapés like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter, and asked: If mighty Mother Russia felt that she could invade little Georgia with a pretext of defending the Russian-friendly Ossetians and Abkhazians, in order to prevent the Georgians from moving closer to the Western allies, why would she hesitate to assault little Crimea on the pretext of protecting its ethnic Russian population, in order to secure its absolutely essential warm weather naval base and cow the Ukrainian government from further overtures to the West? She picked up–and ate–another deviled egg before answering, “probably will.”
We didn’t get anywhere near the war zone, but may have visited the next one.
Arthur Cotton Moore, architect, planner, painter, and furniture designer, is the author of The Powers of Preservation.
