In Crimea, WWII looms large as Russians return, fueling Soviet nostalgia

Many of the men on Lenin Square were wearing orange-and-black ribbons, known as the Ribbon of St. George, a Russian symbol of World War II commemoration. They were the newly organized pro-Russia “self-defense forces,” formed with the ostensible purpose of protecting Crimea from the kind of chaos that roiled Kiev during the protests throughout this winter that ultimately ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and set in motion the Russian incursion into Crimea. The Kiev protests — known as “Maidan,” after the square in which they were centered — featured a substantial presence of far-right groups, some with Nazi sympathies. Western media, often wedded to a narrative of plucky, pro-Western protesters vs. pro-Russia corrupt autocrats, tended to play down this element of the protests. The Russian media, on the other hand, covered little else.

And so in Crimea, if you asked the men of the self-defense forces why they were wearing a symbol of a war that ended 70 years ago, they would tell you, with full sincerity, that it was because they were “against fascists.” Frequently, the arguments on Lenin Square would feature a pro-Ukrainian person exasperatedly asking a beribboned man, “What fascists? Where!?” and the man countering by asking what the person's father or grandfather did during WWII, implying they may have been less-than-loyal Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, there was conversation. But by March 6, the atmosphere in the city had grown tenser and the pro-Ukrainian Simferopolians seemed to have given up on engaging their opponents in conversation, and moved their discussions to Facebook or to smaller demonstrations outside of the city center.

That Crimea would be celebrating its WWII heritage is a cruel irony to the peninsula's oldest inhabitants. In 1944, the Soviet authorities deported the entire population of Crimean Tatars — nearly 200,000 — to Central Asia because some of them had cooperated with the German occupiers. Nearly half died as a result of the deportations.

At the end of the 1980s, the Soviet authorities let the Tatars return to Crimea, and they did, en masse, and now represent about 12 percent of Crimea's population. However, one rarely sees Crimean Tatars on Lenin Square.

As the referendum approached, the Communist Party of Ukraine had set up a booth on the square and was running an informal opinion poll. Residents could fill out a paper ballot choosing one of three options: to keep the Lenin statue, to move it to a less central part of the city or to remove it altogether. While the elderly ladies running the poll said that about 95 percent of people had chosen the first option, one of the first people to come up, a man who appeared to be Tatar, checked the “remove” box. The women objected: “What do you have against Lenin? He gave us free education. Free health care! And this is our history; we can't just remove our history! Without a past we have no future!” The man hurried away; when asked if they thought Crimean Tatars, given their experience, might have a different take on Soviet rule the ladies said, “Well, it wasn't right that they got deported, but that was so long ago! All of the people who signed those orders are in the grave now.” Suddenly, history was ancient.

Like many pro-Russia Crimeans before the parliament voted in favor of joining Russia, she said that she would like to be part of Russia but didn't think it was possible. Instead, she said she wanted autonomy within Ukraine, citing Scotland and Catalonia as positive examples. When asked what the central government in Kiev had done that she mistrusted, one of the polling women said, “They banned the Russian language.” She acknowledged, “Yes, we're speaking Russian now. But go to Lvov” — the most famously Ukrainian nationalist city in western Ukraine — “and try speaking Russian. You'll get beaten up.” As it happened, the night before, the mayor of Lvov appeared on local TV speaking in Russian in a special recorded address to Crimeans, lamenting the misunderstanding that had led them to invite “the army of a foreign power” onto their soil. “We support the desire of all Ukrainians — Ukrainians, Russian, Crimean Tatars, Jews — to peacefully develop their own culture, speak in their own language, remember their own history,” he said. The pollster from the Communist Party scoffed, “That was the first time in his life he'd ever spoken Russian.”

The Crimean Tatars are perhaps the strongest supporters of Crimea’s remaining in Ukraine, the strong presence of nationalists in Kiev notwithstanding. The Crimean Tatars’ mistrust of Russia is rooted in history: It was the Russian army of Catherine the Great that conquered the land the Tatars had ruled for centuries, and it was Moscow that deported them. “The situation today is very dangerous,” said Abdumanan Egiz, a member of the informal but influential Crimean Tatar governing body, the Mejlis. “Crimean Tatars don't feel safe; with Russian troops all around there is no guarantee for anything. We're afraid there can be violence.”

He is incredulous at the idea that Russians' rights could be trampled by the new government in Kiev. “Everything is in Russian here. Wherever you go you speak Russian — the government, parliament, local governments, all use Russian. Education is in Russian in Crimea. What more could be done? This is the motherland of Crimean Tatars, they are the indigenous people of this land, and they don't have this right. This is part of Ukraine, and you can't feel that this is Ukraine except for the flags. So what kind of violations are we talking about?”

He said that while most Crimeans understand Russians have a privileged position, Moscow has adroitly manipulated the emotions of a vocal minority. “The majority, still today, live with that Communist propaganda; that's why the only thing they're talking about is World War II. The rest of the world forgot about this,” he said. “Moscow is doing well using them as a tool. They're not talking about development, peaceful coexistence and other things; they're talking about World War II. They have another agenda.”

Asked if he was worried about the “self-defense forces” eventually being used against Tatars, he said, “You can expect anything from marginal groups. They're being used as a geopolitical tool.” He continued, “I don't like to talk about this, but we remember the former Yugoslavia. This was also in Europe, just 20 years ago and very close to Crimea. And this was a very similar situation where in a small territory many different groups are living, with different religion, language, culture, but this is used as a tool to rearrange the territory.”