Crimea's past, Ukraine's future

I did not expect the call of a muezzin in Simferopol. Not that hearing the chosen being invited to their devotions troubles me. I appreciate this caution against allowing the commerce of daily life to distract one from giving thanks to God.

Yet other residents of this Crimean city find the five-times-daily summoning of Muslims to prayer, the adhan, worrisome. It reminds them that ownership of this peninsula is contested. They forget one thing -- it always has been.

Nearly the size of Belgium, Crimea historically was a bridgehead connecting the empires of the Eurasian steppes with those of the Black and Mediterranean basins. Invaders have come and gone -- ancient Greeks and Scythians, Rome's legions, then Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, various Turkic nomads, Venetians, Genoese, Ottoman Turks and, finally, Tsarist Russia's armies, conquering in 1783.

That gateway role is reflected in Crimea's history. In 988 in Chersones, now part of Sevastopol, Kyiv's Prince Volodymyr converted to Christianity, then that faith was diffused among the East Slavs. Today the region's vistas are pleasant -- vineyards covering gently rolling hills and wide valleys -- but this very same terrain witnessed the Ukrainian Cossacks of the Zaparozhian Sich fight marauding Tatars and resist Ottoman encroachment.

And Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade immortalized the disaster that befell another band of cavalry near Balaclava, in 1854. Heroically interpreted by Errol Flynn in his 1936 film of the same name, this Hollywood version of that Crimean War battle left at least one young boy begging his mother to take him to their local public library, to read that paean in its entirety -- the first time I sought out poetry.

In 1919-1920 this headland became a bastion for the anti-Bolshevik White Army of Gen. Denikin, a point d'appui for foreign military interventions unsuccessfully deployed against Lenin's regime.

Crimea was next overrun by the Nazis, in 1942, then suffered cultural genocide in May 1944 when the Soviets returned and deported the Tatars because of their supposed disloyalty during the German occupation. Stalin is said to have contemplated a similar treatment for Ukrainians, a deed left undone only because there were too many of them.

And at Yalta eastern Europe's postwar fate was sealed in February 1945 when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met in the Livadia Palace to carve out the "spheres of influence" that shaped Europe's geopolitics for another half century.

Soviet Ukraine acquired Crimea in 1954 after Nikita Khrushchev transferred the property's legal title from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, a gift marking 300 years of allegedly fraternal relations between these two distinct nations.

It was a hollow gesture as Crimea remained in the USSR and no one then envisioned the Soviet empire's collapse or an independent Ukraine.

As for the Tatars, permitted to trickle back from Central Asian exile only at the end of the Soviet period, they began returning in greater numbers after 1991, when Ukraine's government tried to redress the historical injustice they had endured, even though that crime was of Moscow's making, not Kyiv's.

Still, Crimean society remains Russified, retarded by a relic Soviet mentality akin to what most of Ukraine's eastern marches wallow in, that ignorance fueling Ukraine's current drift away from Europe. So Lenin statues stand prominent in Simferopol, Sevastopol, and Yalta. Asking why, I was told: "We were allowed to dump Communism but had to keep Lenin."

They have not really rid themselves of either.

Making matters worse are revanchists campaigning to bag Crimea for "Mother Russia." Dozens of billboards proclaim Crimea's future prosperity lies in reunification, a blatantly secessionist placarding not being countered by Kyiv. The very few posters heralding Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as Crimea's hope -- and Ukraine's -- are in Russian only. Perhaps the president's propagandists have their countries confused.

Will Crimea's status remain uncertain? Maybe there's an answer in what I found in a madras, an Islamic school, in Bakhchisaray.

There I saw a mullah instructing a small group of children, young boys and girls learning the Koran together.

I asked in Ukrainian if I might take their photograph.

When the Turkish teacher replied that he spoke no Russian, one of his pupils, a girl, 11, began translating -- in perfect Ukrainian.

Aware of her Crimean Tatar heritage and Islamic faith, she also proudly identified herself as a Ukrainian.

If more of her fellow citizens did likewise, Ukraine might still make it back to Europe.

Lubomyr Luciuk teaches political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 5, 2010 A10