Did he think it was inevitable that Russia would try to conquer Ukraine? "Looking at history, the Russian
elite was always trying to enlarge Russia at the expense of its neighbors and to pursue the policy of
imperial quest. You can trace this deep into history," he said. "In the past there was no Russia, there was
Moscow kingdom, and they called it Muscovia, it was only at the beginning of the 18th century that Peter
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the Great invented the name Russia, thus taking the historic name of what was known as Kievan Rus."
Tarasyuk quickly sketched a history of Ukraine in which, consistently, the only thing to come from the
east was trouble—from the wars that ended in Khmelnytsky's 1654 peace deal to the formation of the
Soviet Union to the famine. So what did Tarasyuk think of the monument to the Friendship of Nations? He
paused, and smiled. "I don't see any danger in the friendship of nations."
From: Joshua Kucera
Subject: Simferopol Is the Conspiracy-Theory Capital of Crimea
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009, at 7:19 AM ET
SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine—Listening to Russians can be a lot like listening to Ron Paul. Much of what they
say is refreshing, speaking truth to power. The hypocrisy inherent in the U.S. foreign policy of cloaking
realpolitik in the rhetoric of "nation building" and "democracy promotion"? The Russians get it. But just
when you're starting to see their side of things, they drop a conspiracy theory to rival the secret plan to
adopt the Amero.
Take Sergei Kiselev, a leading scholar of post-Soviet geopolitics and a geography professor at Tavrichesky
National University, the largest university in Crimea. I interviewed him at his office in Simferopol, the
capital of Crimea, and he made some important arguments about Ukrainian politicians pushing NATO for
their own political gain and about the excesses of Ukrainian nationalism.
And then he explained why Crimea, unlike many other analogous territories, remained peaceful after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. There are a variety of theories for this, but Kiselev offered a novel one.
"Look at the map of Eurasia—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Transdniester, Abkhazia,
South Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Xinjiang,
Tibet. All of these places have had war. But not Crimea. Why?" he asked. "Russians, in their blood, have a
genetic aversion to violence. Russians absorb violence like a pillow," he said. "This isn't nationalism, this is
analysis and observation."
Later, he outlined a "well-known plan" of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko to widen the war from
Georgia into Ukraine. The plan, Kiselev said, involved provoking a conflict between the Russian and
Ukrainian navies in the Black Sea, blowing up the Russian consulate in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv,
and occupying several Russian-operated lighthouses on the Crimean coast. For good measure, the plan
apparently included the bombing of a synagogue in Dniepropetrovsk, an industrial city just to the north of
Crimea. What a synagogue had to do with a war between Ukraine and Russia, he didn't explain, but
presumably a conspiracy seemed incomplete without somehow including the Jews. This plot, he said, was
foiled only because the Ukrainian interior minister had exposed it. I hadn't heard any of this, so I checked
back with journalists I had met in Kiev. None of it, of course, was true.
Crimea was, in fact, part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1954, when Khrushchev changed
the internal borders to give it to Ukraine. Why he did so is not clear. Russians argue that it was because he
was Ukrainian and that he was drunk when he made the decision; some have tried to dispute the legality of
the hand-over. There is some geographical logic to the move: Crimea is connected to mainland Ukraine by
a thin isthmus, but it's not connected to Russia. (These days traveling between Crimea and Russia requires
a short ferry ride; Russia has been trying to build a bridge, but Ukraine has blocked the efforts.) Politically,
though, Crimea leans Russian. More than half of the peninsula's residents are ethnic Russians, and many of
the Ukrainians there have pro-Russia sympathies. In the 2004 presidential elections that precipitated the
Orange Revolution, the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, got more than 80 percent of the vote
in Crimea. Until recently, the Communist Party, which supports Ukraine reintegrating with Russia,
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dominated the regional parliament.
In Simferopol, it's easy to imagine you're in Russia rather than Ukraine. Everyone speaks Russian, and
most signs, TV and radio programs, and ads are in Russian. Visually, the city is remarkable mainly for its
lack of local flavor. It has pretty much everything you find in the average post-Soviet city of 400,000
people—concrete, short skirts and furs, sad babushkas selling cigarettes in cold underpasses—and nothing
you wouldn't. The local economy, as in most of these sorts of places, seems to be driven mainly by coffee,
cell phones, and lingerie.
I came here by overnight train after a week in Kiev, where, for the most part, I heard the point of view that
I could get from Washington: Russia is a threat; Ukraine will benefit from membership in NATO and the
European Union; the West, by promoting democracy and NATO membership, is representing Ukrainians'
real interests against Russian interference and malfeasance. All this is at least partly true, but there is
considerable room for skepticism as well, and I was looking forward to hearing the other side.
There was, to take a small example, the question of Russian passports. Most of the "Is Ukraine Next?"
stories that appeared after the Georgia war repeated the same ominous detail: The Russian consulate in
Simferopol had been handing out Russian passports en masse (as many as 70,000) to residents of Crimea.
This was ominous because Russia had done the same thing in the Georgian breakaway republics of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia—it gave nearly everyone there a Russian passport, which then provided a pretext
when Moscow wanted to intervene: It was protecting its citizens.
When I was in Kiev, several government officials repeated this story, but usually with the caveat that
"there were reports from Simferopol ..." This caveat suggested two things to me: Either they were making
the story up and hiding behind "reports" to dodge responsibility, or they really didn't know what was going
on in Crimea. After spending time in Crimea, I eventually determined that both were probably true. But I
found no evidence that there was any attempt by Russia to co-opt Crimea's residents, as in South Ossetia.
While it's impossible to prove a negative, I asked a lot of people in Simferopol of varying political
motivations, and no one had seen any evidence of a mass passport giveaway. (I tried and failed to get
comment from the Russian Consulate.)