But other than pointing out where their enemies are wrong, what are the Russians offering? Since the end
of the Cold War and the discrediting of communism, the Western ideal of democracy and free markets has
not been much challenged. But as it has gotten stronger and more assertive during the Putin era, Russia has
begun to mount a geopolitical challenge to the West. It's bolstering alliances with other countries that want
to challenge American hegemony, places like Iran, Venezuela, and China. But it's not yet clear whether
Russia is putting forth any sort of new principle to challenge the West. In Simferopol, the people I talked
to—generally pro-Russian think tankers, journalists, and analysts—did not appear to have any new
ideology. I did, however, see impressive advances in the fields of conspiracy theories, hysterical
overreactions, and dubious logic.
A friend had recommended that I talk with a journalist at Krimskaya (Crimean) Pravda, but when I
reached the reporter, he suggested that I talk instead to the editor-in-chief. As the name suggests (and as
the hammer and sickle on the front page drive home), the paper is a leftover from Soviet days. But the
editor, Konstantin Bakharev, is young, dynamic, and English-speaking. He put out little bottles of Vitel
water, imported from France, that I later learned cost about $7 in Simferopol.
(The Russians I met in Crimea, it should be noted, were extraordinarily hospitable. While the people I met
in Kiev were generally all business, in Crimea no meeting took place without coffee or tea and a tray of
cookies. And while interviewees are usually looking at their watches by the 45-minute mark, the Russians
I met in Crimea would happily talk for two hours or more—until my head ached, my translator was
exhausted, and my voice recorder was out of memory.)
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Bakharev challenged the notion, still widely held in Kiev and Washington, that Russia had unilaterally
started the war with Georgia. He's right. But then he went a step further, and argued that Washington had
pulled strings in Georgia to start the war. His "proof," as he put it? His father-in-law was recently traveling
in Georgia, and on his way from the airport, he noticed a road being built. Black men—not an everyday
sight in Georgia—were doing the construction. When he got to Tbilisi, he asked one of his government
contacts what the story was with the black guys working on the road. The explanation was that
Washington was funding the construction of the road but didn't trust the Georgian government not to steal
the money—so they'd sent their own road workers. He concluded triumphantly: "So, if the U.S. doesn't
trust Georgia to build a road by themselves, do you think they would trust them to start a war?"
From: Joshua Kucera
Subject: Crimean Tatars Are the Wild Card of the Region
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009, at 6:51 AM ET
BAKHCHISARAY, Ukraine—The stone minarets of the 15th-century Khan's Palace that dominate the
skyline here, a city of about 50,000 a 30-minute bus ride south from Simferopol, are a reminder that while
today Ukraine and Russia are jousting over Crimea, for most of the past millennium, another group ruled
the peninsula: the Crimean Tatars. Muslims and speakers of a language closely related to Turkish, the
Crimean Tatars are the descendants of the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan who settled here in the 13th
century. Their historical legacy is nearly invisible today, systematically destroyed first by the czars and
then the Soviets.
But the Tatars, improbably, have revived themselves and are once again political players in Crimea. They
are no longer the rulers, but as a politically active minority, they could act as the wild card in an eventual
conflict over Crimea.
The Tatars established a khanate that was allied with the Ottoman Empire and ruled Crimea for five
centuries. But they eventually got in the way of a rapidly expanding Russian empire, which, attracted by
the Black Sea ports, annexed Crimea in 1783. That year, the population of Crimea was 83 percent
Crimean Tatar, but Russian occupation occasioned a mass exodus by the Tatars, mainly to Turkey. Russia
assimilated the Crimean Tatar nobility and destroyed Tatar buildings.
By 1937, the Tatar population had declined to only 21 percent of Crimea's population. During World War
II, Stalin ordered the coup de grâce: Crimea was occupied by Germany, and he accused the Tatars of
collaborating with the Nazis. In a period of just three days, every Tatar man, woman, and child was
deported from Crimea—most loaded on train freight cars without food or water and shipped to Central
Asia. Tatars estimate that 46 percent of their population died within a year of the deportation. It was
barely a footnote in the history of World War II, but it became the defining event of the Crimean Tatar
nation.
(Incidentally, some Tatars did collaborate with the Nazis. But the deportations seemed motivated more by
Stalin's mistrust of ethnic minorities—there were similar expulsions of other Muslim groups like Chechens,
Ingush, and Balkars, who were behind Soviet lines such that there wasn't even an option to collaborate.
And, besides, some Ukrainians collaborated. Krushchev, in his 1956 "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party
Congress, said the Ukrainians would have been deported, too, except that "there were too many of them."
Today, Crimean Tatars take pains to emphasize their role in fighting on the Soviet side—for example, by
naming streets and squares after their war heroes.)
The Tatars were allowed to return in the late 1980s, and Ukrainian independence has given them political
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weight for the first time in centuries. About two-thirds of the Tatars—300,000 in total—have returned to
Crimea from Central Asia. But the deportation and return seems to have given them a drive that is lacking
in most post-Soviet peoples.