Perched solidly on the cliff overlooking the expansive natural
harbour of Sevastopol, Crimea, there is a magnificent stone building hosting
one of the world’s oldest marine research stations, the A.O. Kovalevsky
Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas (IBSS) of the Ukrainian Academy of
Science. With 125 scientists and 220 support staff, this is one of the most
important institutes in the Black Sea. But now, as several times in the past,
it is a centre stage witness of one of the most difficult political stand-offs
in modern Europe.
My first visit to IBSS was late in 1991 in the middle of the
formal break-up of the Soviet Union. I flew from Moscow to Simferopol airport
serving the capital of Crimea (and currently occupied by armed militia).
Sitting next to me was a young student from Mali who was studying agricultural
economics in Simferopol University. “Did the end of the communist system affect
your studies?” I asked her in my deficient French. “The lecturer suddenly told
us that everything we had learned the previous year was irrelevant, so they added
another year to the course,” she told me. At the airport, I was met by my
‘minder’ from the international relations department of the institute. “How
about a drink?” he said. That done, he suggested dinner and during our polite
but protracted conversation was looking nervously at his watch. “Is there anything
you should be telling me?” I asked, wondering why our journey hadn’t begun.
“Err, OK, I’ll tell you. As you know, Sevastopol is a closed city and we need
permission from the KGB for you to enter. Ahem, we put the wrong date on the
form so we have to wait until midnight.”
For those of us nurtured on James Bond films, there was
something exciting about entering a closed Soviet city steeped in military
history at one in the morning (the fact that there was a visiting Italian naval
ship in the harbour was a twist of irony). I stayed with the Director, Sergei
Konovalov, a bear of a man, warm and hospitable. After a tour of the institute,
two elderly senior researchers invited me for a walk and engaged in good
humoured banter. “There is the headquarters of the Communist party; see, it’s
been boarded up by order of Gorbachev.” “And you used to be a member,” said one
of my hosts to the other. He smiled and responded “You gave up smoking and I
gave up my membership; we all have to give up something.” Later we stopped at a
little kiosk selling paper flags of the former Soviet republics and another
good-humoured argument ensued on which one was the Ukrainian flag.
I sailed from Sevastopol and Yalta to Bulgaria on the
research ship Prof Vodyanitskiy. Beyond our talk of research, conversations
bubbled about the politics of the break-up and what this could mean for Crimea.
“Look”, said Konovalov, “This is the first time we are allowed to sail past
Foros.” Necks craned and binoculars were focussed on the coast towards the
place where Gorbachev had been held hostage in his summer residence a few
months earlier. “Now everyone is encouraged to sail past.”
Over the next 14 years, I returned many times to Crimea as a
UN official, a researcher and leading a programme of public awareness. I was at
the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol when tense negotiations
were going on about splitting the fleet between Russia and Ukraine and there
was talk of armed conflict. The scene was surreal. At a reception hosted by the
fleet commander, there was a stacked bank of heavy TV screens one end of the
room with a mosaic image of pop videos. Outside, a crowd was chanting in
Russian: ‘Russian Fleet, Russian Fleet’ and the sound wafted into the room
during lulls in conversation and blaring music. Exactly at five pm, the
chanting stopped and the crowd vanished, just in time for the commander to wish
us well. ‘Command-control’ extends well beyond the wardroom in Crimea, just as
it still does in modern Russia.
As a country, Ukraine has had a difficult birth with its
divided ethnicity and struggling economy. The ethnic and political centrifugal
forces that pulled Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia apart are acting in Ukraine
where there are sharp divisions between the Ukrainian speaking West and Russian
East. And just as Serbia declared that it would intervene anywhere there was a
minority population of Serbs, so does Russia when it perceives the interests of
its own nationals are in jeopardy. Beyond that however, in many places there is
still a huge nostalgia for the Soviet past. To what degree does this yearning
influence the politics today?
Thirteen years after my first visit, I returned to
Sevastopol as Chief Scientist on the Bulgarian research ship Akademik. No
longer a closed city, the place was bustling with activity and the waterfront
now had a wide range of restaurants and clubs, one right under the Marine
Hydrophysical Institute, Sevastopol’s other marine research centre. But we had
arrived on the 9th of May, Victory Day, the event that commemorates
the capitulation of Germany in the Second World War. This event is particularly
poignant for Sevastopol which suffered a 220 day bombardment. The
well-rehearsed massive parade of several thousand troops, sailors, elderly
veterans laden with medals and garlands of flowers, schoolchildren and workers,
stirred a genuine emotional vortex that could not fail to bring tears to the
eyes. And the spectacular fireworks and festivities that followed made, and
still make, this a big family festivity. I walked up the hill to the statue of
Lenin pointing at the decrepit Russian naval fleet from the vantage point of
his column below which a few wreaths had been laid. The past, romanticised as
it was, remained very much alive in the present.
And it was not just a matter of romantic illusions. The
crumbling concrete seafront of Yalta or the popular resort of Alushta bear
witness to the time when Crimea was the holiday destination of choice for
Soviet citizens. Many of the more favoured young people spent idyllic times in
the Artek pioneer camp which helped mould their own values in later life. Many
of that generation still find it difficult to comprehend the abrupt change as
the bubble burst and the Soviet Union collapsed; they conflate Russia’s
apparent return to prosperity and their own ethnicity with resentment against
the Yeltsin-era chaos and the formation of a new Ukrainian state. And these sentiments
are easily exploited.
Now the West watches haplessly as the choreography plays
out. It missed its chance to invest in the 1990s and offer a new prospect for
future prosperity (though this was easier said than done). Not everyone in
Crimea wants to return to Russian rule; there are those who genuinely believe
in a federated Ukraine and now fear repression. And there are the ethnic Tatars,
carried to these lands from the time of Genghis Khan and partly extradited from
it by Stalin’s social engineering. I ran an environmental awareness workshop
for teachers from Black Sea countries in Alushta in 2002 and we experienced
some of the warm Tatar hospitality. Our Turkish participants were whisked off
to the mosque on Friday (“but I never go to the mosque”, one of them
protested); the Tatars have been prospering and enjoying freedoms they did not
experience in the Soviet past and they too will be watching the situation with
trepidation. But they too are a minority.
I fear for Ukraine and for my friends on both sides of the
emerging ethnic divide. It is easy to rip the emerging country apart in the new
Great Game between East and West. I stood with Ukrainian colleagues in the
cemetery in Kharkiv where lines of headstones record the Polish officers killed
by Stalin’s KGB in the Second World War. One of the group, a former Soviet
paratrooper with a robust and cheerful demeanour stood silently, his face
stricken with sadness. “You see that grave” he said, “he had the same surname
as me.”
