Borderland

by Anna Reid

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Wart on Russia’s Nose: Crimea

  The person of Selim Giray is comparable to a

  rose garden; the son who is born to him is

  a rose. Each in his turn has many honours in

  his palace. The rose garden is ornamented

  by a new flower; its unique and fresh rose

  has become the Lion of the padishah of

  Crimea, Selamet Giray Khan.

  – Arabic inscription above the portal of the

  royal mosque at Bakhchisarai

  ON THE MALAKHOV bastion at Sevastopol two rows of cast-iron cannon-balls have been laid out in the shape of a cross. They mark the place where, on 28 June 1855, Admiral Paul Nakhimov, laconic, frock-coated commander of the city’s defences for the previous eight months, was shot in the head by a French sniper. He had been viewing the enemy batteries through a telescope, and his last words, before the instrument fell from his hands, were ‘They’re shooting better today.’

  It is a quiet grey day in early March. In Kiev there is still snow on the ground; down here the streets are dry and the breeze from the sea smells of spring. Showing me round are Arkady, a journalist from Simferopol, and Nataliya, a student born and brought up in Sevastopol itself. Both are typical Crimeans: Nataliya’s father is a retired naval officer, Arkady’s a Russian bus-driver whose Stakhanovite feats of long-distance travel earned him a nice little vine-covered house in the sunny south. Nataliya’s parents are less fortunate: the tap-water in their housing block is undrinkable, so they heave buckets up five flights from a pump in the yard. Do they have hot water? ‘Oh yes – but only twice a week.’

  All the same, Nataliya is proud of her city. ‘This,’ she says, pointing across a ravine with a wrecked bus at the bottom, ‘is where the enemy were camped. They fired on us for 349 days before they took the hill.’ Sandbags and a row of bronze cannon mark the Russian emplacements, and the whole area is dotted with monuments and memorials. A bas relief of Tolstoy, here as a young artillery-officer, shows him beardless and in profile, glaring from between jug-ears. Across the other side of the hill stands the ‘Museum of the Heroic Defence and Relief of Sevastopol’, a giant stone rotunda built in 1905 to mark the siege’s fiftieth anniversary. Niches round the outside wall house a series of busts: whiskered generals and admirals, the surgeon Pirogov – ‘the first person to use anaesthetics on the battlefield’, says Nataliya – and a nun – ‘Dasha of Sevastopol, our Florence Nightingale’. Inside, a woman with a white baton is talking a group of Central Asians through a 360-degree, three-dimensional diorama, all heaped bodies, gleaming bayonets and fluttering tricolors. From her commentary one would never guess that Sevastopol actually surrendered. On the way out we pass a faded little fun-fair, still closed up for winter. ‘On Young Pioneers’ Day,’ Nataliya says, ‘all the schools used to come up here. First we’d go to the cinema – it was free just for that day – then we’d come and take rides on the carousel, all in white dresses.’

  Sevastopol is a holy city twice over – sacred not only to Russian military sacrifice, but also to Russian Orthodoxy. On the edge of the town, on a windy, half-drowned peninsula lined with boarded-up summer cottages, stand the remains of Cherso-nesus, the Greek city where the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius first landed in Rus, bringing the Gospel and the Cyrillic alphabet with them. In the chilly dusk, we wander among sunken streets and shattered columns, lapped by a gun-metal sea. Near the shore a giant bell hangs on a wooden frame. ‘Strike it,’ Arkady says; ‘it’s good luck.’ The clapper has disappeared so I throw a stone at the bell instead, producing a long, melancholy buzz. A nineteenth-century basilica marks the spot where Prince Volodymyr, converter of Kievan Rus, was once thought to have been baptised. Later the archaeologists changed their minds, and now trees are growing through the church’s roof. ‘They’re supposed to be repairing it,’ says Arkady with a shrug, ‘but they haven’t got the money.’

  Hypnotised by its glorious past, Sevastopol is caught in a time-warp. The city is tidy in the old, dour Soviet way. There are no billboards, no money-changers or gypsy beggars, few kiosks with their jumbled rows of Western cigarettes and psychedelic liqueurs. Every third man is in uniform – the officer’s handsome black and gold, or the sailor’s bell-bottoms and brimless ribboned caps. The local newspapers are called things like Glory to Sevastopol and The Motherland Flag, and the clock on top of the Sailors’ Club bangs out the tune ‘Legendary Sevastopol’ every hour. On May Day veterans gather at the railway station to lay flowers beside an old steam train painted with the slogan ‘Death to Fascists’. When the Soviet Union collapsed, nearly all the naval base’s officers went over to Russia, refusing to swear new oaths of loyalty to Ukraine and running up the tsarist St Andrew’s Cross over the battleships rusting in the oily harbour. They also hung on to the fleet’s fine neoclassical headquarters, shoving the disgruntled Ukrainians off to dilapidated barracks in the suburbs. Ashamed to let me see his office, a Ukrainian lieutenant gave me an interview outdoors in the rain. ‘It’s all lies what the Russians say about us having four ships and eight admirals,’ he grumbled, as a birch-tree dripped on to his collar. ‘These are very old political tricks – we’ve got four ships, four admirals.’ Back in the old headquarters overlooking South Bay, a Russian officer had told us that he still couldn’t quite believe that Russia and Ukraine were separate countries: ‘It will take dozens of years before we realise that we live in different states. Nobody takes all these customs controls seriously.’ And the Ukrainian ships? ‘We’re always happy when they get back to base by themselves – they don’t always manage it, they’re so inexperienced.’ His father was with the Black Sea Fleet before him, but he didn’t know where he would end up. ‘Most officers think of themselves as citizens of Crimea and of Russia. As for me, I grew up in Crimea, but Russia is my Motherland.’

  Until 1996 Sevastopol was a closed city. All non-residents, Ukrainian citizens as well as foreigners, needed special permits to visit. After days of fruitless run-around for the right papers in Simferopol, I got past the check-points into town with the aid of a borrowed Ukrainian passport and a discreet twenty-dollar note. ‘I brought some Germans here a while ago,’ Arkady said. ‘They looked really Western in their big anoraks, so I took them in through the vineyards. But you look just like one of ours, so we won’t bother.’ I resolved to take this as a compliment. Months later I collared Sevastopol’s notoriously old-guard mayor at a London conference devoted to Ukrainian economic reform. A beetle-browed, brown-suited dead ringer for Brezhnev, he looked uncomfortable among the chattering, blazered businessmen. ‘So when,’ I asked, ‘is Sevastopol going to stop being a closed city?’

  ‘I can’t believe, Anoushka’ – eyebrows raised in bonhomous concern – ‘that foreigners have any problems getting in.’

  ‘But they do – I had to bribe the militsiya.’

  ‘But you should have called me! We want tourists, but élite, controlled tourism only. We can’t have lots of tourists, because we have no hotels!’

  ‘Yes, you do – I stayed in one.’

  ‘They have no water!’

  ‘But if you stay closed you’ll never get any investment, any new jobs. Your own businessmen say so.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have been talking to these people – they’re bandits, just little bandits!’ What he wanted, he said, was for Sevastopol to become a ‘free economic zone – because for every economic zone you need a fence, controls. And we have all this already!’ As he manoeuvred away through the crowd, his stubby hands started to shake – whether the effect of too much vodka or suppressed fury, I couldn’t tell.

  With its passionate Russian-ness, its stunned refusal to acknowledge the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sevastopol is the whole of Crimea in concentrated miniature. Sixty-six per cent Russian-speaking, the peninsula has not been part of Ukraine for long. Khrushchev handed it over to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1954 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Pere
yaslav; Crimeans say he must have been drunk. Staid and balmy, it was the place where every Russian dreamed of going on holiday, and where Party functionaries and military types came to retire.

  When Gorbachev held his referendum on maintenance of the Union in March 1991, 88 per cent of Crimeans voted in favour, the highest percentage anywhere in Ukraine. Crimeans did in fact sign up to Ukrainian independence nine months later, but on a low turnout and by a margin of only 4 per cent. Since then, the peninsula has been a continual thorn in Kiev’s side. It elected a pro-Russian regional parliament, which has twice passed ‘constitutions’ declaring virtual independence, and voted, in an illegal referendum of March 1994, in favour of dual Russian–Ukrainian citizenship. Though the pro-Russian demagogue Yuriy Meshkov was easily booted out of the Crimean presidency once he got into turf-wars with his own parliament, the peninsula remains terminally unenthusiastic about being part of independent Ukraine. Unable to reconcile themselves to the new order, but nervous of demanding outright union with Russia, Crimeans daydream of turning the clock back to a rebuilt Soviet Union, to a make-believe world where Russians and Ukrainians were much the same thing. One of Meshkov’s more irritating achievements was to put the peninsula on to Moscow time.

  Crimea’s wistfulness about Russia is reciprocated. If Russians find accepting independent Ukraine painful, taking on board the fact that Crimea – with its Cyprus trees and Massandra wines, its lapis-lazuli sea and shining cliffs – is part of it, is even worse. ‘Crimea is Russian, Russian!’ an otherwise impeccably democratic Moscow acquaintance told me one evening. ‘It’s never been anything else!’ And the Donbass slag-heaps? ‘Oh well, that’s another question.’

  Russian or not, one can see why Crimea is worth making a fuss about. In my grandmother’s attic, I found travel diaries written by my great-great-great-uncle, a roving Scottish MP. ‘Climbing to the top of a hill overhanging the sea,’ he wrote in 1878, ‘I lay down under a pine tree and felt like a lotus-eater. Blue water, green trees, wild precipices, smiling orchards and vineyards, stately villas, and rude mountain villages, all lay around me in panorama . . .’ Avert your eyes from the communists’ shabby sanatoria, and the view from the cliffs above Yalta is just as lovely today. Another wandering Victorian, the Reverend Thomas Milner, was patronising – Crimea was no match for the Alps, and its reputation for romantic scenery due only to the flatness of everything else. But most travellers were happy to rhapsodise. ‘If there exist upon earth a spot as a terrestrial paradise,’ wrote the polymath Cambridge don Edward Daniel Clarke in the early 1800s,

  it is the district intervening between Kutchuckoy and Sudak, along the south coast of the Crimea . . . The life of its inhabitants resembles that of the Golden Age. The soil, like a hot-bed, rapidly puts forth such a variety of spontaneous produce, that labour becomes merely amusing exercise. Peace and plenty crown their board; while the repose they so much admire is only interrupted by harmless thunder reverberating in rocks above them, or by murmuring waves upon the beach below.1

  Like so many ingredients of Russia’s self-image, the Crimea-as-Russian-heartland story has a hole at its centre. For the happy Golden Agers Clarke was talking about were neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but Crimean Tatars – still, when he visited, the large majority of the peninsula’s population.

  Muslim and Turkic-speaking, the Tatars arrived in Crimea in the thirteenth century, with Batu Khan’s mighty Mongol army. Intermarrying with the tribes of the interior, they ruled the peninsula for the next 500 years, first as an offshoot of the Horde, and when the Horde crumbled, as a semi-independent khanate under Ottoman protection. ‘Henceforth,’ Khan Mengli Giray promised the sultan in 1478, ‘we are the enemy of your enemy, the friend of your friend.’2 Though Soviet historians tried to deny the Tatars historical legitimacy by painting them as mere Turkish vassals, in fact the arrangement was a loose one. The sultan had the final say in the choice of khan, elected from among eligible Girays by the ‘kurultai’, a Horde-inherited assembly of Tatar nobles. But the khanate had its own legal system, bureaucracy and coinage, and above all its own army, with which it was able to exact yearly tributes from Poland and Muscovy (the Russian payments only came to an end under Peter the Great), and launch regular slave-raids deep into Ukraine.

  Baron de Tott, Louis XV’s envoy to ‘the Kam of the Tartars’, accompanied one such expedition into the Zaporozhian lands in January 1769. Armed with bows and scimitars, the Tatar horsemen rode short-stirruped, like modern jockeys, and took two or three horses into battle each, leaping from one to another mid-gallop when under pursuit. The rich wore embroidered caftans trimmed with fox or sable, the poor sheepskin coats with the wool turned outside, so that they looked like ‘white bears mounted on horses’.3 Marching under the green banner of the Prophet, they burned every village they came to, turning the snow grey and blocking out the sun. Mid-campaign, de Tott wrote, the cloud of cinders from 150 burning Cossack settlements stretched a ‘full twenty leagues into Poland’.4 A single Tatar horseman might capture ‘five or six slaves of different ages, sixty sheep and twenty oxen’,5 carrying the infants in saddlebags and herding the rest along in front of him for months at a time. In this, at least, the Tatars compared favourably with the accompanying Turkish Sipharis, who ‘after dragging these wretched people about with them for some time, tired of the trouble, and cut them in pieces to get rid of them.’6

  But Tatar life was not all slave-raids. Having dreaded his posting, de Tott found that the khan’s ‘pretended barbarous court’ had a certain rough-hewn Oriental charm. Visitors were received at sunset, after evening prayers, and entertained with clowns and musicians until midnight – a pleasure somewhat marred by the fact that nobody was allowed to sit in the royal presence. Hawking and coursing – 500 horsemen at a time – were favourite pursuits, and de Tott scored a diplomatic triumph with a fireworks display for Khan Makfoud Giray’s birthday. ‘Accustomed as he had been,’ the envoy wrote complacently, ‘to nothing but smoaky gerbs [sic], bad crackers and small rockets, badly filled and ill directed, the success of my exhibition was complete.’7 For his grand finale he administered Makfoud and his nobles with electric shocks; for the next few days ‘Nothing was talked of but electricity, and the number of the curious continually increased’.8

  Makfoud’s successor Kirim Giray, a clever, affable man with a weakness for practical jokes involving severed heads, became a close personal friend. Under de Tott’s influence he developed an enthusiasm for French cuisine (especially its wine-based sauces), and requested that Tartuffe be translated into Turkish for performance by the court buffoons. On campaign, the two spent long evenings talking politics inside a giant crimson-lined tent, Kirim delivering his opinions ‘on the abuses and advantages of liberty, on the principles of honour, or the laws and maxims of government, in a manner which would have done honour to Montesquieu himself’.9

  By de Tott’s day, the khanate was nearing its end. The Ottoman empire was in decline, and Crimea with it. Fewer successful Turkish-backed wars meant fewer infidel prisoners, and the slave-trade withered. At the same time, Russia was starting to look Crimea’s way, tempted by the Black Sea ports and by the empty ‘wild field’ south of the Zaporozhian Sich. The eighteenth century saw a series of military expeditions against the khanate, and in 1772 the Tatars were forced to exchange Ottoman for Russian protection. Two years later, having thrown the Turks out of Kaffa, Catherine II signed a second treaty with the Porte itself, under which Crimea was not to be interfered with by either side. ‘Independence’ lasted less than a decade, and in 1783 Russia annexed the peninsula outright. Catherine instructed that notices be prominently posted ‘to announce to the Crimeans Our receiving them as Our subjects’.10 The Girays decamped to Constantinople, where they became courtiers to the sultan: the Crimean khanate – ‘one of the most important states in eastern Europe’ according to one modern historian11 – was no more.

  In their determination to cast the Tatars as little better than nomadic tribesmen, and Cr
imea itself as virtually unsettled land before their own arrival, the Russians tore down almost all reminders of the Tatar past – hundreds of mosques, palaces, medressas, caravanserais and hammams. One of the few buildings to have survived more or less intact is the khans’ palace at Bakhchisarai, spared only because Pushkin versified about it and because Catherine II stopped there on her way to Sevastopol. (Its star attraction used to be a specially installed royal bathtub.)

  Though its contents and most of the interior decoration have long gone, Bakhchisarai still carries a whiff of sybaritic glamour, of the Krim Tartary of fairy-tales. The buildings are homely, ramshackle, with stumpy minarets, fretworked eaves and open verandahs, quite lacking the aesthetic rigour of Samarkand or the spooky claustrophobia of Topkapi. When the Rev. Milner came here in the mid nineteenth century the rooms were painted with ‘flowers, fruit, birds, beasts, stars, scrolls, villages and landscapes’ – all vanished now, but proof, as he pointed out, that the Girays ‘were free-thinking Mohammedans; for the Koran expressly forbids the representation of living objects’.12 The empty fountains in the overgrown garden are carved with rose-bushes, goldfish and baskets of pears; the turban-topped tombstones in the royal cemetery with Arabic verses, sunflowers and scimitars. Nothing grows there now but dusty steppe grass, but Milner saw nut-trees and lilacs. From inside an octagonal mausoleum – it once had a gilded cupola – comes the sound of hammering. ‘No we’re not doing repairs,’ a workman tells me when I poke my head in, ‘this is a carpentry shop.’ Over the whole seductive complex, at the top of a flight of granite steps, looms a large grey Russian tank. Officially it is a war memorial; unofficially, a reminder of just who is – or was until recently – in charge in Crimea.

  Nineteenth-century tiavel-writers all waxed furious at the cultural havoc Russia wreaked on its newly conquered territories. One of the most splenetic was Cambridge’s indefatigable Clarke, visiting in 1800: