Historic boundaries and historic injustices

Perhaps it is fitting during this week when the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide is being commemorated, that we note the recent words of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a film celebrating his 15 years in power (finally the pretense of his swapping the post of Presidency with his aide Medvedev for that of prime minister in order to circumvent the term limits on the Presidency has been cast aside), Mr. Putin yesterday stated, "It's not because Crimea has a strategic importance in the Black Sea region. It's because this has elements of historical justice. I believe we did the right thing and I don't regret anything,"


Mr Putin, soon to be in a hagiographic film starring himself. Photo from gblor.ru

What historic injustice did Putin put right in the annexation of the Crimean peninsula?

Depending on how far back one wishes to go, we might consider the three centuries of rule under the Ottoman empire in the 15th to 18th centuries, followed by Tsarist Russia annexing it in 1783. Soon after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was finally secured, it declared the peninsula a Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1945 it became a Soviet oblast (province), and in 1954 was ceded to Ukraine. Those elusive and fleeting years when Russia and the Ukraine were ostensibly equal allies, the Russians maintained a Black Sea fleet based in the port capital of Sevastopol, Crimea, and Black Sea resorts allowed Russian and Soviet elite a respite at a warm ice-free setting for their holidays.

The Russian Black Sea fleet is based on the Crimean Peninsula. Photo from beforeitsnews.com

As the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, the Crimean peninsula remained part of Ukraine until the latest upheaval in 2014 when Ukraine began to lean towards the West. Judging the West as lacking in resolve, Mr Putin and his green little men took over the peninsula and declared it part of Mother Russia once again and now we are up to date. Teatree assumes it was the unilateral decision by the Soviet politboro of 1954 to give the land to Ukraine that Mr Putin refers to as an historic injustice, though there are other possibilities.


Putin has always rejected the idea that these "green men" without official army insignias that suddenly showed up in eastern Ukraine were Russian. In the Crimea, Putin maintained the same story for a few months, but then conceded the obvious after the trumped up referendum that showed the majority of voters wanted to reunite with Mother Russia. Photo from www.independent.ie

One of the historic ethnic groups living on the Crimean peninsula were Muslim Tatars, comprising up to 25% of the population. After the Crimean War of 1853-1856 between the Tsarist Russia and Western powers fighting over the weakening Ottoman Empire,the tatars had to flee en masse to avoid persecution by the Russian victors who had ultimately maintained control. During the Bolshevik revolution of 1917-21 which devolved into a multi-year Russian civil war, the peninsula and its population was ravaged by multiple factions. The tatars who had filtered back to their native lands were ravaged once again in the 1930s by Soviet leader Stalin, who also introduced large numbers of Slavs into the region. In another irony, from 1923 into the second world war, there were efforts to move Soviet Jewry into the land, with one soviet functionary, Vyacheslav Molotov, even suggesting the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland.


The Crimean peninsula juts out into the Black Sea - it has changed hands and loyalties many times. Russian President Putin now claims it with the extra stamp of righting an historic injustice. Graphic from goodcounsel.blogspot.com

From a posting at the worldjewishlibrary, we read, "The Crimean peninsula was, for decades, a potential Jewish homeland. After Catherine the Great conquered Crimea from the Ottomons in 1783, she encouraged Jewish settlement to the region. In the following century, tens of thousands of predominantly young Jews moved to this part of "New Russia." By the late 1800s, Crimea had become a thriving training center for future Zionist pioneers who used the land to test agricultural techniques before they relocated to Palestine. In fact, Joseph Trumpeldor once trained potential migrants in the Crimea. The Soviet Politburo was even behind the idea and accepted a proposal to establish a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Crimea in 1923, though it later reversed the decision. Even so, from 1924 until 1938, the Joint Distribution Committee - through the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation and its American Jewish financiers - supported Jewish agricultural settlements in Soviet Crimea."

At any rate, World War II brought savage fighting to the peninsula between German and Russian forces. Germany wanted the land for its strategic value and its warmer agricultural climate, and occupied it for nearly three years. Jews here, as well as in Ukraine were targeted for annihilation during that time. The Soviet army recaptured the capital city, Sevastopol, in 1944, and Stalin immediately ordered the entire population of Crimean Tatars forcibly deported to Central Asia as collective punishment for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis. Only late in the Soviet empire's existence were the tatars politically rehabilitated and allowed to return to what was now an ethnically slavic region with Ukrainian and Russian populations.


Crimean tatars loading up for exile after World War II, photo from flb.ru

In 2014, with Russian forces suddenly in charge once again on the peninsula, the tatars who had returned or remained were facing a dispiriting, though not unfamiliar dilemma. Embrace Russia or leave your homeland. An al-jazeera article captures the new plight in detail, found here.

Once again, Crimean tatars, shown here in their mosques, have been told that they must embrace Russia or face consequences. While they were neglected by Ukraine's government, they still had enjoyed relative freedom. Photo from www.theguardian.com

So on we go - the number of historic injustices are plentiful, many have been inadequately addressed, and many ignored. And Putin, like other strongmen of the past, has chosen to pick a particular slight but primarily to further his own power and influence.

Far East Russia, along the "road of bones"

Confession. This post is a result of Teatree watching, Long Way Round, a film documentary of two British actors riding motorcycles around the world, more or less, from London headed east across Europe, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, to Far East Russia, jumping to Alaska, Canada, mainland US to New York City. Along the way, in Far East Russia, they toiled over what is known, infamously, as the "road of bones."

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A different look at the country Russia, divided into regions by this birding website with the following description, "There are a bewildering array of regions, districts, autonomous regions, city districts and opther political subdivisions in Russia. Rather than dedicate a birding page to each we have chosen to split the huge landmass into several super-regions which have similar climates, avifaunal habitats and so forth. Graphic from http://www.fatbirder.com/links_geo/europe/russia.html

Far East Russia is essentially wild and sparsely populated land. And in the country's recent dark past regarding internal oppression 1930s-1940s), the communist leader Joseph Stalin used Siberia and Far East Russia as a convenient place to send individuals (by the millions) who were a perceived threat to the communist ideology, though more precisely, his growing personal power.

Labor camps throughout this cold distant land - made famous in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's books "The Gulag Archipelago," and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - were both the source for probably mindless work projects as well as the sites representing the end of life for millions of unfortunate Russian and Soviet Empire citizens. The particular section of highway in the graphic below was denoted the "road of bones" due to the practice of burying workers who had died constructing the road, in the roadway itself.

Officially known as the Kolyma Highway - the section in red - it is also known as the "road of bones." From Wikipedia, "It was constructed in the Joseph Stalin era of the USSR by Dalstroy construction directorate. The first stretch was built by the inmates of the Sevvostlag labor camp in 1932. The construction continued (by inmates of gulag camps) until 1953. The road is treated as a memorial, because the bones of the people who died while constructing it were laid beneath or around the road. The land there is permanently frozen so interment into the fabric of the road was deemed more practical than digging into the permafrost to bury the bodies of the dead."

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An icy bridge on the Road of Bones. Photo by CompassExpeditions.com.

Now in 2014, the highway remains dilapidated by modern standards, though in its defense, the land is so cold for much of the year, and so desolate, that ice roads can be built quickly and practically used for much of the year, without investing efforts and funds to build a paved roadway to modern standards.

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One of the colder places on earth - from Yakutzk to Magadan. Photo from askyakutia.com

Rather than build a major bridge to replace this relic, an ice road over the frozen river will suffice for nearly half the year, and for a couple months, six-wheel drive trucks can wade through the water except during the spring runoff. Photo from http://karakullake.blogspot.com

Hardy, or perhaps foolhardy, passenger vehicles link up with truck convoys during the brief season when the roads are not frozen ... Photo from the-bblue.blogspot.com

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The end point of this treacherous road from Yakutsk is the Russian town of Magadan, population just under 100,000. Photo from www.trekearth.com

Monuments

A haunting memorial was built along the highway nearing Magadan. It commemorates all those who died building the highway and the circumstances that led them to these ill fated labor camps.

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Despite some effort searching for the details of this monument (when, by whom, etc) not much has emerged. See figure at the bottom of the memorial to get a sense of size. Photo from http://caravanchronicles.com

An even more bewildering monument - at least in terms of "why" - is one in the town of Magadan itself. There are a few folks apparently still enamored with Stalin, just as there are those with Hitler. (Or those, for that matter, who deny the Holocaust ever occurred.)

A new statue of Stalin, erected in May 2013, was financed by the “Almazy Anabara” diamond-mining company and supported by its company’s president Matvei Evseev, who is a member of the United Russia party. Photo and article by Bolot Bochkarev, a journalist, fixer & guide based in Yakutsk, Russia His website is http://askyakutia.com/tag/road-of-bones/