We all have great expectations, especially
when we are young. Later in life, sunny skies often turn dark and by necessity
we trim our sails.
So it is both refreshing and quite
remarkable to encounter a 70-year old man whose life trajectory set him on the
opposite course of continually enlarging his expectations, most especially when
that man is the recently installed President of the United States.
Unfortunately, when a large dose of
capriciousness worthy of a Boris Yeltsin, as a Russian editorialist recently
noted, is added to those expectations, those of us who supported Donald Trump’s
presidential bid in hopes of an actual improvement in the U.S.-Russian
relationship are feeling the sting of betrayal. (Any comparison to Boris
Yeltsin is truly the kiss of death to 98% of Russians, and not one that should
warm any American’s heart.)
To Recap: First, we had Ambassador Nikki
Haley’s maiden U.N. speech that included the now tiresome barking at the
Russians over Ukraine and Crimea so as to nearly match in spirit, if not in
volume, that of her predecessor, the unlamented Samantha Power. Trump himself
tweeted: “Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration…,”
and shortly thereafter White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, informed us that
President Trump “expects Russia to return Crimea” to Ukraine.
The return of Crimea is one Donald Trump
expectation that will not be met now or ever. Nor should it be in light of the
actual details on which Ukraine makes its claim to the peninsula. Those details
tell a tale of property (territorial) rights, something to which an American
real estate magnate ought to be able to relate.
In 1954, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary
of Ukraine’s re-incorporation into the Russian empire, Nikita Khrushchev, First
Secretary of the C.P.S.U. and himself a son of Ukraine, made the grand gesture
of bequeathing the Soviet-created Socialist Republic of Ukraine the peninsula
of Crimea.
However, Article 5 of the Constitution
(Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics states:
“Socialist property in the U.S.S.R. exists
either in the form of state property (belonging to the whole people) or in the
form of co-operative and collective-farm property (the property of collective
farms or co-operative societies).”
Article 6 clarifies further:
“The land, its mineral wealth, waters,
forests, the factories and mines, rail, water and air transport facilities, the
banks, means of communication, large state-organized enterprises (state farms,
machine and tractor stations, etc.), as well as municipal enterprises and the
bulk of the dwelling-houses in the cities and industrial localities, are state
property, that is, belong to the whole people.” (Progress Publishers, Moscow
1969)
In other words, Crimea was never within
Nikita Khrushchev’s gift.
The argument that Khrushchev was handing
off both the peninsula and a military asset (Sevastopol) critical to the entire
Soviet Union’s security to a single Soviet republic requires a willful
misreading of both history and the law.
Certainly the First Secretary was free to
adjust the administrative districts of the U.S.S.R. as he and the C.P.S.U. saw
fit, but he had no right to carve off a piece of national territory and hand it
to Ukraine without the agreement of the legal and constitutional owners; in
this case, the Soviet people as a whole. No referenda seeking the agreement of the
Crimean or the Soviet or the Russian Republic’s people for the transfer of the
territory were ever held.
No one kicked up a fuss at the time because
Khrushchev’s gesture was seen as just another vacuous political stunt to which
all state leaders are given from time to time, while being understood as an
administrative change of little significance within the totality of the
U.S.S.R.
It’s doubtful the famously “hare-brained”
Khrushchev considered that his childish and surely inconsequential meddling
would or could ever be interpreted otherwise.
To understand why what Khrushchev handed
off was nothing more than a nearly empty box tied with a pretty ribbon (the
First Secretary had to be well aware of it himself), we need to back up six
years prior to Khrushchev’s 1954 gift – to 1948.
On 25 October 1948, Sevastopol was taken out
of the U.S.S.R. by resolution No. 403 of the Council of Ministers, and on
29 October 1948 by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the
Russian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic. These two actions had the effect
of re-classifying Sevastopol as a municipality excluded from regional
governance and as a city under jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.
Consequently, decisions of the Crimean regional executive council never applied
to Sevastopol, the main base of the Black Sea Fleet. (Dmitry Rogozin, The Hawks of Peace, Chapter 11.)
Rogozin, Russia’s former Ambassador to
NATO, explains, “…it’s not the Black Sea Fleet that is based in Sevastopol, but
Sevastopol itself is an integral part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.”
I would add, “As goes Sevastopol, so goes
Crimea.”
Crimea is significant because of
Sevastopol, which along with any infrastructure critical to the city, was
governed from Moscow. Administratively, all that Khrushchev handed off to Ukraine’s
local potentates were the outlying hamlets, roads, ruts, tractor stations,
village water wells, post offices, etc.
Thus, the nearly empty box tied with the
pretty ribbon.
Now let’s speed forward to the March 1991
referendum on what was known as the Union Treaty. At that time, electorates in
9 of the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union voted to retain the
Union. (The six dissenters were Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
and Moldova, all of which were demanding independence.)
Imagine then the Soviet electorate’s
surprise on 8 December 1991 when they awoke to the news that their country, the
one they had lived in their entire lives and for which 27 million of their
family members had given their lives defending from German invaders, no longer
existed: the U.S.S.R. had been liquidated by the Russian Federation’s Boris
Yeltsin, Ukraine’s Leonid Kravchuk, and Belarussia’s Stanislau Shushkevich upon
those three men’s sole initiative.
The Belovezhskaya Puscha agreement
marked the exact moment of Yeltsin’s usurpation. What was Gorbachev without the
USSR? Nothing! A footnote, nothing more. And Boris, tired and emotional from
such a busy day, and so eager for his moment of triumph that he simply “forgot”
to insist upon a resolution of Crimea’s uncertain status before signing the
Declaration of the Dissolution of the U.S.S.R. (It was said that Yeltsin
was so drunk five men were needed to cope with the celebrant’s removal from the
scene of the crime.)
Thus was Ukraine’s fraudulent claim to Crimea
perpetuated for another 23 years, during which Ukraine used its assumed control
over Sevastopol to poke, extort and torment the Russian bear. Russia had the
oil and gas, but Ukraine had Sevastopol and the pipelines to Europe. (See here for the post-1991 shadow boxing between
Russia and Ukraine, and here for an informed overview of Ukraine’s
probable future.)
The distressed and dissatisfied people of
Crimea voted in three referendums for re-unification with Russia; in 1992, in
1994 and in 2014, each with increasing majorities greater than 90% of those
voting. The election of 2014 was not an upset, but, rather the realization of
the consistent wishes of the Crimean people, who couldn’t get to the polls fast
enough.
New wannabe exploiters like NATO and the
EU, egged on by the reptilian John McCain and his girlfriend Lindsey Graham,
trying to play Kiev’s game could make for a real high-priced show.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson,
Maria Zakharova, stated the Russian view succinctly when she responded sharply
to news of President Trump’s expectation with just eight words, “Crimea is a
territory of the Russian Federation”. Somewhere along the way, she added,
“The Russian Federation does not give territory away.”
President Trump, don’t try to reverse the
tides of nature or of history, King Canute showed long ago it can’t be done;
the rightful claims of the dead’s heirs just keep poking their noses into every
corner of every contrived narrative of the past, making constant trouble for
those who would ignore them.
Dare I mention Sudetenland, Galicia or
Kosovo?
Let the peoples of Russia, of Crimea, and
of your own land read our Dickens in peace. We have no quarrel between us.
After all, there’s many a lesson to learn in the tale of Pip.
Even for you, sir.
Russia and the post-Cold War world have long been
subjects of Ms. Williamson’s journalism. Write to her at annewilliamson@msn.com.