Just over two years have passed since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Since then, the peninsula has remained in international limbo and has become something of an information vacuum for outside observers. <\/p>\n
Yet before the Ukrainian crisis began in late 2013, there was a lack of information and deep understanding not just of Crimea, but of Ukraine as a whole. <\/p>\n
In the wake of the 2012 UEFA football championship, held across Ukraine and Poland, Rory Finnin, a Cambridge academic and expert on Ukraine, described the country as Europe\u2019s terra malecognita<\/em>. Finnin emphasised how poorly Ukraine was understood in the continent\u2019s west.\u2028\u2028 This lack of understanding is even more pertinent regarding Crimea, as a periphery within a periphery, and a place which is only becoming more isolated since Russian annexation.<\/p>\n Ukraine was a terra maleocognita<\/em> for western Europe, and Crimea a periphery within it<\/p>\n Neil Kent\u2019s recently published Crimea: a History<\/em> aims to fill this gap in knowledge by offering a broad history of the peninsula. For Kent, this ignorance of Crimea has created an image of the peninsula somewhere exotic and \u201cAsiatic\u201d. Instead, he argues the reverse: that Crimea is \u201cno wild and alien land\u201d, but somewhere that is distinctly and distinctively European<\/em>. \u2028<\/p>\n Neil Kent, based at the University of Cambridge\u2019s Scott Polar Institute, is a scholar better known for his work on Polar and Scandinavian history and culture, including The S\u00e1mi Peoples of the North<\/em> (2014), A Concise History of Sweden<\/em>, (2008), The Soul of the North: a Social, Cultural and Architectural History of the Nordic Countries<\/em> (2000). <\/p>\n Crimea: A History<\/em> therefore diverts from its author\u2019s more usual topics. In its own way, it\u2019s a response \u2014 academic, personal and political \u2014 to the Ukrainian crisis and the deteriorating relations between Russia and the west. \u2028<\/p>\n A woman carries a Crimean flag past the Kremlin after a rally celebrating the first anniversary of Russia\u2019s annexation of the peninsula. Moscow, March 2015. Photo (c): Denis Tyrin \/ Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Across ten chapters, Neil Kent speeds through Crimea\u2019s history from the ancient to the present, including an epilogue on Crimea\u2019s annexation. En route, he touches on Crimea\u2019s Middle Age history, Ottoman encroachment and the Russian Empire\u2019s annexation of Crimea in 1783, before exploring Crimea\u2019s shifting position within the Soviet Union and across the post-Soviet space.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2028Kent does therefore offer a timely and detailed historical perspective on Crimea. However, what he devotes to breadth in discussing Crimea\u2019s \u201clong history\u201d, he sacrifices in depth.<\/p>\n This emphasis on the Crimea\u2019s \u201cEuropeanness\u201d serves to chastise Turkey and Crimean Tatars as the region\u2019s \u201cother\u201d<\/p>\n For Kent, understanding more about Crimea\u2019s long and varied history is fundamental for appreciating \u201cwhat binds and divides Europe\u201d. He emphasises the Europeanness of Crimea, and the location of Crimea at a \u201ccrossroads to Eurasia\u201d and \u201cgateway to Europe\u201d, going as far as to say that Crimea was and still is more significant to Russia than St Petersburg, Russia\u2019s imperial capital. <\/p>\n Such an approach taps into a discourse that has long plagued Russia and Europe, concerning whether Russia is part of, or distinct from, Europe. Rather, Kent argues that Crimea is simultaneously European and<\/em> Russian. By extension, Russia is also European because of the importance of Crimea to Russia\u2019s national imaginary.<\/p>\n In this account, Crimea is a keystone that can help to bring cohesion and solidarity at a time \u201cwhen ancient divisions threaten the very fabric of a common European civilization\u201d. Kent distinguishes between Crimea and Russia, which are part of a \u201ccommon European civilization\u201d, and the threatening \u201cexternal alien forces\u201d. However, he is neither explicit in identifying who these \u201calien\u201d others are, nor in unpacking what it\u00a0means to be<\/em> European<\/em>. <\/p>\n The implication here serves to chastise Turkey and Crimean Tatars as the \u201cother\u201d in Crimea, as medieval anti-Slavic \u201cslave raiders\u201d. This offers a very different account to scholars of Crimean Tatars, such as Brian Glyn Williams, whose recent book emphasises Crimean Tatars as a nation constructed out of trauma, deportation and contemporary discrimination.<\/p>\n Crimean Tatar women meet after a collective prayer for victims of the 1944 deportation at the Kebir-Jami mosque in Simferopol, Crimea. (c) Artem Kreminsky \/ VisualRIAN. All rights reserved.Too often, Kent\u2019s analysis is saturated with essentialist and civilisational overtones that overlook political context. Kent\u2019s portrayal of the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia as a \u201cfratricidal war\u201d and the Middle East as \u201calways\u201d a \u201cpowder keg\u201d of conflict between different religions is reductionist. This emphasis downplays the significance of local and international political actors \u2014 not to mention economic factors \u2014 as key mobilisers within these various conflicts, not least the incursion of Russian special forces into Ukraine.<\/i><\/p>\n Kent portrays the West, notably NATO, as ignoring, if not misunderstanding, Crimea\u2019s \u201chistorical context, ethnic make-up and popular will\u201d, as though this somehow explains or legitimises Russia\u2019s incursion and annexation of Crimea. <\/p>\n The real picture is rather more complex. Rather, in my research in Crimea, conducted before annexation (in 2012 and 2013), I found that the idea of what it mean to be Russian in the region was contested and fractured. Instead of adhering to neat census categories, those I interviewed gave different meanings to being Russian, with many challenging the idea that identifying as ethnically Russian was analogous to being pro-Russian, much less pro-Putin.<\/p>\n Kent\u2019s analysis is saturated with essentialist and civilisational overtones that overlook political context<\/p>\n Secondly, I found that even the most vociferous supporters of Russia in 2012 and 2013 did not support joining Russia. Instead, they preferred a peaceful status quo to an uncertain territorial change. Crimea\u2019s annexation by Russia \u2014 and the relative lack of bottom-up protest \u2014 is therefore a puzzle to be explored<\/em>, rather than\u00a0explained away<\/em> by reductionist accounts of Crimea\u2019s complicated territorial and ethnic history. <\/p>\n Empirically, Kent should have offered more detail of the sources he relied on in forming this account. He offers some potentially fascinating insights into Crimea\u2019s transfer to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, such as the limited role and power of Khrushchev in making this transfer (in contrast to popular understanding of the event).<\/p>\n Nikita Khrushchev was first secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party when Crimea was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954. Photo CC: Wikimedia Commons.<\/i><\/p>\n Kent alludes to primary Soviet newspaper sources as the evidence confirming this interpretation, but fails to cite these directly. The usefulness of this book, therefore, as an introduction to Crimea is limited for readers who might wish to follow up with the primary source materials that Kent might have used in producing this book.<\/p>\n More worryingly, there are also factual mistakes in the text. For example, in the introduction, Kent cites \u201cthe last official census\u201d taken by Ukrainian census results in Crimea. Assuming he is citing Ukraine\u2019s 2001 census, as post-Soviet Ukraine\u2019s first and last official census, Kent claims that 63% are reported as ethnic Russian. In fact, it was 58%. <\/p>\n More alarmingly, Kent confuses Russia\u2019s ruling political party United Russia (Yedinaya Rossiya<\/em>), with the Crimean party (before 2014) Russian Unity (Russkoye Yedinstvo<\/em>). He argues that United Russia (as opposed to Russian Unity) was present and significant in helping Crimea\u2019s annexation from within in February 2014. In detailing the circumstances of Crimea\u2019s annexation, it is fundamental to distinguish between local Crimean and international (i.e. Russia) actors and organisations which promoted Crimea\u2019s annexation. <\/p>\n Overall, Kent overlooks the subjectivity of his account of Crimea. By portraying his evidence as incontrovertible facts, the author ignores what remain contested interpretations of history, identities, and legacies. Kent argues he could see the \u201cstorm clouds\u201d looming over Crimea as early as 2006. Certainly, relations within Crimea, and between Kyiv and Crimea, were contentious before 2014. <\/p>\n Yet Kent\u2019s history of Crimea\u2019s storm clouds do not get us closer to understanding how the peninsula came to be in international no-man\u2019s land, nor why Russia became willing to risk everything to put it there. Such an explanation would require a more nuanced and less primordial account of Crimea\u2019s history, whether European or Russian.<\/p>\n Neil Kent\u2019s <\/em>Crimea: A History\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0published by Hurst Books this April.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just over two years have passed since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Since then, the peninsula has remained in international limbo and has become something of an information vacuum for outside observers. Yet before the Ukrainian crisis began in late 2013, there was a lack of information and deep understanding not just of Crimea,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}No foreign land\u00a0<\/h2>\n
Eternally Russian (since 1783)\u2028<\/h2>\n
The trouble with \u201ctruthiness\u201d\u2028<\/h2>\n