Vol. 79/No. 12 April 6, 2015
Russian President Vladimir Putin now openly says he began organizing to seize Crimea from the moment Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled by massive popular protests on Feb. 22, 2014. In a new TV documentary he praises the troops who seized the province. At the time, Putin denied that the fighters who poured into Crimea in unmarked uniforms, dubbed “little green men,” were Russian soldiers.
On Feb. 27, 2014, gunmen seized the Crimean parliament building. They oversaw the “election” of Sergei Aksyonov, whose Russian Unity party held just three of 100 seats in the parliament, as the new Crimean prime minister. A so-called referendum for Crimean independence was set for March 16.
There were protests in response by opponents of the Russian intervention, including 15,000 on March 8, International Women’s Day. But the referendum was pushed through with a mix of thuggery and propaganda claiming the new government in Kiev was made up of fascists who would take away rights of Russian-speakers. Crimean officials claimed the result was 96 percent in favor of joining the Russian Federation.
For centuries Crimea was the home of the Tatar people, among the many oppressed nations within the Russian czarist empire. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Tatar culture flourished in the early 1920s under the Bolshevik’s Crimeanization policy, led by V.I. Lenin. After the death of Lenin, a growing privileged layer in the government bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin consolidated control and carried out a counterrevolution against Lenin’s revolutionary polices and revived Great Russian chauvinism.
During World War II Stalin slandered the Tatar people as agents of Hitler, and forcibly deported the entire population to Uzbekistan, Siberia and the Urals. Nearly half of the Tatar people died in the process.
Beginning in the 1960s, Tatars began returning to Crimea. At the time of the Russian annexation last year, the population was about 12 percent Tatar, 25 percent Ukrainian and 58 percent ethnic Russian.
Tatars, supporters of Ukraine face repression
The vast majority of Tatars opposed the Russian takeover. In April 2014 Russian officials banned Mustafa Dzhemilev from Crimea. He was the former head of the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar parliament, and leader of the Tatar people for decades. In July the current head of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, was also banned. And in January Akhtem Chiigoz, deputy head of the Mejlis, was arrested on accusations of organizing “mass disorder” for his involvement in protests on Feb. 26, 2014, in support of Ukrainian sovereignty.Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, a native of Crimea, has been imprisoned in Russia since last May on trumped-up “terrorism” charges for opposing Moscow’s occupation. Three participants in a March 9 commemoration of the birthday of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko were prosecuted simply for holding a Ukrainian flag and ribbons in the flag’s colors. Russian officials are refusing to renew the license of the one Crimean Tatar television station.
The occupation government is demanding residents get a Russian passport. “To retain Ukrainian citizenship you had to write quite a degrading letter of application,” Dzhemilev said in a March 3 interview with Euromaidan Press. “If you don’t get a Russian passport you don’t have the right to send your kids to school, you don’t have a right to undergo treatment at a public hospital, in short you barely have any rights.”
Sanctions by Washington and the European Union against Moscow have had a harsh effect on working people. In December Visa and Mastercard suspended credit and debit-card services to Crimea, citing U.S. sanctions. Tourism, the region’s largest industry, is down by one-third. Inflation is 38 percent, and even higher for food. Crimea depends on Ukraine for its water and electricity, and Kiev has reduced supplies of both, leading to blackouts and irrigation problems.
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