Recently the historians gathered together to discuss the problems of Crimea. And though the conversation wasn’t based on the stereotyped “Whose Crimea is?”, there was a conflict of three essentially different world-views – philosophical, scientific and pragmatic – during the round-table discussion. Having talked about the question “How to understand the history of Crimea”, the scientists started to discuss another subject: what, actually, Ukraine needs to return Crimea. Or, rather, what did it lack to save Crimea?
National consciousness of Crimeans
Andriy Ivanets, who is the historian and the head of the Presidential Administration’s department on the temporarily occupied territory and social adaptation, relied upon the consciousness and the “dual post-Soviet loyalty” of a significant number of Crimeans. He discovers the confirmation of this fact in the last public opinion poll presented by the company GfK Ukraine as part of the project Free Crimea: “I have to remind the poll in December, 2013. At that time about 70% of Crimeans said that they are patriots of Ukraine. If this poll were held this year, we could expect the result, when most of them were patriots of Russia. What is the reason for that? The reason is that a significant number of Crimeans had the dual post-Soviet loyalty. In other words, when they were asked whether they were patriots of Ukraine, they answered: “Yes, we are patriots of Ukraine.” But if at the same time they were asked: “Are you patriots of Russia?” They would also answer: “Yes, we are patriots of Russia.”
His colleague Sergiy Gromenko, who is the member of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, doesn’t agree with him and notes that the GfK research is inadequate because “if someone calls you on your landline and asks: “Whose Crimea is?”, will many of you answer that Crimea belongs to Ukraine knowing that you may be accused under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation?” So, he thinks, “it is not rational to believe in 82% of support as well as talk about the dual loyalty. It exists but in much smaller scales.”
The Ukrainian vision and narrative
The history of Crimea is disconnected from the unified Ukrainian history in the Ukrainian school books. Andriy Ivanets sees the problem in this: “Crimea should be submitted as part of the Ukrainian territory in the modern Ukrainian science. In order to teach the history, it is needed to have a full range of historical practices searching the history of Crimea as the history of the Ukrainian experience for the purpose to satisfy both the needs of the academic history and other needs. No matter how to teach it – as the narrative or fragmented reports about the history – there should be Crimea as a part of our historical experience. The same goes for popularization of the history.”
But Sergiy Gromenko thinks that the main problem for Ukrainian understanding of the history of Crimea is a lack of the cohesive vision: “The truth is that the Ukrainian historical science has failed to create any kind of the official history of Crimea for 23 years. There were several tactical attempts by efforts of the Crimean scientists but the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian historiography were in too much of a bind to think of that. So, we even don’t have a subject to really discuss: it is like no vision of the Crimean history from the Ukrainian side.” In the scientist’s opinion, the only thing we can do now is “to dispute with the Russian vision, the Russian myths and as for the Ukrainian position, it must to be formulated first.”
Yuriy Ruban, who is the chief of the Head Department for Humanitarian Policy of the Presidential Administration, suggested the historians, who, in his opinion, “receive the money from the government for thinking up the narratives, to come up with a message for politicians: “They have to come up with the language for politicians and the politicians have to use this language for their political purposes. This is a cynical view but it is a thing that the government pays to the scientists for.”
Experts on Crimea
On the other hand, there was no way to get such a vision because Sergiy Gromenko insists that there is a “total lack of the experts on Crimea”: “We found out after the annexation that there are no specialists and most of the problems of the modern policy of Ukraine regarding Crimea are lying in the fact that there is no expert opinion to rely on. To my mind, the foremost question is to get the forming-up process of the history of Crimea in Ukraine back on track.”
Andriy Ivanets doesn’t support this idea, although he notes that there is still a lack of “the experts on Crimea” in Ukraine: “I wouldn’t say that there were no scientists, historians, who could deal with Crimea, on the mainland territory at all. There was a lack of them.” The historian also thinks that there was a lack of specialized institutions – the departments of the Crimean area studies at various institutes. The financing for that was not still found.
Rationality
According to Andriy Ivanets, Russia quickly removed the Crimeans from the Ukrainian information space to “form a purely Russian consciousness of Crimeans” by using the history. However, “there is a large number of Crimeans, who recognize their belonging to Ukraine”, that’s exactly why Ukraine should provide them with the possibility to also receive information about the peninsula through the remote courses, publishing of the historian materials, popular essays.
But Yuriy Ruban is strongly convinced that Russia takes absolutely rational decisions regarding Crimea: “They were getting ready for them keeping the identities and the decisions were taken because some people have been got at and someone acted in view of political reasons… All our constructs, all these our schemes that we like to build, class or nation struggles are working poorly before the political decision-making procedure. I can see that on the example of such a politician as Volodymyr Putin, he watches his own TV too much, so he got big problems in the area of rational policy.”
The experts still didn’t reach an understanding in the question of what exactly Ukraine lacked to save Crimea. Probably, it is all of them. However, it is obvious for the citizens of Ukraine and Crimean immigrants that it is needed to eliminate these gaps quickly and effectively and, most importantly, systematically. Otherwise, we are at risk to be out of touch with reality as well and, thus, with Crimea.
Yana Goryunova, specially for Pod Pricelom
