Once when I was a child, I heard two mysterious words “the dead season” for the first time. Some old lady said these words on the wet November embankment in Yalta. They stuck in memory and each time when I came on the South Coast of Crimea in late autumn or winter, I felt the accuracy of this metaphor. Summer Crimea really becomes different during this period: the leaden sea melts into the same sky, the cold wind cuts you to the bone, there is not a single person on the embankment, where you barely pass among the crowd in summer… There is greyness, overwhelming greyness… But when the sun comes out – there is a lot more of it than in Kiev – the feeling of some emptiness and impropriety, unreality of everything that is happening, still remains. The memory comes back to pictures from the cult Soviet film “ASSA”: palm trees on the Yalta embankment are covered with snow. This is a surrealistic picture. It does not happen. Yalta is a city of holiday, sound of the sea lapping against the rocks, tanned girls, restaurants, “a shimmering suit”… But there are palm trees covered with snow…
If I were asked to describe the current situation in Crimea in a few words, for want of a better response, I would have said: “the dead season” came in Crimea. And this is not due to the time of year or the tourist attractiveness of one or another region of once-blessed land. It is about Crimea as a whole. It is about what is going on there now.
Crimea is dying. But it even doesn’t offer any resistance. It dies as a resort: the Ukrainian people, who were the majority of tourists, don’t come here anymore, and it is difficult to get there for the Russian people because of transport logistics. Let alone tourists from far-abroad countries.
The agricultural sector is also dying – it can’t exist without Ukrainian water but water will hardly return in Crimea. Now the Crimean steppe landscape reminds American parched savannahs, where black skeletons of sunflowers stands in accurate lines.
Business is dying – connections with the mainland are broken, it is difficult to build connections with Russia (delivery, prices, complexity in the legal field), nothing remains but the circular flow in Crimea itself. People lose their job, move away – someone to Ukraine, others to Russia or seek fortune in faraway places. In these circumstances, young, active and ambitious people move away. The Russian security-service agents and officials, who will hardly stay here for a long time, come – there are no prospects, only, perhaps, after retirement.
Education is dying – nobody, except Russia and Zimbabwe, recognizes diplomas of Crimean universities, so it means that those, who are smarter, will look for other educational institutions outside the peninsula. After young people leave, Crimea will quickly regain the status of “the conservation area of retirees” that was given to him in the 80s of the last century.
In the face of the triumph of the severe “Russian world”, the fragile tolerance that gave hope for maintenance of interethnic peace on the peninsula is dying. Now only the rule of force is working, which means that peace is possible only when someone is stronger than other person. But in such a situation this another person feels like a victim that sooner or later will want to compensate own present humiliation. When the rule of force will already be on his side.
When assessing the situation in Crimea, for some reason, lines from the immortal work of Mikhail Bulgakov come to mind: “the darkness covered the city hated by the procurator” (truly speaking, the “goblin” doesn’t suit to the role of a procurator but I’m talking about other things). It is not the darkness but something more terrible – hopeless greyness covered Crimea leaving its mark on people’s faces. Now they are focused, self-absorbed, closed from the outer world, where each day brings them a lot of problems… And what can be more terrible than greyness? There is a way out of the darkness, a desire to get to the light. The greyness is not the darkness, it covers, fills with sadness, deprives of any incentives to actions. The greyness is an ideal environment for totalitarian regimes: grey people control a grey mass. This greyness is a way to oblivion for Crimea. This is the “dead season” that now has come for the whole peninsula. But, may be, there is still a chance? May be, someday we will be able to enjoy the yellow sunflowers on a background of a stunning blue sky of Crimea.
