Koktebel may no longer be as picture postcard-perfect as it was when Russian poet and painter Maximilian Voloshin “discovered” it. But the brilliant interplay of light and landscape that drew him and other artists to this magical stretch of the Crimean coast almost a century ago has survived the garish bars and kitschy souvenir shops that now line the sea front.
Today, almost seven months after Crimea — the playground of the privileged from the Tsarist period through the Soviet era to more recent times — switched its loyalties from Ukraine to Russia, there is unease in paradise.
Politics is on everyone’s mind here, but isn’t always willingly articulated.
Not far from Koktebel’s Voloshin Museum, I pause to chat with two shop girls. They speak no English, so I mouth “Putin.” One gives me a thumbs-up, the other a thumbs-down, the first, an ethnic Russian, the second Ukrainian. A Tatar mother and daughter who run the pharmacy next door join us. “Putin?” “Neutraaal,” the mother responds, stretching the word out.
I finally find an English-speaking Ukrainian. Ambivalent about the changes, she acknowledges there are compensations: her mother, a government schoolteacher, now receives a Russian salary, higher than the one she got as a Ukrainian citizen. And yes, the Russian government is pouring money into Crimea to develop it. But contact with relatives in Ukraine is now minimal as conversation has become difficult…
Is there anything to be happy about?
Well, Crimea has been spared the violence that has devastated Southeastern Ukraine, she says.
The Crimean situation I am in Koktebel, a tiny Black Sea resort, to attend a jazz festival on the invitation of the Rossiya Segodnya International News Agency. The Koktebel Jazz Party, named thus to distinguish it from the Koktebel Jazz Festival, is an annual feature here since 2003 and has shifted this year to Odessa in Ukraine. It has a political subtext — to demonstrate that all is well in Crimea to an international audience of musicians and hopefully, some journalists.
Russia is also waging an information war against the West with the latter succeeding in demonising Vladimir Putin
An overwhelming 97 per cent in Crimea may have voted for “reunification” with Russia on March 16, but western governments say the referendum violated international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Technically they are right. But, ahead of the referendum, the Supreme Council of Crimea and the Sevastopol City Council cited Kosovo’s secession from Serbia in its March 11 joint resolution to underscore that Serbia’s protests at the time hadn’t deterred the West from recognising Kosovo.
Convinced that the change of government in Ukraine earlier this year was a U.S.-engineered coup d’état, Russia wanted to signal through the Crimean referendum that it would, in its national interest, counter U.S. attempts to extend NATO’s area of influence eastwards, right to its borders, and do whatever was needed to protect its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, a strategic naval base in Crimea. (After the Soviet Union splintered, Russia entered into an agreement with Ukraine on the continuance of its base here.)
The “return” of Crimea to Russia, therefore, saw President Vladimir Putin’s approval rates in the country soar to 83 per cent in end April-early May — a 29 percentage point increase since last year.
In Koktebel’s souvenir shops, Mr. Putin’s face is on T-shirts and fridge magnets. One has U.S. President Barack Obama and Republican leader John McCain running with the Russian President astride a bear in hot pursuit; another, ironically, as that most enduring of American heroes, Superman. Is Mr. Putin then as popular in Crimea as he is in the rest of Russia? Or are the magnets and T-shirts an attempt by the Russian President’s image-makers — as some people suggest in Koktebel — to build him up here?
Whatever the truth, Russia is also waging an — unequal, some would say — information war against the West with the latter succeeding, in large measure, in demonising the Russian President, creating the unwarranted fear that he has ambitions to recreate the Soviet Union.
On the front lines of this other war is Koktebel Jazz Party’s flamboyant organiser, journalist Dmitry Kiselev, Mr. Putin’s “chief propagandist,” a description he dismisses as a “stereotype.” But he acknowledges that the state-owned Rossiya Segodnya he heads hopes to provide a “counter-narrative” to western news agencies like Reuters, even as the older state-owned Russia Today is expanding its TV coverage internationally in several languages.
Mr. Kiselev’s hugely popular — if provocative and polemical — Sunday TV talk show has also helped build domestic public opinion for Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine. This has added to the current anti-West mood in the country, bolstered by the economic sanctions against Russia. “We’ve no interest in recreating the bipolar world that existed before the Cold War,” he says. “We want a multipolar world, where every country has its say, not one dominated by the U.S.”
Hosting a million refugees With Crimean “reunification” still contested, Russia is focussing attention on Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis. In Moscow, at the office of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, the photographs displayed along its corridors are graphic depictions of the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhanz provinces. The U.N. estimates that 3,660 people have died in the last six months and, despite the September 5 truce, the killings continue.
But the concern is not just within government offices. On September 17 to mark U.S. Constitution Day, as part of a protest entitled “The Tears of Freedom,” a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty, her face bloodied and hands clutching photographic evidence of human rights violations in eastern Ukraine, stood mute in front of the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The message was unambiguously anti-U.S.
Ukraine’s civil war has backers outside the country’s borders. The West has accused Russia not just of arming and funding Russian insurgents but of covertly sending in Russian troops. Russia has focussed on the Ukrainian army’s use of heavy artillery and aerial bombardment in civilian areas, and working in tandem with the armed militia of the ultranationalist Ukrainian political party, the Right Sector.
The net result: Russia is now host to around a million refugees — all Ukrainian citizens — temporarily settled in different parts of the federation.
Ferbert Aleksander, the director of a confectionary enterprise and a Russian citizen whose parents live in Donetsk, has, for the last six months, been running the Donbass Foundation, getting medical aid and food supplies into Ukraine using Ukrainian contacts. But it isn’t easy, he says. “They have smeared me saying my volunteers are taking in arms for the self-defence forces; my family members there are being carefully watched.”
Georgy Fedorov says the Civic Chamber, of which he is a member, is providing legal aid to not just the refugees, but also to those inside Ukraine to file law suits, and at the international court in Strasbourg, against human rights violations.
For Moscow, facing its most serious crisis since the end of the Soviet Union, this is a war that is being fought on all fronts.
smita.g@thehindu.co.in
