Crimea as a visual aid, or Putin of Tauris
Crimea is turning into a visual aid for the modern world’s rules like a crashed car on the road curb with a placard “Driver, remember what drunk driving leads to!” The Crimeans did not drink, of course, but many of them really filled the glasses. Now that festive euphoria is giving way to hangover, you can sit down on an empty bench among a deserted beach and reflect without politics, the voice of someone’s blood in the veins, or striped breeches – simply as a peaceful individual who has something deep in the heart, like a hen in the vegetable garden, rather than a double-headed bird in the eyes.
Let’s begin with this vegetable garden by a little country house. All the houses, vegetable gardens, and other property in Crimea are open to question. Some friends of mine, who have been building a dacha on the outskirts of Alushta for 15 years, are now stuck in Odesa with Ukrainian documents, being aware that somebody in Crimea will soon receive a permit for their property. They joke that now they are eligible, as the nobility once were, for restitution. Indeed, Bolshevik-style expropriation plus bandit-style mayhem is a very precise description of what is going on in the peninsula. The barbarian sinking of ships, seizures of hostages, shootouts on the street, kidnappings, and “nationalization” of somebody else’s property – all these unlawful, antihuman, and eco-hazardous steps of the invaders are an eye-opener for the world public about the Putin regime.
This regime’s pattern is unpretentious and repeats in general terms the pre-Peter I ways to manage patrimonial estates. The Muscovite tsar would place his people at the head of, say, the Astrakhan Khanate, the Nogai Horde, or the Don Cossack Host, which were allowed, in exchange for loyalty and contributions to the central treasury, to rule the people and property of these territories. These principles govern today the life in Krasnodar Territory, Chechnya, the Siberian and European regions of Russia, where governors and administration heads rule the roost in their “fiefs.” For this reason, the “accession of Crimea” is nothing but allowing the peninsula to be plundered by satraps with a criminal record. Vladimir Putin wanted to do the same to Ukraine, but the pathological kleptomania of Yanukovych stood in the way. It is beyond any doubt that the Kremlin’s Crimean partners will fit in with Putin’s “Russian World” scenario. Crimea will live in poverty, while the leadership will flourish.
It is not a forecast but a rule of the existence of a system stripped of democratic and legal principles. Systems of this kind have gone extinct on the European continent, in North America and Australia, and most countries in Asia and Latin America are dropping them. Only Russia goes on living by the rules of successful feudal lords, thinking that a conquered land will add a word to the title and bring more “gold” into the state coffers. They do not take into account that the world has changed, that territories need expenditures, that human intellect and creative potential are far more important than oil and gas reserves, and that the brains of the American guy who invented Facebook cost more than Gazprom as a whole. And there are millions of such guys in the countries where freedom and people prove their worth without Kalashnikov assault rifles. Of course, this is not talked about in the Russian Duma’s corridors. Instead, they rejoice at the “restoration of historical justice” by way of sabotage, provocations, and blatant lies. “Crimea is ours!” the Russian criminalized establishment shouts, taking over other people’s property and forgetting that all the Russians will have to pay for this property of the Ukrainian state and its citizens. They forgot, for some reason, the first and still valid US warning about the inevitable material punishment of the people and organizations implicated in the expropriation. But the robbing instinct proved to be stronger than the self-preservation sensation. For the words “conquered territory” really strike a chord in the Russian heart.
Crimea is now going to be… Maybe, like Iturup, an abandoned island, to which Japan lays claim? Or like Kaliningrad? Here is what a certain Vitaly Antropov writes about this land on a website for those who wish to move over: “I have traveled about Central Russia and I was surprised to see that all cities look almost the same. And, while Kaliningrad, despite a contrast between dreary tenements and German villas, still creates the impression of a city (sometimes Soviet style, and sometimes a garden city), the mainland provinces are a huge village: the center of every town shows streets with half-rotten, lopsided, and sagged (windows-deep) old wooden houses. And there’s usually a big shopping center in front of them. While sidewalks in Kaliningrad are often broken, there are simply none in other towns. Roads in Kaliningrad are terrible in the courtyards, quite tolerable in the city, and good and even romantic in the oblast (I adore green tree arbors, which I’ve never seen in Central Russia). In other cities, the situation with roads is more pleasant only as an exception and, for example, in Petersburg things are not better even by an inch (driving there really got me pissed). And it is just terrible to recall the most important highway Moscow-Saint Petersburg – I’d never expected a disgrace like his. Yes, Moscow is living high off the hog – they remove asphalt from excellent roads and sidewalks and cover them with a new layer… This surprised me” (http://nesiditsa.ru/discovery/pro-kaliningrad-plyusyi-i-minusyi).
Alas, Crimea will not live high off the hog, as Moscow does, but will resemble Iturup, Kaliningrad, Tiksi, Urengoi, Blagoveshchensk, Chita, Ulan-Ude, and other outlying districts of Russia. Putin will not gentrify the peninsula, but Tauris is supposed to become a pearl in the crown of its conqueror. If the “conqueror” had received the peninsula by tsarist grace, he would have been the Potemkin of today. But since he is receiving it as a gift from roguish crooks, he looks so far like Ataman Putin of Tauris.
