The return of soviet Crimea: What’s happening with the Ukrainian peninsula’s economy these days?

Whether people want them to be or not, their impressions of regions even within their own countries are often shaped by myths—and Crimea is no exception. Most Ukrainians tended to think of the peninsula—with the exception of Sevastopol—as a beach resort and wine-making region, even during soviet times. 

In fact, it was not quite like that under the soviets. The myth about the “all-union health cure resort” was originally started as propaganda to cover the truth the real nature of the economy of Crimea. Based on how its residents were employed, how its territory was utilized, what the state invested in it, and the volume of manufacturing produced on the peninsula from after WWII until the USSR collapsed, it was:

-      firstly, a huge army, navy and air base—and eventually a nuclear and space base—that all ensured the Soviet Union’s dominion in the Black Sea region and its access to the Mediterranean and in the Middle East;

-      secondly, a major industrial R&D center in the Union for making military instrumentation and shipbuilding;

-      thirdly, one of the food-processing centers of the USSR specializing in processing fish caught in the oceans—most of the commercial ocean-going fleet of the Ukrainian SSR was based in Sevastopol and Kerch—as well as vegetables, fruit, grapes and wine.

Crimean industry was based on dozens of enterprises making military instruments, building ships and repairing sea-going vessels. That’s where ships for the Soviet Navy, guided torpedoes, missile control systems, navigational and radio equipment, tank sights, complicated parachute systems, including for space rockets and for landing tanks, and so on.

Prior to the 1990s, foreign tourists were forbidden to leave Simferopol to go anywhere except Yalta and Alushta. Sevastopol was off limits even to those who lived in Crimea unless they had a special permit, while even residents of Sevastopol could only enter Balaclava, where the Black Sea Fleet was based, with special permits. Soviet resorts were not a flourishing sector of the economy but, on the contrary, a costly state-funded social program of the Soviet Union.

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