Daniel McLaughlin In Lviv
For centuries Lviv was a great city of Poland and the Habsburg Empire.
Today it remains a quintessentially central European place, from its ramshackle
baroque and Renaissance buildings to its thriving cafe culture.
Geographically and temperamentally, Lviv is now the most “western” city in Ukraine, but this is a big country – the largest entirely in
Europe – and two years of violent upheaval have mingled some of its 45 million
people in unplanned but transformative ways.
More than 8,000 Ukrainians moved to Lviv to escape a Moscow-backed
insurgency 1,200km to the east, most of them Russian speakers who had never
been here before but who ignored Kremlin propaganda that painted the city as a
poisonous nest of Russian-hating fascists.
The Bakhchisarai cafe, on a cobbled street in the old heart of Lviv, is a
good place to meet Ukrainians from a distant and very different region. They
come here to enjoy the cardamom-infused coffee and honeyed pastries of home.
About 2,000 Crimean Tatars now live in Lviv, far from the Black Sea
peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014, after protests and deadly
clashes forced Ukraine’s venal president Viktor Yanukovych and his clique to
flee to Russia.
Two years ago today Crimeans woke to find that camouflage-clad gunmen had
taken control of the region’s parliament, airport and other key buildings – a
Russian military operation that laid the groundwork for a disputed referendum
and Crimea’s incorporation into Russia less than three weeks later, on March
18th.
In the hours before the first appearance of Moscow’s now notorious “little
green men” – Russian soldiers without identifying insignia – thousands of
Crimean Tatars had rallied outside the region’s parliament in defence of
Ukrainian statehood.
Terrible situation
When they dispersed, feeling they had got the
better of their opponents, the Crimean Tatars had no idea that Russian troops
and local militia would seize Crimea that night – or that their homeland would
soon be governed once more from Moscow.
“There were always some people who would say ‘Crimea is Russia’, but we
never expected it to come to this,” says Edem, a 34-year-old businessman,
sipping coffee in the Bakhchisarai, which takes its name from a fabled Crimean
city.
“My generation didn’t fully understand what exile meant. Now we know. We
feel it just like our forefathers felt it in the Soviet days, and now we feel
stronger than ever about our homeland.
“We need to turn this terrible situation – this shock of exile – into the
energy to improve ourselves. So that when we return home – and we will return
home soon – we will be able to make Crimea flourish.”
Edem was born in the Soviet republic of Tajikistan, bordering Afghanistan
and China, into a family that Joseph Stalin had exiled along with the entire
Crimean Tatar population in 1944 for alleged collaboration with the Nazis.
About half of the more than 200,000-strong community died from hunger,
thirst, disease and cold on their brutal eastward journey in railway cattle
cars and during the first year in remote central Asia and Siberia.
Crimean Tatars were allowed to return home only in the late 1980s and often
faced hostility from settlers in Crimea, which was a popular retirement
destination for Soviet servicemen and their families.
Much of the peninsula’s ethnic Russian majority remained loyal to the
Kremlin, and in a 1991 referendum Crimea was the region that showed by far the
least enthusiasm for Ukrainian independence.
No comments:
Post a Comment