Crimea, that little spit of land at the head of the Black Sea, is in the news again these days. In the days to come, it might as well become a flashpoint between two world superpowers – the US and Russia.
But while the world is watching with bated breath, the events unfolding on the promontory, my own thoughts went back to my childhood years, when I had first read about Crimea in school.
Like most school-going kids, my first introduction to the Crimean peninsula was through English literature. I still remember the immortal poem, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Written by Lord Alfred Tennyson, who at the time of writing was the poet laureate of the British Empire, the poem described one, eventually unsuccessful charge by British troops on Russian positions during the dreadful Crimean War (1853-1856). The war, which was fought by Britain and France as allies of the fading Ottoman Empire against an expanding Russian Empire, has gone down in history as being the ‘first modern war’, since not only were modern services like railways and telegraph introduced during it, but also revolutionary new ways of healthcare. But more of that later.
I still remember these immortal lines by Tennyson. And why shouldn’t I? After all, I learnt them by rote for my English examination:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
The Crimean War is the source of another childhood memory for me. Growing up, we had three books by Pandit Nehru at our home: The Discovery of India, An Autobiography and Glimpses of World History. The last was a favourite of mine, a book that Panditji wrote in the form of letters to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, during his incarceration at Naini Jail in Allahabad. I still remember the chapter titled ‘Sick Man of Europe’, dealing with the declining footsteps of the Ottoman Empire in Europe in the nineteenth century. And those lines by Tsar Nicholas I to the British Ambassador which started the phrase in the first place: “We have a sick man on our hands…A very sick man…”
The greatest imprint about Crimea though, came by reading about the story of Florence Nightingale. Growing up, all children are taught about how Nightingale, ‘the Lady with the Lamp’, revolutionised nursing methods in the mid-nineteenth century. It was only when I was in class 6 or 7 that I learnt about the actual backdrop against which all this happened. This was a passage in my English textbook detailing the gentle exploits of Nightingale during…the Crimean War. How she went out to the front with her band of female nurses and treated wounded, injured and dying soldiers in filed hospitals, how Scutari, a district of Istanbul was a base camp of sorts for her band, etc, etc.
The other reference to Crimea came through the word, ‘Balaclava’. A port on the southern edge of the peninsula, the place became well-known for the piece of cloth that was used during the war to protect soldiers’ faces and heads from the severe cold. I recently discovered that we in India also use balaclavas. Only here, they are called ‘monkey caps’.
Last, but not the least, Crimea is also known for the city of Yalta, which gained importance at the end of World War II. That was when it hosted the ‘Big Three’. Josef Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Spencer Churchill met at the Livadia Palace in Yalta towards the end of the war to decide on the future course of action in post-Nazi Europe. In a sense, the western-Soviet partition of Europe and Cold War boundaries on the continent began at Yalta.
All these are my childhood memories of Crimea. Today, as an adult, I have also discovered that Crimea’s history is not just about the Crimean War and World War II. The place has played a key role in European history both, before and after these two events.
For instance, not many know it, but Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of the Kievan Rus, was baptized into Byzantine Christianity in Crimea, in the historic city of Sevastopol (today home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the nerve centre of the current crisis).
Many ethnic groups and polities have ruled Crimea in the millennia gone past: ancient Greeks, Scythians, Bulgars, Khazars, Goths, Huns, Mongols, Tatars of the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In the post-Soviet Era, it has become a flashpoint for Ukrainian-Russian, and on a larger scale, Russian-Western frictions and tensions, all of which have now led to the current crisis.
As a Russophile and an admirer of all things Slavic, I sincerely hope that Russia, Ukraine and the West would be able to solve their problems and peace would come again to Crimea. I would not want any child in later generations to grow up reading how this beautiful piece of land became the site of a third battle in the second decade of the 21st century.
