Sunday, February 28, 2016

Exiles from the Crimea make a new life in Lviv

Daniel McLaughlin  

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.

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