Samuel Huntington, the guy who said that the reality of the post-Cold War world was a "clash of civilizations" (and come the War on Terror, boy did he seem right), would love what's going on there now. In Simferopol, Crimea's regional capital, ethnic Russians wrestled with Tartar Muslims who would now like to be part of Europe (not exactly known for welcoming Muslims with open arms). The Russians would like to return to Russia; a state from which they seceded not thirty years ago.** The Russians who would like to join Vladimir Putin's semi-authoritarian patriotocracy see the half democratic coalition in Kiev as "fascists" -- which some of them are as they embrace a hyper-nationalistic "Ukraine for the Ukrainians" idea (and of course, the Russians in the Ukraine should be Ukrainians, think the fascists [who are now apparently multiculturalists]). The cosmopolitan democrats, of course, look down on all of them. "Our first goal," said one high modernistic enlightened soul on the BBC today, "is to unite the country." No it's not. It's to make it into the just-like-every-other-liberal democratic fantasyland you imagine represents progress. It's really just more shopping. Putin, meanwhile, is doing naval exercises in the Black Sea. Which is a lake. I think it's a lake, anyway.
The ideological wires are so simultaneously interlaced and dispersed in the Ukraine it's very hard to make heads or tails of anything except that vague historical memories have taken their revenge on contemporary politics. In American presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, a weird right -- I won't call it an extreme right; "weird" will do -- sometimes liked to refer to Obama as a "fascist" and "communist" simultaneously. That amounted largely to a "something I've heard about from the past I think I know about but I'm not sure but I have a feeling so I say it out loud" kind of thing. Things run a little differently in the Ukraine. In all of the former Soviet Union, but very much the Ukraine because of how much of the Second World War's eastern European theater was fought there (and how brutal the fighting was), "fascism" means serious things. Rather than random historical imagination, it means destroyed families. It means questions of collaboration. It means scorched earth retreat policies. It means holocaust and violent, underground resistance. However, with the forces of history which produced an ideological collapse where we don't have fascists and communists anymore -- and to even say "liberal" or "democratic" rings a bit hollow as those ideas don't have anything to oppose (we kind of just are) -- the cauldron of jumbled historical imagination is being stirred even in the Ukraine. In the Crimea specifically, where Lord Cardigan, as immortalized by Lord Tennyson (lordy, lordy), encouraged his hosts to charge "half a league, half a league, half a league onward." Political contest becomes like your college buddy encouraging you to get over your hangover by having another beer; we try to straighten out our political direction by reaching for all the old categories (the ones that kind of put us there in the first place). It's history's fault; global change made us this way. At least we know, unlike 1853, that the Sardinians are unlikely to invade.
* The Circumstance; is unsure if foie gras is the intended dish of certain of the domesticated animals intended to be eaten on the Yanukovych estate. Could be, though, if some are geese.
** Well, twenty-three or twenty-four years ago, depending on whether or not one counts from the independence declaration or the referendum on independence, which was won by a count of roughly 90%-10%. The Crimea initially declared its own independence; then decided to in fact partner up with the newly independent Ukraine.
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