Warning, this will be long: many media outlets keep referring to Crimea as Russian, well, it does have a majority Russian population NOW, but this is a relatively recent development. In 1783 (the same year that the treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution), the Russian Tsarina, who herself was German, and was screwing pretty much all of her military officers, annexed Crimea, after it had spent hundreds of years as either a Turkish or Mongol outpost. She ordered that a naval base be built at the location of an ancient Greek settlement - todays Sevastopol (btw, one of her naval officers at that time was the same John Paul Jones of Dont give up the Ship fame). Following that, in 1854 when the light brigade made its famous, hopeless charge into the valley of death at Balaclava (Crimea), the population was still more than 75% Tatar (basically the descendents of Mongols and Turks). It wasnt until Stalin ethnically cleansed the peninsula of Tatars - whom he saw as collaborators with the Germans - in 1944 that the demographic map changed in favor of ethnic Russians. In short, the fact that Crimea has a majority of Russians is an artifice, they have no more historical right to the Crimea than Turkey (or Mongolia, for that matter). Hands off Crimea, Russia!!
Posted on: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 23:53:55 +0000