Where the Iron Crosses Grow

However, Beria’s ethnic-cleansing operations in the Crimea continued after the main operation against the Crimean Tatars. In June 1944 he received authorization from Stalin to round up Armenians, Bulgars, Greeks, and other non-Russian minorities; they too were put on trains and sent eastward. In mid-July, Beria was chagrined to learn that his NKVD troops had neglected to search the Arabat Spit, and that a number of Crimean Tatars were still there. Apparently, he had already reported to Stalin that all of the Crimean Tatars had been removed, and the discovery of these “un-persons” was an embarrassment. He hastily sent troops to round up the villagers on the Arabat Spit, but instead of loading them onto trains, they were loaded onto barges left over from the amphibious landings of 1943. Around July 20, 1944, the barges were towed out into the Sea of Azov and scuttled, drowning hundreds of civilians. Details of this event are still obscure. The Soviet ethnic-cleansing operations in the Crimea were a heinous crime that bore a striking similarity with the German “special actions” in the Crimea. Oddly, both Jews and Muslims in the Crimea faced persecution and extermination by the opposing sides, but as is well known, it is the victors who write history, so the German crimes in the Crimea have been exposed to the world, while Soviet crimes both before and after World War II have been hidden.

As if to reinforce their point that they were the victims, the Soviet regime decided to hold war-crimes trials in Sevastopol in November 1947. Generaloberst Erwin G. Jaenecke, the former commander of AOK 17, was the most senior German officer indicted by the Soviet tribunal, but it is interesting that the specific charges against him related to his use of the “Taifun” weapon system near Kerch in November 1943.[17] The Soviets claimed that “Taifun” was a chemical weapon, and Jaenecke was charged with authorizing its use. He was convicted by the Soviet tribunal and spent eight years in a Soviet work camp until released in 1955. The Soviets also tried and convicted a number of other Germans for offenses committed in the Crimea, but usually for reprisals against Soviet POWs or partisans, not for the ethnic-cleansing operations of 1941–42. While Stalin was alive, and even for many years afterwards, Soviet historians were reticent to raise the subject of the Holocaust, since it was too close a subject to other Soviet-era crimes.

CHAPTER 10 Postscript, 2014

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Karl Marx

In 1954, the Soviet Union legally transferred the Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Nikita Khrushchev believed that the “gift” of the Crimea would help to solidify Ukrainian support for the communist regime, which had been tenuous from the beginning. However, Khrushchev had not counted on the Soviet Union crumbling into the “ashbin of history” less than four decades later, leaving the whole question of Russian-Ukrainian solidarity a moot point. Instead of wistful notions of Slavic Brotherhood, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 enabled the Ukraine to make a break for the open prison door in order to gain its independence and seek a different course. The new government in Kiev retained control over the Crimea, and Russia was too overwhelmed by internal chaos at the time to press its interests. Ironically, after using force to acquire the Crimea in 1920 and 1944, the Russians lost control over the region by peaceful means in 1991.

When Russia regained some of its internal stability in the mid-1990s, its leaders’ first order of business was not territory, but to take back critical military assets that had been abandoned in the Ukraine. In December 1994, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum, in which all signatories guaranteed the territorial integrity of the Ukraine in return for Ukraine returning Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russian control. Leaders in Moscow were also concerned with the fate of the Black Sea Fleet and the naval base at Sevastopol, which had been languishing in limbo for years. Although the Black Sea Fleet was reduced to a worn collection of rusting and obsolescent warships, with very little military value and no mission, it retained an outsized political and ideological value to the leaders in the Kremlin. For the leaders in Moscow, the Black Sea Fleet is a status symbol, just as it was for the tsars. In May 1997, Ukraine and Russia signed the Partition Treaty, which divided the fleet between the two, and allowed Russia to maintain a lease on the base until 2017. Gradually, economic ties developed between Ukraine and Russia, with the former becoming very dependent upon Russian natural gas.