Recently, the occupiers’ propaganda machine revisited the past, using the notorious “Russia Today” to present a retrospective on the “history of Crimean autonomy.” The segment featured “speaker” Vladimir Konstantinov, “Sevastopol historian” Vadim Khapaev, and “Simferopol professor” Anatoly Filatov as talking heads.
The occasion was the 105th anniversary of the proclamation of the Crimean ASSR in 1921, and the goal, entirely predictable, was to “prove” the supposedly “Russian” character of this Soviet republic. Beyond the expected torrent of anti-Ukrainian sentiment, it is worth noting that these Russian chauvinists completely denied not only the role of the Crimean Tatar people in the events of a century ago but even their very existence on the peninsula.
It should be recalled that the Crimean ASSR came into being precisely because of the presence of an indigenous Turkic population on the peninsula, and it was abolished in 1945 as a direct consequence of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
Now, the “official version” claims that the ASSR in Crimea was a kind of “Russian exclave,” and that its abolition occurred for “unknown reasons”—reasons which Konstantinov himself dismissed as merely a “change of scenery” that supposedly had no “significant consequences.”
It is worth noting that, in the past, the occupiers, albeit grudgingly, had acknowledged that the Crimean autonomy of the Soviet era was “multi-ethnic.”
The current “shift in direction” reflects a general rise in Russian Nazism and chauvinism on the peninsula, a movement now waging war not only against signs and “foreign words,” but even against events that took place a century ago.
