Sevastopol is a city of monuments and squares. Dour statues of Admirals Nakhimov, Lazarev and Ushakov dominate the squares named for them. There are, in fact, over 1,400 monuments in this naval city. But there is no monument to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children who died in Sevastopol during the first (1854-1855) or second (1941-1942) defenses of the city, or the many who died digging up unexploded munitions since then.
This blank spot in the city’s history is a central theme in Vladislav Krapivin’s novel, Three from the Carronade Square, written in the 1970s and recently made into a television miniseries. The series has ignited local debate about the need for a monument. But first the fictional Carronade Square must be found.
The most likely candidate is Sixth Bastion (Shestaya Bastionnaya), a small street in the old city. During the Great Patriotic War, the headquarters for Sevastopol’s defense forces and a cannon battery were located not far from here. Indeed, the slope of the hill resembles the one described in the story. The remains of fortress walls rise up on the left. Shabby stone steps plummet down the slope. The place is empty, calm and flooded with sunlight. The ground is paved with old cobblestones; dry, pointed grass grows up between the stones; garbage from nearby houses is scattered about (the navy has long since stopped picking it up); troops of stray cats pace the yards; dogs gather near marketplaces.
“I will do all the stone work!” says Vladimir Drevetnyak, gesturing boldly about the would-be Carronade Square. “We’ll bring young trees and clear the garbage. Wouldn’t that be great! What a view of the Northern Bay and Konstantin’s Ravelin!”
Drevetnyak was born in Sevastopol, works with stone and is studying at the Crimean Agrotech University to get his third or fourth diploma. He has a small stone-working factory, and his monuments and memorial tablets can be seen in Simferopol, just two hours away.
“Several million years’ warranty,” Vladimir exclaims.
Catherine’s City
The Crimea Peninsula has been inhabited (and fought over) by Eastern European peoples – from Cimmerians and Bulgars to Goths, Huns and Tatars – for over 10,000 years. One of Sevastopol’s more recent predecessors on the southwestern tip of the peninsula was the ancient Greek port city of Chersonesos, founded in the fifth century bc. Its well-preserved ruins are still visible west of the city.
As a modern naval base, the city, first named Akhtiar, dates to 1783. The following year Empress Catherine II (“the Great”) ordered Grigory Potemkin to establish a fortress on the site and name it Sevastopol, meaning “venerable city.”* Alexander Suvorov, the legendary military leader, was put in charge of building the fortress. “There is no harbor like this, not only around this peninsula, but in the entire Black Sea, where the navy would be as safe and the officers on the ships would feel as comfortable and secure,” Suvorov wrote. For his efforts, the empress gave Suvorov a golden snuffbox inlaid with diamonds. On the 200th anniversary of the fort’s founding, a bust of Suvorov (in Suvorov Square) was unveiled. A monument to Catherine was not erected until 2008, on the city’s 225th anniversary. And not without a fight. In fact, the struggle for this monument reflected the larger battle between Russians and Ukrainians for control of the Crimea.
The Crimean Peninsula became part of the Russian Empire in 1774, after Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. The peninsula was an independent republic within the USSR from 1921-1945, and part of the Russian Republic, within the USSR, until 1954, when it was gifted by then leader Nikita Khrushchev to the Ukrainian Republic. The change meant little for the next 37 years, as long as the Soviet Union still existed. But then, starting in 1991, rifts began to develop between the post-Soviet states of Russia and Ukraine, many of which played out in Crimea.
Today, most residents of Sevastopol, and of Crimea generally, speak and think in Russian.† Yet, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have all become Ukrainian citizens. This has led to some sticky political situations. For instance, the mayor of Sevastopol is appointed by the Ukrainian president, while the City Council is directly elected by the residents and thus pro-Russian. The two institutions rarely agree.
“Who’s more important – legislative or executive power?” Drevetnyak storms. “It’s clear from the name that the legislative takes the lead. The mayor is subordinate to the law, and that’s how it should be! Still, the Executive Court of Kiev decided that the Sevastopol City Council will be subordinated to municipal authorities. This is against the constitution!”
In short, the city council voted to put up a monument to Catherine, but the mayor’s office said no. Which led to the ironic situation in which both the council’s decision to erect the monument and the mayor’s decision to remove it were legal. The statue went up and a group of passionate locals pitched their tents around Catherine, to guard against her removal.
In the end, the mayor backed down and the statue stayed. Today Catherine Square is calm and full of flowers. Catherine graciously extends a hand with a charter that reads, “There will be a town.”
City By The Bays
Sevastopol has not one harbor, but several: Kazachya, Karantinnaya, Korabelnaya, the Bay of Matyushenko, and others. It is pleasant to stroll the city at sunset or early in the morning, under its famous chestnut trees, before the sun scorches the white stone walls, before souvenir vendors fill the streets along the waterfront. This difference between the morning calm and the tourist bustle is especially distinct in nearby Balaklava, which was transformed into a tourist district after the warships were pulled out and a submarine maintenance works closed down.
Balaklava, about 15 kilometers from downtown Sevastopol, is full of fishermen, yachtsmen and underwater archaeologists mining for the plentiful ancient and medieval artifacts buried along the coast. Babushkas sell corn on the cob for four hryvnas apiece, and boatmen offer tourists rides to Jasper Beach, at the foot of Cape Fiolent, where you can visit St. George Monastery, which dates to 891. Yet it is only in the morning that you will enjoy a moment of calm to observe the old homes, with their tile roofs, and the dilapidated Genovese towers rising above the mouth of Balaklava Bay.
For all the efforts to make Sevastopol into a tourist city, the biggest challenge may not be infrastructure but psychology. A photographer related how he was riding on the St. Petersburg-Sevastopol train and an officer stated that Sevastopol’s future was in tourism. The photographer asked if the officer could say, “What would you like?”
“Me? Of course not!”
“What about your grown-up son? Can he?”
“Are you kidding? He’s an officer’s son.”
And not many can. Sevastopolians must, like the residents of Yalta and Sochi, learn the etiquette of service. One wonders if it is possible before 2017, when Ukraine’s lease agreement with the Russian Navy runs out.
Alexander Ivanovich Shevtsov – Ivanych for short – has certainly learned the proper etiquette. He takes tourists sailing on his yacht, playing guitar and singing songs about Sevastopol and the sea, telling stories about Balaklava and about how much the writer Alexander Kuprin,* loved this part of town. Kuprin was a frequent visitor to Balaklava and turned into an alcoholic after he became popular. He once famously sent a letter to Emperor Nicholas II announcing Balaklava as an independent state. The emperor’s chancellery returned the letter with the following note: “You drink too much, Alexander Ivanovich.” A monument to Kuprin perches on the waterfront.
many russian authors lived and wrote in Sevastopol. There are references, clear or subtle, to this city in the works of Konstantin Stanyukovich (the author of Sea Stories), Leo Tolstoy, who fought here at the Fourth Bastion, and Konstantin Paustovsky. Vladimir Dal began work on his thesaurus in Sevastopol, and the tangled streets of Artilleriyskaya Slobodka remind one of the towns Zurbagan and Liss, from the mind of the romantic writer Alexander Grin: “The small houses appear here and there amid the illusory streets… the town emerged from the crumbs of cliffs and hills linked by stairs… and narrow spiral trails.”
Yet few small houses remain in Artilleriyskaya Slobodka. The older ones are occupied by lonely pensioners; as they change hands, new owners generally tear them down. The neighborhood is a quiet place, with white walls and red tile roofs roasting in the sun and ladder-stairs jumping out of nowhere and diving into the narrow alleys between blind walls.
Krapivin’s Carronade Square would fit in with the toponymy of this neighborhood: many nearby bastions, including the Sixth and the Seventh, used seaborne carronade cannons (manufactured by the Scottish company Carron in the 19th century, thus the name). When the Crimean War defense of the city began in 1854, the navy took charge of the ground forces, brought the cannons ashore and started building fortifications. The city prepared to defend itself from the sea (Russia famously scuttled over a dozen ships at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay, to prevent the allied fleet from entering), but all the British, French and Turkish attacks came by land. The siege lasted for 349 days, ending only when Russian forces lost the Malakhov redoubt and retreated, leading to Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War.
Despite the fact that the cadets and younger children who had helped fix the fortifications had been pulled from the city, many stayed behind, fought alongside and often instead of their parents when gunners, soldiers and marines fell from canister shots, shrapnel and bullets. They cleaned hospital wards, brought gunners kvas, water, bread and clean clothes, retrieved faulty bombs, spent bullets and rounds, often for cash: half a pood* of rounds cost one silver kopek, and one pood of bullets – four kopeks. Yet most of the children’s names are lost to history.
“Basically, we look for names in old guide books and try to extract them from the documents,” says Elena Gavrisheva, of the Sevastopol Defense Museum’s Department of Pre-Revolutionary History. “However, there is not much information. For example, we know that 16-year-old Dionisy Toluzakov was killed and buried at Bratskoye Cemetery, or that 15-year-old Darya Shestoperova got a medal. Yet, at the end of the day, there are no names or dates even in the Naval Library. And we need to constantly remind people about those kids; we must remember them…”
Names of young defenders from the second defense (1941-1942) are more easily found. Valerik Volkov from the 7th Marine Infantry Brigade was the author of a handwritten newspaper, Okopnaya Pravda (The Trench Truth); he was killed in the summer of 1942. There were some children in the same brigade who survived the war to witness the victory, but the boys from Arbuzov’s guerilla platoon, most of whom were 14-17 years old, did not make it.
When the war was over, children again gathered spent munitions. Writer Gennady Cherkashin was still a boy when he returned to liberated Sevastopol from evacuation. He remembers how boys searched the steppe for copper. Even ten years ago, boys would find pocketfuls of scrap from the 35th Battery – part of the long defense line during the war, where tens of thousands perished with their backs to the sea. The battery was looted in the 1990’s, but you can still see gangs of boys and amateur archaeologists with metal detectors roaming what were once the front lines. Both find old medals, badges with names and addresses of German and Soviet soldiers, and spent cartridges. Sometimes boys find more dangerous remnants and get injured when they suddenly go off.
Tunnels and galleries that stretch for miles in the thick rock under Sevastopol are another danger. Many were made during the Crimean War siege.
“Some boys found a way into the underground tunnels in spring,” says Elena Sergeyeva, a tour guide who is also lobbying the city for a Carronade Square monument. “They suffocated – set some boxes on fire and couldn’t get out. Three boys were still outside. They got scared their friends hadn’t returned and called for help. A policeman went down to help the boys, but he suffocated, too. It was his day off, but he went there anyway. Later, doctors said to his wife: ‘Your husband was a very strong man. With that concentration of carbon monoxide, he got very far.’”
The Third Stand
In 1886, the first marine yacht club was opened in Sevastopol, under the patronage of Tsar Alexander III. The club is nestled in the ruins of a fort built during the Crimean War, at the mouth of Sevastopol Bay. Hundreds of naval officers and civil sailors have studied here. In the Soviet era, the yacht club was a training site for USSR, European and world champions. The club was completely destroyed during the Second World War, but competitions resumed in 1949.
“We sailed on anything we could find or fix,” says instructor Eduard Mikhailovich Puzach. “Later, we got some trophy boats from Italy, Germany and Holland. Why not?! The enemy took ours; can’t we do the same?!”
Eduard is a former naval officer, a connoisseur of Crimean wine and an artist. At the club, he teaches children to sail and believes they have a mission to preserve the traditions dating back to 1886. “We do exactly what we are supposed to,” he says. “Train the best sailors for the Navy.”
But times are hard for the club. The club’s fleet does not get any new boats, and sailboats must be fixed on site, at the instructors’ expense; children do not pay tuition. “Well, life’s full of hardships!” Puzach says. “We do our best here.”
That could well be the city’s motto for the last 20 years, during which the primary battle lines have been defined by language, and ethnic Russians feel themselves under siege from the government in Kiev.
Hundreds of years ago, when the peninsula was under the absolute rule of the Crimean Khans, the Chersonese, St. George’s and other monasteries were allowed to continue functioning. Indeed, the Khan even financed Christian monasteries – it helped him keep in touch with what was going on inside them. Many observers wonder why Kiev cannot adopt a similar tolerance toward the Russian language. After all, it is not that local residents dislike Ukrainian – on the contrary, the adults of today often visited their grandparents in Central and Western Ukraine and loved their soft, rich language, so close to their own.
It is compulsion that people reject. In a country where most citizens speak and think Russian, product labels, medical prescriptions, legal proceedings and business documentation are now exclusively in Ukrainian. Yet at the same time, judges and notaries often do not know sufficient Ukrainian, and it can take three people and a dictionary to translate something from Russian.
Still, under a new directive of the Ukrainian Ministry of Education, schools have until September 2012 to transfer all education into Ukrainian. Parents, teachers and children are protesting this “innovation,” not because the language is difficult, but because it limits students’ opportunities. Why not, after all, preserve the study of Russian – a U.N. language, while at the same time teaching Ukrainian?
The language impasse has been compounded by the ongoing passport debacle. Since the mid-1990s, when residents visited municipal authorities to obtain any sort of certificate, they had to hand in their (Soviet) passports. When they were returned to them, they bore a stamp saying, in Ukrainian, “Gromodyanin Ukrainy” (Citizen of Ukraine). Many did not want the stamp and thus avoided municipal authorities. They believed that, as long as they did not have a stamp of citizenship, some part of Russia remained. Some even damaged their passports trying to erase the stamp.
Later, commanders at the Russian naval base began to issue supplements to Soviet passports which confirmed that the bearers were Russian citizens. Such supplements were only supposed to be issued to military personnel and family members, but rumor had it that eventually half of Sevastopol’s residents obtained such supplements (which were later invalidated), because in Sevastopol everyone works (directly or indirectly) for the Russian navy or is somehow related to a military family.
Interestingly, many residents received Russian passports and did not turn in their Ukrainian passports, which they had gotten in exchange for their old Soviet ones. By some estimates, half of Sevastopolians have dual citizenship, even though neither Russia nor Ukraine allows this. It is not uncommon to see someone on the Sevastopol—St. Petersburg or Sevastopol—Moscow train acting a bit nervous at the border: is this the Russian or Ukrainian side? Which passport should they show?
The passport issue became even stickier in the wake of the Russia-Georgia War of 2008. One of the reasons given by the Russian government for its incursion into North Ossetia was to protect Russian citizens – i.e. those holding Russian passports, rumored to have been distributed in large quantities in the months leading up to the invasion. “Ukraine can no longer close its eyes to the problem of dual citizenship,” read an official statement at the time. “Representatives of certain pro-Russian parties declare that on the peninsula [as a whole] there are about 170,000 citizens of the Russian Federation.” The government only accepted that there were 15,000, all connected to the naval presence.
It may seem like the city is in the midst of a third siege. But that would be overstating things. Sevastopol is not just an old warrior bristling with solemn monuments. Yes, it is majestic and sunlit, but it is also full of roadside vendors, colorful flowers and lanky seaport tomcats. It is not fully Ukrainian, but neither is it fully Russian. In some ways, it is still rather Soviet. People still buy newspapers in Soyuzpechat kiosks, although Soyuz – the Union – fell apart almost 20 years ago. You can still buy cold draught kvas from trailer tanks for 4 hryvnas a liter or “half a loaf of white bread” in a warm, sweet-smelling bulochnaya where golden loaves lie stacked on tall racks. Rosy-cheeked shopgirls look at you kindly and will even cut you a quarter of a loaf, no questions asked. (Just try that in Moscow!)
A recipient of decades of military subsidies, Sevastopol is crowded with expensive Lebanese cedars, beaches – although worn with time – covered with specially-delivered pebbles and sand, and fitted out with wave-breakers and piers. The Soviet government was good at large-scale construction projects, and, after the Great Patriotic War, the decimated city was completely rebuilt in just ten years. New plants and educational institutions had the smartest staff, and the Navy got the best officers. Men got free apartments, worked and got married – mostly to school teachers and librarians. Which may explain this exchange between two children, overheard on a downtown street:
“What are you doing, kholop?”*
“What?! I am no kholop! Look at yourself first!”
Of course, children have other games to play, too. They ride rollerskates (and fight and swear) and ride their skateboards on Primorsky Boulevard. There, by the Aquarium, touring musicians play at sunset on summer days, and benches are occupied by German, Italian and American tourists who watch the hot, red sun bounce off the white façade of Konstantin’s Ravelin... and lanky cats skulk nearby – they think these are their benches...
Outside an open window, the yard is overgrown with grapes, walnut trees and dry grass. Laundry is drying on the lines. The kholop dispute came from a passing gang of six-year-olds with bronze skin and sun-faded hair. Dashing between the fluttering sheets, surely none of them were thinking about political squabbles between Ukraine and Russia; they likely did not know that the Russian navy will soon leave this fort city or that many kids their age died defending Sevastopol. They don’t need to think about this, because the weather is great and the huge boulders at the ancient Greek town of Chersonesos – perfect for diving into the warm Black Sea – are just ten minutes away. RL
* From 1797 to 1826, the base was actually renamed Akhtiar, upon a decree by Tsar Paul I. During the German occupation, the Nazis renamed the city Theodorichhafen.
† According to the last Ukrainian census (2001), 76.6% of Crimean residents consider Russian their native tongue.
* Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938) is best known for his novel, The Duel.
* pood: an old Russian measure of weight equivalent to 16.8 kilograms.
* Kholop – lackey, indentured slave, is an historical term from the time of serfdom that is only found in literature.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
