Even before 2014, Crimea had never quite found its place in independent Ukraine. Originally an autonomous republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), it was transferred to Ukraine by Stalin in 1945; it became an oblast of Soviet Ukraine in 1954.

In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the peninsula’s Russian-majority population (67% according to the 1989 census) were concerned at the rise of Ukrainian nationalism in government circles in Kyiv.

In 1989, at the instigation of the People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika (popularly known as Rukh, the Movement), the supreme soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had passed legislation designating Ukrainian as the sole state language. This law was the first of many on linguistic issues and a recurrent cause of friction over the following decades, since although it protected the rights of Russian speakers, it led Crimeans to fear forcible Ukrainisation. The mass return of Tatars also heightened ethnic Russians’ fears of marginalisation.

Three referendums highlighted Crimea’s unique political situation. The first, held by the regional government on 20 January 1991 without Moscow or Kyiv’s approval, reestablished the territory as an autonomous republic, but left the issue of whether it belonged to Russia or Ukraine unresolved. The question Crimeans were asked to vote on indicated that the territory was, at some point in the future, to join a renewed Soviet Union based on a more equal relationship between the USSR and its constituent republics, as proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev in July 1990. This plan was submitted to voters in (…)

Full article: 733 words.

Amélie Le Renard is a sociologist and a senior lecturer at the University of Burgundy, a member of Cimeos and an associate researcher at Paris-Diderot University’s Migration and Society Research Unit (Urmis). Her latest book is La Banlieue du ‘20 Heures’, Agone, Paris, forthcoming

(1) The state religious institution has issued fatwas that require the wearing of the veil. In practical terms, this means that unveiled or “badly” veiled women in mixed-gender public spaces may be warned by the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (religious police).