The First Partition of the Ukraine or Mr Putin takes a page out of Catherine’s book

Rome, Sunday 2^nd March

The First Partition of the Ukraine or Mr Putin takes a page out of Catherine’s book

 

Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the personal system of power he has built around him are often compared to the tsars that ruled the country until the 1917 revolution. But of all the Romanovs Mr Putin’s penchant for hard-nosed Realpolitik perhaps puts him closest to Catherine the Great (1762-96)—an outsider, like Mr Putin, whose rise no one foresaw and whose grip on power few expected to last. Having presided over after a ruthless but inconclusive war in Chechnya and a victory in a modest bust-up with Georgia, Mr Putin hasn’t always seemed able to fill the empress’s shoes. But, barely a week after the flight of his ally and crony Viktor Yanukovich from Kiev appeared to have handed control of Ukraine to the supporters of closer integration with the West, he has boldly seized the (in Russian eyes, immensely symbolic) Crimea—an audacious act of opportunism even the indomitable empress would have been proud of.

Modern Russia was perhaps born in the Crimea. The humiliating defeat Russia suffered in the Crimean War (1853-6) at the hands of Britain and France set in train contradictory forces of reaction and reform that tsarism couldn’t resolve and ultimately led to revolution. Until the late eighteenth century, however, the peninsular was the home of the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people descended from the Golden Horde whose rulers, known as khans, owed nominal allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Crimea was a rich and fertile place and the Tatars’ Ottoman overlords still struck enough fear into Europeans to deter most predators. But then as now the Crimea had the misfortune of being situated in a turbulent region—a borderland where the Ottoman domains brushed uneasily against those of an aggressively expanding Russia and a fast-disintegrating Polish Commonwealth, which as the largest state in Europe, after Russia, then incorporated much of the territory of present-day Ukraine. Within a few short years a combination of Polish disunity, Turkish mistakes and Russian opportunism (superbly executed by Catherine) saw Russia oust the Turks from the Crimea, handing the tsarist empire the Black Sea port it longed for.

The parallels with events in Ukraine today are so illuminating, it bears looking at them a little more closely. In 1768 Stanislav Poniatowski, the recently elected king of Poland, signed a ‘Perpetual Treaty’ with Catherine as empress of Russia. Outwardly, the treaty sought to protect the freedoms of Poland’s Orthodox minority of which Catherine styled herself the defender—much as Mr Putin has lately been doing on behalf of Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking minority. But Catherine also used the treaty to restore in Poland an ancient but unwieldy system of government, which Stanislav (a puppet who turned out to be made of stronger stuff than she expected) had sought to reform by restricting the nobles’ right to veto royal legislation. All but ungovernable, Poland was left defenceless against its eastern neighbour, on which, given Catherine’s role as guarantor of Poland’s constitution, its continued existence now completely depended. The trap had now been laid.

It was duly sprung. When, despite the restoration of their rights, a faction of nobles cast Stanislav as a Russian puppet, the ensuing war gave Catherine the opportunity she needed: in 1771, under the guise of protecting the Polish constitution, a Russian army entered Poland. With an unworkable constitution and in-fighting among its nobles (some of whom were in Russian pay), Poland collapsed, sending ripples across Europe. Fearful of the Russian advance, the Turks joined in, but the Russians defeated them and forced them to hand over the Crimea. Prussia and Austria, unwilling to sacrifice themselves for Polish sovereignty, decided instead to join Catherine in dividing Poland up. In 1772 the First Partition of Poland awarded some 12 per cent of Polish territory to Russia and handed bits of the rest to Austria (11 per cent) and Prussia (5 per cent). A second partition followed in 1793 (which gave Russia most of modern Ukraine between Kiev and Lvov as far north as Minsk in today’s Belarus); a third in 1795 erased Poland from the map. To round it off, Catherine formally annexed the Crimea in 1783 and, in a second war with Turkey between 1787 and 1792, extended the Russian frontier as far south as the Dniester, just below the modern Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which the Russians founded.

Russian settlers then followed to farm the fertile Ukrainian steppe, which explains the mixing of Ukrainian-, Russian- and Tatar-speaking people in modern Ukraine—and why the fate of Russian-speakers in Ukraine’s east and south hangs so closely together with those in the Crimea in the defence of whose ‘rights’ (remember the Polish nobles) Mr Putin deployed the Russian army and navy on Saturday.

What’s so striking is that behind Mr Putin’s mobilization orders lies a combination of elite in-fighting, constitutional wrangling and Russian opportunism at Europe’s eastern crossroads that’s almost a set-piece replay of the situation Catherine exploited. Just as she took advantage of the endemic squabbles among Poland’s disunited and venal nobility, so Mr Putin has managed to exploit the competition between Ukraine’s modern-day elites (Ms Timoschenko in the west, Mr Yanukovich in the east) for a division of the country’s economic spoils. And just as Catherine’s treaty trapped Stanislav into a dependence that robbed him of his legitimacy, so from 2004 the Kremlin’s deal-making with Mr Yanukovich delivered him into Mr Putin’s pocket, making him look in many Ukrainians’ eyes like a Russian stooge unworthy of the presidency. And chief among these deals was the fateful promise of a $15bn loan last November in return for Ukraine’s walking away from an agreement with the European Union that, in the long run, would have reduced Russia’s influence over its neighbour.

This is not to say that Mr Putin foresaw the protests that erupted in Kiev when he forced Mr Yanukovich to abandon the deal with the EU, nor that he either hoped for or planned Mr Yanukovich’s subsequent downfall. But like Catherine in Poland, Mr Putin has so well shaped the landscape of power inside Ukraine that he has been able to turn both events to his advantage now they have occurred. So well laid was Mr Putin’s trap that even Mr Yanukovich’s departure (like Stanislav’s pluckiness) has proved no impediment.

As in eighteenth-century Poland, Russian meddling has plunged Ukraine into a constitutional crisis that has left the country fatefully divided and allowed Russia to portray itself as the defender of law and order, and minority rights. Picking up on the legacy of decades of anti-nationalistic Soviet propaganda, Mr Putin has even been able to cast Kiev’s revolutionaries and their supporters in western Ukraine as ‘Nazis’ and ‘Fascists’—and Russia as the defender not only of the lawful Ukrainian president and legitimate Ukrainian constitution, but of freedom from tyranny itself. (The audacity of it all would surely have pleased Catherine.)

What, thanks to skilful diplomacy, the eighteenth-century empress had but Mr Putin lacks right now is international partners to legitimize his activities. This makes his Crimea-grab more vulnerable than Catherine’s territorial acquisitions at any one of Poland’s partitions. And such legitimization is, ultimately, what he needs the West for. Can he get it?

How far Mr Putin pushes the advantage of the current moment will determine the answer to that question. The West has no way to force Moscow out of the Crimea—and no interest in encouraging Kiev to try. Ukraine’s new leaders have hammered their colours to Europe’s mast, but scan the horizon in vain for Western aid to avert the economic disaster the withdrawal of Russia’s loan has made imminent. For all their bluster, the Western powers won’t risk a war for a distant peninsula—and they need Mr Putin’s help in other places (such as Syria, Iran) and Russia’s gas to heat homes from Vienna to Prague and Berlin to make even serious economic sanctions unlikely. The only real deterrent is the Ukrainian army and the spectre of war itself. Even against Georgia, a much smaller and poorer equipped opponent, Russia held itself back from more than a limited war and modest territorial gains that it could defend at little cost. In this respect, Mr Putin seems more circumspect than Catherine ever was.

The weaker and more divided the politicians in Kiev show themselves to be, the more numerous pro-Russian demonstrations in eastern Ukraine will be and the more insistent on Russian intervention they will become. And the more pro-Russian demonstrations appear in these eastern cities, the more Mr Putin will feel tempted to give them satisfaction and intervene. A successful referendum in Crimea (now scheduled for 30 March) with a healthy margin in Russia’s favour, will also add fuel to their fervour. With a favourable referendum result—and given the curious history and ethnic composition of the peninsula—the West might just be able to accept a Russian Crimea. But it won’t give its blessing to a larger redrawing of the border, or a partition, the way Prussia and Austria did for Catherine. Instead, Mr Putin must way the chance of legitimizing his fait accompli in the Crimea against the uncertain outcome of a messy lunge for a bigger chunk of eastern Ukraine—Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk.

Given Mr Putin’s caution and the peninsula’s overwhelmingly greater value (strategic and symbolic), he’ll almost certainly choose the Crimea. Catherine would have too—if she’d had to.