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                                                                                UKRAINE, Page 39

Ready to Cast Off


As the world watches nervously, the Crimea tries to steer a
course between an angry Russia and a suspicious Ukraine, two
nuclear-armed countries that already disagree over everything
from the ruble to command of the Black Sea Fleet

By JAMES CARNEY/YALTA


    Patches of snow still glimmer on the craggy mountains
above, but on the Black Sea coast of the Crimean peninsula
summer has arrived. In Yalta the terraced stone walls of the old
town are draped in purple wisteria and wild yellow roses, and
the first wave of tourists has come to stroll among the
palmettos, cypresses and golden rain trees lining the town's
crooked streets. Though it was not far from Yalta that Mikhail
Gorbachev spent three days under house arrest last August during
the coup attempt, the resort is best remembered as the site
where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin convened to redraw the map
of Europe. That was 47 years ago, when the Crimea fell
unquestionably within the Kremlin's empire and only dreamers
wasted time imagining a world without the Soviet Union.

    But the unimaginable has since come to pass, and now the
Crimea is at the center of a bitter territorial row between
Russia and Ukraine that threatens to destroy the fragile
Commonwealth of Independent States and make enemies out of two
nuclear-armed nations. In the Crimean capital of Simferopol,
ethnic Russians gather daily outside the local parliament
building to accuse Ukrainian leaders of disregard for their
right to self-determination. In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev,
400 miles away, thousands have converged in recent weeks to
protest Moscow's "imperialist" designs on the Crimea, which is
part of Ukraine but has a Russian majority. "Until we have
independence, the Crimea will always be a vassal of Kiev," says
Antonina Alekseyeva, a pro-Russian demonstrator in Simferopol.
"All lies," retorts Nikolai Filipovich, an ethnic Ukrainian
standing a few steps away.

    The debate revolves around an ironic tribute to the two
states' shared history. In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev transferred
the region from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Republic
as a "gift" commemorating 300 years of Russian-Ukrainian unity.
But the transfer was largely symbolic. Moscow's writ still ran
in the Crimea, just as it did in the time of the Czars. Since
last year, however, when Kiev started agitating for
independence, Russians in Crimea launched a movement to secede
from Ukraine and rejoin Russia.

    Ukrainian President Leonid Krav chuk tried to slow the
movement, warning that "there can be no guarantee that events
in the Crimea will not lurch out of control and that human blood
will not be spilled." But the Crimean parliament ignored him and
last month passed a resolution calling for a referendum on
independence. The response from Kiev was swift: the Ukrainian
parliament declared the Crimean resolution unconstitutional, and
government officials hinted that the Crimean legislature might
be dissolved and direct rule from Kiev imposed.

    Under pressure, Crimean leaders backed down and rescinded
the resolution, but not before Russian Vice President Alexander
Rutskoi, the Kremlin's standard-bearer for increasingly
influential Russian nationalists, blasted Ukrainian politicians
for portraying Russia as "an insidious empire" and trying to
break up the Commonwealth. "The referendum in Crimea must be
held, and no one can ban it with force or with threats," Rutskoi
insisted in a newspaper article. Two days later, in a
closed-door session, the Russian parliament upped the ante by
voting to annul the 1954 transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine as
"an illegal act" of the Communist Party and called for
negotiations between Kiev and Moscow to decide the peninsula's
status.

    The parliament in Kiev last week rejected the Russian
allegations, but the Ukrainians did agree in concert with
Crimean leaders to grant the region special economic status. But
Kravchuk's government, which depends on support from Ukrainian
nationalists in parliament, has flatly defined the Crimean
problem as "an internal affair" that does not concern foreign
states. "There will never be negotiations," says Vladimir
Kryzhanovsky, Ukraine's ambassador to Moscow. To negotiate, he
argues, would open a Pandora's box by calling into question all
the myriad treaties and border determinations made during 74
years of Soviet rule. "If we negate everything that was done
under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, then we must negate all
existing borders," he says. "And that could only lead to a new
world war."

    As if the issue weren't complicated enough, the Tatars,
who controlled the Crimea until 1783 when the Turkish Khanate
was defeated by Catherine the Great, are staking a claim to
their native land. Deported across the eastern Soviet Union en
masse in 1944 after Stalin accused them of collaborating with
the Nazis, the Crimean Tatars have been returning by the tens
of thousands in the past two years. With support from Kiev,
which views them as a buffer against the Russian majority, some
200,000 Tatars have started building houses across the peninsula
on state-owned land.

    Though their leaders favor retaining the Crimea's status
as part of Ukraine, many Tatars in the new settlements are
ambivalent. "I came because this is my home," says Mimyet
Vileyev, 34, who arrived in the Crimea two years ago for the
first time in his life. "I don't believe what any of the
politicians say," he remarks with a shrug. "It's their fight."

    The arms that could be used raise international concerns.
Though Ukraine has pledged to withdraw the remaining 176 Soviet
strategic missiles on its territory and become a non-nuclear
state by 1994, some nationalist parliamentarians have suggested
holding on to the 46 weapons not targeted for destruction under
the start treaty as a lever to get the West's attention and
respect. Concerned that bickering between Kiev and Moscow might
degenerate into a violent conflict, the West has been pressuring
both sides to come to terms peacefully. Russian President Boris
Yeltsin recently took a step in that direction, announcing that
Moscow had dropped its insistence that the 380-ship Black Sea
Fleet, based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, was a "strategic
force" that should fall under joint Commonwealth command.

    Wrangling over the Black Sea force has poisoned
Russian-Ukrainian relations for months, with Kiev demanding at
least 30% of the fleet as the foundation for a new national navy
and Moscow refusing to yield. Now, following Yeltsin's
announcement, a commission will be created to decide how to
divide up the fleet equitably.

    Even as the Black Sea Fleet dispute heads toward
resolution, larger issues continue to strain ties between the
two states -- including the overall future of the Crimea and
Kiev's resistance to Russia's taking the lead on economic
reforms. Specially printed Ukrainian coupons, designed as a
temporary currency to phase out use of the Soviet ruble,
circulate freely in the republic. In Yalta's shops, cashiers
give change in a random mix of coupons and rubles that leaves
the buyer guessing about the value of both.

    By July 1, Kiev plans to replace the ruble completely with
a new national currency, a move certain to disrupt already
weakened trade links between Ukraine and the rest of the
Commonwealth. Critics argue that by insulating Ukraine from
Russia, Kravchuk is trying to avoid the kind of radical market
reforms demanded by international lending organizations. Kiev
counters by ar guing that economic subordination to Russia is
a drag on Ukraine's development as a sovereign state.

    Many Russians in the Crimea fear that a Ukrainian currency
would cut them off completely from the Russian state and
relegate them to second-class status in Ukraine. Many
Ukrainians, meanwhile, guard their newly won sovereignty
jealously and harbor deep suspicions about the giant neighbor
to the east that ruled their nation for three centuries and now
professes democratic principles. "Imperial tendencies are
prevailing again in Russia," warns Ukraine's Kryzhanovsky,
"tendencies based on the law of might, not the law of reason."

    Kravchuk and Yeltsin are scheduled to meet in the near
future to try to put aside the acrimony and mistrust of recent
months. It was Russia and Ukraine, together with Belarus, that
united last December to forge the Commonwealth and bury the
Soviet Union. Without the cooperation of Kiev and Moscow, the
C.I.S. will surely fail. It may fail anyway. But more troubling
is the prospect of new violence in Europe, this time between
two of the largest, and best armed, nations on the continent.