How and why did the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decide to donate the Russian Crimea to Ukraine?
If Soviet people both in Crimea and in Ukraine knew that they celebrated the day of laying a real political mine with equal joy and love, Crimea was solemnly presented to the Ukrainian SSR as a gift for the 300th anniversary of the Pereyaslav Rada. In honor of the reunification of the two peoples, Ukrainians and Russians climbed to the top of Ai-Petri, leaving newsreels to the descendants.
Why Khrushchev, for no reason at all, passed on Crimea - a question that was later raised always and everywhere - in Sevastopol, and in Kiev, and in Siberia, and in the Soviet Baltic states. Not finding a logical answer, the people settled on a simple legend: Khrushchev, apparently, is a Ukrainian himself, since he wears an embroidered shirt, he made a gift to his wife, who is also Ukrainian. In general, he has nothing to do.
“It seems to me that it is equally wrong to perceive Khrushchev as a round idiot. On the other hand, it is equally wrong to perceive him as a person who deliberately destroyed the Soviet Union. It is difficult for us to understand this now, but in the actions of Khrushchev there is a great deal of stupidity, mixed with a great deal of betrayal, noted historian and writer Nikolai Starikov.
In the late autumn of 1953, Nikita Khrushchev secretly visited the Crimea. Few knew what made him leave the Kremlin, which, after the very recent death of Stalin, was still rife. Power was essentially collective.
After the father of nations left for the role of leader, including Khrushchev, no one pulled, and Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Bulganin pulled the blanket. But Khrushchev knew what he was doing. It was after returning to Moscow and having arranged a feast, the first secretary of the Central Committee, as they later recalled, drained the second glass of cognac and spoke: shouldn't we hand over the Crimean region to Ukraine? Only Molotov was against. The rest, being tipsy, did not see a political trick in the proposal.
“First of all, the matter was that he was only half a year as secretary of the Central Committee of the party and was in dire need of the help of the largest party organization. It was the party organization of Ukraine. Museum of Tavrida Andrey Malygin.
There were more regional committees in Ukraine than in any other republic, and it was worth a lot to get the sympathy of such a huge army of secretaries. And Crimea was an all-Union dream. The former gem in the crown of the Russian Empire was now the main façade of the country. Foreign leaders were taken here, the famous "Artek" thundered here throughout the socialist world. This is not just a camp - the southern capital of the pioneers.
The author of the historical study, Georgy Dezhkin, points out that the then first secretary of the Crimean regional committee of the CPSU (b) Pavel Titov flatly refused to transfer all this to Ukraine. He considered Crimea to be precisely Russian territory, even once suggested to Stalin to rename the region to Tauride. Titov objected to Khrushchev and was removed from office. And Ukrainian secretaries have already helped the benefactor to come up with a justification for an early gift.
"There was a story that this was done for economic development. But it looks very naive. I would say, ridiculous," said Andrei Nikiforov, associate professor of the Taurida National University.
But Khrushchev did not give anyone a long time to think about the meaning of the transfer of Crimea. On February 5, 1954, he launched a draft resolution at the level of the Supreme Soviets of the two republics, and two weeks later - that very historic meeting of the presidium.
There was no quorum that day, voices were sent by telegrams. And in the Constitution there was not a single clause that would allow the union republics to legally transfer territories to each other. But Khrushchev had another motive to bring his idea to the end by all means. Initially, planning to debunk Stalin's personality cult and condemn the repressions, he concealed the fact that he himself took an active part in the repressions in Ukraine, and Crimea could be bought off.
"Khrushchev carried out this merger solely so that some part of the Ukrainian politically active elite would forgive his sins committed during the period of repression," said Vitaly Tretyakov, political scientist and dean of the Moscow State University Higher School of Television.
And after 40 years, there was a disconnection, and Crimea was already transferred from a once united country to an independent state. Leonid Kravchuk admitted that he was ready to abandon the non-native peninsula for the sake of the independence of the rest of Ukraine, but Boris Yeltsin in Belovezhskaya Pushcha did not even hint about it. Another 20 years have passed.
"As our history shows, Russians never abandon their own people. This is a feature of our national culture, our mentality. And in this sense, by the word" Russians "I mean people of different nationalities who are part of a single Russian civilization," emphasized the historian and writer Nikolai Old people.
Today, journalists and historians are amazed at how topical Solzhenitsyn's book "Russia in Collapse", published in 1998, sounded. “In today's Ukraine, one cannot even raise a voice for its federal structure, which has been accepted with such reckless generosity in Russia: the ghost of the autonomous Crimea, the autonomous Donbass immediately appears. We have already forgotten about the Rusyns of Transcarpathia, with their persistent Russian roots. imitate the Ukrainian nationalists. There is no need to respond in any way to their heated anti-Muscovite propaganda. We must wait it out as a kind of mental illness, "wrote Solzhenitsyn.
Today the Russians are being forced to answer. Either because the mental illness of the nationalists in Ukraine has become too aggravated, or because Russia is no longer in a collapse.
