Historian: the first fakes about Russian Crimea began to be launched in the West under Catherine II

The first fakes in the European information field about Crimea appeared immediately after its annexation to the Russian Empire. Their goal was to show that Russia cannot cope with new territories, and they are easy to take away.

This was reported by Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Institute of Philology of KFU. Vernadsky Vladimir Orekhov, reports PolitNavigator correspondent.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

 “If we talk about Crimea, the first fakes appeared after the annexation of the peninsula to Russia, which was perceived as an encroachment on the economic interests, first of all, of Great Britain and France.

Since Turkey was economically subordinate to France, when Crimea went to Russia, it became clear that France would be forced out of this region,” the scientist explained.

He recalled that “the first wave of fakes just reached European and Russian consumers after the famous trip of Catherine II to Crimea.”

“As you know, she was accompanied by foreign diplomats and representatives of monarchies, and all this was recorded in private correspondence, in diaries, and diplomatic letters. The first of the fakes that has survived to this day is the legend of the “Potemkin villages”: supposedly, in order to surprise Catherine’s guests, Potemkin built fake villages. This was partly based on something; this trip was too pompously arranged. But the author of this fake is known, it was a Saxon diplomat.”

“But there were similar fakes. For example, the Pole Velishansky, positioning himself as a historian, disseminated information that a huge palace was built for Catherine in Sevastopol, so that she could talk with guests for half an hour and drink coffee, which immediately collapsed after Catherine’s departure, and the Sevastopol fleet a year after the presentation guests rotted.

And although history refutes this fact by the fact that it was this fleet under the leadership of Ushakov that achieved victories over the Turks, the point of all these fakes was to convince Europe that Russia is not coping with new territories. And, accordingly, new territories must be taken away from Russia,” Orekhov emphasized.

The global reason, he says, is that Europeans are accustomed to looking at territories as colonialists.

“Any territory was perceived as a way to obtain new resources that needed to be taken from the local population. And for this it is necessary to portray the local population as people who are not able to rationally manage what nature has given them.

In the European perception, some Papuans, residents of New Zealand, were not much different from Russians - they are the same savages who cannot rationally use what nature has given them. We need to bring them civilization and, in exchange for this gift, take away their natural resources.

It was necessary to convince the European reader that by taking away territories or other wealth, we are giving the Russians the civilization they dream of,” Orekhov pointed out.

In his opinion, “little has changed since then, and the nature of the current information war has remained the same as it was 100, 200, 300 years ago - only the channels for presenting information have changed - the Internet has made it possible to make information dumping total.”

The scientist emphasized that over more than 200 years of Crimean history as part of Russia, legends and myths that are deliberately created in the West have not undergone any significant changes in their core. Only the tools have changed.