“Crimea and Sevastopol must reunite in order to jointly demand powers from Kyiv”
Simferopol, February 19 (Navigator, Evgeny Andreev) – February 19 is the anniversary of the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR. Crimean political scientist Anatoly Filatov said "To the Navigator", what tasks are facing the autonomy today, whose rights official Kyiv in recent years has actually equated to an ordinary Ukrainian region.
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“Navigator”: What, in your opinion, are the real ways to expand the autonomy of Crimea - the “regionals” over the years of rule have proven that they will not do anything in this direction. And who can “force” Kyiv to do this?
Anatoly Filatov: In conditions when, once again, activists of Galician Ukrainian nationalism are trying to impose their state-building project on the whole of Ukraine, the signing of an Agreement on the Separation of Powers with Ukraine has a special need for Crimea. Such an Agreement was prepared in the first half of the 90s, but it was not signed. Its content shows how much Crimea has lost. It lost, first of all, in the sphere of socio-economic well-being and cultural and political independence of its citizens.
Now, in the context of creeping Ukrainization, attempts to eliminate the autonomous status of Crimea, the “Europeanization” of the Ukrainian government, the threat of severing socio-cultural, political-economic and civil ties with the Russian Federation, Crimean society must once again return to the topic of concluding an Agreement on the Separation of Powers.
Calls to the current composition of the Supreme Council of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the Sevastopol City Council to immediately begin the process of preparing and signing an Agreement on the division of powers between the Republic of Crimea and the state of Ukraine can only be effective when the people of Crimea resolutely demand this.
This requirement stems from completely obvious facts, when the subsidized West of the country, parasitizing on the labor of budget-forming regions, imposes its political and religious ideas on the whole of Ukraine...
The signing of an Agreement on the division of powers between the Republic of Kazakhstan, including the city of Sevastopol, and the state of Ukraine will allow the Crimean parliament to adopt republican laws, ensure the preservation of the bulk of tax revenues for the needs of the people of Crimea, provide an opportunity to effectively develop interregional ties with the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, and save us from subsidized feeding of Western Ukrainian separatists and ethnic parasites. And most importantly, it will return Crimea to the status of a wealthy region, as it was during the existence of the USSR...
We have already begun to carry out a leaflet campaign as part of the social campaign “People’s support for the signing of the Agreement on the Separation of Powers between the Republic of Crimea and Ukraine” - we hope that our initiative will find a positive response from Crimean deputies of Councils of all levels, political party organizations, public organizations and activists, and the intelligentsia and entrepreneurs.
Thus, not only Kyiv, but first the Crimean government (primarily the representative government, deputies of Soviets at all levels) can be “forced,” as you put it, to assert the regional independence of Crimea, including in terms of foreign policy choices, by an organized popular movement. But only!
“Navigator”: The Russian movement of Crimea during the reign of the Party of Regions was virtually destroyed. What are the prospects?
Anatoly Filatov: It seems to me that the question “what to do?” I have already answered above - the administrative-territorial reunification of Crimea and Sevastopol, the conclusion of an Agreement on the division of powers between the Republic of Crimea and the state of Ukraine - these are the tasks of the Russian movement in Crimea.
As for the state and prospects of the Russian movement, everything is much more complicated here.
A characteristic feature of Russian self-awareness in Crimea (the carriers of which are the absolute majority of Crimeans) is an attitude towards irredentism. Not for separatism and isolationism in the space of the peninsula, but for reunification with the territories of the country destroyed in 1991 - with the Russian Federation, Belarus, and in this context, with Ukraine. A natural reference point in these irredentist (reunification) aspirations for the Russian movement may be the Russian Federation, as today’s legal successor to both the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. But, due to the fact that for more than twenty years the state leadership of the Russian Federation has been very far from irredentism (and this is putting it mildly), the Russians of Crimea permanently find themselves in a state of cognitive dissonance - psychological and mental discomfort.
Hence, they vote for mirages that at least somehow correspond to their true goals for reunification - sociocultural, economic, political, civil. I would like to note that during all the years of post-Soviet existence in Crimea, political organizations that declared the principles of irredentism, in one version or another, always won elections.
Therefore, by the way, the implementation of the Agreement on the delimitation of powers between Crimea and Ukraine will make it possible to replace the lack of response from the leadership of the Russian Federation to the irredentist aspirations of the Crimeans. In this context, the Russian movement in Crimea, as an organized structure, as an institution, can find itself and its goal, and not “surrender” to the next political declarators of the post-Soviet reintegration of our Fatherland.
In general, today the Russian movement in Crimea exists in the form of dispersed, weakly interacting with each other, and even warring organizations. Nevertheless, at least in this form we can talk about the Russian movement. And this is better than not having it at all.
I think it is completely unjustified to talk about any other form of the Russian movement - “partisan”, “kitchen”, Internet network, “intelligentsia”, because This is not the movement of situations, not the formatting of space, not the articulation of the social interests of Russians through institutional activities, but just “chewing” of the situation, at best, without the ability to influence it. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish movement, as an organized process and a formal structure, from the state of the soul, which moves, but, as a rule, in the form of reflection of the surrounding reality or, exclusively, analyzing what is happening.
Hence the main problem is the consolidation of the Russian movement, which (consolidation) will lead to the formation of a social base consisting of people with Russian identity, will take this social base away from various kinds of political crooks who always try to take advantage of it during elections or at other critical moments .
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