By now we have all seen the disconcerting video in which Alessandro Barbero and Angelo d’Orsi discuss Crimea (here are the images at an event in Turin a few days ago), giggling as if they were at the bar and reciting historical falsehoods as if they were distributing peanuts to the birds in the park. What was missing was that, when speaking, they imitated Lavrov’s voice or directly Putin’s. “Crimea is in Russia,” said Barbero, destroying his reputation as a popularizer of history in one quick sentence. “It has always been Russian,” added d’Orsi, who is not a historian in the strict sense of the term since he taught the history of political doctrines, a subject more akin to political philosophy than history. “Yes, before Caterina it was the Tartars,” Barbero corrected him in a moment of professional clarity. “Let’s not talk about it,” he immediately added, realizing that it could undermine the Single Thought of the evening.

Crimea was not always Russian

Yes, because Crimea has not “always been Russian” at all, far from it. It had belonged to the Mongols, with presences from Genoa and Venice, and then to the Tatars, considered the ethnic group of the peninsula. Then, in 1783, it was occupied by the Russian Empire, with Catherine II, thanks above all to the military skills of her ex-lover Grigory Potemkin (yes, him, the one with the famous staircase in another Ukrainian city not far away: we are talking about Odessa), who re-founded Sevastopol in the Crimea. And this is where the story of Crimea changes.

Analogies between the 18th century and today

However, it is interesting to focus on what an advisor to Catherine II, Aleksandr Bezborodko, wrote in his diary, because there are traits that are used today by the Russian establishment to justify the invasion of Ukraine. According to Bezborodko, the inhabitants of Crimea were very happy to join Russia because they were discouraged by the fact that the Ottomans did not want to grant them independence.

Nothing could be further from the truth: the inhabitants of Crimea were not particularly interested in independence from the Ottomans, and the Ottomans had not done much against a non-existent intention. Bezborodko wrote that “their (the Ottomans’) main goal was to deprive the Crimeans of independence (…), they banished the legitimate khan (…), they made numerous perfidious attempts to introduce rebellion in the Crimea”. And then he wrote that “our only desire was to bring peace to Crimea” and “in the end we were forced by the Turks to annex the area”.

Do you remember anything? Of course. Putin and his propagandists always say that Russia was forced to annex Donbas and Crimea because Ukraine, after the “coup d’état” (which never happened) with which the “legitimate president” was supposedly ousted, would have deprived the inhabitants of Donbas of their independence (directed by Russia): Moscow’s objective would be to bring “peace” to Ukraine, and to do so the only way would have been to invade it. Of course the “legitimate khan”, Sahin Giray, was a puppet of Catherine II, while the “legitimate president” of Ukraine kicked out of Parliament (not by the “coup”) was the pro-Russian Viktor Yaunkovich.

“Russian” Crimea, administratively autonomous

With Russia master of Crimea, the era of deportations began for the Tatars and, at the same time, of the Russification of the peninsula through the transfer of Russians. In the empire of the Tsars, Crimea was administratively included first in the Governorate of New Russia and then in that of Tauride (approximately the south of Ukraine). Since there is so much talk about the languages ​​used, according to the 1897 census in the Tauride Governorate 42% spoke Ukrainian, 28% Russian, 13.6% the Tatar language, 5.4% German, 3.8% Yiddish and then residues of other languages.

Simple Russian region only for nine years

So Crimea was annexed, yes, to the Russian Empire (and treated as a colony, but the discussion on this point would expand), but administratively it was still controlled by local rulers in the Ukrainian area. When in 1918 the Bolsheviks dissolved the very short-lived Crimean (Tatar) People’s Republic, reannexing the peninsula, they established the Tauride Soviet Socialist Republic (they did not annex it directly to the Russian RSFS).

This happened following the Russian civil war with the creation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea within the Russian RSF and then with the definitive incorporation from 1942 to 1954, when Krushev incorporated it into the Ukrainian RSS, which was logical given the geographical proximity and the consequent simpler management of the territory. In 1991, the majority of Crimeans voted in favor of Ukrainian independence. Russia later recognized this state of affairs, until 2014.

The laughter

It’s worth going back to the video, just for completeness. When Barbero declaims that “Crimea is in Russia”, he does not miss the opportunity to provoke Carlo Calenda. “Do you know where Crimea is? Perhaps Senator Calenda would say that it is in Ukraine. May God forgive him! Crimea is in Russia”, is the exact phrase that Barbero utters, chuckling. It is his communicative key. The big smile, the laugh: it’s the way Barbero expresses himself when he tells the story. He’s been doing it practically forever, and it’s always been one of the reasons why we’ve all, at least once, and I personally even found him more than once, found him likeable and brilliant.

The massacre of rights

But, in this case, Barbero puts laughter into a massacre. The massacre of international law, first of all, according to which Crimea is in Ukraine, period. There is no middle ground, there is no grayscale: according to international law, it is in Ukraine. Then there was the massacre of other rights. Because the Russian occupation has been accompanied, for years, by the denial of the right to be Ukrainian in Crimea: the inhabitants are forced to get Russian passports, to learn Russian at school and not Ukrainian, to use Russian everywhere to avoid the risk of someone labeling them as terrorists.

In occupied Crimea, in fact, anyone who claims that there is a state of illegitimate occupation is considered a terrorist (based on international law as well as his beliefs).

We finally discover what we had long suspected. Barbero had already had the opportunity to state inaccuracies about the invasion of Ukraine, but now he takes a step further: he affirms a falsehood as truth, making fun of those who tell the truth, and therefore agrees, in an astonishing way, to compromise his reputation as a serious scholar. All to say that Crimea is in Russia. Truly incredible.