Did the Crimea try to separate from Ukraine in the 1990s?

The last years of the Soviet Union and the first years after its collapse proved to be a confusing period in Crimean politics. The local com­munist functionaries at first managed to control the levers of power, but they faced a number of challenges: reaching an understanding with the new Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv, dealing with the return of the Crimean Tatars, and responding to the birth of popular poli­tics on the Crimean Peninsula.

The Soviet Union was still in existence in January 1991, when the Crimean leadership organized a successful referendum on restoring the autonomous republic. The plebiscite was largely a preemptive measure aimed against the Crimean Tatars, who might otherwise demand the restoration of “their” autonomous republic, a move potentially involving affirmative-action and land-restitution rights as the indigenous people. The result also afforded the Crimean authorities a stronger position in their negotiations with Kyiv. Indeed, a rapprochement of sorts was apparently reached, because the Ukrainian parliament did grant the peninsula the status of an autonomous republic, and in return the local bosses did not sabo­tage the December 1991 Ukrainian referendum on national indepen­dence. The “yes" vote reached 54.2 percent in the Crimea, albeit with the lowest voter turnout rate in the country at 60 percent.

By 1992, a year of economic collapse and escalating nationalist rhetoric in the post-Soviet states, Russian involvement had aggra­vated relations between Kyiv and the Crimean capital of Simferopol. The Russian parliament debated the legitimacy of the 1954 transfer, and the Russian vice president spoke openly in favor of reclaiming the Crimea.

The Crimean functionaries of the old communist lineage soon lost control over the separatist movement that they had used as leverage against Kyiv. When the Crimean parliament created the position of republican president in 1994, the populist activist Yuri Meshkov from the “Russia" electoral bloc won the elections. A tug of war ensued between his administration and the Kyiv authorities, but the Russian position proved decisive. Using military means, President Yeltsin of Russia had recently defeated his parliament and vice pres­ident, both of which represented a more extreme nationalistic po­sition with respect to the Crimea. Accordingly, Yeltsin refused to meet with Meshkov and showed little enthusiasm for a major con­flict with Ukraine. In 1995 the Ukrainian parliament annulled the “separatist” 1992 version of the Crimean Constitution, together with the president's position. Meshkov moved to Russia and communist functionaries returned to power in the Crimea. Beginning in the first decade of the 2000s, the Communist Party of the Crimea lost polit­ical influence, while the Party of Regions recruited into its ranks the more dynamic local establishment figures.

The rights of the Crimean Tatars continued to be neglected throughout this period. Since the late 1980s, some 250,000 of them returned to the peninsula without any assistance from either the Ukrainian or Crimean authorities. By the time of the 2001 census, the Tatars constituted 12.1 percent of the population, and their share has likely increased because of a higher birth rate and continued repatriation. However, they remain politically underrepresented. In 1991 the Crimean Tatars established their own representative organ, the Kurultai, and its executive arm, the Mejlis, which tended to side with Ukrainian democratic parties against the pro-Russian majority in the Crimea.