The City of Glory

The demise of world empires and the loss of colonies by West Euro­pean states is often regarded by students of nationalism 'as a central feature of the post-war Western European experience.'¹ In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War resulted in the disintegration of the multinational Russian/Soviet empire and two 'pan-Slavic' states, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

At the core of the differences between Russia and the West in dealing with the loss of empire lies the specific character of Russian imperial­ism, whose peculiarities have been strongly manifested over the last two centuries and noted by students of the region. John Dunlop, who has written extensively on the 'loss' and 'fall' of the Soviet empire,² has even questioned the usage of the term 'empire' in regard to the tsarist state and the USSR. He writes that 'imprecise use of terminology serves to skew and to distort the position of Russians under both the Tsars and the Soviets.'³ Richard Pipes, for his part, believes that the Russian Empire acquired special characteristics owing to the fact that in Russia 'the rise of the national state and the empire occurred concur­rently, and not, as in the case of the Western powers, in sequence.'⁴

A number of specific characteristics distinguish Russian imperial­ism from the classical imperialisms of countries like Britain and France. These characteristics include the absence of Russian colonies overseas, active incorporation of the elites of the conquered border­lands into the Russian imperial elite, prevalence of empire-building tendencies over nation-building ones, employment of a federal faςade for the highly centralized state of the Soviet period, etc.⁵ It can also be argued that the very concept of 'Russianness' that replaced the old Muscovite identity in eighteenth-century Russia was constructed not only by the Great Russians but also by the Little Russians/Ukrainians, who were recruited into the imperial ruling elite and were looking for ways to formulate their new empire-oriented identity.⁶ As a result, 'Russian,' as opposed to 'Muscovite,' often meant not Great Russian but all-Russian or East Slavic.

The 'conflict of borders,' in which political boundaries cut across ethnic and cultural ones, is one of the inevitable consequences of the demise of any empire. Although in most cases it is the colonial and not the imperial peoples who suffer most, in the case of the disintegration of the USSR it has been the Russians who have claimed to be the most victimized, with millions of their brethren effectively cut off from the Russian state by the new state borders. The old imperial tradition of Russian national identity and the feeling of being victimized by the demise of the USSR account for many characteristics of contemporary Russian nationalism.

If indeed, in the words of Geoffrey Hosking, Western powers like Britain had empires but Russia was an empire, for Russia the dissolution of the USSR has meant not only the loss of imperial possessions but also the loss of its very being. In no other area has this been as obvious as in the realm of national identity. The 'sacred space' of the empire, the cultural and historical map created by Russian imperial nationalists of the nineteenth century and Russian proletarian internationalists of the Soviet era, has been torn apart by the events of 1991. Numerous cultural and political symbols of old imperial Russia (such as Kyiv and Narva) and twentieth-century Soviet Russia (such as the Baikonur Cosmo­drome and the Brest fortress) were displaced beyond the borders of the Russian Federation almost overnight.

When independent Ukraine left the USSR, it effectively took with it a number of prominent imperial 'sacred places' on the Russian cultural map. They included traditional 'all-Russian' places of religious worship and pilgrimage, such as the Cave Monastery and St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, and places associated with the history of the Russian Empire dur­ing its 'golden age' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Poltava and Sevastopol. Kyiv, Odesa, and Sevastopol also served as places of new government-sponsored pilgrimages in the Soviet era as Soviet municipalities awarded them the status of 'hero-cities' to com­memorate the heroism of their defenders during the Second World War.

The results of the December 1991 independence referendum in Ukraine came as a major surprise not only to Mikhail Gorbachev but also to his adversaries among the Russian political elite, who were grouped around Boris Yeltsin. The overwhelming success of the referendum in eastern Ukraine was totally unexpected. Even in the Crimea the referendum vote was 54 per cent in favour of independence, signalling a serious threat to Russian interests in the Black Sea region. This was especially the case in Sevastopol, the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Support for independence in Sevastopol was slightly higher than in other areas of the Crimea: 57 per cent in favour. There was also another indication that voters in Sevastopol were more pro-independence than those in other parts of peninsula. Viacheslav Chornovil, a pro-Western candidate for the presidency and a former dissident, received more votes in Sevas­topol (10.93 per cent) than the ethnic Russian Vladimir Griniov, a repre­sentative of the highly Russified city of Kharkiv (8.38 per cent).⁸

The possibility of Sevastopol and the Crimea allying themselves with Kyiv and leaving the USSR to become part of Ukraine alarmed the Russian leadership and caused it to intensify its efforts to maintain the Black Sea Fleet under Moscow's unilateral control.

The cornerstone of all Russian claims to the Crimea and Sevastopol is the myth of Sevastopol as an exclusively Russian city, the 'city of Russian glory,' the symbol of the Russian fleet and Russia's glorious past. For many Russian politicians the history of the Russian presence in the Crimea is closely connected to the history of the fleet and hence to the history of its main base in the Crimea, Sevastopol. The former commander of the fleet, Admiral Igor Kasatonov (recalled from Sevas­topol to Moscow in December 1992), stressed in an interview to the Russian newspaper Literaturnaia Rossiia that Russia cannot be imag­ined in any form without its glorious Black Sea Fleet. To deprive Russia of the Black Sea Fleet and its naval bases in the Crimea and Black Sea region would mean setting it back three centuries to the times before Peter I.¹⁰ In the autumn of 1996, when the status of Sevastopol was once again under discussion in the Russian parliament, Russian news­papers published an appeal from A.P. Nakhimov, G.V. Kornilova, and A.P. Istomin - allegedly descendants of Sevastopol heroes - to the pres­ident, government, and parliament of Russia. The appeal called on the authorities to bring Sevastopol under Russian control.¹¹ The names of Admirals Nakhimov, Kornilov, and Istomin - the commanders of the fleet and defenders of Sevastopol during the Crimean war of 1853-6 - symbolize, perhaps better than anything else, the core of the Sevasto­pol myth as it exists in contemporary Russia.

This chapter seeks to explain the Sevastopol phenomenon in the his­tory of the Russian Empire and the USSR. The two principal concepts employed for that purpose are the 'territorialization of memory' and historical myth as an important element of national memory. The study takes as its point of the departure Anthony Smith's definition of the ter- ritorialization of memory as 'a process by which certain kinds of shared memories are attached to particular territories so that the former ethnic landscapes (or ethnoscapes) and the latter become historic home- lands,'¹² and John A. Armstrong's definition of myth as 'the integrating phenomenon through which symbols of national identity acquire a coherent meaning.'¹³

At the centre of this chapter is the development of the Sevastopol myth (the complex of historical interpretations related to the defence of the city during the Crimean War of 1853-6), which is examined in its relation to the history of Russian national identity.

Modern Russian national mythology began to take shape in the first decades of the nineteenth century with the growth of national awareness and the formulation by Count Uvarov of the 'theory of official national­ity,' the triad of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality.¹⁴

In the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, the major battlefields of the imperial army were effectively turned into places of national ven­eration and served as important components of the new national mythology. From that perspective Russia was not an exception to the general rule, as it simply followed the universal pattern of the territori- alization of memory and national myth making. According to Anthony Smith, battlefields historically have played an important role in the process of territorialization of national memory, as they 'marked criti­cal turning-points in the fortunes of the community, be they victories like Marathon, Lake Peipus, Bannockburn or Blood River or defeats like Kosovo, Avaryar, Karbala, or the fall of Jerusalem or Constantino­ple.'¹⁵ The Borodino myth in Russia serves as a good example of the 'battlefield' type of mythology.

The Sevastopol myth that was formed in the second half of the nine­teenth century in many ways resembles the myth of Borodino. This myth, as it exists in contemporary Russia, is based predominantly on the events of the Crimean War (1853-6). The war resulted from interna­tional conflict over the partition of the Ottoman Empire. In 1853, St Petersburg began a successful campaign against the Turkish protec­torates of Moldavia and Wallachia, but very soon the Ottomans received crucial support from two powerful West European states, Brit­ain and France. Neither of these powers wanted Russia to strengthen its position in the Balkans or take control of the Black Sea straits. With the entry of Britain and France into the war, the centre of the conflict moved to the territory of the Russian Empire. In 1854 the allies invaded the Crimea and besieged Sevastopol, the main base of the Imperial Black Sea Fleet. This turn of events came as a major surprise to the Russian government, which, forty years after its victories over Napoleon, still believed that the Russian army and fleet were the most powerful in Europe. As the war showed, that was by no means the case, and the only enemy forces against which the imperial army and fleet could launch successful campaigns were those of the declining Ottoman Empire.

The Russian fleet could not withstand that of the allies and was forced to retreat to the Sevastopol harbour. The only factor that helped the Russian Empire in the war and rescued it from immediate defeat was the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol. The siege cost the allies thousands of soldiers and officers killed and wounded, humiliat­ing the elite forces of the two colonial powers. Nevertheless, in 1855, after a long and exhausting siege, the imperial army had no choice but to withdraw from Sevastopol. The war was over. Russia was forced to sign a humiliating Paris peace treaty with the allies that did not allow it to maintain a Black Sea fleet or fortresses on the shores of the Black Sea. This military defeat, the first on such a scale since the Muscovite­Polish wars of the seventeenth century, created the atmosphere in which the Sevastopol myth came into existence.¹⁷

The veneration of the heroes of Sevastopol began at the initiative of participants in the Sevastopol defence themselves, apparently with no support from the government. It was thanks to donations from the sail­ors of the Black Sea Fleet that the first monument to Admiral Lazarev (who died before the outbreak of the war) and Admirals Kornilov, Istomin, and Nakhimov (all three killed during the siege) was erected in August 1856. In 1869, it was again on private initiative that a committee for the organization of a Sevastopol military museum was established in St Petersburg. The tradition of venerating the victims of the Crimean War was influenced by one of the main trends of Russian political thought, Pan-Slavism. Such Pan-Slavs as Mikhail Pogodin supported government policy towards the Ottoman Empire insofar as it reflected their own agenda of taking control of Constantinople and liberating the Orthodox Slavs under the Ottoman yoke.¹⁸ The Russian public at large viewed the siege of Sevastopol as a symbol of the heroism of the Rus­sian people, which had saved Russia from foreign invasion despite the inefficiency and corruption of the tsarist administration.¹⁹

Although as early as 1869 Tsarevich Aleksandr Aleksandrovich vis­ited Sevastopol on his trip to southern Russia and was given a tour of the former battlefield by General Totleben,²⁰ the court apparently was not involved in the creation of the new sacred place until the Russo- Turkish War of 1877-8, which was launched by the government under Pan-Slavic slogans.²¹ Benedict Anderson regards 'official nationalisms' of the European states in the nineteenth century as a 'willed merger of nation and dynastic empire' and stresses that 'it developed after and in reaction to the popular national movements proliferating in Europe since the 1820s.'²² The history of the formation of the Sevastopol myth in imperial Russia helps to explain problems that the court encountered when taking, in Benedict Anderson's words, 'to the streets.' While reluctantly participating in the creation of the Sevastopol myth, the court wanted to stress the role played in the defence of Sevastopol by such government-appointed officials as the commander of the Russian army in the Crimea, Prince Mikhail Gorchakov. The Russian public, on the contrary, came up with a hero of its own, Admiral Pavel Nakhimov.

Nakhimov, a hero of Sinope (a successful navy battle against the Turks in the autumn of 1853), in fact played a secondary role in the defence of Sevastopol. He was clearly demoralized by the allied con­trol of the Black Sea and, according to numerous accounts, sought death on the fortifications of Sevastopol. Apart from that, he was never in charge of the defence, and only in 1855 was he appointed to serve as commandant of the port.²³ The rules of myth making nevertheless required that Nakhimov be transformed from the hero of the success­ful attack on Sinope into a hero of the defence of the motherland. Dur­ing and after the siege of Sevastopol, Nakhimov became known to the general public through newspaper and journal publications as 'the soul of the defence of Sevastopol' and a friend of the common people. Nakhimov, reprimanded by superiors early in his career for brutality towards sailors, became extremely popular among his subordinates by the end of his life because of his genuine attention to their needs. More important to this study is that, given the general atmosphere in Rus­sian society after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the growing influence of the populists, the new hero of the Russian public was almost fated to be a 'friend of the people,' and the young Nakhimov's harsh treatment of sailors, recruited by the authorities predominantly from peasant serfs, was rarely mentioned.²⁴

A strong 'populist' element was also introduced into the Sevastopol myth by its best-known propagandist, Count Leo Tolstoy. In his 'Sevas­topol Sketches,' Tolstoy presented the defence of Sevastopol as a story of the suffering, sacrifice, and heroism of the common people - rank- and-file sailors, soldiers, and civilians.²⁵ The 'Sevastopol Sketches' became very popular with the Russian public, surviving even the col­lapse of the empire. Thanks to Bolshevik populist rhetoric, Tolstoy's sketches made their way into the Russian literature curriculum in Soviet schools. By the turn of the twentieth century, Sevastopol had become one of the most venerated places of the empire. In the 1890s, monuments to Admirals Kornilov and Nakhimov were erected, and the new building of the Sevastopol military museum was opened. This was, in fact, the first step towards the creation of a new imperial sacred place, the first on recently conquered territory to rank with St Peters­burg, Moscow, and Kyiv. The ritual complex that was developed in Sevastopol through joint efforts of the public, the court, and the Black Sea Fleet played an important role in the creation of a new historical tradition shared by the throne and emerging Russian civil society alike.

Probably it was not accidental that the veneration of the heroes of Sevastopol reached its peak when Russia became involved in a new imperialist conflict, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. To commemo­rate its fiftieth anniversary, numerous monuments to the defenders of Sevastopol were erected in the city, and a museum featuring a pan­oramic depiction of the 'Defence of Sevastopol, 1854-5' was opened. The Russian government was still at pains to present its own version of the defence, as opposed to the populist one, in the panoramic painting. Court officials demanded that the artists remove the figure of Admiral Nakhimov and replace it with the figure of Prince Gorchakov. As a result, Nakhimov never made it to the largest and most elaborate painting depicting the Sevastopol defence. ²⁶

Despite the many similarities between the Sevastopol myth and the equally populist myth of Borodino (which also made its way through the collapse of the empire into the civil religion of the new Bolshevik regime), there is an important difference between them. Even though both can be called 'defence of the motherland' myths, the Sevastopol myth was the first to be based on the events of a war conducted on previously non-Russian territory that had been annexed to the empire only seventy years before the outbreak of the Crimean War. From that perspective, the Sevastopol myth presents a new type of Russian mythology, one that justified and glorified the defence of new impe­rial possessions acquired by the tsars during the eighteenth and nine­teenth centuries. The Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War gave rise to a new imperial myth - that of the heroic defence of Port Arthur, which in many ways resembled the old Sevastopol myth. Port Arthur served as the base of the imperial fleet in the Far East and was besieged by the Japanese army. Eventually, after a long siege, it was surrendered by the Russian imperial army and fell to the Japanese. The popular Port Arthur myth, like that of Sevastopol, condemned the inefficiency and corruption of the tsar's generals and praised the heroism of the Russian soldiers. Like the Sevastopol myth, that of the heroic defence of Port Arthur came into existence in an atmosphere of defeat and national humiliation.²⁷

The prerevolutionary Sevastopol myth praised the heroism of the Russian people, which, according to the official view, consisted of three branches: the Great Russians, the Little Russians, and the Belarusians. This concept of a tripartite Russian people did not survive the events of the 1917 revolution. The new Bolshevik authorities were forced to rec­ognize the existence of three separate peoples - the Russians, Ukraini­ans, and Belarusians. What remained almost intact after the revolution was the myth of Sevastopol. As before, it was based on the heroism of the Russian people, now understood not as the heroism of a tripartite nation but as that of the Great Russians alone. The first years after the Bolshevik takeover brought predominantly negative attitudes towards imperial Russian history. Lenin's view of tsarist Russia as a prison­house of nations was developed in the writings of the leading Soviet historian of that time, Mikhail Pokrovsky, and his school. The consoli­dation of power by Stalin in the early 1930s resulted in a dramatic change of official attitudes towards the Russian past. Not only were the old negative approaches to imperial Russian history abandoned, but the followers of Pokrovsky were persecuted and often sent to the Gulag. The beginnings of the national revival in the non-Russian Union republics were crushed by the authorities, and Stalin employed Russian nationalism to extend the power base of his oppressive regime.²⁸

Russian nationalism was employed as a means of mobilizing Soviet society on the eve of the Second World War. The atmosphere of prepara­tions for war set the stage for recalling images of the imperial past and the comeback of the Sevastopol myth. Soviet aggression against Finland, whose allies were Britain and France (Russian adversaries in the Crimean War), also helped create an appropriate atmosphere for the myth's reemergence. The first major Soviet historical work on the siege of Sevas­topol was issued in 1939. Its publication coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War and the Soviet invasion of Poland.²⁹

German aggression against the USSR and the outbreak of the Soviet- German war accelerated the reorientation of the Soviet propaganda machine towards heroic images of the imperial Russian past. The war was officially called the Great Patriotic War, a designation based on the official name of the Russian war against Napoleon in 1812. New myths based on the events of the war came into existence, and old ones made their comeback in a big way. One of them was the myth of Sevastopol, whose reemergence was of special significance for the war effort, as Sevastopol was again besieged in 1941-2, this time by the Germans, and the defenders of the city again displayed true heroism.³⁰ Admiral Nakhimov, a participant in the first defence of Sevastopol, was ele­vated to the status of national hero by Soviet propagandists. In 1944 an order and a medal named after Nakhimov were introduced to decorate Soviet Navy officers and rank-and-file sailors. In the same year, special cadet schools for the training of naval officers, also named after Nakhi­mov, were established.³¹ He was thus transformed into an icon in the Soviet Russian iconostasis, taking his place next to Aleksandr Nevsky, Aleksandr Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov.

The new wave of Sevastopol veneration came in 1955 with the com­memoration of the hundredth anniversary of the Crimean War and the defence of Sevastopol. The commemorations were held in the atmo­sphere of the Cold War, in which the old Sevastopol enemies, Great Brit­ain, France, and Turkey, were NATO members and adversaries of the USSR. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles dealing with the history of the Sevastopol siege of 1854-5 were published during the first post­war decade. It was then that the standard Soviet work on the Sevastopol siege was written by a well-known Soviet historian of the Stalin era, Evgenii Tarle. Entitled The City of Russian Glory: Sevastopol in 1854-55, it was issued in 1954 by the publishing house of the USSR Defence Minis­try.³² The book was based on Tarle's earlier two-volume study, The Crimean War, and was addressed to the general public.

Tarle began working on the history of the Crimean War in the late 1930s, as Soviet relations with Britain and France were deteriorating. The authorities gave him exclusive use of otherwise inaccessible Rus­sian foreign-policy archival files. The first volume, published in 1941, was awarded the Stalin Prize. The second volume appeared in 1943, and the work was frequently reprinted. In his introduction to the fourth edition of the book in 1959, Nikolai Druzhinin praised Tarle for successfully refuting the concepts of Mikhail Pokrovsky and his school. According to Druzhinin, Pokrovsky had failed in his writings on the Crimean War to reveal the aggressive character of French and British imperialism, exaggerated the superiority of West European technology and military training over their Russian counterparts, and neglected to distinguish between popular and official Russian patrio­tism. In Druzhinin's opinion, Tarle had managed to correct all these mistakes of his predecessor.³³

In the title of his new book, The City of Russian Glory, Tarle coined the currently popular designation of Sevastopol, based on its Greek name, which means 'city of glory.' Tarle's general approach to the history of the Crimean War is a mixture of criticism of the imperialist character of the war (a tribute to the works of Marx and Engels) and glorification of the Russian nation. The book begins with the statement that the Crimean War introduced a glorious page into the history of the Russian people. This is followed by an attack on 'British imperialism.'³⁴ In another passage, Tarle compares the siege of 1854-5 to the defence of Sevastopol in 1941-2 and attacks the 'heirs' of Hitler and Hitlerism in Washington and West Germany.³⁵ Following the writings of Marx and Engels, Tarle often blames imperial Russia, not for its own imperialist ambitions but for its weakness and backwardness, which prevented the empire from winning the war. The Crimean War was presented by Tarle to the Soviet reader as a war launched by the Western states 'against our Motherland.'³⁶ According to the historian, in 1854-5 the defenders of Sevastopol not only fought for the city but also defended 'the annex­ations made by the Russian state and the Russian people in the times of Peter I and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.'³⁷

The title of Tarle's book, The City of Russian Glory, reflected one of the work's main characteristics: it praised Russian glory and Russian hero­ism in a context in which 'Russian' was viewed exclusively as Great Russian. There was no attempt to interpret 'Russian' in any broader manner. The campaign against Jews and 'cosmopolitans' in the late 1940s and early 1950s brought to the fore the practice of glorification of ethnic Russians and denial of any attention to historical figures of non­Russian origin. One of the most venerated historical figures in Stalin's USSR was a participant in the Crimean War, the brilliant Russian sur­geon Nikolai Pirogov. A special feature film was produced at that time to glorify Pirogov, whose achievements were supposed to prove the superiority of Russian science and scholarship to those of the West. It is not surprising that Pirogov was among the most venerated heroes of the Crimean War, and Tarle's book was no exception in its treatment of the famous surgeon. At the same time, the names of generals and offic­ers who played an important role in the defence of Sevastopol but were of non-Russian background were barely mentioned in the book.³⁸

An example of Tarle's nationalistic approach is the case of the military engineer Eduard Totleben, who was in charge of the fortifications at the time of the siege and whose talent and activity contributed immensely to the success of the imperial army. Totleben, who had received a great deal of attention in Tarle's earlier books on the Crimean War, was ran­domly mentioned in The City of Russian Glory The historian now accused Totleben of depriving officers with Russian surnames of the glory they had earned during the war.³⁹ Instead, Tarle devoted many pages of his book to the glorification of Admiral Nakhimov. The official version of the history of the Sevastopol siege, employed by Tarle, was written along Russian populist lines and claimed that after the death of Admiral Kornilov, who was killed during the very first attack on the city, Admiral Nakhimov became the 'soul' of that defence.⁴⁰

Tarle's book, which became perhaps the most popular Soviet publi­cation about the Sevastopol siege and contributed immensely to the creation of the image of Sevastopol as a city of Russian glory, displayed the symbiosis of Marxist phraseology and ideas of Russian nationalism that formed the ideological base of Stalin's policies from the 1930s to the 1950s. In the 1960s, owing to the change in the Soviet ideological approach under Nikita Khrushchev and the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine, the celebration of Russian heroism in the Sevastopol siege of 1854-5 was overshadowed by glorification of the heroism of the Soviet people in the Sevastopol siege of 1941-2. Sevastopol's heroic defence against the invading Germans served as one of the sources of a new mythology, that of the 'Great Patriotic War.' In the 1960s Sevastopol, along with Moscow, Leningrad, Odesa, and a number of other cities, was awarded the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the principal focus of historical literature devoted to the Crimea and Sevastopol shifted to the history of the Soviet period.⁴¹

Around the same time, the exclusively Russian character of the Sev­astopol myth was effectively challenged by the glorification of Sevasto­pol heroes of non-Russian origin. The heroism of the ethnic Ukrainian Petro Kishka (in Russian transcription, Petr Koshka) was highly praised in all books about the Sevastopol siege published in Ukraine.⁴² In the 1980s, a book by A. Blizniuk devoted to the heroism of Belaru­sians in the Sevastopol siege was published in two editions in Belarus. (The most prominent of the ethnic Belarusians who fought at Sevasto­pol during the Crimean War was Aleksandr Kozarsky.)⁴³ The reclama­tion of parts of the Sevastopol myth by Ukrainians and Belarusians continued until the dissolution of the USSR but never managed to shake the exclusively Great Russian character that the myth had acquired in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s.

The fate of the Sevastopol myth in post-Soviet Russia offers a striking example of a sharp conflict between cultural and state boundaries on the territory of the former USSR. The territorialization of Russian national memory that took place within the boundaries of the Russian Empire and then of the Russian-led USSR had to face the challenge of the newly shrunken Russian territory after 1991. The confusion of the Russian public at large with regard to the new state boundaries was profoundly expressed in the words of a poem by A. Nikolaev:

On the ruins of our superpower

There is a major paradox of history:

Sevastopol, the city of Russian glory,

Is outside Russian territory.⁴⁴

The Sevastopol myth, though restructured and reshaped after the fall of the USSR, is alive and well in contemporary Russia and constitutes an important part of current political discourse. One of the best examples of the modification of the Sevastopol myth in post-Soviet Russia was pre­sented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the patriarch of Russian nationalism, in his pamphlet 'The Russian Question' at the End of the Twentieth Century. For Solzhenitsyn, Russia's appropriation of the Crimea marked the attainment of her 'natural southern boundary.'⁴⁵ He refuses to attribute responsibility for defeat in the Crimean War to Russia's backwardness, siding instead with the nineteenth-century Russian historian Sergei Soloviev, who advocated the continuation of the war in 1856.⁴⁶ Solzhen­itsyn also attacks the West for interfering in the Russo-Ukrainian debate over Sevastopol. He wrote in that regard: 'The American ambassador in Kyiv, Popadiuk, had the gall to declare that Sevastopol rightly belongs to Ukraine. Based on what historical erudition or relying on what legal foundations did he pronounce this learned judgment?'⁴⁷ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's view of the history of Russian presence in the Crimea is not an isolated phenomenon. In many respects it follows the current trend in Russian historiography towards rewriting Soviet-era Russian history along neo-imperialist lines.

Since the dissolution of the USSR, the Russian myth of Sevastopol has made use of the prerevolutionary mythology of the Crimean War and largely dismissed the Soviet-era mythology of the Second World War. The most likely explanation of such a modification of the Sevasto­pol myth lies in the different relation of the two Sevastopol myths to the Russian national idea in general. The Soviet-era component of the Sevastopol myth, based predominantly on the events of the Second World War, appears quite limited in its ability to provide a basis for the mobilization of Russian nationalism in its dispute with another Slavic nation, Ukraine, over the Crimea and Sevastopol. The Crimean War mythology that represents the heroism of the Russian imperial army exclusively as the heroism of the Russian people, on the other hand, does offer such a basis.

There can be little doubt that the modification of the Sevastopol myth in the 1990s exemplifies important trends in the development of Rus­sian national identity in the post-communist era. Such trends include nostalgia for the lost empire, confusion over the issue of Russianness (whether it includes Ukrainian and Belarusian components), and grow­ing anti-Western sentiments among contemporary Russian elites.

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