The dissolution of the USSR brought to the fore the whole range of problems that usually accompany the dissolution of empires.
The disintegration of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and, to some extent, French empires took place in the midst of war. Despite the fact that Britain and, later, Portugal withdrew from their colonial territories almost peacefully, the national, tribal, and religious conflicts that commenced after the departure of colonial administrations eventually resulted in bloody conflicts and wars.
Among the many problems that followed from the dissolution of the USSR was the border question. Although the border disputes in the former USSR were not as acute as in the former Yugoslavia, they constituted a serious threat to peaceful relations between the former Soviet republics. It was hardly accidental that the first major manifestation of national unrest in the USSR came with the events in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region claimed by two former Soviet republics, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The long war that they waged for control over Nagorno-Karabakh demonstrated how dangerous border conflicts in the former USSR can be. The frozen conflicts in Transdnistria and Abkhazia serve as another indication that the transformation of administrative borders into state borders turned out to be a very complicated and uneasy process.1
With the disintegration of the USSR, the border question raised relations between two other republics of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine, to a level of special importance. The problem came to light in late August 1991, after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence. On 29 August a spokesman for the Russian president, Pavel Voshchanov, announced that if Ukraine seceded from the USSR, Russia would reserve the right to revise its borders with Ukraine.2 In fact, the new Russian authorities claimed Russia's right to the eastern and southern oblasts of Ukraine, areas that underwent a high degree of Russification during the communist regime, and to the Crimean peninsula, a region transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954.
Since the results of the Ukrainian referendum (held in December 1991) demonstrated overwhelming support for the idea of Ukrainian independence (more than 90 per cent of those who took part in the referendum voted for independence), the 'empire-saviours' (to use Roman Szporluk's expression) in the Russian leadership were forced to abandon previous Russian claims to the eastern Ukrainian oblasts and concentrate specifically on the issue of the Crimea. This is the only region of Ukraine where ethnic Russians constitute the majority of the population, and the vote for independence there was the lowest in Ukraine (54 per cent in favour). As the 'all-Union resort' and home of the Black Sea Fleet, the Crimea was viewed by many Russian politicians as 'ancient Russian territory.' Leaders of nationalist factions in parliament have used every single opportunity to publicize their opinion that the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was carried out in violation of the Russian constitution and that there were more than enough legal arguments in place to demand its return to Russia.3
In April 1992, when the confrontation over the Crimea had reached its peak, Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi of Russia made a direct claim to the peninsula while on a visit there, using historical arguments. Rutskoi rejected one aspect of Crimean history - the transfer of the peninsula to Ukraine in 1954 - and emphasized another, the annexation of the Crimea by the Russian Empire and its military presence there: 'If one turns to history, then again history is not on the side of those who are trying to appropriate this land. If in 1954, perhaps under the influence of a hangover or maybe of sunstroke, the appropriate documents were signed according to which the Crimea was transferred to the jurisdiction of Ukraine, I am sorry, such a document does not cancel the history of the Crimea.'4
In another remark made by Rutskoi during his visit of April 1992 to the Crimea, he asserted that the Black Sea Fleet was and would remain Russian.5 The myth of Sevastopol as a 'city of Russian glory' has often been used as the cornerstone of the historical justification of Russian territorial claims to the Crimea. That myth is based on the events of the Crimean War (1853-6) and presents the heroism of the multinational Imperial Army during the siege exclusively as the heroism of Russian soldiers.
It was used to justify and protect the imperial aggrandizements of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was revived under the Stalin regime, especially during the Second World War, and then during the Cold War. With the disintegration of the USSR and the rebirth of Russian imperial ideology, the myth of Sevastopol, like other imperial myths that survive from the Soviet period, was invoked to defend Russian interests beyond the territory of the Russian Federation.6 It was in the tradition of Sevastopol mythology that Admiral Igor Kasatonov proudly asserted in his interview with Lit- eraturnaia Rossiia that the tomb of Admirals Lazarev, Nakhimov, Kornilov, and Istomin, who were killed during the siege of Sevastopol (1854-5), was restored at the St Volodymyr (St Vladimir) Cathedral during his tenure as fleet commander.7The exploitation of the Sevastopol myth by leading Russian politicians and military commanders in their territorial claims to Ukraine obliged the Ukrainian side to fight back with the same weapon - historical arguments and justifications. In his interview with Sevastopol television in January 1993, President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine proposed to solve the Sevastopol question peacefully by avoiding the issue of whose glory is symbolized by the city. 'Otherwise,' he said, 'one might return to the times of Alexander of Macedon and Julius Caesar.' And he continued: 'Why do we limit ourselves to a hundred- year period? Could we not take a thousand years into consideration? Really, there are no limits. One person might like to start with the 1920s, and another with the 1940s.'8 Thus Kravchuk tried to avoid questioning the history of the Russian presence in the region, while emphasizing the legitimacy of claims made on the basis of a relatively short period in the history of the peninsula, although its history is in fact very long and includes the period of Greek colonization. In order to counter the Russian position, Ukrainian historians and politicians chose to base their policy of preserving their country's territorial integrity on a highly elaborate Cossack mythology.
From the historiographic point of view, Ukrainian nation builders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries based the idea of an independent Ukrainian state on two main myths: that of Ukraine as the only direct successor to medieval Kyivan Rus' and that of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the head of the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1918 and, like many other leaders of the national awakening in Eastern Europe, a prominent historian, contributed much to the development of both myths. It was his initiative to adopt the trident - the political symbol of the medieval Kyivan princes - as the national coat of arms. Hrushevsky can also be considered the most prominent twentieth-century student of the Cossack era.9
This chapter takes as its point of departure John A. Armstrong's definition of myth as 'the integrating phenomenon through which symbols of national identity acquire a coherent meaning.'10 The present author also shares Armstrong's approach to the study of the myths, based on the method of Claude Levi-Strauss. 'I am utterly incompetent to judge whether the version of Kiev and its successors that Hrushevsky presented is "truer" than other versions,' argued Armstrong in his discussion of Ukrainian historical mythology. 'The basic insight provided by the anthropological approach is that such questions are irrelevant for identity except insofar as they affect a constitutive myth.'11
Thus the main goal of this chapter is not to decide whether the Cossack myth is 'true' or 'false' but to determine how it was created and subsequently transformed to meet the challenges of the Russo- Ukrainian border dispute of the early 1990s.