Glacial Period: Conflicts and the Collapse of Circulations

For the Balkans and the Black Sea, the FirstWorld War (1914-18), fought primarily on land with minor sea engagements, was but another episode in a series of unending upheavals, and the region fell into a nightmare: in Anatolia, a million or more Armenians were massacred;^[734] the Russian and Ottoman Empires, both exhausted, ultimately collapsed and splin­tered into a galaxy of small states.

The defeat of the White Russians in Crimea (November 1921) occa­sioned a new exodus of nearly a hundred thousand refugees from Sevastopol, thanks to the ships of the Black Sea fleet. The new order of the interwar period led to the reincorporation of the suc­cessor states of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union and the birth of a Turkish nationalist state (the Republic of Turkey). To the west, Romania recovered Bessarabia - the part of the principality of Moldavia lost in 1812.

By contrast, a radical change in the regime of the Black Sea came with the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 in which the Western Allies of World War I recognised the new Republic of Turkey as the successor state to the Ottoman Empire.

One might think that largely opening access to commerce in the Black Sea would have been the end of the region’s trials, yet it was not to be: sea commerce plummeted on the northern shore, now under the control of the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, Russia and Ukraine suffered a terrible shortage of food that killed millions as a consequence of war and droughts: the bread basket of Russia suddenly failed to feed itself, but the traditional solution of bringing relief supplies by sea was applied. A new famine known as the Holodomor occurred again in the 1932-33 under Joseph Stalin; this time, there was no relief from the sea and the death toll was staggeringly high.

A secret clause in the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin in 1939 (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) conceded Bessarabia back to the Soviet Union, as part of its ‘sphere of influence’.

The subsequent war between Germany (with its allies Romania and Bulgaria) and the USSR had the effect of closing the Straits to the bellig­erents of both sides, as Turkey remained neutral. This not only prevented the British navy from assisting the Russians; it effectively prevented Italy and Germany sending their own war vessels into the Black Sea. As a result, naval warfare on the Black Sea was almost non-existent during World War II, in comparison to the enormous land operations. Extreme violence seems to have been a hallmark of the region: the occupation of Ukraine provided another opportunity for mass carnage, with the killing or deportation of nearly two-thirds of the Jewish population from the region by the Germans and their allies.^[737] Crimea, for its part, was the scene of fierce land fighting that gave rise to particularly cruel episodes (for the Russians, the defence of Sevastopol built its patriotic signifi­cance on the defeat of the Crimean War). Finally the Battle of Stalingrad (September 1942-February 1943), one of the deadliest in recorded his­tory, took place halfway between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In the contest for pre-eminence between land and sea in the region, the first was definitely winning.

As if finally to accomplish the ambitions of Tsarist Russia, the defeat of Germany allowed the USSR to expand its control over the western shore of the Black Sea: it brought the Soviets back to Bessarabia, which they re-annexed. The coastline of the Black Sea between Odessa and the River Prut, which had belonged so far to Bessarabia was ceded to Ukraine, making the new Republic of Moldova landlocked; it also placed Romania and Bulgaria under Soviet domination. The Crimean Tatars, accused en masse of collaborating with the Nazis were deported to Central Asia.

The Cold War therefore closed the Black Sea, dividing it in two: a communist north under the Warsaw Pact, and Turkey to the south within NATO.^[738] Most sea connections between the two ‘worlds’ were interrupted, with the notable exception of long-distance trade through the Straits (especially from the port of Novorossyisk). To make things more complicated, an awkward redistribution of territory occurred in the Black Sea in the early 1950s, the consequences of which are felt to this day: Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (1954). What had merely been an administrative division became a seri­ous issue when the Soviet Union split apart in 1991.^[739]