CRIMEA IN THE CROSSHAIRS

The Black Sea peninsular has been coveted by rival interests for centuries, with the current Russian occupation motivated by several factors

- WORDS PETER CADDICK-ADAMS

Authoritarian regimes and dictatorships have an uneasy relationship with the past. One hallmark is their weaponising of history, in reshaping the past and deleting anything inconvenient. For much of its life, the Soviet Union destroyed whatever traces it could find of the pre-revolutionary era; under Joseph Stalin, it even deleted its own people from books and photographs.

So when we come to the Crimea - that diamond-shaped 10,000-square-mile (25,900-square-km) peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea - we should not be surprised its history and ownership is much disputed by the current Russian regime under Vladimir Putin. It was originally peopled by warrior Scythians, who were replaced along the coast in places like Chersonesus, Balaklava, Yalta and Kerch by Greek traders and colonists, themselves absorbed by the later Roman and Byzantine Empires. Some towns became trading stations of Genoa, until the entirety was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century.

Catherine the Great annexed Crimea to Russia in 1783, founding its principal military harbour Sevastopol at the same time. The region's strategic position led to the Crimean War (1853-56) and it was much contested following the 1917 Russian Revolution, where White Russian forces made their last stand. When the Bolsheviks eventually secured Crimea in 1921, it became an autonomous Soviet republic until occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1941-2. When the Soviets retook it in 1944, Stalin ordered the indigenous Crimean Tartar population, a few of whom had admittedly collaborated, deported to Siberia. (They returned only in 1989, though after 2014 many have been re-exiled by Putin's incoming bureaucrats.)