The billboards that sprouted overnight in the Ukrainian territory of Crimea this March offered stark, clear choices. Flowers versus a fascist army boot. Righteous World War Two victory versus Nazi collaborators intending a second holocaust. Slavic, Soviet values versus Western greed and decadence.
‘We’ve lived in moral and spiritual exile for 50 years,’ Anatoly Gendin, a Crimean Jew, told me, days before the hastily organized referendum called by the Crimean leadership in which Crimeans could vote to join the Russian Federation. The Ukrainian president had been overthrown by an EU-oriented popular protest movement in Kiev. Ukrainian lawmakers had lost little time in proposing to repeal a 2012 law that made Russian a second state language in regions with a significant Russian-speaking population. Crimea was occupied by armed men who everyone knew were Russian soldiers. Crimean TV was showing only Russian channels.
