Wallerstein Constant

April 21, 2022 thread

The siege of Mariupol became one of the best known tragedies of this war. In the course of the three months long siege, this major industrial city was razed to the ground with much of its civilian population killed in the process. While it is the bloodbath of 2022 that made this city internationally famous, Mariupol had complex and rich history. Hosting one of the key industrial clusters, first of the Russian Empire and then of the USSR, Mariupol makes for a great starting point for our discussion on Russia and its place in the world system.

Mariupol was founded by the Crimean Christians deported from their native land in the 1770s. The deportation of Christians from Crimea received surprisingly little international coverage. Until the 18th century the Muslim Crimean Khanate was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire

Crimean Khanate is a misunderstood polity often viewed almost as an Ottoman province. And yet, although they used Ottoman language & terminology in their administration, in practice their legal, political, institutional norms were different: more Golden Horde-ish than Ottomanish

Theoretically both the Ottomans and the Crimea were monarchies. In practice however Crimea was a military democracy with tons of constitutional checks on the monarchic power. Meanwhile, institutional structure of the Ottoman Empire was designed in order to maximise the said power

That doesn't mean that Crimea was more "progressive" than the Ottomans. It was probably the other way around. Crimea was a Turkic steppe state which didn't became a great empire and where traditions of tribal democracy were not systematically dismantled by the emerging monarchy

Paradoxically it may sound, constitutional character of Crimea means it was more archaic. That may sound strange for modern Anglos but their forefathers would find it logical. Which is obvious if you scroll through debates of the English Civil War era on the Ancient Constitution

Being so archaic, Crimean Khanate was ethnically diverse. Ruling class was Tatar (=Kipchak Turkic). But there also lived Greeks, Armenians, Jews, etc. According to Jacob Ziegler, it was the last place where the Gothic language, dead elsewhere, was still spoken in the late Middle Ages

The ethnic situation in Crimea could be illustrated by an Armeno-Kipchak language. Crimean Armenians forgot their tongue and switched to the Kipchak. However, they continued to write it with Armenian letters. First printed Turkic books ever were written in a now dead Armeno-Kipchak

After centuries of Russian-Crimean wars, Crimea (and their Ottoman suzerains) were defeated. In 1774 Catherine II imposed a peace treaty which proclaimed Crimean Khanate to be a sovereign state, free from any foreign (=Ottoman) authority. It was occupied by the Russian army