Crimeans betwixt and beyond : liminality, loss and the struggle for home in post-annexation Ukraine

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Crimeans Betwixt and Beyond: Liminality, Loss and the

Struggle for Home in Post-Annexation Ukraine

‘Crimea is Ukraine’

June 2018

Student: Nick Massey (11788526)

Supervisor: Dr O. G. A. Verkaaik 1st_{reader: Dr M. Veenis}

2nd_{reader: Dr J. A. McBrien} _{MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology (GSSS)}

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The fieldwork that contributed to this thesis would have been impossible without the interest, support and benevolence of a good many people in Kyiv and Lviv. I am, first and foremost, sincerely grateful to Crimea SOS for agreeing to facilitate my research. From my first day in the Kyiv office in January, I was made to feel welcome by every member of staff, and I only wish I could have spent longer than three weeks becoming familiar with the hugely important humanitarian, advocacy and community work the organisation undertakes throughout Ukraine. I would like to thank Anya, Emine, Ira, Maria, Nadya, Olya, Sabina, Yuliya, Denys (‘Denchik’), Oleg and Yuriy (‘Yura!’) for the many stimulating conversations we had on migrant-related issues. Tamila remains a constant source of encouragement, and I am grateful to her for her humour, patience and insightful suggestions. Above all, I would like to thank Olga, who from our first meeting was willing to share with me her own vulnerability. She became a loyal friend to me in the field, for which I am eternally grateful.

I would like to thank Mariya and Khalil for their assistance and co-operation in Lviv. I arrived at an inopportune time in late January when the local Crimea SOS office was moving location, but they still managed to find time to accommodate me. I am particularly grateful to Khalil for our informal chats over coffee in the warmth of the Centre for Urban History. I thank him also for introducing me to the Les Kurbas Theatre. I will not forget the incredible, interactive performance of Lesya Ukrainka’s The Forest Song.

The Krimska perepichka (‘Crimean Bakery’) in Sykhiv became a home from home for me in Lviv. I thank Oksana, Svitlana, Tanya, Nikolay and the other staff there for welcoming me and assisting me with my research. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching at the bakery, and I thank my students for making Tuesday and Thursday mornings such fun. I am particularly grateful to Irina, Kamila, Kateryna, Sasha and Yulia for teaching me about the finer points of Lvivian/Ukrainian social behaviour – especially as it plays out on the city’s public transport system. Looking back, travelling on the #53 bus now feels like a rite of passage in itself.

Transcribing interviews is always a time-consuming task, so I must thank my students Kamila, Polina and Tetyana for their wonderful generosity in helping me. Not only did Polina transcribe my interview with members of Lviv’s City Council; she even managed to translate the Ukrainian sections into Russian to save me valuable time. Such gestures go a long way when alone

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in the field, and I am immensely grateful to these women for their kindness and heartfelt reciprocity.

I would like to thank Oksana at Lviv City Council for setting up interviews with busy politicians and civil servants. Their views were vital to understanding the local response to the migrant crisis in 2014, and I am glad to be able to reflect them in my thesis.

I am grateful to Viktoria for sharing with me the legal expertise she has amassed over her years spent working at Crimea SOS and in her post-graduate studies in Germany. Our long conversations in Hanover and Göttingen helped me to put the Crimean crisis in context.

Iryna has become a good friend since our first meeting in Crimea in the summer of 2012. Her impressive knowledge of social psychology and Ukraine’s multi-cultural heritage has enabled me to understand some of the country’s regional and cultural dynamics. Ours was one of the most fascinating interviews I conducted during my time in the field, and it was fitting that it took place just a stone’s throw from Maidan Square.

I am very grateful to Dr Sean Loughna at the British Embassy in Kyiv for explaining to me the structure of Ukraine’s Ministry of Temporarily Occupied Territories and IDPs.

Revisiting the traumatic events leading up to displacement requires considerable courage, and I am indebted to those who agreed to share with me their recollections of life under occupation and their lives since resettlement. I would like to thank Afize, Emine, Eugenia, Gulnara, Iryna, Kseniya, Nadya, Oksana, Oleksina, Olga M, Olga S, Olya, Renata, Sabina, Ilya, Alim, Khalil, Mikhail and Oleg for recalling 2014 and the years since with such candour. It was a genuine privilege to hear their stories.

At the Universiteit van Amsterdam, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Oskar Verkaaik, for responding insightfully to my ideas as they developed in the field, and for his helpful suggestions on draft chapters. I am also grateful to Dr Milena Veenis and Dr Julie McBrien for taking the time to read and discuss my completed thesis. Lastly, I thank Dr Yatun Sastramidjaja and Milena for their critical input into my original research proposal.

I would like to thank Ferdinand for kindly allowing me to live at his flat for my first ten days in Kyiv. I am also grateful to John for his local contacts at the UK Embassy.

I am grateful to JJ for introducing me to Areta, without whom I would not have made contact with as many Crimean migrants as I did during the weeks I was in Lviv.

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For keeping me sane in both the preparation and write-up phases of the thesis, I would like to say a huge ‘paldies’ to Rūta, Erik and Lexi. Rūta’s chats, Erik’s never-ending supply of alus and Lexi’s (slightly more limited) bučiņas meant more to me than they may know.

And finally, as ever, I thank my parents, Celia and Philip, for their unceasing support during the coldest months of the Ukrainian winter, their attentive readings of my fieldwork diary, and our shared weekend calls and chats over breakfast. I really cannot thank them enough.

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SUMMARY

In this thesis, I argue that Ukrainian citizens displaced from Crimea to mainland Ukraine following the Russian annexation of 2014 have experienced two liminal time-spaces, the first characterised by fear, anxiety and disorientation while under Russian occupation in Crimea (a ‘liminal hotspot’), and the second by protracted uncertainty (‘permanent liminality’) on becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs) on the mainland. The ‘permanence’ of the second liminal phase stems partly from the poorly functioning state apparatus responsible for assisting the displaced as they attempt to regain stability in their lives, and partly from the fact that hopes of de-occupation of Crimea are diminishing with each passing year. Some who have been forcibly displaced continue to live a life suspended in time, refusing to accept the status quo yet with limited agency to alter their or their homeland’s situation. Others resolve to propel themselves beyond uncertainty by drawing on their professional skills, experience, and familiarity with the vagaries of Ukrainian bureaucratic processes.

Despite the short- and long-term difficulties created in these two interconnected liminal time-spaces, most displaced Crimeans engage actively with their predicaments in order to transcend them. Some campaign against human rights infringements committed by occupying forces in their homeland. Others become – by virtue of their adaptability, resilience and drive – forces for collective good in their new host communities. Despite these tendencies, the hyperconnectedness of 21st_{-century migrants means that, although the homeland may be physically}

inaccessible, it remains ever-present in the emotional worlds of those who have left it – a double-edged sword for those wishing to settle permanently and build a future in their new environment. In harnessing the analytical power of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality – a concept reinvigorated in transdisciplinary social science scholarship over the last decade – I aim to bring the complex experiential dimensions and agentive potentiality of internal displacement into sharper focus.

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PREFACE

‘When your heart is not where it’s supposed to be…’

Whenever I think of Crimea and the people who agreed to share with me their stories of displacement, I recall the photograph on the front cover of this thesis. The image shows an artistic rendering of the Crimean peninsula hanging in full view on the back wall of the Krimska perepichka, or ‘Crimean Bakery’, in a suburb of the western city of Lviv, a city where I spent seven weeks as part of my fieldwork. Upon returning from the field, I began re-reading interview transcripts from conversations with displaced Crimeans now based in Kyiv and Lviv, and my thoughts returned to the enduring pain caused by ‘the events’ of 2014.

Listening to my interview with Sabina, a Crimean Tatar who has worked for the non-governmental organisation Crimea SOS in Kyiv since 2015, the image of the heart that lies at the centre of the map immediately comes to mind. The heart itself is formed by no tangible material, but rather by the space created by countless light-blue and yellow threads that run from the peninsula’s Black Sea shores to its interior. It is at once a striking statement of political allegiance and an affective symbol of homeland attachment; a reminder of loss, and a rallying cry for solidarity. Drawing on the testimonies of displaced Crimeans I met in the field, it is conceivable that each thread represents a person, each one a Ukrainian patriot and defender of the idea of a free, inclusive, tolerant Ukrainian Crimea. Sabina’s words capture the trauma of separation from the people of her hometown in words that resonate with the affective power I intuit when recalling this ‘Crimea of blue and yellow threads’:

When my parents are far away, and though I have many friends and my brothers and sisters here [in Kyiv], when your heart is not where it’s supposed to be, when your soul suffers, when you sit at work and your head is somewhere over there… you have this internal disquiet. <…> I don’t love Simferopol1_{for its streets, its houses or its roads. No. I love the people who live in Simferopol, that}

feeling of home. Here, those people are missing.

1_{Simferopol is, de facto, the administrative capital of the Republic of Crimea within the Russian Federation but is, de}

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My translation of the last sentence cannot do justice to the agonising finality communicated by Sabina’s words. The story I wish to tell here is one of a group of people whose hearts are not where they are supposed to be; whose ‘internal disquiet’ is a consequence of their decision to start a new life in search of freedom, to defend their personal and collective ideals in spite of their ‘sufferings of the soul’. For these people, ‘home’ is not the ‘streets, houses, roads’ of their city, but rather those who inhabit them – friends and relatives left behind in a homeland now being transformed under a foreign regime. These are the people who have refused to live under foreign occupation, choosing instead to uproot themselves to mainland Ukraine where the air is breathable, neighbours share their allegiances, and the future is in their – not foreign – hands. This is the story of those Crimeans who are ‘betwixt and between’, a ‘community of fate’ ripped out of their familiar everyday life and forced by their own political convictions to navigate a new, liminal existence in internal displacement.

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INTRODUCTION

Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

What is it like to go to sleep in one country and wake up in another? How does it feel when, half-asleep, you draw back the curtains to see unmarked soldiers paroling your street who were not there the night before? How do you respond to the combination of shock, panic and fear growing in the pit of your stomach? How do you make sense of events that appear incomprehensible? Whom do you call to check that your mind is not playing tricks on you? Could all this be a dream, or perhaps some kind of sick joke?

For a minority of Ukrainian citizens waking up across the Crimean peninsula on 27 February 2014, such questions signalled the beginning of a period of shock, disorientation, and profound existential uncertainty. Not that they knew this at the time. Nervous phone calls took place in which those loyal to the idea of a Ukrainian Crimea corroborated sightings of ‘little green men’ – the label subsequently given by social media to the monosyllabic yet unnervingly polite troops whose uniforms bore no insignia. The country was at this point in political turmoil over its future, with Kyiv’s Independence Square until recently the site of violent clashes between pro-European activists and government forces loyal to deposed Ukrainian president and Kremlin ally, Viktor Yanukovych. Between late January and late February 2014, 103 activists – posthumously remembered as the ‘Heavenly Hundred’ – were shot dead by police in the bloodiest protests Ukraine had witnessed since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

With the nation mourning its tragic human loss following Kyiv’s ‘Revolution of Dignity’ (Ukr. Revoliutsiia hidnosti), few residents of Crimea expected the arrival of Russian troops and military hardware within a week of the bloodshed. Yet as improbable as this was, it came to pass: the Russian government had struck Ukraine at its most vulnerable. To use a phrase which I would hear ominously repeated in interviews with displaced Crimeans: ‘Russia had arrived’.

With the peninsula’s pro-Russian majority voting in favour of Russian rule in the Crimean status referendum of 16 March 2014, its pro-Ukrainian minority soon had a life-changing decision to make: do we remain in our homeland territory under foreign rule or do we leave to resettle on mainland Ukraine? Do we take flight, or do we stay to fight the institution of foreign rule in our

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homeland? For those who decided to leave, a lengthy period of transition and a host of questions followed: where will we live? How will we feed ourselves? How will we be received by our host community? A similar existential dilemma faced those who chose to remain: will the state step in to assist us? Will we retain our Ukrainian citizenship? Will we still be able to make a living in ‘Russian Crimea’? This plethora of questions heralded a new, post-annexation period in modern Ukrainian history. This thesis takes as its main concern one strand of this new period: the experiences of forced migration of more than 20,000 pro-Ukrainian Crimeans from their homeland territory to the Ukrainian mainland.

According to the 2017 Global Report on Internal Displacement, 2016 saw 31.1 million new internal displacements as a result of conflict, violence and disasters. This equates to one person forced to flee every second. By the end of 2016, 40.3 million people were living in displacement following conflict and violence – nearly double the number since 2000, and the highest figure recorded since monitoring began in 1998. An estimated 1,653,000 of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) are resident in Ukraine, a figure that continues to rise on account of continuing hostilities in – and forced migration from – the east of the country.2

Anthropologists are increasingly turning their analytical gaze on such people on the move to reveal the diverse range of experiences produced by cases of forced migration and displacement (Doná 2015, Horst & Grabska 2015, Korac 2009, Koser & Martin 2011, Powell 2015). In addition to exploring the emic perspective on displacement, some researchers incorporate critiques of IDP policy and the social categorisation it produces (Brun 2015, Brun and Fábos 2015). Although the primary focus of this thesis is the experiential dimension of displacement, etic aspects are also considered in the applied element of my research as part of an attempt to sensitise state actors to the short- and long-term social impact of their response to the Ukrainian IDP crisis (see chapter II). Ethnographic data collected from interviews and observations is key to understanding both the subjectivities produced by the government’s IDP policies, and the strategies developed to navigate them. Insights produced on both emic and etic levels will, I hope, make a valuable contribution to the evolving anthropological literature on displacement, as well as to the limited yet growing body of transdisciplinary social science scholarship on post-crisis Ukraine (Georgsen and Thomassen 2017, Uehling 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2016, 2017).

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Finding their place: post-annexation Crimeans and the anthropology of forced migration

Although often referred to in the literature of refugee studies (and indeed other related sub-disciplines) as one distinct category, displaced people

do not constitute a naturally self-delimiting domain of anthropological knowledge. Forced population movements have extraordinarily diverse historical and political causes and involve people who, while all displaced, find themselves in qualitatively different situations and predicaments. (Malkki 1995: 496)

Like many political anthropologists researching displacement, I take my epistemological lead from Liisa Malkki, whose cautioning against the reification of categories (and its subsequent dehumanising effect) is as relevant today as it was in the 1990s. Each group of forced migrants finds itself at a particular juncture in the history of the state, region and continent it inhabits, and any analysis of their situation and actions must reflect these highly specific circumstances. At the same time, I concur with Elizabeth Colson’s response to Malkii that

uprooting and its aftermaths are structuring events…that happen to human beings who have much in common whatever their histories and who can be expected to respond in very human fashion when under attack. Only the most determined relativist would exclude the possibility of looking for commonalities across experiences and responses. (Colson 2003: 3)

I seek with my own epistemological approach to remain conscious of both tendencies. Post-2014 Ukraine, while representing a unique case of internal displacement on account of its multiple occupied territories, is nevertheless a case of mass uprooting, the causes and consequences of which may be witnessed in comparable scenarios across the world.3 The challenge is to demonstrate how the particular circumstances leading up to displacement structure the events which follow in a way that is comprehensible to all scholars of forced migration.

Analytically, the Crimean case of displacement is remarkable for three related reasons. First, in contrast to many of their fellow displaced Ukrainians from the war-torn Donbass region in the east, their status as ‘forced’ migrants is ambiguous: Crimeans had the choice to remain ‘at

3_{In 2016, sub-Saharan Africa overtook the Middle East as the world region most affected by internal displacement} through conflict and violence, with almost one million new displacements in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the Middle East, Syria, Iraq and Yemen witnessed two million new displacements in total during 2016. See http://internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2017/pdfs/2017-GRID.pdf (12/03/18).

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home’ on the peninsula on the condition that they accepted Russian rule. While for many pro-Ukrainian Crimeans this was unthinkable, a large number of them have – usually for reasons of mobility, family dependency and/or property ownership – remained in Crimea despite their vehement opposition to the new regime. Second, being internally displaced, Crimeans remain in their national homeland – if no longer in their homeland territory. Rights conferred by citizenship, as well as familiarity with social processes, national culture and language would therefore suggest favourable conditions for making home. Furthermore, Crimeans who have resettled in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv (my primary fieldwork site) have an important point of commonality with their hosts: both Crimea and Galicia (the region in which Lviv is located) have been subject to numerous foreign conquests and periods of imperial rule throughout their history. It is plausible, therefore, that Crimeans – and in particular the indigenous Crimean Tatars, who were previously deported from their homeland under Stalin in May 1944 – would consider themselves part of a wider ‘community of fate’ in their new host city.4_{Third, the apparent irreversibility (as the}

situation currently stands) of the Russian annexation means that a realistic ‘discourse of return’ remains active only in certain circles, namely amongst Crimean Tatars, who continue to campaign actively for the de-occupation of their indigenous homeland. Although the Russian take-over was, from the very beginning, declared illegal by the global political community, the socio-political transformation of Crimea by the occupying powers continues unabated, altering irrevocably the face and atmosphere of pro-Ukrainian Crimeans’ once-familiar homeland space.

This three-part configuration of Crimean displacement has specific implications as far as resettlement on mainland Ukraine is concerned. Over the last decade, the related anthropologies of home and mobility have stressed the importance of recognising the specificities of individual configurations of displacement. Finding an analytical middle road between sedentarist bias and a ‘free-floating placeless paradigm’, Jansen and Löfving (2007) argue against the assumption that ‘all human beings, understood collectively as cultural groups, “belong” to a certain place on earth and derive a primordial identity from that belonging’ (ibid.: 4). Applying this argument to the Crimean case, and with the above three-part configuration in mind, we may consider alternative, creative ways in which the displaced population – which include ethnic Ukrainians, Russians,

4_{See Baehr 2005. Social theorist Peter Baehr has sought to energise the concept of ‘community of fate’ as one which} ‘come[s] into being as a result of stress and crisis, instantiating a mode of life that hitherto was only nascent, and interrupting the doze of routine. [It is] also capable of being socially productive and consequential, which means capable of collective action for the brief time [it is] in existence’ (emphasis in original), p. 181.

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Crimean Tatars and other minority ethnic groups – make home that do not necessarily rely on a connection between ‘culture’ and rootedness. To take the fabled ‘discourse of return’ as an example: it is, as these scholars argue, possible to remain ‘home-oriented’ without, in fact, wanting to return home (ibid.: 9). In light of the way the homeland space has now been tainted by the occupying forces in the four years since the annexation, this is a realistic possibility for the displaced Crimean population. Similarly, if the internal aspect of displacement suggests greater agency on account of greater security through citizenship and language, then this may also allow ‘opportunities for change, improvement, and the unexpected – that is, room for dreaming and imagining’ (Jansen and Löfving 2007: 10). By remaining alert to the sedentarist tendency to naturalise ‘home’ on the one hand, and ‘cosmopolitan ideologies arguing against roots’ encountered in much anthropological literature on the other (ibid.: 11), I have sought to remain cognisant of the creative ways in which displaced Crimeans engage in resettlement in their new, unfamiliar environments.

Displaced Crimeans in the ‘betwixt and between’: liminality as analytical lens

The concept of liminality is one well-known to social anthropology, having first been elaborated by Belgian ethnologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep. In his famous work Les Rites de Passage (1908), van Gennep developed a three-stage structure consisting of the préliminaire, liminaire and postliminaire to analyse the ritual passages of members of preliterate and tribal societies. As part of a group of anthropologists that included Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, van Gennep’s theoretical approach to studying society conformed to the school of structural anthropology dominant in the early part of the twentieth century. He believed that the idea of ‘rites of passage’ – now frequently applied to non-tribal societies – enabled an understanding of human behaviour as people’s social status changed through life. His analogy of a house in which people move from room to room, crossing thresholds and walking through passages was intended to highlight the ‘in-between’ stage separating two different statuses. It was this threshold, or limen, that Victor Turner later developed as a theoretical concept in his own work on the Zambian Ndembu in the 1960s.

Turner’s interest in liminal personae (‘threshold people’) derived from the observed effects of rites of passage on individuals in their group setting. In ‘Liminality and Communitas’ (1966), he described liminal entities as being

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neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural traditions. (Turner 1966: 95)

The ambiguity of the position of liminal beings may be expressed by their being stripped of ‘status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system’ (ibid.: 95). Moreover, for Turner liminality was inextricably linked to the notion of communitas, a feeling of unity which he argued issued from the ‘nakedness’ (ibid.: 106) characteristic of the shared experience of rites of passage. If society is usually characterised by structure and hierarchy, then a period of liminality, by contrast, signifies the breakdown of structure, enabling a shared sense of ‘lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship’ (ibid.: 96). Applying the idea of communitas to societies more broadly, Turner viewed individuals’ and groups’ life courses as being punctuated throughout by experiences of ‘high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality’ (ibid.: 97).

In the decades since Turner’s comprehensive theorisation of the concepts, liminality and communitas have been applied to a wide range of ‘in-between’ states, ranging from flood crises (Jencson 2001), to life prison sentences (Jewkes 2005), to the loss of one’s home through fire (Lollar 2010). Since 2009, however, there has been a notable surge of scholarly engagement in the ideas of van Gennep and Turner as the full scope of their application has gradually emerged. Sociologist Arpad Szakolczai, one of the most vociferous advocates of liminality as a concept for use across the social sciences and philosophy, goes as far as to say that its range of application ‘can be compared to Weberian “charisma” and Foucauldian “discourse” (Szakolczai 2009: 165). He rails against the suggestion that the term should remain ‘copyrighted’ by anthropologists studying tribal societies (which is now a rather outdated notion of anthropology in any case). On the contrary, liminality may assist us in the analysis of any event or situation that involves the breakdown of order and the formation of new structures (ibid.: 165). Bjørn Thomassen’s article on ‘The Uses and Meaning of Liminality’ (2009) has likewise been a rallying cry for scholars across the human sciences to harness the concept as an analytical tool, a move which has produced numerous, insightful empirical studies (Dominguez et al. 2017; Georgsen & Thomassen 2017; Jette & Stenner 2017; Motzkau & Clinch 2017; Nissen & Sørensen 2017). As Thomassen himself

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puts it, liminality is now considered to be ‘a master concept in the social and political sciences writ large’ (Thomassen 2009: 5). He proceeds to map out the new territory into which the concept could reasonably expand:

[L]iminality is applicable to both space and time. Single moments, longer periods, or even whole epochs can be liminal. Liminal places can be specific thresholds; they can also be more extended areas, like “borderlands” or, arguably, whole countries, placed in important in-between positions between larger civilizations. Liminality can also be applied to both single individuals and to larger groups (cohorts or villages), or whole societies, or maybe even civilizations. (ibid.: 16)

It is important to stress at this point that these scholars’ engagement with van Gennep and Turner’s theories represents a conscious move beyond the way in which they were originally conceived and applied within structural anthropology. If Turner focused on ‘the stateless societies beloved of political anthropologists’ (Turner 1966: 96), then Szakolczai and Thomassen acknowledge the shift in anthropologists’ object of study to modern states and their (r)evolutions. My intention here is not to jump on the ‘liminality bandwagon’, but rather to apply the theory in a judicious way so as to reveal and explain the complexity of social upheaval at a time of crisis.

How, then, do liminality and associated concepts apply to the case of modern Ukraine? What light can their application shed on the experience of pro-Ukrainian Crimeans forced to navigate the uncertainty created by foreign occupation and protracted displacement? A consideration of Ukraine in the wider geopolitical and historical context reveals that liminality as an analytical lens is applicable on multiple levels, many of which remain unexplored.

First, the political crisis ensuing from the Ukrainian government’s non-signing of the Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013 was, as Georgsen and Thomassen (2017) have shown (see chapter I), experienced by Ukrainians on Independence Square in Kyiv as a suspension of normal, everyday life characterised by contrasting feelings of ‘fear and courage, anxiety and hope, grief and joy, boredom and excitement, destruction and reconstruction, exclusion and inclusion, division and unity’ (Georgsen and Thomassen 2017: 206). Second, the occupying forces in Crimea – visibly unmarked and temporarily unknowable – may themselves be described as liminal beings for the discomfort and distrust they engendered in pro-Ukrainian Crimeans (Yurchak 2014). Third, I argue that the period of eighteen days between the occupation and the formal annexation constitutes an archetypal ‘liminal hotspot’ (Stenner et al. 2017) in which the previous social order breaks down and citizens find themselves enmeshed in an atmosphere of

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heightened affectivity with no resolution in sight. Fourth, the post-annexation period, during which thousands of Crimeans left their homes to settle on mainland Ukraine, bears all the hallmarks of what Szakolczai calls ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai 2017), in which the temporary suspension of normality becomes permanent. As I argue in chapter II, leaving Crimea did not bring an end to the pro-Ukrainian minority’s liminal status; it merely signaled a departure from the ‘liminal hotspot’ and an accompanying attenuation of emotional affectivity. As long as the homeland territory remains occupied and Crimeans themselves remain in forced displacement, their liminality endures. Fifth, the treatment of forced migrants in the weeks and months following their departure led some to feel like ‘second-class citizens’, a liminal position located somewhere between ‘citizen’ and ‘foreigner’ (Uehling 2017). Finally, as a post-Soviet state ‘stuck in transition’ on its way to becoming a liberal, democratic European state, Ukraine is itself in a protracted liminal phase stretching back to the moment of separation from the Soviet Union. As I will argue in what follows, a major consequence of this last form of liminality – dysfunctionality – permeates the daily lives of those already living in the liminal time and space of protracted displacement.

Liminal beings in a dysfunctional state: the ‘double liminality’ of the internally displaced

‘Their behaviour is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life.’

― Victor Turner (1966), ‘Liminality and Communitas’, p. 95.

Although characterised by uncertainty, the liminality of displaced Crimeans has also been a source of creativity, as testified to by many of my informants who have toiled, crafted and collaborated in their bid to carve out a future beyond ‘the events’ of 2014 (see chapters II and III). Doing so, however, has been far from straightforward, since Ukrainian state responses, structures and processes have – almost at every turn – presented obstacles that challenge the navigational ability of those intent on moving forward. In this respect, the story of displaced Crimeans is also one of agency forged and tempered by experiences of life in a dysfunctional state, of a civic engagement

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informed by the knowledge that outdated, Soviet socialist notions of deservedness and deferred responsibility will not enable individuals to realise their dreams of building new lives beyond displacement. As Sabina put it succinctly: ‘you can’t live in constant expectation of something.’ In telling the story of displaced Crimeans, I seek to illuminate how their perceptions of Ukrainian state dysfunctionality frame and shape the navigational strategies they have adopted since 2014.

In this thesis, I will argue that displaced Crimeans experience a ‘double liminality’. The events of February and March 2014 constituted an abrupt, wholly unexpected disruption to their lives, upsetting everyday rhythms and rendering both present and future uncertain. Following Stenner et al. (2017), I refer to this in chapter I as a ‘liminal hotspot’, an interpretative framework that assists in capturing pro-Ukrainian Crimeans’ experience of shock, profound disorientation, and agency against-the-odds in the days and weeks following the Russian occupation, before their ultimately forced decision to migrate to the Ukrainian mainland. In becoming internally displaced to mainland Ukraine – with all the legal and administrative obstacles that this uprooting created – displaced Crimeans have come to inhabit a second liminal time and space, one in which the enduring effects of the ‘liminal hotspot’ are augmented by hostile encounters with state structures and processes that are ill-equipped to respond adequately to the needs of its crisis-affected citizens. Failures at state level work inadvertently to preserve these citizens’ liminality, frustrating forced migrants’ attempts to transcend uncertainty, and impeding the resumption of normal life. In chapter II, I will examine the ways in which dysfunctionality at the state level inscribes itself on migrant experience, prolonging the preservation of the liminal time-space. Here, many of the internally displaced are forced – on account of outdated post-Soviet regulations and procedures – to identify as different from their fellow, non-displaced Ukrainian citizens, often being made to wait longer than may be deemed reasonable or acceptable for the resolution of legal or administrative matters. Normality does resume, however, in spite of these adverse conditions. Indeed, I argue that these two, discrete forms of liminality are closely connected in the field of post-annexation social navigation; that is to say, the strategies employed by the displaced to navigate and move beyond their original liminal state are bolstered by a familiarity with the liminal space inhabited by all Ukrainians: the space created by the semi-functional machine of the Ukrainian state. Crucially for comparative anthropology, there is direct applicability here to other cases of internal displacement, since this connection is an important bi-product of IDPs’ status as citizens of – rather than newcomers to – the host country. Unlike refugees arriving in a foreign state, many IDPs possess

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extensive knowledge (and, in the case of Ukraine, countless painful experiences) of the workings of the state, and upon displacement are able to manage their expectations accordingly. In chapter III, I will show how such prior knowledge and experience inform the kind of energetic social engagement, civic activism and communitas I witnessed during my time conducting independent fieldwork in Lviv.

Methodology

In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the post-crisis landscape in Ukraine, I chose to conduct my fieldwork through the non-governmental organisation Crimea SOS, founded in February 2014 by three Crimean Tatars resident in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and in the western city of Lviv. Crimea SOS has five offices: a main office in the capital, Kyiv, and four smaller offices in the cities of Lviv, Kherson (southern Ukraine, close to the Crimean peninsula), Poltava (central-eastern Ukraine) and Zaporizhia (south-eastern Ukraine). The organisation was the first in Ukraine to respond to the large-scale humanitarian crisis caused by the annexation of Crimea and the eastern territories of Donetsk and Lugansk. Since 2014, Crimea SOS – along with sister organisations Donbass SOS and Vostok SOS – has provided humanitarian assistance and legal consultation to displaced persons from all three occupied territories. It has also developed initiatives designed to help migrants integrate into host communities following displacement. With the help of funding from the UNHCR and a number of foreign governments, it remains a key player in the post-crisis humanitarian field in Ukraine.

My three weeks in the organisation’s head office in Kyiv gave me the opportunity to interview co-founder, Tamila, and five of her employees – four of whom came to work for Crimea SOS after themselves leaving occupied territory. These conversations provided me with valuable insights into how the post-crisis situation unfolded after the ‘liminal moment’ of occupation, what roles the Ukrainian government and NGOs played, and, crucially, how civil society views both the state response to the crisis and its attitude to displaced persons more broadly. These views constituted indispensable contextual information for the fieldwork I later conducted among migrants over seven weeks in Lviv.

Once at my main fieldwork site, I relied mostly on snowball sampling as a method for finding respondents in the displaced community, with whom I subsequently conducted

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structured interviews in Russian (see appendix I, p. 93). In total, I conducted twenty interviews: seven in Kyiv and thirteen in Lviv. I complemented this ‘migrant data’ with two interviews at Lviv City Council (one with politicians and one with civil servants), as well as participant observation in various contexts connected to both the post-displacement lives of migrants, and everyday life as experienced by Lviv residents more generally.

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CHAPTER I – LIVING IN A ‘LIMINAL HOTSPOT’: THE SHOCK OF OCCUPATION, ANNEXATION, AND THE MIGRATION DILEMMA

During liminal periods, characterized by a wholesale collapse of order and a loss of background structure, agency is pushed to the forefront and reorientations in modes of conduct and thought are produced within larger populations. While in a way this is a straightforward suggestion, its consequences still need much more systematic discussion. ― Bjørn Thomassen (2009), ‘The Uses and Meaning of Liminality’, p. 20.

Your ATM card stops working, and then your bank closes. Familiar foods, foods you have been eating your entire life, are banned and disappear from grocery store shelves to be replaced with foreign ones. Your medication becomes six times more expensive than before. Then your cell phone stops working, and you must find a new carrier to regain service. The television station you relied on for nightly news closes. You are told you have three months to turn in your passport for a new one, or you may not be able to renew your driver’s license or return to your home after travel. This chaotic and liminal situation is not, of course, hypothetical. It is what happened to residents of Crimea following annexation by the Russian Federation. ― Greta Uehling (2015a), ‘Everyday Life after Annexation: the Autonomous Republic of Crimea’

I was afraid, I was scared, I forbade the children from leaving the house. My pro-Russian friends said “everything’s fine, [the Russians] are coming to save us, they’re coming to free us”. So I forbade the children from leaving the house. I didn’t know what would happen next. I mean, if Ukraine were to resist, there would be war. That much was clear. I didn’t know at what moment that might happen. Simferopol, where the ‘little green men’ were, was an hour away... ― Olya, displaced from Yalta, southern Crimea

Recent transdisciplinary scholarship on experiences of liminality in social contexts has developed the concept of the ‘liminal hotspot’, a psychosocial term first coined by Paul Stenner as a way of capturing the transformative dimensions of highly emotional happenings (Stenner 2011). Stenner bases the concept on a link between the already established and widely applied notions of

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liminality and affectivity. In a special issue of Theory and Psychology devoted to this emergent analytical concept, a ‘liminal hotspot’ is defined as

an occasion of sustained uncertainty, ambivalence, and tension in which people feel “caught suspended” in the limbo of an in-between phase of transition. They may be occasions of impasse in which an interruption of the everyday, taken for granted state of affairs becomes permanent and the people involved become stuck, as it were, in enduring liminality. <…> [A ‘liminal hotspot’ is] an emergent feature of the play of particular circumstances: circumstances in which the usual normative orders are for whatever reason suspended or disrupted. (Stenner, Greco & Motzkau 2017: 141-142)

The authors emphasise that, although the term ‘liminal hotspot’ is, broadly speaking, a psychological concept, it is nevertheless ‘part of a psychosocial orientation with a focus on embodied persons in social practice, rather than individuals in abstract’ (Stenner et al. 2017: 144). At the heart of this declaration is an emphasis on the experiential dimension of liminality: a ‘liminal hotspot’ may refer to any set of circumstances where individuals feel their lives to be disrupted, with no end to the disruption in sight (‘enduring liminality’). Coincidentally, one of the contributions to the aforementioned journal issue identifies contemporary Ukraine as a site of liminality, focusing on the events immediately preceding the occupation and annexation of Crimea. Georgsen and Thomassen (2017) discuss the anti-government ‘Euromaidan’ protests on Independence Square (alternatively referred to as the ‘Revolution of Dignity’), proposing the argument that the popular uprisings that took place in Kyiv during the winter of 2013-14

involve the essential features of liminality: suspension of ordinary rules; a fundamental questioning of power structures and political legitimacy; an order turned upside-down; a situation marked by volatility, ambivalence, and potentiality; and the embryonic formation of a communitas as protesters met and mobilized in Independence Square in ritualized action, unified by confronting the same essential dangers. (Georgsen & Thomassen 2017: 198-199)

According to the authors, whose analysis employs van Gennep’s tripartite structure of separation, liminality, and re-aggregation to locate the liminal within the revolutionary setting, the Ukrainian government’s decision in November 2013 to suspend preparations for signing an Association

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Agreement with the European Union served as a ‘liminal moment’, triggering mass protests in central Kyiv. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens saw their future in Europe, yet now their hopes for eventual membership of the EU – and with it a long-awaited end to the widespread corruption plaguing Ukrainian society – had been dashed. The ‘separation’ was, therefore, a ‘wish for rupture’ with existing government structures (ibid.: 202). The subsequent building of barricades on Independence Square signaled the suspension of normal life as protesters crossed the liminal threshold into uncertainty, ushering in ‘new forms of sociability and communication’ in the ‘affective field of force’ of Independence Square (ibid.: 203, 204).

In the liminal space of ‘Maidan’ (the short-hand way of referring both to the location and the political movement initiated there), a sense of communitas – a key concept in Turner’s original theorisation of liminality – was born of the freedom and unity felt by protestors as they occupied Independence Square. However, this was juxtaposed with feelings of fear, anxiety and grief as Maidan became the scene of the worst violence Ukraine had seen in the post-Soviet era. Although the protests ultimately succeeded in deposing the president (the primary symbol of corruption within the government), the final stage of ‘re-aggregation’ was nevertheless incomplete, since the progressive aspirations of the Euromaidan movement have yet to translate into political reality. The protestors themselves may have felt ‘forever changed’ (ibid.: 210) by the feeling of communitas experienced at Maidan, but gradually a sense of widespread frustration and disillusionment prevailed as uncertainty over Ukraine’s political future remained (Miller 2016). Crucially, this is where political settings such as the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity differ from ritual passages as theorised by van Gennep and Turner: in the former, and particularly in the case of Ukraine, there is no clear way out of liminality.

The Kyiv uprising clearly bears many of the hallmarks of a ‘liminal hotspot’. Maidan was, however, just one of several liminal time-spaces created by the events of 2013-14. In this chapter, I argue that the Russian occupation of Crimea created the next ‘liminal hotspot’ in the unfolding crisis in Ukrainian political reality, the experiential dimensions of which must be grasped if we are to better understand subsequent experiences of forced migration as lived by displaced Crimeans.

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The sudden appearance of masked, armed soldiers on the streets of Simferopol (the administrative capital of Crimea) in late February 2014 marked the beginning of the Russian annexation, which was formalised following the referendum of 16 March. In the local and international press at the time, these soldiers became known as ‘little green men’ (Ukr. zeleni cholovichki; Rus. zelenye chelovechki) due to the absence of insignia on their uniforms. In Russian state-controlled media they were even referred to as ‘polite people’ (Rus. vezhlivye lyudi) on account of the apparently harmless and monosyllabic way in which they interacted with local Crimeans. The overnight appearance of masked soldiers with no apparent state affiliation and an unwillingness to explain their presence to local residents caused widespread confusion and uncertainty: who were these impostors? Who had sent them? What was their mission in Crimea? For most, the answers to these questions were clear given the geopolitical tensions affecting relations between Ukraine and Russia at the time (Sakwa 2014). Residents of Crimea came to suspect these men to be Russian-sponsored military personnel deployed with the aim of occupying strategically important buildings such as the airport and the regional government headquarters in Simferopol. Their suspicions were ultimately to be proven right, and it was at this point that thoughts of flight to the mainland were engendered amongst the minority pro-Ukrainian population.

There are, of course, similarities between the ‘liminal hotspot’ of Independence Square and those created in the occupied Crimean cities of Simferopol and Sevastopol. The existing social order was disrupted; uncertainty prevailed as participants adjusted to a new socio-political reality; high levels of affectivity were palpable in their emotional responses. However, there are key differences in the quality of the liminal time-space created by the occupation, as interviews with displaced Crimeans in Lviv revealed.

First, the ambivalence characteristic of liminal spaces was expressed less as internally conflicting emotions within like-minded individuals, and more as opposing political allegiances amongst the divided Crimean population as a whole. Since the majority of Crimeans welcomed the beginning of Russian rule, much media coverage at the time showed ecstatic pro-Russian Crimeans waving the Russian tricolor and being photographed with the so-called ‘little green men’. These residents were in no doubt about the peninsula’s rightful place and its future direction, and therefore any talk of the regime change as an ‘occupation’ was anathema. The pro-Ukrainian minority, by contrast, experienced no such collective effervescence, but rather collective shock, disbelief and deep anxiety. The affectivity of their liminal space was therefore heightened by the

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highly visible, ritualised celebration by their pro-Russian co-residents – many of them friends or even close relatives.

Second, the liminal space inhabited by the pro-Ukrainian Crimean minority in late February 2014 was not created through their own agency as was the case with the Maidan protesters. Order was disrupted by external forces in a rigorously planned operation designed to leave no space for any form of protest. Indeed, as Alexei Yurchak has described it, this was a ‘military occupation staged as a non-occupation’, a ‘curious new political technology…designed to fulfil

two contradictory things at once – to be anonymous and yet recognized by all, to be polite and yet frightening, to be identified as the Russian Army and yet, be different from the Russian Army. They were designed to be a pure, naked military force – a force without a state, without a face, without identity, without a clearly articulated goal. (Yurchak 2014; emphasis in original)

Unlike during the Kyiv uprising, where the protestors knew their adversary and its political agenda, in Crimea, the enemy was willfully unknowable, its long-term intentions stubbornly undeclared. If in Kyiv the liminal space was marked by a lack of ‘easily identifiable ceremony masters to blaze a trail’ (Georgsen & Thomassen 2017: 199) following the deposing of President Yanukovich, then in the case of Crimea, the question of ceremony masters is wholly redundant: ‘non-occupation’ meant no separation from the existing order, and therefore no period of liminality. It was as if the Russian government had always been in charge.

The following analysis features recollections of February and March 2014 as retold to me in February and March 2018. These accounts reveal that, away from the staged liminality of ritualised pro-Russian celebration, pro-Ukrainian Crimeans found themselves exposed to a liminality that was entirely unstaged, and marked by heightened negative affectivity. I argue that their circumstances – particularly during the eighteen-day period between the occupation and the referendum on annexation of 16 March – may justly be described as ‘pure liminality’, where ‘both spatial and temporal coordinates are in play’ (Thomassen 2009: 18). This framing of pre-migration experiences foregrounds the all-important decision of pro-Ukrainian residents to leave Crimea and the second liminal space created by this voluntary separation from the newly imposed order.

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One of the so-called ‘polite people’, March 2014 (Baranets 2016)

Unidentifiable, unknowable, unmentionable: Russia’s ‘little green men’

If we return to February 2014, what were your thoughts and feelings when soldiers appeared on the streets of your city?

Yes, this was around February-March, I think. There were lots of them and they were very active. There were people who welcomed them, had their photograph taken with them and were happy to see them. Then there were those who were neutral, and then those who began to leave [Crimea]. Some left immediately, and I think even now people are still leaving. I remember that many [soldiers] started to appear around the end of February, and it became clear that the [autonomous] Crimean government wasn’t doing anything against the [Russian] military forces because of their physical and numerical superiority. But we carried on as normal, I would meet up with my friends, and then [the soldiers] would say “you can’t go here, you can’t go there”. It was a complete nonsense. These big guys with guns… It was horrible. I remember how they took over Simferopol airport. I realise that it’s a strategically important building for an occupying country. What was worse was the people who were happy about it, the ones who went up to the soldiers and took pictures with them with their children on their shoulders, saying how great it was… It was clear that this was now pretty much a done deal. And then when the conflict started in the Donbass [in

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eastern Ukraine] it was clear that the Ukrainian government would be too busy dealing with that to worry about Crimea.

In my question to Ksenia, I deliberately chose not to label the soldiers as affiliated to Russia, since it was in this unmarked and shadowy form that they initially appeared to Crimeans. Lack of knowledge disempowers through uncertainty, and I was interested to gauge what effect (if any) this initial lack of knowledge had on Ksenia. Revealingly, there is no mention of the soldiers’ state affiliation in her description: the words ‘Russia’ or ‘Russian’ are eerily absent as she recalls the scenes from February 2014. I interpret this non-mentioning as the product of their unmentionability, a phenomenon which, I argue, functions analytically on three levels.

First, when the soldiers appeared, there was ambiguity around their exact provenance. Nobody could state with certainty whether they had been formed from local, pro-Russian Crimean forces or were in fact troops sent from the Russian Federation. Second, as she states elsewhere in the interview, those who opposed Russian rule had to be guarded with their comments for fear of being ‘ratted on’ by pro-Russian Crimeans. Her non-mentioning of their connection to the occupying forces might, therefore, reflect a wider practice developed under threat of denunciation. Third, when the Russian government stated over a year later that these troops were indeed Russian-sponsored military personnel, this only served to confirm the residents’ long-held suspicions: by now, the fact did not need confirming. The unmentionability of the name of the occupying Other thus has three potential underlying factors: uncertainty produced by a knowledge gap; fear instilled by the threat of knowledge dissemination; and a sense of banality created by the confirmation of long-suspected knowledge. Considered in broader perspective, the manipulation of knowledge by the occupying regime worked here to disempower those, like Ksenia, who opposed the presence of Russian-sponsored military personnel on sovereign Ukrainian territory.

Ksenia’s depiction of the soldiers is also notable for her reference to those who, unlike her, ‘were happy to see them’. We gain a sense here that hitherto ambiguous political allegiances were made visible for the first time through the physical gestures of Crimean residents to the unmarked soldiers. Whereas some remained ‘neutral’ and others ultimately ‘began to leave’, a significant proportion openly demonstrated their endorsement of the troops’ presence, despite being unaware of their exact provenance, identity and intentions on the peninsula. Ksenia refers twice to those who had their photographs taken with the soldiers, images usually associated with peacekeeping

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missions in war-torn conflict zones. Her disapproval of her fellow Crimeans’ actions reflects the antipathy felt by pro-Ukrainian residents towards their pro-Russian co-residents at the moment the latter publicly made their political allegiances known. If, until this point, individuals had been reluctant to express these allegiances in communities of diverse ethnopolitical make-up, the physical presence of soldiers suspected of affiliation with Russia now made them abundantly clear. Here, then, it is the sudden acquisition of knowledge about her fellow citizens – some of them perhaps relatives or friends – that produce the resignation perceptible in Ksenia’s conclusion that ‘[the Russian annexation] was now pretty much a done deal’. Her disillusionment is then further exacerbated by the sense she gains of the lack of support forthcoming from the Ukrainian government – additional knowledge assisting her in the decision-making process on whether to remain in or to leave Crimea.

In the context of the foregoing analysis, the media descriptions of the occupying forces as ‘little green men’ or ‘polite people’ take on a distinctly sinister hue when juxtaposed with Ksenia’s non-naming of, and real-life encounters with, the men themselves. Far from being the harmless, peaceful individuals the Russian state media claimed them to be, they appear instead – by virtue of their unmarked and shadowy presence – to be key symbolic weapons in the state-planned manipulation of knowledge that enabled the successful take-over of the Crimean peninsula.

Above: ‘What’s fashionable this year? Joining the Russian Federation’ Below: ‘Polite people’

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‘Politeness takes cities. 2014 – year of culture in Russia’5

“I’m not going anywhere”: the sudden and uncanny rupturing of friendships and familial relations

The events inside the ‘hotspot’ had the powerful effect of transforming relations between Crimeans of different political persuasion. If, prior to the annexation, it did not serve people’s friendships and working relationships to express their political views, the socio-political upheaval brought about by the Russian incursion prompted many to make their allegiances clear. While the majority pro-Russian population flew Russian flags in ritualised celebration, those opposed to Russian rule were forced either to tolerate the foreign occupation of their home territory or to vote with their feet. As Ksenia’s recollections show, there was at the same time a significant risk of arrest attendant on any open expression of opposition to the new status quo. Political power had shifted unambiguously to the pro-Russian majority.

Can you describe the kind of conversations you had with other Crimeans at the time?

5_{These photographs were taken by one of my informants, Renata, and posted to social media on 6 June 2014. On the} same day in 2018, she used Facebook’s ‘share a memory’ function to re-post them with the message: ‘This was my last trip [home to Crimea]. The only pleasant moments were when I met up with a friend, saw my dear mother-in-law, and finally got the chance to collect my son and care for him humanely on mainland Ukraine. It was all such a long time ago.’

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To those people [who support Russian rule], you immediately become an enemy. Around people like that it’s best to keep your mouth shut, say nothing, because tomorrow the mother of your child’s classmate who you were walking with the other day or a former classmate could easily go to the police or the FSB [the Russian security service]. To them we’re total enemies. To us they’re traitors: people who have sold out their state, sold out their citizenship. They have their own reality. These people are traitors, and this is why I refuse to return to Crimea. Even if it becomes part of Ukraine again, part of Turkey or becomes an autonomous republic… I refuse, because to live with people who have betrayed you, sold you out, sold your home, your family to another country… it’s terrible.

We didn’t talk openly about our own views for the sake of our own personal safety, because if you shout about it loudly then it won’t end well… By April [2014] it was already clear that the situation wouldn’t change. The Ukrainians [i.e. the government] blocked off Crimea… It was clear whom you supported even when you walked down the street, you were visible and they focused on you, it was important for them [the occupying forces] to know [who supported which side].

Here we see the stark impact of the shift in power relations on social interaction between minority pro-Ukrainian and majority pro-Russian Crimeans. Despite inhabiting the same territorial space, the ideological split amongst the population reveals that Crimeans had, as Ksenia states, been living in alternate realities. On a rational level, this will not have surprised anyone with even the most basic understanding of political allegiances in the region. Yet in this highly charged atmosphere of sudden and unexpected socio-political transformation, the symbols of which (military vehicles, soldiers, foreign flags) are all around, it is arguable that, in the field of situated human action and reaction, rationality becomes impaired by extreme levels of emotional stress. The revelation of co-residents’ true convictions, which had hitherto been concealed within the private domain, were now made public in the most unambiguous and shocking way.

In order to provide the theoretical concept of the ‘liminal hotspot’ with greater analytical depth, I would like to argue that the emotional force of these revelations is akin to the ‘uncanny’ feeling one experiences when the identity of familiar people is suddenly and unexpectedly defamiliarised. As German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch wrote in his famous 1906 essay ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, ‘the human desire for the intellectual mastery of one’s environment is a strong one’. With these revelations about Ksenia’s fellow Crimeans, the ‘[i]ntellectual certainty’ she may once have had vanished, and with it the ‘psychical shelter in the struggle for

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existence’ on the peninsula (Jentsch 1906: 15). The psychological force of these revelations is clear from the defensive repetition of the emotionally-laden phrases ‘sold out’ and ‘I refuse’. The shock and subsequent feeling of betrayal are palpable in Ksenia’s language and do much to explain her ultimate resolution of her own ‘fight or flight’ dilemma.

The perception of close friends’ emerging allegiances was one factor in the emotional affectivity that impacted on pro-Ukrainian Crimeans in the post-occupation ‘liminal hotspot’. For some, however, this affectivity was not restricted to the public realm; rather, it entered the private, domestic space as a product of intra-familial rifts. Olya, a mother of four from the coastal resort town of Yalta, describes the powerful effect that the ritualised aesthetic reconfiguration of Ukrainian sovereign space had on her family:

The most interesting thing was that we began to lose our children. Our eldest son was, at that time, twelve-and-a-half, and the next one was eight. Their school was affected by the politics, the propaganda. A portrait of Putin was immediately hung in the entrance, together with the lyrics to the Russian national anthem, the flag, etc. “Russia is our homeland” and all that. This was on top of [Russian] TV and their pro-Russian grandparents. My eldest son ended up screaming that he didn’t want to leave, that he’d stay with his grandparents. “Go to your Ukraine, if you want to!” he shouted at us. We began to lose our children under the influence of propaganda. “I’ll rip up my ticket and jump out of the train,” he told us, “I’m not going anywhere. If we leave, I’ll come back.” We agreed that when he turned 14 (the age when you receive a passport in Russia), he could decide for himself. “If nothing changes in that time, then we’ll allow you to go back to live with grandma and grandpa. You should see everything with your own eyes.” It’s very difficult, very difficult indeed when it’s your own child. Oh, how [the children] laughed. “You and your Ukraine!” they laughed.

Here we see how innocent children were caught up in the affectivity of the liminal hotspot. Like most children in majority pro-Russian Crimea, Olya’s son found himself in a space where, almost overnight, familiar signs and symbols were re-assigned to carry Russian value. If the streets had become spaces for ritualised celebration designed to normalise the new order, then schools and universities became spaces in which the ritualised redecoration of rooms and corridors enabled their aesthetic-ideological re-valuation. It is important to restate here that, in pro-Russian Crimean reality, there is no period of liminality: the reversing of symbols merely serves as visual

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confirmation of what the majority – including Olya’s son’s teachers – already knew: that ‘Crimea is Russia’. As with the notion of ‘occupation’, therefore, ‘re-aggregation’ is, as far as it can be applied to pro-Russian Crimeans, a redundant analytical concept.

From Olya’s pro-Ukrainian perspective, however, the revelation of her children’s unexpected new allegiance has the force of shattering loss. Not only had she woken up in a different country; the speed and efficiency of the political transition, assisted by a well-oiled and locally-enabled propaganda machine, meant that, in the space of a few days, her own children had now become radically transformed. The uncanny resides here in the unsettling disparity between the visual familiarity of one’s flesh-and-blood and the strangeness of their utterances. With images of Vladimir Putin now commonplace in this suspended reality, Olya’s conversations with her successfully indoctrinated son must have had the effect of communicating with a ventriloquist’s doll, with his school teachers (and, by extension, Putin himself) controlling his utterances almost by remote control. It is not for nothing that Freud, in his famous essay on ‘The Uncanny’, makes specific mention of fellow psychiatrist Jentsch’s observations regarding ‘waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata’ (Freud 1919: 226). Olya’s experience here reflects that ‘unpleasant impression’ and ‘feeling of unease’ (Jentsch 1906: 12) that such phenomena engender.

At this point, it seems appropriate to introduce to the ‘liminal hotspot’ a particular figure whom Turner argued appeared in such conditions: that of the ‘trickster’. In his most recent discussion of liminality, Szakolczai argues that, ‘when the taken for granted order of things becomes suspended,

suddenly imitative processes might emerge which can easily spiral out of control and generate a schism within a previously united and harmonious group, especially if certain individuals who do not participate in emotional involvement – called “tricksters” by anthropologists – gain influence. (Szakolczai 2017: 233)

The imitative process begun in Olya’s son’s school leads to a schism that threatens to divide her family. Her son was, of course, not to blame; his strange utterances are merely a product of the upturned reality in which pro-Russian Crimeans gained pre-eminence. These individuals were, and continue to be, subject to the same political influencing as Olya’s son, therefore to label them

Crimeans betwixt and beyond : liminality, loss and the struggle for home in post-annexation Ukraine