The valley of death is now a vineyard, and the ground once spattered by the blood of the Light Brigade horsemen, as they charged the Russian guns 150 years ago, now produces reputedly excellent sparkling wine. A small, whitewashed monument erected by the British Army in memory of "those who fell" on October 25, 1854, keeps a lonely vigil amid the vines.
At the end of the valley where the thundering Russian guns awaited, there is now a railway line. The origins of the conflict lay in the eastern war of 1853 in what is now Romania and Bulgaria, and it transferred to the Crimea, then part of the tsarist Russian empire, the following year. Britain and France wanted to block Russian ambitions to swallow chunks of the crumbling Ottoman empire. Together with their Turkish and Sardinian allies, they embarked on what some historians call the first global-scale war. From naval raids in St Petersburg and Finland, the war visited the Balkans, the Crimea itself, and carried on into what is now the mangled Russian province of Chechnya, through to attacks on Russian possessions on the empireÕs Pacific coast.
Later, the Crimea saw more savagery. The heights above this vineyard near Balaclava witnessed more suicidal bravery in the second world war, when 100,000 Soviet troops died charging uphill against well-fortified Nazi positions. It has been relatively peaceful since, an area where few foreigners were ever allowed under the old Soviet regime.
The Crimea, a peninsula that hangs like an exotic earring from the lobe of Ukraine, is a former republic that engineered independence out of the Soviet disintegration. Along with the jewel of the Black Sea, Ukraine inherited the Crimea's complex and dangerous ethnic problems, a seething cocktail of racial, religious and political rivalries that some fear could boil over into a new conflict, as savage and historic as the wars that tore apart the old Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Ukraine goes to the elections at the end of this month, aware that whoever wins will inherit an increasingly dangerous Crimea.
The peninsula comprises mostly steppe farmland in the north. In the south, mountains shield spectacularly beautiful coastal areas from the harsh winters that sweep down from the Arctic, and ensure pleasant climates for towns like Yalta, where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt shaped Europe's cold-war future.
Throughout history the peninsula has been colonised by Scythians, Greeks, Romans, Khazars, Genoese and Venetians. From the 13th century until the armies of the Russian empress Catherine the Great invaded and annexed the peninsula in 1783, it was the homeland to Crimean Tatars, a people speaking a Turkic language and practising a liberal brand of Islam. Under their princely leaders — the Khans, descendants of invaders who arrived from the east with Genghis Khan — the Crimea was rich in both commerce and culture. Many Crimean Tatars were killed or fled after the Russian invasion. Around 300,000 fled in 1856 after being accused of supporting Britain and her allies during the Crimean war. In 1944, on the pretext that they had collaborated with the Germans, Stalin ordered the deportation within a few days of the remaining 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia. Around 14% died of sickness and malnutrition within 18 months of being transported and dumped in the barren and inhospitable areas of Uzbekistan.
After each brutal displacement, more was destroyed of the architecture, monuments and cemeteries that told of the Muslims who had lived in the Crimea for centuries. The only town preserved in a semblance of its ancient form was the capital of the old Muslim Crimea, Bakhchisaray, because the Russian poet Pushkin had written about it, making it awkward to eliminate. It was resettled after the last war with mostly Russians. Many worked in the Soviet Black Sea fleet's top-secret military facilities at Sebastopol and Balaclava. Thousands of senior servicemen and Communist-party officials retired in the Crimea's pleasant southern climes. These retirees, and serving Russian naval personnel, forged a powerful amalgam of diehard communists and Russian nationalists.
These Russian retirees and their families and others of Russian descent form 58% of the Crimea's population of just under 2m. Ethnically Russian but officially Ukrainian citizens, most have little affection for their government by the independent Ukraine. Many openly support the declarations of Russian nationalist politicians in Moscow that Crimea is rightfully a part of Russia. Fear that political clashes with Russian separatists could escalate into violence that might draw in Russia led the Ukrainian government to cave in to demands to give the Crimea a level of autonomy. But the attempt to defuse tensions only encouraged ethnic Russians to thumb their noses at the Ukrainian government in Kiev.
Ukrainian is rarely spoken on Crimean streets, most schools teach in Russian, and most newspapers are printed in Russian. The streets of the peninsula's capital, Simferopol, still named after Soviet-era leaders and secret policemen, are adorned with an adapted Russian flag. The 500,000 Ukrainians living in the Crimea represent 27% of the population, and they feel like foreigners in what is nominally their country. The Crimea's extremist Russians feel encouraged by Moscow. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is determined to keep Sebastopol as his primary Black Sea fleet base, for swift entry into the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus, and has cajoled Kiev into giving it lengthy leases there. When Ukraine gained its independence, the Soviet-era Black Sea fleet was divided so that Russia retained the best vessels and Ukraine was left with mostly rusting hulks and one submarine without the batteries to run it.
What hasn't helped to damp down tension in the Crimea is that after independence, the Ukrainian government told the Crimean Tatars they could return to their homeland and would be given Ukrainian passports and financial help. Around 250,000 have returned and another 150,000 others could also move home. Many Russians feel intense resentment towards the Tatars. They accuse them of wanting to grab land, pave the way for Islamic fundamentalism, and eventually declare an independent Crimean Tatar state. When Tatars hold rallies or commemorate events like the deportation, Russian adults and schoolchildren are warned to stay off the streets in case Tatars turn on them.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been accused of stirring up more trouble. It has played on popular prejudice against the Crimean Tatars, warning against Islamic fundamentalism and drawing historic parallels of conflict between Christians and Muslims. Uniformed "Cossack" organisations, which promote the unity of Slavs but are mainly Russian and pledge allegiance to the Russian Orthodox Church, have confronted Tatar groups in land disputes. Some of those confrontations have come perilously close to conflict.
All this has led to brittle ethnic relations, and large-scale brawls between Tatars and Russians are common. Earlier this year, police fired above a crowd of Crimean Tatars trying to release one of their own whom they said had been wrongly arrested. The leader of the Tatars' biggest civic organisation, the Mejlis, is Mustafa Djemilev, who is also a member of the Ukrainian parliament. For Crimean Tatars he is a hero. During the Soviet era he spoke out to keep the Crimean Tatar identity alive, and to demand that his people be allowed to return home, which earned him 15 years in the gulag.
Djemilev blames the Kremlin and local Russian organisations — including the Communist party, which ruled the Crimea until two years ago — for fanning fear that the Tatars will violently dispossess Russians and take revenge upon them. "Russians definitely fear that the Crimean Tatars would do the same to them as the Russians did to the Crimean Tatars, if we had enough force," he said.
