Crimea tries to turn the clock back

CRIMEA, home of the Black Sea Fleet and crucible of what the CIA fears might be the next war in Europe, today quit Ukraine and rejoined Russia. The world trembled. But not a shot was fired.

For the moment the secession goes no further than the clock tower: instead of losing an hour, like the rest of Ukraine, for summertime, Crimea sacrificed two hours to fall into line with Moscow.

The modest but provocative act of rebellion coincides with elections across Ukraine that will not only elect a new 450- seat parliament in Kiev, the capital, but determine whether this fragile country can survive.

The decision to change time zones was decreed by Yuri Meshkov, a Russian nationalist elected president at the end of January on a platform of economic and then political withdrawal from Ukraine.

It is just one of the many symptoms of a nation unravelling under the strain of regional division, political paralysis and an economic catastrophe that, according to a recent opinion poll, has left 40 per cent of Ukraine's population in favour of reunification with Russia and another 39 per cent in support of open borders.

So fragmented has Ukraine become that nearly 6,000 candidates are standing in today's election. Scores of run-offs will be needed. Odd election rules make it possible there might never be enough people elected to get a quorum.

Ukraine's national currency, launched at par with the rouble, is now worth less than a 20th of the far from robust Russian money. It takes 39,000 Ukrainian coupons to buy a single US dollar. Savings are worthless, fuel is scarce and 85 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.

The wreckage threatens to crush Ukraine's statehood. 'People do not flee prosperity, they flee poverty,' says Dmytro Ponamarchuk of Rukh, moderate nationalists who galvanised support for independence in 1991. 'If we had a referendum on union with Germany, 80 per cent would vote yes. Life is so bad here now they will vote for union with just about anyone.'

Crimea's new President, Mr Meshkov, a former KGB border guard and lawyer, ran his campaign from a bar in the Crimean capital of Simferopol called Bagram, after the Afghan airbase from which Moscow launched its last great imperial adventure. The bar boasts beer from Milwaukee, formica-topped tables, venetian blinds and the festering jingoism of empire-builders betrayed. It is run by Afghan Veterans' Union of Crimea, one of the most active chapters in a vast network of Afgantsi, demobbed soldiers determined to preserve old ties, to remember 14,000 Soviet fallen and - at least over Crimean cognac and coffee at the Bagram - to reverse Russia's retreat.

Today will bring what they hope will be the first step on the road back. Not only is Crimea joining Moscow Time, it is also holding a referendum on greater autonomy from Ukraine. The vote is non-binding, but it continues a drift out of Kiev's orbit of influence.

There are also elections for a new local assembly and 23 seats in the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev. Most of the victors will be Russian nationalists determined, at the very least, to free Crimea from Ukraine's banana-republic currency and imploding economy. Among the candidates is Vladimir Klychnikov, chairman of the Crimean Afghan Veterans Club: 'We survived Afghanistan, we can survive this.' How did he prepare for his new life in politics? 'I grew a beard. A politician needs to look serious and solid.'

His campaign revolves around attacks on a 1954 decision by Nikita Khrushchev to withdraw the internal boundaries of the Soviet Union so as to remove Crimea from the Russian Federation and present it as a 'gift' to Ukraine. The transfer lost all legitimacy, Mr Klychnikov says, as soon as the Soviet Union perished.

At the other end of Ukraine, 1,000km to the north- west, memories of battles in Afghanistan are replaced by folklore about more distant valour in the forests around Lvov. It was here that Ukrainian guerrillas fought Soviet soldiers - many of them fellow Ukrainians - during the Second World War. In more remote areas resistance continued until as late as 1956.

The martial myths of western Ukraine are fuelling a plethora of small but vocal Fascist groups. The most prominent, Ukrainian National Assembly, is expected to win several seats in today's parliamentary election. Its paramilitary wing, Ukrainian People's Self-Defence (UNSO), claims to have sent fighters to Abkhazia and Moldova to thwart Russia. It canvassed support by members marching through the streets of Lvov in military uniforms, waving swastika-like insignia and vowing to crush any challenge to Ukrainian territory. In Kiev, the group put up lurid posters promising cheap bread and revenge against 'hooligans who rape your children and smash your heads with rifle butts while the police refuse to register your corpses'.

About the only unifying factor in Ukraine is anger at the elite in Kiev, mostly do-nothing former Communists. Badly tarnished is President Leonid Kravchuk, an erstwhile ideology boss now reviled by Ukrainian and Russian nationalists. Today's elections, though, could save him. If they go badly wrong, he could act on a threat to declare emergency rule. In Ukraine, banking on failure is perhaps the safest strategy.

(Photograph omitted)