Catherine Annexes Crimea

APR 08 1783 · 12:00

Catherine II of Russia, by Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder, 1780s. Kunsthistorisches Museum. Place: Karasubazar (later Belogorsk), Crimean peninsula; manifesto issued at St Petersburg Figures: Catherine II of Russia · Grigory Potemkin, governor of New Russia, organizing the annexation on the ground · Şahin Giray, last khan of Crimea, pensioned then exiled then executed by the Ottomans · Abdul Hamid I, Ottoman sultan From Suzerainty to Sovereignty by Decree The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 had detached the Crimean Khanate from Ottoman suzerainty and made it nominally independent, with Russia recognized as protector. For nine years a sequence of pro-Russian and pro-Ottoman khans alternate; Şahin Giray, the Russian client, cannot pacify the peninsula. By the spring of 1783, Potemkin's troops are in occupation; Catherine signs the annexation manifesto on 8 April; Şahin Giray abdicates; the khanate's notables swear allegiance to the Russian Crown at Karasubazar on 9 July. The Ottoman Porte protests but does not fight. France and Austria, in conferences over the previous winter, have indicated they will not intervene. The system is again silent: a sovereign Muslim polity of three centuries' standing, recognized by treaty nine years earlier, is absorbed by treaty-less manifesto, and no European chancery objects in writing. A Claim Repeated in Two Centuries Russia takes the Black Sea coast from the Dniester to the Caucasus, the basis for the new naval base at Sevastopol (founded 1783), the city of Yekaterinoslav, the colonization of New Russia. The Tatar population emigrates in waves over the next century: an estimated 800,000 leave for the Ottoman lands between 1783 and 1922. The peninsula's demography is reshaped by Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Bulgarian settlement. The 1783 manifesto also produces an enduring rhetorical claim, repeated by every Russian government with an interest in restating it. Crimea is, on this argument, Russian by historic right of conquest and settlement; its inhabitants are Russians; its detachment under Khrushchev in 1954 was an administrative anomaly. The argument is rehearsed verbatim by Vladimir Putin in his March 2014 annexation speech and again in his February 2022 declaration (see [[invasion-of-ukraine-2022]]). The 1772 partition (see [[first-partition-of-poland-1772]]) and the 1783 Crimean manifesto, written eleven years apart by the same monarch, establish a method that Westphalian-era Russia will continue to apply.