Crimean Vote to Join Russia Divides Ukrainian Families
When Galina Khromtsova urged her daughter Yulia to come home to Crimea and vote for the peninsula to join Russia, she says she froze when she heard her response.
“Mama, I’m for Ukraine!” Yulia Khromtsova told her last week from Kyiv, where the 24-year-old works as a photo editor for a glossy magazine.
“I was shocked,” her mother recalled.
The tensions over Crimea have become the worst East-West conflict since the end of the Cold War. But Sunday’s referendum on the peninsula’s future is also dividing families, forcing them to pick sides of a new border that Russia seeks to draw.
The personal divisions are a reflection of the broader split within Ukraine, a patchwork of leftover imperial territories populated by ethnic Ukrainians and Russians and created as an independent country within its current borders with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Three months of protests in the capital have pitted proponents of closer ties with Europe and the promise of more democracy against those drawn to Russia, with its oil-fueled autocracy and centuries of shared Slavic history.
Often, as with the Khromtsovas, it is a generational rather than an ethnic divide.
For older people such as 58-year-old Galina, who runs a small children’s-clothing stand in Sevastopol where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based, Sunday’s referendum offers a return to a more comfortable Soviet past and an escape from the hardship she says has defined her experience of independent Ukraine.
“We lived in Ukraine all this time, and no one has ever needed us. We haven’t had a single decent president, but in Russia they have Vladimir Putin, who really works,” she said, calling him “our savior.”
“We feel like we’re going home, to mum, dad, relatives, close people. It’ll be like Soviet times, or maybe better,” she said. That is the political message that has ensured Mr. Putin strong support for years in Russia, where many voters have been willing to trade political freedom for prosperity and stability, richly overlaid with Soviet nostalgia.
In Ukraine, politics remain raucous and competitive, but often dysfunctional. Residents have seen little of the explosion of wealth that Russia’s huge oil and gas resources have brought.
On Sunday, Galina left her small, Soviet-era flat in the Balaklava district of Sevastopol to cast her vote in favor of joining Russia at the polling station.
“I feel very satisfied,” she said.
But her daughter didn’t travel to vote. Instead Yulia called the referendum “illegal,” a position shared by the pro-European government in Kyiv, as well as Western capitals.
She supported protesters in Kyiv who helped oust a pro-Russian president, and is part of a younger generation of Crimean natives who have left the region, some of whom increasingly identify themselves as Ukrainian, even if they have Russian roots.
“I’m an ethnic Russian. My parents are Russian. But I am also Ukrainian. I grew up here and went to school here. I’m proud to live in this country,” said the younger Ms. Khromtsova, who was born two years before Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. She learned Ukrainian in school in Sevastopol, but still speaks Russian with her mother.
Despite two decades marred by economic woes, political paralysis and viral corruption, she takes pride that Ukraine, unlike Russia, has some of the freedoms of a fledgling democracy: competing political parties, an active civil society that was at the heart of recent protests, and media that, while controlled by powerful business interests, present different viewpoints.
“In the current situation, I’ve realized how valuable freedom is to me. [Russia] is a complete dictatorship. You can’t express a single free word. It’d be like living in a cardboard box that you can’t escape from,” Yulia said.
Her mother, Galina, was born in the Kirov region, about 600 miles east of Moscow, but moved to Crimea at the age of seven. She then lived in Moscow for several years with her first husband, before moving back to Crimea in 1985 with her second husband, a military man.
Crimea had become part of Ukraine in 1954, but it was little more than a formality while the Soviet Union existed.
Walking along Sevastopol’s Lenin Street one recent evening, Galina Khromtsova recalled her youth in the 1960s and 1970s, when Crimea sparkled as a holiday destination amid the relative peace and prosperity of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule.
As she passed a monument to Komsomol, the Soviet youth league, she recalled reciting the words on the inscription—”Courage, steadfastness, loyalty of the Komsomol”—when she entered the group. She attended dances at the nearby Officers’ House and hung out with the Soviet navy on the shore.
She said she hasn’t been troubled by the presence of Russian soldiers in recent days.
“We called for them,” she said, reflecting the line of the pro-Russian Crimean authorities, who say they requested Russian military support to protect them against a supposed threat from Ukrainian nationalists in the rest of the country.
As a caravan of cars honking horns and flying Russian flags cruised past, she waved at them.
“It is just a feeling of joy in the soul,” she said.
When Ukraine voted in a referendum on independence in 1991, the elder Ms. Khromtsova cast her ballot in favor, hoping it would provide a stabler future for her daughter, born in 1989—just as Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika had thrown much of the country into poverty and instability.
It didn’t take her long to change her mind. She recalls the 1990s as a time of hardship.
“People survived any way they could,” she said. “There were no laws.”
She says she struggles to understand her daughter’s devotion to Ukraine. “That child has seen nothing good. In Ukraine, these presidents, they did nothing for kids. Just poverty. I remember how we sometimes went hungry,” she says.
Yulia says she remembers the poor heating in their apartment, but it was easier to brush it off as a child. “It didn’t last long,” she said. “I don’t remember feeling poor.”
After studying in Sevastopol, Yulia headed to Kyiv five years ago to live with her boyfriend.
Her mother says that is when her views changed.
“In Kyiv, the information is different,” said Galina, who like many in Crimea, gets much of her news from Russian state television, with its fawning coverage of Mr. Putin and frequent comparisons of the new leadership in Kyiv to fascists.
She says that her son, who is 32 and lives at home, sides with her. He and Yulia haven’t spoken for years and he declined to be interviewed.
For Yulia, the protests in Kyiv were a political awakening.
After a harsh police crackdown, she began to attend frequently, taking sandwiches and tea to protesters manning barricades, as well as to riot police on the other side.
“The majority of people in Sevastopol aren’t troubled by anything and are frightened of losing what they have. But here, they have a different energy,” she said.
Her mother watched with concern as clashes between police and protesters intensified, leaving dozens dead. As nationalist politicians and symbols came to the fore in demonstrations, Russian state television, which is popular in Crimea, became more strident in denouncing events as a violent coup d’état by “fascists,” a word used frequently in the Soviet Union to describe those who disagreed with Moscow.
That struck a chord with Galina, whose father fought Nazi Germany in World War II. Sevastopol residents take pride in their city’s steadfast, but ultimately unsuccessful, defense against the German attack.
Echoing Russian TV, Galina frames Sevastopol’s fight for separation from Kyiv and union with Moscow as resistance against a hostile new government.
“We began to defend out city so there would be no bloodshed here,” she said. “I’m not against Ukraine, but the people in power aren’t very good. They are destroying history.”
Yulia says she’s given up trying to change her mother’s mind after repeated attempts to convince her that Kyiv is now peaceful and there is no threat to Russians and Russian speakers. “I’m tired of trying. Neither pictures nor information works. My mum doesn’t trust me but Putin and Russian TV,” she said.
Yulia says she’ll continue visiting home every summer, even if Crimea is part of a separate country. But she’ll stick to her Ukrainian passport, unlike her mother, who wants to take Russian citizenship.
“Not because I don’t like Russia, but because of the principle,” Yulia said. “What’s happening now is like a raid by pirates. It is like taking something that doesn’t belong to you.”
Write to James Marson at paul.sonne@wsj.com