When American pundit Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian president Vladimir Putin in February 2024 he was expecting a discussion about NATO. What he received was a lecture on history. For Putin, the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was not about the present or the future, but about the past. He repeated to Carlson what he had said elsewhere – that present-day Ukraine is a modern creation that disrupts centuries of Russian history tracing back to the medieval state of Kyivan Rus’.
The Carlson interview was not the first time Putin treated the world to his version of Russian history. In July 2021, mere months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin published the essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” That article was then turned into a book in which the Russian Archival Authority provided historical documents to support Putin’s claims. These publications were part of a broader and longstanding Kremlin strategy to reshape childhood education, academic thought, and public discourse about history around politically convenient narratives. Long before Carlson sat down with him, Putin had placed history at the centre of his politics.
Yet while Putin loves to bring up 9th century Kyivan Rus’ and controversial twentieth-century Ukrainian figures like the ultranationalist Stepan Bandera there is one part of history he does not like to mention: the Khanate of Crimea. Crimea has long been central to Russian propaganda regarding Ukraine, with the Kremlin claiming Crimea was unfairly severed from Russia under the Soviet Union. Crimea also was the first region of Ukraine Russia directly seized back in 2014. Yet the earlier history of the peninsular is not something Putin, historian-in-chief, likes to discuss. Why?
The reason is simple. The history of Crimea complicates Putin’s idea that Russia has historically owned the region of present-day Ukraine. Crimea was never a part of Kyivan Rus’, and so cannot be neatly folded into the narrative that Russia is the true heir to that medieval state. Ancient and medieval Crimea had Greek and Italian trading posts. The Mongol Empire, the great, sprawling empire of medieval Eurasia, once controlled the region. By the fifteenth century a successor-state to the Mongol Empire, the Khanate of Crimea, emerged. This was an independent, Islamic, Tatar-speaking polity not allied to Russia but rather to their major rival the Ottoman Empire.
How, then, did Crimea become part of the Russian Empire? As Putin briefly noted in his long lecture to Carlson, Russia took control of areas around the Black Sea after a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire known as the Russo-Turkish Wars. By 1774 the Khanate of Crimea was no longer an Ottoman ally; in 1783 Russia finally annexed the peninsula. This is then a major contrast to Putin’s beloved narrative of a thousand-plus-year-old Russian Empire that was cruelly dismembered in the late twentieth century.
Despite his long lecture to Carlson, Putin avoided as much as he included. Crimea, with its textured history and late incorporation into the Russian Empire, is a region Putin desperately wants to control but the history of which he cannot discuss.
About the author: Clare Griffin is an associate professor in the Hamilton Lugar School’s Brynes Institute (REEI) and the Indiana University Department of History. Her academic research focuses on science, medicine, and expertise in the early modern Russian Empire.