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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Ukraine war is one of my major interests. Not long after the takeover I found it 10x harder to see the people I followed who tweeted about Ukraine.

One notable vignette: Elon Musk called the Crimean handover “Kruschev’s mistake”. That’s a very specific statement steeped in Russian revanchism.

* One has to know Crimea used to be part of Russia

* One has to know Kruschev handed it over to Ukraine in the 1950s for an anniversary

* One has to believe this was wrong

* One has to ignore voting at Ukraine’s independence suggesting the inhabitants at the time wished to be part of Ukraine and not Russia

It suggests the comment was inspired through talking to a Russian revanchist. One would not get this interpretation from, say, Wikipedia.

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Musk is part of Twitters alt-right pipeline, and this pipeline is contrarian to western trends by default. West supporting Ukraine makes them support Russia as default, not because they like Russia (only fringe alt-righters think Russia is better place to live than the West).

I don’t think he is a vatnik as some here have said, but one of the memes going around the bubble is „think for yourself, question everything”. This makes him think that Russian aggression has some justification simply because „things are never what they seem” or „things are never black and white”.

You provided a very thoughtful comment and I appreciate it, but why don't you type quotes "like this"? (Not a dig - genuine question)

IIRC those quotes are from particular European keyboard layouts.

I am from Poland, in our language opening quote is at base line:

https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/formex/physical-...

Do you know what the different levels mean? Looked around but couldn't find anything on the site.

Nested quotes within quotes.

That's what I initially thought, but then it says that Level 1 and Level 3 in English are both single quotes, whereas you actually start with double quotes and alternate them with single quotes the more you nest, so it made no sense (and still doesn't).

Wikipedia's editorial position is a separate issue.

It isn't impossible or contradictory to hold both concepts in one's mind. If Russia wants Crimea, it was a mistake for the USSR to hand it over. From that point an individual could also believe that every region has the right to secede. The two views are not contradictory.

It takes a specific kind of bias to read intent into the statement.

Let us try again with an issue divorced from the inflammatory topic.

"The getaway driver made a mistake by turning off the engine."

The above statement doesn't assume support for getaway drivers or bank robbery. It is an observation of folly, nothing more.

> One has to ignore voting at Ukraine’s independence suggesting the inhabitants at the time wished to be part of Ukraine and not Russia

Yeah, no. The Independence referendum asked "Do you support the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine?". To which 37% of the electorate of Crimea and 36% of Sevestopol said yes. They were never asked if they wanted to join Russia.

That’s misleading framing. Ukraine was in the USSR with Russia. Referendum asked if they wanted to leave.

Results in Crimea:

54.19% yes

45.81% no

It would not have been sensible to ask “would you like to join russia” as Ukraine was already part of the USSR at the time the question was asked.

Now, those are obviously not strong results, but it also doesn’t immediately suggest the handover was a mistake. The split is even.

My point was, to come to the framing that this was “Kruschev’s mistake” one needs some preconceived ideas about how things ought to be.

> That’s misleading framing.

Your original claim was that the independence referendum results suggested Crimea wanted to stay in Ukraine and not Russia. I agree, that framing was misleading as they were never asked that question.

> Now, those are obviously not strong results, but it also doesn’t immediately suggest the handover was a mistake. The split is even.

You are listing the Yes and No percentages while ignoring the low turnout. Only 37% of the electorate of Crimea and 36% of Sevestopol voted yes. The next lowest Yes vote was 64%, a clean majority.

> It would not have been sensible to ask “would you like to join russia” as Ukraine was already part of the USSR at the time the question was asked.

Ukraine was part of USSR, not Russia. I don't see why it would not have been sensible to ask Crimea if they wanted to join Russia. If Ukraine has the right to self determination, why doesn't Crimea?

> My point was, to come to the framing that this was “Kruschev’s mistake” one needs some preconceived ideas about how things ought to be.

After witnessing recent events, one could also look up the history of the region and conclude that Krushchev made a mistake.

Everybody has a bias. But you are pretending your particular framing is neutral.

> After witnessing recent events, one could also look up the history of the region and conclude that Krushchev made a mistake.

My point is the odds of adopting this specific framing as a non-russian are minimal without contact with russian revanchist sources.

My own framing surely comes from exposure to pro Ukranian sources, but that’s sort of too my point: it simply isn’t normal for an outsider to know the details of these things. “1783 until Kruschev’s mistake” is highly specific.

Musk’s original tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000

If you're not aware, there was an important vote in March 1991. [1] It was about joining a reforming of the USSR, the "New Union Treaty", which Crimea had already internally overwhelmingly voted to join on January 1991. Ukraine changed their whole-state version of the poll to read, "Do you agree that Ukraine should be part of a Union of Soviet sovereign states on the basis on the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine?"

It was obviously a cynical political ploy, because independence of Ukraine would be incompatible with the reforming of the USSR. But that's the context of going into the independence poll which happened in December 1991. Ukraine put Crimea into a lose/lose scenario. The only way to possibly rejoin the USSR would be to vote yes for independence. But obviously Ukraine had no intentions of rejoining the USSR, in spite of what their poll said.

This is probably why so few Crimeans chose to vote. It was 41% abstain, 37% yes, 22% no. It certainly wasn't about joining Ukraine over Russia.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum

I am trying to read this comment as read by a history buff in 1995 and I'm finding it hilarious.

People can just read history and interpret them... This trend of interpreting every politically adjacent thought as originating from one propaganda source or another is insane and absolutely destructive to having any sort of reasonable discourse.

Were I a valueless entity of influence endeavoring to convince society of concepts 'less than well supported' then reasonable discourse would most certainly be the first to the guillotine.

"He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

Interestingly enough the original title for that work was intended to be "The Last Man in Europe." It was only commercial interests that drove it to "1984."

Yep, he shares those unmistakingly Russian takes once is while and they should come from somewhere. Wild guess would be some Russians hired to work in Space-X or another instance of gazprom money funneled through a son living in London investor types.

> One has to know Crimea used to be part of Russia

This is Europe. Everything was part of something else if you go back long enough. And in most cases not even that long.

It's also a phrase that barely existed on English-language Twitter before his tweet; you'd really wonder who he's getting this nonsense from.

You forgot something:

* One has to know Khruschev had been the head of the Ukrainian communist party before he became the head of the USSR

"Russian revanchist"

So the position that the Ukraine has to take Crimea back is 'Ukrainian revanchism'?

One would also not get your interpretation from, say, Wikipedia. Conveniently enough, they have an entire page on Crimea in the post-Soviet era. [1] Quoting that page:

* "With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence the majority ethnic Russian Crimean peninsula was reorganized as the Republic of Crimea, after a 1991 referendum with the Crimean authorities pushing for more independence from Ukraine and closer links with Russia. In 1995 the Republic was forcibly abolished by Ukraine with the Autonomous Republic of Crimea established firmly under Ukrainian authority. ..."

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There's an unfortunately (or fortunately for history buffs) large amount of history there. Here are some of the key events. One big one is a Crimean referendum in January 1991, that Wiki is indirectly referencing above. The other one is from December 1991, that the poster above is referencing:

* [2] January 1991: The USSR was still alive, but collapsing. Crimea, under Ukraine, under the USSR voted on reestablishing the Crimean Autonomous Soviet socialist Republic and participating in the New Union Treaty. The New Union Treaty was a failed USSR effort to reconstitute the USSR. In other words Crimea was voting to rejoin the USSR. It passed with 82% turnout and 94% approval.

* [3] March 1991: The first USSR referendum on the New Union Treaty was run. In Ukraine the wording was changed to also include joining the New Union Treaty being contingent upon a Ukrainian declaration of independence. This was more a cynical polling (in Ukraine) since independence and being part of the New Union would have been largely mutually exclusive. But it's important because it sets the stage for...

* [4] December 1st, 1991: The USSR still technically exists, but is in its death throes. Ukraine runs their independence referendum. All of Ukraine, including Crimea, votes yes. But not in the same way. Crimean voters were in a weird position. Thanks to the March referendum, Ukraine has left Crimea in a "heads I win, tails you lose" type scenario. You're supposed to vote yes to rejoin the USSR, but that's increasingly obviously not happening. Voting no makes it legally impossible to rejoin the USSR. 41% of Crimeans do not vote, 37% vote yes, 22% vote no. So "yes" wins. This was most certainly not a vote about joining Ukraine instead of Russia.

* December 8th, 1991: Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian leaders secretly meet in Western Belarus. They sign the Belavezha accords, declaring an official death of the Soviet Union.

And that's far from the end, but it's far enough for this little segment of history.

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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea_in_the_post-Soviet_era_...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_refer...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_re...

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