Ready To Cast Off

By JAMES CARNEY YALTA

Patches of snow still glimmer on the craggy mountains above, but on the Black Sea coast of the Crimean peninsula summer has arrived. In Yalta the terraced stone walls of the old town are draped in purple wisteria and wild yellow roses, and the first wave of tourists has come to stroll among the palmettos, ! cypresses and golden rain trees lining the town's crooked streets. Though it was not far from Yalta that Mikhail Gorbachev spent three days under house arrest last August during the coup attempt, the resort is best remembered as the site where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin convened to redraw the map of Europe. That was 47 years ago, when the Crimea fell unquestionably within the Kremlin's empire and only dreamers wasted time imagining a world without the Soviet Union.

But the unimaginable has since come to pass, and now the Crimea is at the center of a bitter territorial row between Russia and Ukraine that threatens to destroy the fragile Commonwealth of Independent States and make enemies out of two nuclear-armed nations. In the Crimean capital of Simferopol, ethnic Russians gather daily outside the local parliament building to accuse Ukrainian leaders of disregard for their right to self-determination. In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 400 miles away, thousands have converged in recent weeks to protest Moscow's "imperialist" designs on the Crimea, which is part of Ukraine but has a Russian majority. "Until we have independence, the Crimea will always be a vassal of Kiev," says Antonina Alekseyeva, a pro- Russian demonstrator in Simferopol. "All lies," retorts Nikolai Filipovich, an ethnic Ukrainian standing a few steps away.

The debate revolves around an ironic tribute to the two states' shared history. In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev transferred the region from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Republic as a "gift" commemorating 300 years of Russian-Ukrainian unity. But the transfer was largely symbolic. Moscow's writ still ran in the Crimea, just as it did in the time of the Czars. Since last year, however, when Kiev started agitating for independence, Russians in Crimea launched a movement to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk tried to slow the movement, warning that "there can be no guarantee that events in the Crimea will not lurch out of control and that human blood will not be spilled." But the Crimean parliament ignored him and last month passed a resolution calling for a referendum on independence. The response from Kiev was swift: the Ukrainian parliament declared the Crimean resolution unconstitutional, and government officials hinted that the Crimean legislature might be dissolved and direct rule from Kiev imposed.

Under pressure, Crimean leaders backed down and rescinded the resolution, & but not before Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, the Kremlin's standard-bearer for increasingly influential Russian nationalists, blasted Ukrainian politicians for portraying Russia as "an insidious empire" and trying to break up the Commonwealth. "The referendum in Crimea must be held, and no one can ban it with force or with threats," Rutskoi insisted in a newspaper article. Two days later, in a closed-door session, the Russian parliament upped the ante by voting to annul the 1954 transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine as "an illegal act" of the Communist Party and called for negotiations between Kiev and Moscow to decide the peninsula's status.

The parliament in Kiev last week rejected the Russian allegations, but the Ukrainians did agree in concert with Crimean leaders to grant the region special economic status. But Kravchuk's government, which depends on support from Ukrainian nationalists in parliament, has flatly defined the Crimean problem as "an internal affair" that does not concern foreign states. "There will never be negotiations," says Vladimir Kryzhanovsky, Ukraine's ambassador to Moscow. To negotiate, he argues, would open a Pandora's box by calling into question all the myriad treaties and border determinations made during 74 years of Soviet rule. "If we negate everything that was done under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, then we must negate all existing borders," he says. "And that could only lead to a new world war."

As if the issue weren't complicated enough, the Tatars, who controlled the Crimea until 1783 when the Turkish Khanate was defeated by Catherine the Great, are staking a claim to their native land. Deported across the eastern Soviet Union en masse in 1944 after Stalin accused them of collaborating with the Nazis, the Crimean Tatars have been returning by the tens of thousands in the past two years. With support from Kiev, which views them as a buffer against the Russian majority, some 200,000 Tatars have started building houses across the peninsula on state-owned land.

Though their leaders favor retaining the Crimea's status as part of Ukraine, many Tatars in the new settlements are ambivalent. "I came because this is my home," says Mimyet Vileyev, 34, who arrived in the Crimea two years ago for the first time in his life. "I don't believe what any of the politicians say," he remarks with a shrug. "It's their fight."

The arms that could be used raise international concerns. Though Ukraine has + pledged to withdraw the remaining 176 Soviet strategic missiles on its territory and become a non-nuclear state by 1994, some nationalist parliamentarians have suggested holding on to the 46 weapons not targeted for destruction under the start treaty as a lever to get the West's attention and respect. Concerned that bickering between Kiev and Moscow might degenerate into a violent conflict, the West has been pressuring both sides to come to terms peacefully. Russian President Boris Yeltsin recently took a step in that direction, announcing that Moscow had dropped its insistence that the 380-ship Black Sea Fleet, based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, was a "strategic force" that should fall under joint Commonwealth command.

Wrangling over the Black Sea force has poisoned Russian-Ukrainian relations for months, with Kiev demanding at least 30% of the fleet as the foundation for a new national navy and Moscow refusing to yield. Now, following Yeltsin's announcement, a commission will be created to decide how to divide up the fleet equitably.

Even as the Black Sea Fleet dispute heads toward resolution, larger issues continue to strain ties between the two states -- including the overall future of the Crimea and Kiev's resistance to Russia's taking the lead on economic reforms. Specially printed Ukrainian coupons, designed as a temporary currency to phase out use of the Soviet ruble, circulate freely in the republic. In Yalta's shops, cashiers give change in a random mix of coupons and rubles that leaves the buyer guessing about the value of both.

By July 1, Kiev plans to replace the ruble completely with a new national currency, a move certain to disrupt already weakened trade links between Ukraine and the rest of the Commonwealth. Critics argue that by insulating Ukraine from Russia, Kravchuk is trying to avoid the kind of radical market reforms demanded by international lending organizations. Kiev counters by arguing that economic subordination to Russia is a drag on Ukraine's development as a sovereign state.

Many Russians in the Crimea fear that a Ukrainian currency would cut them off completely from the Russian state and relegate them to second-class status in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians, meanwhile, guard their newly won sovereignty jealously and harbor deep suspicions about the giant neighbor to the east that ruled their nation for three centuries and now professes democratic principles. "Imperial tendencies are prevailing again in Russia," warns - Ukraine's Kryzhanovsky, "tendencies based on the law of might, not the law of reason."

Kravchuk and Yeltsin are scheduled to meet in the near future to try to put aside the acrimony and mistrust of recent months. It was Russia and Ukraine, together with Belarus, that united last December to forge the Commonwealth and bury the Soviet Union. Without the cooperation of Kiev and Moscow, the C.I.S. will surely fail. It may fail anyway. But more troubling is the prospect of new violence in Europe, this time between two of the largest, and best armed, nations on the continent.