A public beach in Yalta, the Black Sea resort city in southern Crimea that is facing a tough summer if vacationers stay away.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times
YALTA,
Crimea — When choosing the idyllic setting for an extramarital affair,
Anton Chekhov opted for Yalta, and this seaside resort proved so
grateful that it erected a bronze statue of the fictional enchantress
with her Pomeranian on the main boardwalk.
Back
when “The Lady With the Dog” was published, Crimea’s southern coast
rivaled the French Riviera. Chekhov, who wrote several famous works in
his study here with its red walls and stained glass window, was
unequivocal in his enthusiasm.
“The
coast of Crimea is beautiful, cozy, and I like it better than the
Riviera,” he wrote more than 100 years ago, according to the permanent exhibition at his estate. “Yalta is better than Nice.”
That was perhaps the most famous endorsement of Crimea until President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia came along.
Having annexed the Black Sea peninsula
in March, Mr. Putin has since become the main promoter of it as a
Russian holiday destination, and for good reason. With its already
bedraggled economy flatlining, Crimea desperately needs a banner year in
tourism, its No. 1 industry.
Photo
Chess players on a Yalta promenade.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times
But
right now, the summer is looking like a washout, travel experts say.
Few Ukrainians and virtually no Westerners are expected any time soon.
“There
will be no tourist season this year,” fretted Lilia Ivanova, indicating
the quiet harbor near her tour agency. The first cruise ship scheduled
to visit this year, the M.S. Hamburg, steamed past without stopping. All
international flights were halted with the annexation.
Last
year, six million tourists visited Crimea — almost four million
Ukrainians, and the bulk of the rest Russians. About 12 percent were
Westerners from more than 200 cruise ships that docked in 2013,
according to tour operators. Virtually all of those dockings have been
canceled this year.
It
doesn’t help that Yalta — indeed, much of Crimea — fell prey first to
the Soviet penchant for concrete and then to the more modern plague of
endlessly homogeneous chain stores and apartment blocks. The place needs
a little work, and many here hope that the Kremlin will provide it.
In
April, Mr. Putin announced that he had ordered the price of round-trip
airplane tickets for vacationers from Russia slashed to $214, compared
with a normal fare of about $385 from Moscow, and subsidized train
tickets. State-run companies like Gazprom and Rosneft said they would
underwrite vacations for tens of thousands of employees.
Some
Russians who work for government-owned companies have told their
friends that they were ordered to vacation in Crimea this year.
State-run television inaugurated a relentless campaign plugging the
peninsula: Caves! Waterfalls! Palaces! Yuri Gagarin vacationed here!
(Gagarin, the first man in space, remains a Russian archetype, used to
plug almost any state goal.)
But even Mr. Putin spoke bluntly about the limits of its attractions.
“If
we don’t offer cheap tickets, people simply won’t go,” he said in
announcing the subsidies. “Given its current infrastructure, Crimea is
designed for people with small incomes.”
Sunshine,
agriculture and the dilapidated Black Sea fleet are the three main
pillars the Kremlin expects to exploit in its push to transform Crimea
into an economic success story that proves the benefits of Mother
Russia’s embrace. There has also been talk of casinos.
Propping
up Crimea will be a difficult, expensive effort. Russia has earmarked
$5 billion just to save the Black Sea fleet from the scrap heap.
Agricultural exports face transportation issues because the peninsula is
geographically remote from Russia.
A winery in the Crimean seaside resort of
Yalta has been around since Nicholas II. It has survived the 1917
revolution, two world wars and the fall of the Soviet Union. Now it
faces new uncertainty.
Credit James Hill for The New York Times
But
tourism presents some of the biggest challenges. After being the
playground of royalty, Crimea remained a cherished summer vacation
destination in the Soviet Union, as few Soviets were allowed to travel
abroad. It offered some of the only warm beaches available. So tourism
has long been a cornerstone of the economy.
Traditionally,
a vast majority of tourists arrived by train, with most Russians
crossing through Ukraine. For the past two months, however, television
news in Russia, monopolized by the state, has depicted Ukraine as
brimming with neo-Nazis bent on shedding Russian blood. The threat was
largely invented, but it frightened potential visitors.
Initially,
Russia and its allies running Crimea vowed to match, if not increase,
the number of tourists from last year, but they then began to scale back
expectations. The acting head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, was recently
quoted telling local reporters that the government expected at least
three million tourists.
As
if to hedge their bets, Mr. Putin and his allies wasted no time in
accusing Ukraine of benign neglect. Ukraine received Crimea from Moscow
in 1954, then ruled the area for 23 years after the 1991 collapse of the
Soviet Union. Moscow blames Kiev for every flaw, from the decrepit
ships Russia seized to low agricultural exports, which Mr. Putin said
dropped 60 percent under Ukrainian rule.
Russian
government inspectors, the president lamented during a recent national
television broadcast, found Crimea’s hotels and resorts terribly shabby.
Photo
The winery’s courtyard.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times
“Some
of these, if not all, cannot be used under Russian sanitary and
epidemiological standards,” Mr. Putin said. (This in a place once famous
for sanitariums.)
He
went on: “When they asked how former vacationers could have put up with
this sort of quality, they heard this odd, and shameful, answer: ‘It’s
O.K., we mostly had miners as guests here. It made no difference to
them; they’d down half a glass of vodka and go to the beach.’ But we
can’t take this approach with Russian vacationers.”
Tour
operators said the legions of Russian tourists wanting to lounge could
find far nicer beaches, bigger buffets and better hotels in convenient,
inexpensive destinations like Turkey or Egypt, safely distant from the
urban unrest in those countries.
“The
whole idea of tourism in this area is a little different,” said Sergei
V. Ivashin, the young general director of a Moscow franchise for Pegas
Touristik, a major Russian tour operator. “Crimea is not for people who
want to lie on the beach in Egypt and eat eight meals a day, but people
who want to see the culture and history of their own land, their own
country. We are aiming for those kinds of nationalist tours.”
There
is plenty of Russian history here. The biggest draw, with 782,000
visitors in 2013, according to the Tourism Ministry, is Livadia, the
Italian Renaissance palace the last czar, Nicholas II, erected in 1911.
Photo
The cellar containing the winery's historical collection.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times
But Crimea has definitely seen better times.
Take
Chekhov’s home. The writer settled here in 1898, drawn, like so many,
to treat his tuberculosis. He built a modest white house.
He
wrote “The Cherry Orchard” and “Three Sisters” here, among other works.
Sergei Rachmaninoff accompanied the opera bass Fyodor Chaliapin on
Chekhov’s black upright piano. Leo Tolstoy visited. Unlike many Russian
museums ransacked during the 1917 revolution, this one still has
authentic furnishings because Chekhov’s sister and his widow lived here
for decades after his death in 1904.
But
giant apartment towers have encroached on Chekhov’s unbroken view of
the sea and have badly affected the house itself. When cracks developed
about 18 months ago, museum officials went to court to stop the
construction of a nearby apartment building, guides said.
The
heady mix of literary, political and military history helped Mr. Putin
win wide support among Russians for taking Crimea back. Peddling its
beaches, however bedraggled, could lift that support even further. And
experts cite another factor in Crimea’s favor: warmth.
In
oft-frozen Russia, no ruler can really do wrong by adding hundreds of
miles of warm beachfront property, said Natalya V. Zubarevich, a
professor at Moscow State University who specializes in social and
political geography. “The result would not have been the same if he had
added Alaska.”
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