It's official, Crimea is Russian. In the words of Vladimir Putin, "In people's hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia." Indeed Russia said that in Sunday's referendum 97% of its participants, mostly ethnic Russians, insisted that to belong to the Great Russia versus Small Russia (Malorossiya, another name for Ukraine) had been their dream for 60 years since the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, my great-grandfather, transferred the peninsula's jurisdiction to Kiev. In his address to Parliament on March 18 announcing the annexation, Putin said that by this Khrushchev action Russia was not "simply robbed, it was plundered." There are many reasons for transfer that Putin could have outlined: administrative, economic, desire to overcome Joseph Stalin's legacy of central control. Yet he chose to say my great-grandfather was atoning for "the mass repressions of the 1930s in Ukraine."
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Putin says when Khrushchev handed Crimea to Ukraine, Russia was not "simply robbed, it was plundered"
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Nina Khrushcheva says it's unfair to blame her great-grandfather for the act - Stalin was the real villain, she says
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Further economic downturn is now inevitable, she says due to the economic sanctions imposed by the West
Khrushchev too thought that Ukraine and Russia were almost one -- after all a symbolic reason for the 1954 transfer was the 300th anniversary of the Ukrainian-@placeholder unification.