Tug of War in Crimea Reopening Old Wounds : Ethnic tension: Beloved Black Sea peninsula is once again caught in political cross-fire.

Those days of detention in Crimea were the most terrifying of his life for the man who would be the final president of the Soviet Union.

The house arrest of Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Aug. 19, 1991, while vacationing at his palatial dacha in the Crimean seaside resort of Foros, hastened the ultimate disintegration of the Soviet empire.

In the year since that failed coup, ethnic independence movements have threatened to create more than 15 new nations out of the former Soviet Union. Once again, Crimea is caught in political cross-fire.

Crimea--the beloved Black Sea peninsula whose sun-drenched coasts were a playground of czars and Communists--was born of the Golden Horde. It was ruled by Tatars, Muslim descendants of Genghis Khan’s invaders, before Russian Empress Catherine the Great seized it from the Ottoman Turks in 1783.

Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, accusing Crimean Tatars of German collaboration during World War II, exiled the entire population to Soviet Central Asia. In 1954 the presidium of the Supreme Soviet under Nikita S. Khrushchev gave Crimea to its Ukrainian republic, perhaps to honor three centuries of Russian-Ukrainian unity.

Now Russia and Ukraine are separate nations. Russia has lost Crimea, and the once-banished Tatars want to reclaim their homeland.

Crimea stirs souls: Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar. Will Crimea emerge as its own country? Will it rejoin Russia? Or will it remain with Ukraine, but with much greater autonomy?

The peninsula’s 2.5 million people are predominantly Russian, followed by Ukrainians and then Tatars. Each nationality has its crusading organization: the pro-Russian Republican Movement of Crimea, the pro-Ukrainian Crimea with Ukraine, and the Crimean-Tatar Nationalist Movement and the Majhlis of the Crimean Tatars.

“Crimea will not likely be the catalyst for what to do about Russian-dominated regions that are now outside Russia,” said geographer Lee Schwartz of the U.S. State Department. “It’s the least volatile.”

The Ukrainian government “will bend over backward to do whatever Crimeans want as long as they say ‘Crimea, Ukraine,’ ” said Alexander Motyl, associate director of the Harriman Institute in New York City.

“Everything,” Motyl said, “hinges on the Russian Parliament,” which recently repealed Khrushchev’s 1954 gift. “If the Russian nationalists there press (President Boris N.) Yeltsin and push him into a corner on the Crimea, they could spoil everything for everybody. I’m pretty sure Ukraine will not give up the Crimea.”

“The Tatar problem is one neither Russians nor Ukrainians are interested in solving,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “To solve it, they would have to displace many of their own people. There’s not a lot of sympathy for Muslim Tatars.”

In June Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk resolved one potentially explosive conflict. They agreed in principle to divide up the old Soviet Black Sea Fleet, based at Crimea’s strategically situated port of Sevastopol.

Throughout Crimea’s centuries as a battleground, Sevastopol was the prize. The Crimean War (1853-56) was fought mainly around the peninsula’s principal port.

Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey had declared war on Russia to thwart Russian designs on the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire, which Czar Nicholas I called “the sick man of Europe.”

During the siege of Sevastopol, Britain’s doomed Light Brigade ran head-on into Russian gunners. The heroic incident near Balaklava was immortalized in poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

During Sevastopol’s siege, Florence Nightingale, English founder of modern nursing, emerged as the heroine of the Crimean War.

The Russians surrendered Sevastopol in 1855, and the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war in 1856.

During World War II, when the Red Army retook Sevastopol to end Germany’s Crimean occupation, Russian soldiers crossed the harbor any way they could--even in coffins that the Germans had waiting for their dead.

Sevastopol was “a corpse of a city, the deadest city in Russia,” wrote Eddy Gilmore, one of the first war correspondents to enter recaptured Crimea, in April, 1945.