In the summer of 1980, a few days after the Moscow Olympics ended, my family and I arrived in Ukraine for a holiday. My father, for reasons that are still unknown, went to the USSR a few times during the 1980s, always on his own. But that year he took us!
We departed Gatwick on an ancient Aeroflot aircraft, with seats that slid around on runners to enable quick conversion for military use, down to Simferopol in what is now Russian-occupied Ukraine. The wide road from the airport to Yalta, our final destination, was almost empty aside from a constant stream of military vehicles in the other direction, depositing young Soviet conscripts for the war against the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan.
Waking in Ukraine to a very different way of life
At the hotel, we ‘westerners’ were separated from Soviet bloc guests on a floor of our own, with an ever-watchful babushka sitting at the end of the corridor, monitoring our comings and goings. I vividly remember my small Snoopy doll going missing from our bedroom and the radio that could never be clicked off. Downstairs in the huge dining room, we were again segregated, being served after a contingent of East Germans, who had better food. I had so many gherkins on that holiday that I have never eaten another one since!
On a blisteringly hot summer morning, my brother and I were taken, both slightly apprehensive, to Artek Young Pioneer camp up in the hills above Yalta. The Young Pioneers were similar to the Woodcraft Folk, and most young people in the Soviet Union joined. Artek was their best-known camp and only the most academically able young people from the USSR were invited to attend. The day started with singing. Not speaking a word of Russian, we were, of course, unable to join in. I remember helping to make a campfire in the forest and later baking either bread or cakes.
We were shown what they wanted us to see
The heat of the Ukrainian summer was relentless and the day at the collective farm was the same. We seemed to walk for hours in the heat, nodding and smiling at solemn ‘workers’. I discovered later that this was a ‘model collective farm’ with lots of crops on ‘show’ during a time of food shortages in the USSR.
Our hosts were also very keen to show us Livadia Palace, where Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt discussed the end of WW2. It was a very gentle, peaceful place where we took afternoon tea under huge wisteria trees and walked around the well-kept gardens interspersed with statues of Lenin, which I thought slightly incongruous, bearing in mind the palace’s history.
We have never returned to Ukraine
For a variety of reasons, neither my brother nor I have ever returned to this place of such intense memories. The appalling current situation in Ukraine tinges the memory of that summer spent with friendly people in a beautiful landscape with sadness, but also with hope: that the country will rise again as it has before and that it will, once again, become a country well worth a visit. I do hope so.
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