Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 5

 

[Below is the fifth part of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” my account of a trip I took with my high school 57 years ago.  This installment covers my arrival in Kiev, then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the original constituent republics of the U.S.S.R. 

[(Today, despite the unprovoked invasion by the Russian Federation that started in February 2022, Ukraine is a sovereign and independent nation and the capital city is now called Kyiv, its Ukrainian name rather than its Russian one.)

[Part 5 of the journal starts with the entry for 20 April 1965, our arrival in Kyiv from Leningrad.  I cover the continuation of my visa problem with Hungary and a meeting two of my friends and I had with the pen-pal of one of them.  I also report on some of the historical and cultural sights we visited in Kiev.

[At the end of this section, I sum up my impressions of the Soviet Union and its people—from the perspective of a teenager in 1965.  It was not only a world very different from ours today, but one that no longer even exists.

[Any readers of ROT who’ve just joined this thread are urged to go back to 23 May and start with Part 1 and then pick up Parts 2 through 4, posted on 26 and 29 May and 1 June, before continuing with this section.  You’ll find many identifications and explanations that will pertain to this installment but which I haven’t repeated.]

KIEV, UKRAINIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC (U.S.S.R.)

Tuesday, 20 April – 1:55 p.m. – Kiev, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic [now Kyiv, Ukraine]

[Historical Notes and Current Events: When I visited Kiev, now officially called Kyiv, the Ukrainian spelling, since 1991, it was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Indeed, with the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), the Ukrainian SSR was one of the first republics to establish the U.S.S.R. in 1922.

[In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the former Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and Russian SFSR formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, the replacement of the defunct U.S.S.R.  (Ukraine largely ceased to participate in CIS in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea, and withdrew representatives from all statutory bodies of CIS in 2018 as a result of the war in Donbas.)

[With the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russian insurgency in Donbas, both in 2014, tension between Ukraine and the Russian Federation since the second presidential term of Vladimir Putin (2012-present) has steadily increased until on 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

[The Russo-Ukrainian war was actually unprovoked, but Putin’s propaganda offered justification by, first, denying the existence of Ukraine as an independent nation and declaring that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and, second, asserting that the elected government of Ukraine must be overthrown on the pretext that it was run by “Nazis” (see my remarks on the longstanding paranoia of Russia above in the entry for 17 April in Part 4).

[I’m not even going to address the absurd notion that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (b. 1978; 6th President of Ukraine, 2019-present), who’s Jewish, and his government are Nazis.  As far Putin’s second “argument” to justify his invasion of Ukraine, however, the statement he made on 12 July 2021, that Ukraine isn’t a legitimately sovereign state was such an obviously made-up story that no one could take it seriously, but one fact kept repeating in my head.

[Leaving aside for the moment anything concerning Ukraine’s history, its status as a nation and a people is supported in large measure by the fact that the Ukrainian language is different from Russian.  Not only are the vocabulary, spelling, idioms, and grammar different—it’s not just a matter of accent and pronunciation like Siberian Russian, say—but the two tongues have different alphabets.

[They’re both Cyrillic—but, then, so are Bulgarian and Serbian.  Ukrainian has some different letters than Russian.  (That’s why the Russian name for the capital city is Kiev (Киев. pronounced KEY-ev) and the Ukrainian name is Kyiv (Київ, pronounced KEEV).  In the two languages, the names don’t look alike; one of the four letters in the Ukrainian name doesn’t even exist in the Russian alphabet.

[Insofar as the history of the region is concerned, the people who became the Slavs of Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia (now Belarus) were the Kievan Rus, a Norse people who swept down from northern Europe starting in the 9th century and established a realm in the area around what is now Kyiv before spreading north to what became Belarus and east to Muscovy/Russia.

[In other words—and I know I’m being simplistic here—if Ukraine was never a state, then neither was Russia since it was formed by the people of the Kievan Rus, the original eastern Slav realm.  (I don’t know who the Norsemen displaced in what became the Kievan Rus, probably nomadic tribes, assuming anyone lived there, but I don’t know their origins/ethnicity.) 

[In any case, modern-day Russia is historically an offshoot of modern-day Ukraine, not the other way around.  When Moscow was founded in 1147, Kyiv was already 665 years old!  Ukrainians were erecting magnificent churches when Muscovites were building rude little wood huts.]

I am now sitting in my room [at the Hotel Intourist] in Kiev.  The group has left [for Budapest by train at 12:26 p.m., arriving at 10:58 a.m. on the 21st]; I will pick them up again in Vienna [they were due to arrive by train at 7:55 p.m. on the 22nd].  I fly there tomorrow [the 21st] at 12:00 [noon].

[Intourist (Интурист, a contraction of иностранный турист [inostrannyi turist], ‘foreign tourist’) was the official travel agency for foreign tourists in the Soviet Union from 1929 until the fall of the communist regime in 1992.  It was privatized that year.  It ran hotels in most Soviet cities, eventually owning over 100.]

We arrived in Kiev yesterday [Monday, 19 April] late morning [actually, at 1:05 p.m., according to the trip itinerary], and had lunch.  After lunch, we had a short tour of Kiev.  I got all the mess of my visa as cleared up as I could—arrangements to fly to Vienna.

Kiev was much too rushed.  We saw the Saint Sophia Cathedral and Aleksandrovsky Park with its view of Kiev, the monument to the unknown soldier, and one to the revolutionists.

[Named after the 6th-century Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in Istanbul (then Constantinople), Saint Sophia Cathedral was dedicated to the Holy Wisdom, a concept in Christian theology, rather than a specific saint named Sophia.  The foundations were first laid in 1037 or 1011, but the cathedral took two decades to complete.

[An architectural monument of Kievan Rus and a Ukrainian heritage site, in 1934, Soviet authorities confiscated the structure from the church and designated it as an architectural and historical monument-museum.

[Now, I had a little difficulty reconciling what I wrote next above and the facts on the ground.  There doesn’t, in fact, seem to have been an Aleksandrovsky Park in Kiev in 1965 (or anytime in the city’s history).  No variation of that name appears in any reference I found.  I even looked for parks or gardens whose names changed after 1992.

[Aleksandrovsky is a Russian name—and there is an Aleksandrovskiy Park in Saint Petersburg and several other Russian towns.  But in Kiev, there is an Oleksandriya Arboretum (or Dendropark Oleksandriya) on the outskirts of the city.  Oleksandriya is a Ukrainian name derived from Aleksandra (in Ukrainian: Oleksandra)

[Ukraine’s largest landscaped park, it’s dotted with glades, bridges, cafes, gazebos, ponds, and sculptures.  (At 495 acres, the Oleksandriya Arboretum is a little smaller than the Principality of Monaco, or about three-fifths the size of New York City’s Central Park.)  The arboretum, laid out in the middle of the 18th century, derives its name from Countess Aleksandra Branitskaya (1754-1838), a lady-in-waiting to Empress Catherine the Great.

[Ukraine’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, dedicated to the soldiers of the Red Army killed in World War II, is inside the Park of Eternal Glory.  The tomb was opened on 6 November 1957, on the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution. 

[The Monument of the Great October Revolution was a Soviet monument located in what in 1965 was called Kalinin Square (now Independence Square).  It was dismantled in 1991.]

In the evening, before dinner, we discovered that [my schoolmate] David’s correspondent, whom he was supposed to meet in Moscow, had followed him to Kiev (near where she lives).  We met her and talked about everything from literature to Khrushchev and everything in between.  I hope we cleared up some things about the States, like the charity lines of the unemployed collecting their few pennies and the children working in factories from a very early age.

We arranged to meet again before dinner, and went again to Aleksandrovsky Park [Oleksandriya Arboretum?].  We saw another incident of hoodlumism there—a girl and boy having a fight; she had a black eye.

[David was among my schoolmates at Ecolint, the son of the Indian ambassador to Ghana.  David was studying Russian on his own—like me at the time—and had a Russian pen-pal, a student at a Moscow university; I forget which one now, as well as what she was studying.

[In Moscow, my Ecolint roommate, Mark; David; and I were supposed to meet David’s pen-pal, but our schedule kept changing and we couldn’t connect.  (The changing schedule was a tactic the Soviets used to keep Westerners like us from making contact with local citizens.)

[In addition to our sightseeing in Kiev, David worked at making contact with his pen-pal.  This time, he was successful—she lived near Kiev and had taken a break from her university in Moscow—and the three of us went off to meet her before dinner the evening we arrived, Monday, the 19th. 

[We met at the apartment of a friend of hers.  This whole episode was unusual because, not only did we contrive to meet, but we were successful and we met at a private residence.  How we, a trio of foreign teenagers, managed to accomplish that, I have no idea.  I suppose it was just a matter of dumb luck: we didn’t know any better, so we just did it!  

[David’s correspondent and her friend—and, I recall, another young man—and the three of us sat in the apartment living room and after introducing ourselves, we started talking.  The conversation was in English; all three students had been learning English—practically a requirement for Soviet university students in those days.  

[We started off talking about literature—I don’t recall the topic—Nikita Khrushchev, who’d been deposed as Soviet leader just the previous October, and a range of other subjects.  Then the questions we fielded got far more curious than any casual conversation we’d been having.

[The first thing that David’s correspondent brought up was the social situation in the U.S. as they had learned about it.  “Is it true,” she asked, “that there are lines of unemployed in all the cities where the workers collect their few pennies?”  They also asked about the children as young as 8 working in the factories.

[Mark and I practically gasped!  This is actually what she and her peers were being taught in school—including university.  We explained that her image was from the Depression, 30 year earlier.  She had probably been seeing old newsreels or movies like The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and been told they were current events! 

[I don’t know if she believed us or dismissed our explanations and protests as propaganda and the naïvete of youth, but we moved on.

[Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s Republican presidential candidacy in 1964 had worried Europeans of all stripes.  Soviet university students were no exception.  The first thing they wanted to know was how a man could be nominated by his party like Goldwater (1909-98; U.S. Senator from Arizona: 1953-65, 1969-87) and then not win.  They literally couldn’t comprehend the U.S. political system, especially the notion of primary elections and party nominations.

[The Soviet system, of course, was different from both ours here in the States and the one common to parliamentary democracies.  Almost all European democracies had parliamentary systems in which the country’s head of government takes office when her or his party wins a majority in the legislature.  

[In the communist world, no candidate was named unless chosen by the central party establishment.  There was no opposition party to put up a rival candidate, and if there was any opposition within the ruling party, it was settled out of sight of the public.

[The Soviet premier, usually the same as the General Secretary of the Communist Party, wasn’t elected at all, not even in a show election.  I mean, of course, a “popular” election; the Politburo selected the country’s leader, sometimes ousting the existing leader (Leonid Brezhnev [1906-82] succeeding Khrushchev in 1964) and sometimes after his death in office (Yuri Andropov [1914-84] succeeding Brezhnev in 1982).

[In other words, there was no such thing as a losing candidate, since the election’s outcome was predetermined and only one candidate was on the ballot.  So how could a Barry Goldwater even exist?  We tried our best to explain how this worked, but I didn’t know how successful we were.  

[It didn’t help, I’m sure, that we were all only about 17-18 years old—and only two of us were American—so none of us was even eligible to vote.  (The 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allowed 18-year-olds to vote in federal elections, wasn’t ratified until 1971.)  Besides, anything we told our friend’s pen-pal could be written off as propaganda.

[If it hadn’t been so absurd—less Kafkaesque, perhaps, than Beckettian—it might have been frightening.  I mean, here were three university students, presumably members of the Soviet intellectual elite, believing things that weren’t only untrue but based on a 30-year-old catastrophe—what’s more, a worldwide catastrophe that affected even Europe.]

I just had lunch with some guides (I think), one of whom spoke English.  They talked mostly among themselves, but they asked me a few questions.

[When it came time to leave Kiev on the 21st, things got sticky for me.  I remind readers again that I was all of 18 and spoke a tiny bit of Russian and no Ukrainian.  With no more luck with the Hungarian visa in Kiev than we had in Leningrad, the Ecolint group had no choice but to get me on a plane non-stop to Vienna so I could leap over Hungary. 

[With the intervention of Intourist, which was responsible for all such tourist matters, I had a seat for the day after the group left by train for Budapest early in the morning of 20 April. 

[While I had an Intourist agent to look after/keep tabs on me in Kiev after the school group left, I’d be solo in Vienna.  That didn’t faze me because, first, I was used to traveling in Europe on my own by this time, I wasn’t a little boy, and I spoke German by this time.  In addition, should the need arise, I could always go to the U.S. embassy in Vienna and have them contact my dad at the embassy in Bonn, where he was by this date posted (explanation shortly).

[There was little I could do in Kiev for the half day or so when I was on my own.  The Intourist agent didn’t stay with me; she just checked in in the morning and made arrangements to pick me up that afternoon to get to the airport for my flight.  So I just walked around in the area of the hotel.

[Window shopping was all I could do because the first consequence of this ad hoc plan became clear almost immediately.  I had little pocket money.  After purchasing the plane ticket, Mr. Brunst collected all the remaining rubles—they wouldn’t be needing them anymore since they couldn’t take them out of the Soviet Union and, even if they did, they couldn’t spend the rubles since no one in the West accepted Soviet Bloc currency, and they couldn’t exchange them for schillings (Austrian currency until the introduction of the Euro in 1999) or any other Western money—and turned them over to me.  But it was just a few rubles, enough for me to buy some lunch and something to drink later while I was waiting for my plane.

[So I wandered around and amused myself—or assuaged myself, if you prefer—by singing the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” over and over to myself.  The movie had only been released in Europe in July 1964, less than a year before the trip to Eastern Europe.  The songs from the film were in all our heads—probably with the help of Keats French and his rock ’n’ roll guitar.]

It’s fitting that on my last day in the U.S.S.R. I should put down my thoughts on the Russian people.

These people are poor.  That’s no bull or propaganda.  It is the truth.  They are equal, but poor.  Of course, no Russian would say so, because they believe they are not poor, and by their standards, they’re not.  But it is true.  Facts from a Russian herself: the average monthly income is ₽60-80 [$66-88 at the official rate]—that’s only a little over the point at which Americans pay no taxes: $50 a month.

Their clothes are, in my mind, horrible.  It’s mostly true in women’s clothing and men’s shoes.  Some manage, by taste alone, to fix up a little, but it’s not easy.  The best-dressed people in the U.S.S.R. are the cops.

The manners of these people are nonexistent.  Not only do they push and shove in crowded places, but on the street they refuse to move for anything.  If I were to walk a straight line down a sidewalk, I would run into someone, because they won’t move.  And they look right at you, and cross in front of you only in time to make you pull up abruptly—staring at you the whole time.

And  staring: even the Germans are more discreet!  Everyone stares at me in this place.  One man even turned completely around while following me with his eyes.

And they don’t bother to wait for someone [ahead] to go through a door first—they try to go through with them.

And one thing which has nothing to do with my being a foreigner: every one spits in the street!  Everyone.  Ptui—big gobs of it all over the sidewalk.  One man almost spat on me.

[We saw a similar phenomenon in China (see “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980 – Part 3,” 30 December 2021, entry for 26 December 1980); however, respiratory problems were rampant there—and the Chinese supplied spittoons at sidewalk corners all over the cities.]

Another thing: I don’t know how these people know where to go for something in a store.  When they say “department store,” they mean not a store with separate departments for each [type of] good, but a big store divided into “departments,” but everything is spread out everywhere anyway.  For instance—shoes may be on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th floors—the same shoes.  And this is true in food stores as well.

Of course, the people have no money to spend on anything anyway, so why worry?  Just one example: a TV set cost ₽180 [$198 at the official exchange rate], but the average [monthly] wage is only ₽80 [$88] at most anyway, so they scrimp and save for a while to buy a TV, and [then] start on something else.

Of course, their money is a mess, too.  On the official rate, 1 ruble [₽] is worth $1.10 approximately, but it has only the buying power of 1 franc Swiss [about 23¢ in 1965].  Screwy, n’est-ce pas?

In general, the people here are not as bad off as some newspapers imply—they are not starving in the street, but they are not as well off as they would have us believe.

[The next and last installment of my chronicle, “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 6,” will be published on Tuesday, 7 June, beginning with the entry for 21 April 1965.  That picks up with my departure from Kiev and the Soviet Union and all that that entailed; my arrival in Vienna, Austria, to await the rest of the group from Budapest, Hungary; my flight home to Bonn, Germany; and my return to Geneva, Switzerland.

[I invite ROTters to come back for the conclusion of the account next week and read the wrap-up of what I still feel, nearly three decades later, was an extraordinary experience.]