Komsomol love in Kiev

  
Focus: Komsomol girls 1971

When I was a student in Kiev, in 1984-5, my girlfriend was an Intourist guide and a member of the Komsomol. She was 19 and I was 20 something. She was amazing. She had blond hair and blue eyes and she was a Zolotayka. A gold medal winner from school.

She was concerned that I didn't have any manners. So she proceeded to teach me some. How to behave on a bus. How to behave at a restaurant. How to walk in the street (hands clasped in a special way) and how to have fun decently.

Now I was a son of third world revolutionaries and exiles, so I was trying to see all the good there was to see in the what was then the Soviet Union and Olga, that was her name, seemed like a pretty wonderful achievement of a new society to me.

So I was surprised by how unenthusiastic everyone seemed at a festival of international solidarity, There were the Africans and the Latin Americans and the Afghanis and Iraquis and Vietnamese. But noone seemded particularly enthusiastic. There were red and yellow balloons tethered to tables and cups of a sweet brown bubbly liquid with no ice that tasted like the tea dispensed on Douglas Adam's space ships. Almost-quite-but-not quite-exactly-unlike-Coke.

As we wandered with subliminated sexual energy around the Pecherskii Lavra and in the intervals when Olga wasn't singing me revolutionary songs or trying to mould me into a Soviet gentleman - polyester tie and suit and black shoes and all, I had to talk about something so I talked about the political situation in South Africa.

Now most people n those days had the disconcerting experience of meeting Soviet drunks at airports who used to suddenly say strange things like:

"South Africa. Now they've got things right. I want to emigrate there. White people should dominate the blacks."

So perhaps that was a bit of a giveaway even on a cursory visit. There were a lot of racists about in the Soviet Union. They'd talk to anyone in transit.

So Olga, my "right on" Soviet Florence Nightingale, begins to tell me urban legends about how black students steal girls against their will and behave arrogantly as if they were kings and how she was appalled.

I was going to ditch her then and there. Instead I asked her. "Who told you all this?" Where did you hear these stories? "The Dezhurnaya" she said.

"My God Olga. You are a brilliant student and a good person. How can you come out with all this shit?"

She was sullen for quite sometime after that. But, luckily, some Cuban aircraft engineers decided to make friends with us. They did this by bringing us loads of Vodka. Whole sports bags full. And gradually we swung into party mode and Olga joined in and became good friends with the Cubans. It didn't bear thinking about them repairing the Aeroflot planes, but they were a lot of fun.

To cut a long story short. At the end of that particular visit she said to me: "Phil, you know what. I've learned a lot. I've learned that I like politics and that I am not a racist."

Then I realised that despite all her study and all her so called communist education, there was absolutely no evidence that she had ever learned to think critically by the Soviet education system. And to me that was the problem. People had been schooled to think in unison. Even when they thought they were all being independent minded - free thinkers. They all voted for Yeltsin together, they all thought with the fishes. This way. That way. This way.