Briefly: Sebastopol
Arright, so by now we have sailed all the way down the Dnpr or Nypr (whichever way you want to pronounce it) and are on the Crimean peninsula.
First stop, Sevastopol, the capital of the Black Sea fleet. I had no idea that Sebastopol was in the Ukraine (nor Yalta). As it turns out, the Crimea is mostly ethnically Russian and Crimean Tatar but was gifted to the Ukraine by Krushchev during Soviet times.
We were greeted by these guys:
Took a tour of this diorama (my new favourite diorama)
Were entertained in the evening by these guys
Saw a lot of these guys
Once again, Mom and I (this time with several people joining us) took as many chances as we could to run away from the boat and eat caviar and "Diversity of fishes" and "Vodka appetizer" and champanski.
4 comments:
Tatiana told me about the gifting of Crimea, an hilariously stupid move on Kruschev's part. A gift from one SSR to another! Which doesn't cost him anything, because the USSR will never break up, right?
Yeah. Maybe it was also a gesture of apology for forcibly starving eight million Ukrainians.
I've been reading about this for half an hour now, trying to convince myself that the famine either did or didn't have anything to do with it, so I can make a dry remark about Soviets and Tatars, but I've decided that I'm way over my head. To be clear, I don't think Crimea being part of the Ukraine is stupid. I just suspect Kruschev misunderstood that he was really actually giving it away.
I agree. Interestingly, I found out when I was there that until 1991, Ukrainians our parents' age and younger had no idea the famine had happened, and first started learning about it from foreign visitors. That's how terrorized the population was.
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