Posted by Jim at April 29th, 2006

I went to Ukraine just three years after Chernobyl. It was May of 1989. Hope College’s Chapel Choir’s tour of the Soviet Union.

Tinanmen Square protests were on the television, but, the tanks wouldn’t roll in until after we got back to Holland, Michigan. It felt optimistic instead of doomed at the time. In November, the Berlin Wall would fall. An amazing year, all things considered.

While there, we went to Moscow (Red Square and the Kremlin), to Petersburg (then Leningrad), Estonia, and Ukraine. As absurd as it seems to bring a choir to that part of the world (they’ve got a massive choral tradition of their own), the tour was mostly an excuse to go to the Soviet Union now that restrictions were loosening up.

Details blend together. I’m no longer completely sure what exactly we did in which place, but, I know we went to Kiev. We saw the Golden Gate (of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition). We heard rumors about Chernobyl.

Even three years later, people still told stories about it. Almost 20 years later, I don’t remember them, but I remember hearing about them. Kiev was the place where I had the most direct connection to blackmarketeers of the entire trip.

In order to understand why I would have any connection to the Ukrainian black market, you have to understand the economic situation in the Soviet Union at the time. It was a state controlled economy. When you came into the country, you would change money, getting a ruble for every 62 cents (I think). You were told that they would keep track of the money that you spent and you would get in trouble if money was not accounted for.

You could, however, spend money at the special stores for tourists (and officially this was the only place that you could spend foreign money…). These stores sold a variety of things that you simply could not buy unless you had foreign currency. Between the stores and the possibility of buying other things from foreigners (like blue jeans), the Soviet Union’s citizens were very interested in foreign currency. While the official exchange rate was ridiculous, the unofficial exchange rate was closer to 10 rubles for one dollar. I remember hearing that one person had actually been offered 17 rubles per dollar.

In any case, a group of us went exploring in Kiev with no particular plan in mind. This was good because none of us spoke either Russian or Ukrainian. We ran into a couple black marketeers at a subway station as we tried to work out where we were going next.

Meeting them made that leg of the trip. They showed us the city (they knew english). We dropped by one of their apartments and drank one evening (we saw Tinanmen Square on tv). We went to an opera (I’ve no idea which one). We also rowed out to a small island in the Dnieper river and inspected merchandise.

They offered us the usual assortment of touristy pins and buttons (picturing local spots). They also sold fur hats and a few other things–like gas masks. That was a legacy of Chernobyl. Apparently a lot of people bought gas masks after the accident.

I traded a pack of lifesavers for a pin and was amused to find the individual lifesavers used to sweeten coffee when we visited their apartment the next day.

After meeting them on the island, I think I may have gone swimming in the river, wondering all the while what pollutants were in it.

The black marketeers seemed like interesting guys. One had served in the army and had been sent to Poland during his service (probably during the crackdown after the rise of Solidarity). The other had pretended to be insane and thus obtained a deferment. They worked together, doing their best to avoid the attention of both the authorities and the Russian mafia–which was growing stronger now that the Soviet Union was getting less authoritarian.

I sometimes wonder what they’re doing now. I don’t even remember their names–assuming that I ever knew their true names.

Well anyway, that’s what I remember about my own experience of Ukraine. One of these days I ought to write up an account of the whole trip (and find the pictures). There were some more exciting parts than I’ve mentioned here. For example, I ended up sheltering some high school students in my hotel room one night in Leningrad when the police took away a friend of theirs. It is too long a story to write now.

Still, it was cool to go when we did and fun to remember it–even if the memory was prompted by Chernobyl’s twentieth anniversary.