Traveling with a Communist

Traveling with a Communist

squirrel
October 31, 2009
My guide and driver during my visit to Sevastopol and Yalta was Alex, a former Soviet Union Naval Officer and Communist Party member. He is Ukrainian but he speaks more Russian than Ukrainian and also says that most people in Sevastopol and this area are more closely allied to old Mother Russia than to the Ukraine. It is easy to see why when in Sevastopol as there are still buildings left belonging to Russia and the Russian Black Sea Fleet is still stationed there. In fact, I went into Russia just down the street from the main square in Sevastopol. Didn't know it was so close, did you? Well, I didn’t either and luckily I didn’t need a visa to stroll through a small portion of "Russia on the Black Sea".

small church by WWII memorial
He told me many tales of when he was a Naval Officer and serving in the navy on the Black Sea and also just many tales of life when the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. It was all very interesting and I enjoyed the experience very much. He was a few years younger than me and it is amazing that so much was happening in the world when I could have been paying attention to it and just didn’t. It shows how different upbringings can be. My parents never taught us or showed us to be aware of what was going on around us and I have had to try to discover all this on my own and to pay attention to the world. He was raised during the Soviet Union times and was taught obedience to officers and party members and to be careful of what was going on around because someone might be KGB or maybe even worse. He didn’t talk too much about growing up other than a story about an argument with his father about the merits of Stalin. His father had fought under Stalin and been in the army when their only rations were the “sawdust bread”. This was bread made of sawdust, a tiny bit of flour, and water to mix it all together and keep it in one piece. No nutritional value at all and that was all they got on a daily basis so his father lost his teeth and his hair during that campaign. When my guide argued with his father about Stalin, his father had to believe that Stalin was a good man because otherwise his hardships and sacrifices would have been for nothing. Alex finally understood this and stopped arguing with his dad but it took awhile.

Vorontsov Palace
Alex went through the naval academy and got the highest marks in his class but didn’t join the Communist Party until he was nearly ready to graduate. They questioned him about this and possibly this might have affected his career. He served on different ships out of Sevastopol and in the Black Sea fleet and visited many different countries in Africa during his years as an officer. When he was still training as a cadet, he was put on board a submarine for a training voyage. The submarine, not nuclear, would submerge and a junior sailor would call out the levels of hydrogen to an older officer. At 4% mix, hydrogen can explode. He was watching and heard that they had reached a level of 2.8% and it was still climbing but at that time in the exercise, they were underneath another ship and could not surface. Finally they were able to surface and the level had risen to 3.5%. He swore to himself that he would never serve on a submarine.

soviet emblem over the winery
Later, as an officer, he opened his mouth once too many times to question his superior and was assigned to a different fleet. His “punishment” was to be sent to Vladivostok to serve but he requested instead to go to Kamchatka and so there he went and was immediately told to board a nuclear sub and spent the next 5 years serving on a submarine which he had hoped never to do. This included crawling out of the submarine through a torpedo tube as a training exercise to ensure the sub and the men were ready to put to sea.
Driving from Sevastopol to Yalta, you go over the summit of the hills at Baydarsky gate which used to be quite a popular spot for Soviet Union Naval officers. They’d hire a taxi from Sevastopol and drive down to the restaurant and spend time with buddies when off duty and wanting to be away from the wives. He says that as a Naval Officer, they lived very well indeed and this was a close destination and cheap.

soviet flag on the road
Balaclava, the secret submarine base that was started in 1953 and finished and used through the Cold War was something that he knew nothing about even though he was a submariner later. This was such a secret base that no one was allowed into this city without super special clearance and super special swearing of oaths to the Soviet Union. Now when you buy one of the small books about it, there is a photo of the base at that time. Alex says had you had this photo in your possession at any time during the Cold War, the KGB would have taken you away.
He was in the Navy for 25 years. He said that he would have been in much longer except the Soviet Union broke up and he was able to muster out in 1992 with a pension. They asked him to then join the Ukrainian Navy and he refused. I think it was because he was tired of being on submarines but also because he was tired of the bureaucracy and he wasn’t going to get any higher in rank. He said there was no way to get out of the Soviet Union navy. You just didn’t retire from the Soviet Union until you were about ready to fall down dead. Not his exact words but I paraphrase a lot as his English was pretty good but grammar needed work.
Early on he has asked to be stationed somewhere so that his language skills could be used, especially English. Like most military organizations and indeed a lot of company organizations, never say what you want because you won’t get it. He didn’t’ get any position to use his language skills ever but because he had them, he continued to take the test every year and received 10% extra pay for the skills. Another typical corporate example of mismanagement of personnel.
In Sevastopol and Yalta, I have seen more symbols of Communism and the Soviet Union and of Lenin than I ever saw when traveling in Russia. Sometimes I think Alex forgets that he is Ukrainian because he talks of Russia and Czarist Russia with fondness and indeed talks also of the Soviet Union with respect and fondness. I would say he had a great deal of respect for Lenin, not so much for Stalin, and a good deal of sorrow at the death of Czar Nicholas and his family for which he said there had been no reason and no written orders so no one ever really knew who gave the order. All of this came out when we were visiting the Palace where the Yalta Conference had been held. The bottom floor of the palace is a museum to the Yalta Conference while the top floor is a museum to the Romanov family and there are many home photos of Czar Nicholas and his family. He stated many times that he was a military man and he would be sure to have written orders to protect himself before doing anything as questionable as shooting a Czar and his family. Luckily for us all, we did not live in such tumultuous times as that but have only been around since later than WWII and the Yalta Conference.
At some point he left the Communist Party, probably when the Soviet Union broke up and it was safe to do so. He has never been very religious because of growing up in the Soviet Union times but he does know the stories of the different churches where we visited and he knows most of the folk lore of the palaces and the legends. He’s justifiably proud of Sevastopol mostly. I think if Sevastopol was its own country, he could live there quite happily and never leave except he does like to visit America (he was able to get one 5 year visa and has been once and plans to go again before the visa expires).
I grew up during the Cold War and was always taught, when such things were discussed which was rare, that I had to mistrust and dislike Russians and Communists. Then of course that would have included the Ukraine. I was also taught to be very bigoted but luckily that didn’t take very well because I have since had many friends of many ethnicities and races and different countries and backgrounds. I imagine that Alex was taught the same things about my country. His text books would have been very different from mine. What a wonderful world it is now that we can meet and find common ground and travel together, he as the guide and I as the tourist in this case and never have a cross word between us or distrust each other. I do hope that the world continues to improve so that someday I may also freely travel to countries which are denied me now and also find people there like Alex who knows the history and the differences and yet are happy now to welcome strangers and foreigners and share with them their life stories and background.
I've just put in some photos of things we saw together. He loved the squirrel and I have a lot of photos of it. And he was also very surprised to see a Soviet flag flying along side the road in Yalta