Well, not so much about the “khrushchoba.” We are still at the sea in Yevpatoria. There I got a local girlfriend Rita, Aunt Tonya’s daughter, and an adult girlfriend Lyuda, Aunt Tonya’s niece. My parents “entrusted” me to Lyuda and usually we went with her to the wild beach. Lyuda was an advanced student of the then fashionable philology faculty, well-read and pretty. And of course she attracted the glances of young men on the beach. But rarely did anyone decide to get acquainted with Lyuda.
One fellow at a distance of about 20 metres from us sang specially for her a song “blue, blue frost, lay on the wires, in the dark-blue sky a blue star, o ooo! Only in the sky, in the dark-blue sky.” And so every day, as soon as we appeared… Once we come to the beach, and in the distance, on the horizon, white warships have lined up in a row! Beautiful! But it was unclear “in honour of what?” Later from the news we learned of the events in Czechoslovakia. If my memory does not fail me, it was 1968.
And on some beach day two fellows came up to us to get acquainted. One introduced himself as a medical student of the Lvov medical institute. To me, naturally, in a fatherly way, he made the remark “a lot of sun is harmful for health!” to which I answered: “if you are a medic, then treat those who lie in hospital, and not on the beach!” Then he decided to talk with Lyuda about the complicated political situation in the world (and when was it not complicated?), asking the question: “What do you think about the introduction of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia?” Lyuda answered so uncertainly: “well, they asked…” And he: “WHO ASKED?” The fellow asked the question 50 years ago….