To Crimea from Kyiv: How I saw the Buryats in Gurzuf

Vasily Muravitsky, political commentator, Kyiv

Fatigue just overwhelmed me. And on Friday I decided to go from Kyiv to Crimea. Summer has come. Since 2005, I have been to the South Coast every year, so why break tradition?

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In 2005, I worked from late May to mid-September as a counselor at Artek. We woke up by the waves and fell asleep with them. We rehearsed dances and skits against the backdrop of passing yachts, which gently rubbed against Adalary visible in the distance. Bear Mountain looked at me every day, and I climbed to the top of its head 5 times.

The smell of salty freshness, the poetry of distant voyages, fish conversations and the penetrating aromas of cypresses, junipers and southern “shameless girls” that surrounded us, are so firmly imprinted somewhere on my subcortex that I can no longer live through the summer without inhaling more of it. once. I’m suffering... This smell is firmly associated in my head with joy, new discoveries and quiet happiness.

Kyiv. Rain. Central railway station. Tickets to Novoalekseevka. (Trains to Crimea itself were canceled in winter). On this day I went to the dentist, participated in the filming of a program on Channel 17, and rode in a taxi. And five people, different in age and occupation, from a taxi driver to a doctor, asked me when they found out: “How are you going to Crimea? And we really want to go there - but we’re afraid... How can we get there?” Ordinary Kiev residents are interested in Crimea, love it, miss it...

Having boarded the Kyiv-Novoalekseevka train in the evening, which, by the way, runs quite often, we were already there by morning. The Tatars, who organized the new business, immediately took everyone who got out of the carriage and put them in buses and cars. And after 20-30 minutes we were at the Ukrainian customs, passing by a booth, near which a heavy tank was dug in with a meaningful inscription on the barrel “Tanya”, directed towards the peninsula. The guy with the string mustache looked after our bus.

Ukrainian customs allows civilians through easily. This is also a means of earning money. The customs checkpoint on Chongar itself is a medium-large private enterprise. They look at things selectively, without much rummaging.

The longest is the movement along the spit through Sivash. There's a line here. Russian customs officers swear at the Tatars - they disrupt traffic and jump in line. But in general, both of them get along. They make fun of each other.

Tatar Ridvan, filling out the documents, says that tomorrow he will go to pick up a group of vacationers from Lvov. In the queue itself are Kirovograd, Dnepropetrovsk, Kyiv numbers. In Crimea, almost every second number is Ukrainian: there are both visitors and Crimeans who have families or work on the mainland... There are a lot of trucks at the crossing. The queue is several kilometers long.

And here is Gurzuf. Ayu-dag, Adalary, cypresses... Fresh light breeze. Artek and the film festival shift. There are fewer vacationers, but the season is going well. It’s only the end of June – the beginning of July, and it’s not yet in full swing...

Calmly. Peacefully. There are no fences painted blue and yellow. Crimeans do not suffer from this. There are almost no political slogans at all. Life flows the same way as it flowed in 2012, that is, without participation in the war. That participation that not a single person on the territory of Ukraine escaped. A man from war and a man from peace are two different people. And it feels very good.

Updated Artek. New buses. New beautiful shape. From July 3rd in Artek Children's Film Festival. The stela at the entrance to Artek is already a large screen. Once upon a time, Yushchenko removed the Soviet orders from this stele, honestly deserved by all the counselors, teachers and employees. And Artek, since 2005, has been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The degree of division and corruption schemes in supplies there was colossal. Artek was managed personally by DUSya - the state administration of affairs under the president.

Receiving children from Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and from a dozen other countries, Yushchenko’s protege, whom he personally appointed here as general director, without understanding the pedagogical work, from the administration either in Rivne or Lutsk, managed to conduct the opening of the anniversary shift in Ukrainian. The children from Kazakhstan and Moscow in my group did not understand what she was saying, like half the children in Artek at the large stadium where the opening was taking place, but she continued. And then Yushchenko and his assistants dressed Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh, German and Israeli children in blue and yellow T-shirts for the 80th anniversary of Artek - they lined up thousands of people with a flag at the central stadium. The children swallowed dust, but stood... Yushchenko spoke from the stage, admiring the national flag of the children...

National... But Crimea has always been international, welcoming hundreds of peoples to its lands. Why was it necessary to try to make a Ukrainian colony out of it? If the Kyiv authorities had retained a modicum of reason and tolerance towards another faith, culture, language... They had preserved their internationality, Crimea would not have abandoned Kyiv, and a civil war would not have happened in Ukraine itself.

In Crimea itself, peace has been preserved. It's very calm here...

And I also saw Buryats here. Spouses and two tanned girls... One of them, small and pot-bellied, ran and purred the song of the Bremen Town Musicians “There is nothing better in the world”... The eldest walked, straightening an artificial flower in her hair. The sea was rustling in the background...