ABSTRACT
I travelled for the first time to the Soviet Union, to the Yalta holiday resort,
in the 1980s when I was a ten-year-old schoolgirl. The incident that I still
remember most vividly from this holiday is how a local woman relentlessly
persuaded my mother to sell her new, beautiful sun dress. After several days
of ‘negotiations’ my mother gave in and sold the dress to the woman. I
remember having been confused why anyone would want to buy a used
dress – why did she not just go to a shop and buy a new one? During the
1980s my contacts with the Soviet Union continued as I got a pen friend, Sergei, from my school’s ‘twin-school’ in the city of Vyborg. Sergei used to
send me cassettes on which he had recorded albums of the famous Soviet
rock band ‘Kino’. The cassettes were always accompanied by an exercise
book, in which Sergei had written the lyrics both in Russian and English in
beautiful handwriting. These exercise books were my first guide to the
Russian language. Later I visited Sergei and his family several times and
learned much about Soviet everyday and family life.
