The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2023 33 Kiev was also the city where I first realized that Ukrainians are distinct from Russians, with their own nationality. In the 1970s, the solidity of the Soviet empire was not much questioned in the West. We tended to use the homogenized term “Soviets” to describe the citizens of the USSR. I give the USIA and the U.S. government credit that they did not accept that idea and always tried to send along at least one guide who spoke the language of the Soviet republic where we were stationed. In Kiev, her name was Elie Skoczylas, and she was a wonderful personality, lively and confident, not at all afraid to take on all comers. I didn’t understand Ukrainian, but I loved to watch Elie on the exhibit floor. She gave as good as she got and evidently was plenty entertaining, because before too long she had huge crowds of up to 100 people gathered around her. By contrast, I don’t think that I, speaking Russian, ever gathered more than 30. Waves of laughter would rise around Elie as she evidently commented on everything, told jokes and sto- ries, and pushed back against security service provocateurs who tried to heckle her. Pretty soon, travelers were coming from western Ukraine, from Lviv and the regions around it, to visit the exhibit and talk with Elie. On one memorable, hot Sunday (no air conditioning in those days), the line stretched for a mile outside the exhibit hall and many of them were coming to hear Elie. At that point, I understood fully that Ukrainians are not Russians, a fact that they registered clearly in their vote for independence from the USSR some 15 years later. On Dec. 1, 1991, 90 percent of Ukrainians voted in favor of independence with 84 percent of the electorate participating. The results made sense to me after my exhibit experience in 1976. Wherever Elie Skoczylas is, I am grateful to her for bringing it home to me so early. It was in our second city, Alma-Ata (now Almaty), that I realized the Soviet Union was more fragile than I thought. By the time we arrived there, winter was soon to be setting in, and a very cold and snowy winter it was. It didn’t help that the exhibit was set up in an ice rink. Of course, the ice had been melted and water drained away, but the heating system was weak, and the concrete floor might as well have been ice. The sensation I remem- ber most from our time there was unrelenting cold. I did enjoy the beauty all around us, though. We arrived in October at the height of the apple harvest, when the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains were golden and full of apple orchards. Alma-Ata means “father of apples,” and the origin of the species, the first apple trees, are supposed to have come from the region. The markets were stuffed with the most delicious bright red apples. What none of us realized was that with no cold storage, within a week or two, they had disappeared from sale. No more apples. We always could find kimchi, how- ever, what the locals called Koreiskiy salat —Korean salad. It turns out Koreans had come to Kazakhstan to work in the timber industry, so there was quite a large population of them in Alma-Ata. I had rarely encountered native Russian speakers “in the wild.” I didn’t know howwell I would performspeaking with hundreds of themevery day. The November 7 Revolution Day parade in Alma-Ata, 1976. ROBERTFENTONHOUSER