This story appears in the April 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine…
In 1954 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, signed Crimea over to Ukraine as a gesture of goodwill. Galina was 14 at the time.
“Illegal,” she said, when asked about the handover. “There was no referendum. No announcement. It just happened.”
What was Khrushchev thinking?
“He wasn’t,” she snapped. “Khrushchev had roaches in his head.”
Crimea was a lovely present, but the box was empty. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union anyway. “My parents discussed the transfer, but we weren’t concerned,” Galina said. Moscow was still in charge. No one could have ever imagined the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when Crimea would be pulled out of the orbit of Russian rule along with an independent Ukraine.
Do you miss the Soviet Union? I asked Galina, as she reminisced about the stability of life under the Soviets. Prices were artificially low. “You could get a kilo of sugar for 78 kopeks,” she said. “Butter, only 60! Now, I don’t even buy it.” Education and medical care were free. As for a vacation: “I could go to a resort”—now completely out of the question on her monthly pension of $130.
“Yes, we have a longing for the Soviet Union,” she said. “But it cannot come back, no matter how much we wish. We can only toskavat.”
Source: A Jewel in Two Crowns
Looks like National Geographic knew what was going on even in 2011…
The USA knew exactly what they would cause if they tried to touch “The Crimea” and to act like anything else would have happened is being not just muddleheaded, but a truest form of stupid…
WtR