I’ve been rereading the blogs I wrote when my squeeze and I visited Ukraine and Russia in 2002. Alec – ne Oleg – was born in Munich of Russian/Ukrainian parents who fled Kharkov and ended up in a labour camp in Germany at the end of World War II. We were in Ukraine to visit those of his family who had survived both Hitler and Stalin. (That’s a very long story that Alec himself has written down at length and hopes to publish.)

We spent time in Kiev, Kharkov and Poltava. There was poverty, corruption and chaos, as everywhere in post-Soviet eastern Europe. I’ll post more of my contemporaneous reports at some stage when I get them in order, but here I relate two incidents that could loosely be described as Travel Horrors, to give you an idea of what conditions were like at the time. I’m mindful that then, as now, that Ukraine had bigger things to worry about than the state of its hospitality industry.

We’d decided to stop at Poltava on our way back west from Kharkov to Kiev by train. We were both going through a phase of fascination with Peter the Great, having read Robert Massie’s magisterial biography of this remarkable Tsar (1682 – 1725), the great moderniser and founder of St Petersburg. Poltava was the scene of his military victory over the then reigning European power, Sweden.

There we had an encounter with the rudest individual I’ve ever met in my life (with two possible exceptions which I won’t relate here).  A Ukrainian Basil Fawlty, only younger, and ruder.  This was at the Kafe Bar Veselka. diagonally opposite where we were staying at the Hotel Kiev, Zhovtneva 46. 

It was a hot, muggy day and I ordered a beer.  It came out room temperature.  I politely asked for another one, cold.  It came out exactly the same temperature as the first one, and this time I had to insist that it wasn’t cold.  ‘It’s very cold,’ he unreasonably maintained.  But he became extremely hostile, refused to discuss it any further and demanded to know our meal order.  Stunned, we complied, and immediately regretted our timidity, because he demanded that we pay for the meals in advance!  We balked at this, but had to promise him we’d pay for the two undrinkable beers before he’d bring me a third – finally a coldie – from the fridge.  By this time his hostility was so palpable that I seriously suspected he might spit in our meals before he brought them out.

To prevent this, and being somewhat mollified by a) a cold beer and b) the thought that the 2 undrinkables were at least dirt cheap and represented little financial loss, we decided to cut our losses and be pleasant to him. 

To no avail.  When he brought the meals out he virtually slammed the plates down on the table in front of us.  His hostility didn’t abate even when we complimented the food!

In the photo at the top I am sitting in a cafe in Poltava. It wasn’t the Cafe Veselka. I didn’t dare take a picture there for fear of how that horrible fellow would react.