CATHOLIC PICTORIAL  -  FOOD FOR THOUGHT	 INTO THE UKRAINE -
	Fr Francis Marsden	for 10/11/91

The KGB border guard stared at my passport photograph. Then he looked me keenly in the face. He looked back at the passport and again at me. Had I aged too much, or not enough, between 1982 And 1991? After a third searching stare I looked him straight back in the eye and he broke off, even a little sheepishly. Perhaps the game was that he had to stare at you for as long as possible without you looking back at him!

This took place at the Soviet frontier a month ago. I was on the 3.30 pm sleeping car train from Przemyśl in south—east Poland to Odessa on the Black Sea coast, but my destination was only an hour inside the border, the western Ukrainian capital of Lvov. Our train had drawn to a halt just past the high fence, topped with barbed wire, which forms the frontier of the old USSR. A large oblong concrete building housed the customs and border guards who clambered onto the train, five or six to each coach. Their barracks bore the Cyrillic letters CCCP, but carried no red flag on its flagpole. Signs of the times.

My nerves were in shreds because I had no seat reservation ticket for that train. Reservation tickets are compulsory for all Soviet long—distance trains, and have to be bought days in advance or on the black market. A late connection from Kraków had led to my missing the train my seat was on. I had managed to get past the Polish ticket inspector and the Russian sleeping car attendant without them noticing the discrepancy, but I was in dread of another ticket inspection and being turned off at the border. Still, I had bribed Our Lady of Częstachowa with a 20-dollar note at her shrine a week earlier, and she saw me through safely. I thought it would be safer than trying to slip dollars to the border guards in the event of difficulties.

I had found a seat with three Russian women from Odessa who had been on a coach tour of Poland, buying and selling. They were comparing notes on where trade was best, and what nice things you could pick up in Warsaw or Szczeczin, Kraków or Nowy Targ. Everyone on the train seemed to have as many suitcases and holdalls as they could carry, stuffed with clothes, food and goods unobtainable in the USSR. It was as much a freight train as a passenger train. The customs never bothered to look through their luggage. They were more interested in currency.

“Dollari?” one asked me. “Da, shistdisyat. ($60)  Ya napisal,” (I’ve written it down). Then he saw it on the currency declarations  and drew a wiggly line all round it so I couldn’t add on anything afterwards, and stamped it several times.

After 1½ hours at the frontier, the train trundled on. The ladies shared with me their meal of bread, sausage and peppers, and I made them a drink of instant coffee. Nescafe will obviously sell well in the USSR when the time comes. The Soviets make themselves very much at home on trains, spreading out their possessions everywhere. A stout lady opposite made a giant jam jar full of tea, a couple of pints with loads of sugar.

The first flag we saw was on a pole hanging out of a railway hut, some two miles in from the frontier: the blue and yellow flag of Independent Ukraine. As it grew dark, I could see no lights of villages or farms from the train, just miles of darkness. Stalin destroyed the villages and forced the people onto giant collective farms. The fields run, bleak, for miles.

An hour later we were passing through the outskirts of a city. We stopped once or twice, then I saw people with luggage walking along at track level. “Is this Lvov?” No, they assured me. There were no lights or station signs. But people were getting off. In fact it was Lvov. I grabbed mp luggage and made my way to the door. The attendant was annoyed because people had been getting off on the wrong side and made me wait.

I walked several coach lengths between the immense, overhanging sleeping cars, and reached the dimly lit train shed. The station really had no signboards at all: it could have been Kiev or Kharkov or Khabarovsk for all the information they give you. Not even a Way Out sign. I followed people down a bare tiled subway to emerge into a vast waiting room crowded with hundreds of Soviet citizens, with their thousands of pieces of luggage. They looked as if they were living and sleeping there for days.

The sheer crowdedness of it all unnerved me. After all there are 275 million Soviet citizens: a good proportion of them seemed to be frequenting Lvov railway station that evening. The eastern smell of Russian cigarettes and sweat permeated everywhere. It was 8 pm but the two or three refreshment stands were shut. There was no bureau de change or information desk or city map. I had no roubles or kopecks so I couldn’t buy a tram ticket. How was I to get to Hotel Intourist, Mickiewicz Square?

Escaping from the claustrophobia of the station into the night air, I tried to remember from a 1939 reprint map I had seen a week earlier in a Polish bookshop, how to get to the city centre. The roads were cobbled. Tramlines and trolleybus wires ran along them. There were hardly any street lights. Plenty of traffic but no lights in the shops, no neon signs. It was all very dark except for car headlights and the occasional packed tram passing.

I tried to ask people where Mickiewicz Square was, stumbling over the few words of Russian. They replied in a torrent of Ukrainian (I presume), of which I could usually catch only the first phrase:

		“Straight on . . to the centre . . take a tram . . two kilometres.” Rucksack-laden westerners were a rarity in Lvov. No-one seemed to speak any western language. I began to feel very lonely and afraid: if I was recognised as a Westerner, I thought, I could be dragged into a side alley, robbed and done away with. No-one would know for weeks. In fact the crime rate is very low by our standards, and in the daylight everything looked OK.

After 40 minutes, sweaty but relieved, I walked in the door of the Hotel Intourist. “Iz Anglii?” asked the receptionist, obviously expecting me. “Passport.” “No 58” She didn’t seem inclined to prolong the conversation. From the marble foyer a spacious, balustraded and red—carpeted staircase led up to the third floor. The room - surprise, surprise -  actually had a plug in the bath, though not of course in the wash basin. Hot water lasted for two hours a day: a luxury compared with where I had stayed in Warsaw and Krakow.

Indeed the sharp springs didn’t come through my mattress until the fourth night. Then I realised the whole mattress was in an advanced state of decay. Even Mother Teresa’s sisters would have jettisoned it.

The next morning after a breakfast of black bread, cheese and sliced sausage, with tea from the hotel teapot which had a saucer instead of a lid on top, I waited to change money. The official rate is £1 = 1 rouble. The business rate is £1= 3 roubles. The tourist rate is £1= 58 roubles. This is called the planned economy. So for 20 DM (£7) I received a wad of ten-rouble notes, more than the average monthly salary of 250-300 rbl. The only drawback was that there was nothing worth buying with these immense riches. For two days I could not find anywhere to buy a decent dinner or supper. I survived on currant rolls (½p) and ice cream (½p) I bought on the street, and food I had brought with me from Poland.

One reads about the economic crisis in the USSR, but to see it yourself it is very sad. Grocery shops (Produkti) have about 20 items for sale: lard, sugar, margarine, sausage, tinned fish, jars of pickled cabbage, beetroot, peppers, tomatoes, and jars of fruit juice. That’s it, folks. The rest of the shelves are empty. And make sure you’ve brought your food coupons with you. Outside some shoe and clothes shops there were queues – presumably word had got round of a new delivery. But for the most part, the goods on offer looked like the left-overs from parish jumble sale.

A small free market has opened in Lvov within the last year or two, for farmers to sell their own produce. The only “state produce” tomatoes had seen were burst, gangy and mouldering in their own fluid, but the free market had 1 lb good tomatoes for 5 rbl. (8p)-  half a day’s wages. Lines of 20 or 30 peasant women stood trying to sell bouquets in the flower market: some of them, pensioners on 150 rbl/month, were still there at 9 pm clutching a forlorn bunch of flowers, hoping for a customer.

In church at Mass I put a 10 rbl note (16 p) on the plate (They have weekday collections). The collector tried to give me change. Afterwards I realised that to him that was a day’s wages. The Ukrainian Catholic Church has reopened 2,200 parishes in the last two years -  that’s like ten dioceses the size of Liverpool -  but more about that next week.