Julian Nundy in Kiev - 1967

It was in 1967 that the British Council unexpectedly announced that it had reached agreement to send undergraduates to study in the Soviet Union; previously, only postgraduates had been eligible.  The announcement came late for students who wanted to apply for that year and the programme only got fully under way in 1968 when two Nottingham students, myself and David Cunliffe, were selected.

We both left for a full academic year, to Kiev’s Shevchenko University in my case and to Rostov University in David’s.
Our enthusiasm was to be tested by events that summer. On 21 August, Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, one of the most dangerous events of the Cold War. Just over two weeks later, British students sailed by a Soviet ship, the Maria Ulyanova, from Tilbury to Leningrad. On the way, as the Soviet Union endured a barrage of outrage from Western states, the ship was buzzed by Swedish fighters over the Baltic. I was in my cabin when I heard a roar and the ship shook. I ran up on deck to see the two Saab jets with their insignia of three golden crowns on a blue background make a second and final swoop, flying frighteningly close. The ship seemed to judder.

After landing a couple of days later in Leningrad, where a radio broadcast booming through loudspeakers in the port area singled out Britain in general and the BBC in particular as the world’s leading anti-Soviets, I travelled first to Moscow by the Red Arrow night train, then on a second night train to Kiev.On my first day in Kiev, I was taken to meet the Dean of the Languages Faculty and was immediately struck by the single portrait in his office. Instead of the more conventional Lenin or Leonid Brezhnev, the then Soviet Communist Party leader, there was a head-to-toe life-size painting of Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian nationalist poet.

The previous year had seen the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution which was marked by extravagant celebrations.  “You will find life here very different from what you know,” the Dean said. “But take heart, we have been promised that the first 50 years are the worst.”  This was to be a rare expression of independent thought in a country where any unorthodox words could bring down devastating official wrath.

Julian Nundy

Russian Studies with French, 1966-1970