In 1989, I was sent to escort a delegation of chemistry olympiad winners to the last All-Union Summer School for Young Chemists, held at the Orlyonok pioneer camp. The Soviet Union had two more years to live, but the world around us had already begun changing irreversibly. It was a strange mixture of old and new, and that mixture made your head spin — thrilling and terrifying at once.
I had never been to one of the all-union camps — Artek or Orlyonok. To get there as a child, you needed a family with serious connections, which we didn’t have. I wasn’t even bitter about it. Some people run faster, some are richer, some have the right friends — that’s just how things were. But as an adult, as it turned out, I made it to Orlyonok after all.
Orlyonok was impressive. A vast industrial complex for the processing of children’s souls, with well-oiled assembly lines. The operation began in Tuapse itself, where the camp maintained a reception facility in the town center; from there, small buses with counselors ferried the children — and us chaperones along with them — out to the camp. Walking the grounds end to end took at least an hour, though wandering freely was not encouraged. The camp was divided into several units, each functioning as a self-contained pioneer camp in its own right. Campers were expected to remain within their unit, under the close supervision of counselors and staff. The counselors lived in a separate nine-story building, which, among other things, had an excellent canteen serving decent food for cash. Pioneers were forbidden to enter there. They tried to keep us chaperones out, too, but by that point, we’d stopped caring about their rules.
We were given a couple of small cottages — ten people to a room, set among the trees, a few hundred meters from the sea. The bathroom was across the path. The dining hall was a ten-minute walk.
Our students attended lectures by eminent academics — professors from Moscow State University, teachers from specialized schools attached to major universities. We went to some of those lectures ourselves; they were often genuinely worthwhile. Otherwise, our only connection to camp life was the dining hall, three times a day.
The dining hall deserves its own story. In the old pre-perestroika days, it had probably fed people the way all Soviet pioneer camps did — adequately, if not well. But by 1989, food had become desperately scarce, the system was coming apart, and the meals were simply inedible. Our kids grimaced through every plate while we tried to model stoic acceptance. The problem was that it wasn’t an act we could sustain, because the food was genuinely awful — even by Soviet institutional catering standards.
Within days, we’d found our way to the counselors’ canteen. After that, to the village. We stocked up by the crate — liquor, canned goods, fruit — and lived on that. The kids had no such option. One afternoon, we found them staging a protest outside the dining hall, marching with signs that read: Better to die of hunger than of the food. After the demonstration, things improved slightly. Not enough to reach the threshold of edible, but slightly.
The delegations had come from all over the Soviet Union. Even the Balts showed up, though they already held themselves apart. My closest friends that summer, as it happened, were the chaperones from Lithuania and Latvia. I still sometimes find myself humming Ariau, ariau, ariau — a Lithuanian song that Algis, who was escorting the Lithuanian students, taught me. There were also delegations from France and the United States, in the spirit of new thinking, disarmament, and cooperation. The Americans immediately told everyone where to go and took their meals as a group in the counselors’ building. The French girls, meanwhile, were so eager to be close to our students that they refused the special foreign menu and gamely struggled through the same slop as everyone else. The result was universal: everyone loved the French and kept their distance from the Americans, who, for their part, didn’t seem to notice.
Then one day this quiet, ordered camp life ended.
Orlyonok had a patron organization — a nearby border guard detachment. The soldiers came every session; they came to ours as well. And as a gesture of particular goodwill, they let the students fire Kalashnikovs into the sea.
That shooting divided everyone instantly, cleanly, and for good.
Our Soviet kids were beside themselves with joy at having a real weapon in their hands with real ammunition. The Balts announced that this was entertainment for Neanderthals, huddled together, and suddenly stopped understanding Russian. The Americans and the beloved French girls went pale — all at once, somehow — packed their bags, and went home.
This didn’t happen on the last day of the session. There were more days after that, days in which things happened. Conversations, lectures, activities. But I remember none of them. Not a single thing. For some reason, that summer at the pioneer camp ended with those shots fired out across the water.