KITSCH AND TELL

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
AUSTRALIA
September 30, 2006

Just as Yalta has embraced free-market tackiness, Mat Schulz, in turn, embraces the Crimea's favourite resort.
In the centre of Yalta, on Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, a large Lenin statue remains. It has a mountain backdrop, which, in its still, perfect beauty, looks like a two-dimensional film set. Facing Lenin, almost inevitably, is a McDonald's restaurant and beyond is the Black Sea.
Between McDonald's and Lenin there's an enormous stage, where a DJ plays throbbing techno music every night. Children, teenagers clutching beers and sweet vodka drinks, middle-aged drunks and old people all dance together.
Then you have Yalta's boardwalk. Lined with white buildings, lamps, palm trees and wooden benches encased in vines, it was once graceful. Now it is as if the street has snorted a long line of cocaine. Tackiness explodes on all sides, as do mini-manifestations of the free market. Everywhere someone is trying to sell you something, from peanuts and paintings to buckets of tiny prawns, pirated CDs and postcards of old Soviet propaganda posters. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians promenade, packed in. Yalta remains the fashionable resort in the Crimea.
It wasn't always so. The city became popular in the late 19th century, when Tsar Alexander II built Lividia Palace, his summer pad, here. During the Soviet era it maintained its status - people loyal to the party got to frolic in the sun here, tanning bodies that had turned pale after long Russian winters.
No trains or planes travel to this paradise of postmodern, post-communist kitsch. To get here you must first reach the Simferopol train station. Battered cabs, mini-buses and standard buses then bring you to the coast.
But by far the best way to go is to take the world's longest trolley-bus ride - 87 kilometres - in a tank-like object from Soviet times. It clunks and wheezes along Simferopol's streets, feeling at every moment as if it is about to break down, before miraculously rising up into the beautiful Crimean mountains, then back down into Yalta.
In summer, old women wait at the bus station for tourists, cardboard signs advertising accommodation pinned to their ample breasts. Go with one and you gain instant access into the world of a local family.
My room is not exactly a room, but an alcove separated from the living area by a tattered yellow curtain that looks as if it was hung at the beginning of Brezhnev's stint as secretary of the Communist Party. There is a little bed. Above the pillow, on a small ledge, is a murky tank with a single slow fish. On the other side of the curtain are usually three small children, watching cartoons on a bulky TV - dating all the way back to Khrushchev - with an antenna that doesn't work. One of the children has a pair of thick spectacles tied to his head with a piece of string. Often their mother is there with them, standing, gazing at the fuzzy cartoons.
Having this grim room makes Yalta's glitziness even brighter. I walk to the plush hotels, to stare at the rows of luxury cars parked outside, all with tinted windows; watching the Russian "businessmen" with young blonde girlfriends. As for the less flamboyant tourists, I have the impression that, like me, many are staying in dark grimy pockets; the kinds of rooms that Raskolnikov, the main character from Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, hung out in before deciding to murder his moneylender. This is the price we pay to stay in a fashionable city.
What about the beaches - the reason, you would think, for coming to a beach resort? A few scruffy triangles are in the centre of town. In Australia and California, cold drinks and snacks are available on the beach. In Crimea, hobbling old ladies and unshaven men move between packed sunbathers, selling steaming corn on the cob, fried hot pastries and coffee to scald your tongue. Rusty metal fences divide cleaner beaches into segments. You pay to enter and recline on a rented deck chair.
Elsewhere in the Crimea are wilder places closer to nature, especially if you have your own vehicle. As for me, to while away the daylight hours I visit nearby palaces, Greek ruins, mosques, castles and monasteries - all pointing to the Crimea's rich, complex history.
The tsar's family palace, Lividia, is where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met towards the end of World War II, to carve Europe into separate spheres of influence, setting the stage for the long Cold War to follow.
More spectacular than Lividia is the Alupka Palace. Built by British architects for a local count, it flaunts an eclectic mix of Arabic, Russian and Scottish styles. Paths lead downwards, through an exotic garden and past hidden fountains, to the sea. There is also nearby Swallow's Nest, built by a German oil magnate in 1912. It is a slender castle perched at the edge of a cliff, so fairytale it looks as if it was designed by Disney.
I also visit the Chekhov Museum, where the famous Russian writer lived and wrote in a late period of his life. But, as I find with all writers' houses, I don't know exactly what to do there. As a guide stands nearby, I stare at the desk where he penned some great plays, with an appropriately impressed look on my face, and that is it. Then I go back to where I really want to be: soaking up Crimea's open-air nightlife.
Great seafood meals in a restaurant, then cruising the boardwalk with 10,000 other people, clutching a beer bought in a kiosk. Beer, in Ukraine, is not regarded as alcohol and even teenage boys and girls drink it in public. You also see the hard stuff - straight vodka - being downed in 100-millilitre glasses, not exactly as a shot, but swallowed in gulps like water.
I join a young crowd sitting on steps beneath the boardwalk. A greasy-haired busker - a kind of Russian Billy Bragg - is playing. His acoustic guitar and microphone are hooked up to an amplifier too small to handle the volume. But distortion and feedback only add to the performance, comprising one classic Russian rock song after another. The crowd sings along and yells out requests. The atmosphere is so electric I feel like joining in.
Entrepreneurs will photograph you in a variety of costumes and settings. You can wear biker gear and sit on a Harley. Or dress up in clothing and wigs in the style of 18th-century France and sit on a throne. It's also possible to stand between a half-naked African man and woman with plastic fruit balanced on their heads. Above the sets, other tourists watch the photographic shoots taking place.
On my last night, I return home late to find a second bed has been squeezed into my alcove. On it lies the sleeping shape of what appears to be a man. Maybe my host told me I'd be having company, but if so it was in Russian - so I hadn't understood.
By the way, for people who spend more than about $7, accommodation in Yalta can be top-notch. But book in advance.

UKRAINE COVETS RUSSIAN LIGHTHOUSES

A court in Sevastopol has ruled that 22 lighthouses operated by the Russian Black Sea Navy should be handed over to the Ukraine. Sources say that the decision by the Appeals Court had been made under a heavy pressure from Ukrainian foreign minister Mr. Boris Tarasiuk, leader of the nationalistic Rukh organisation. Tarasiuk has a reputation of being a Russia hater acting on instructions from outside of the Ukraine. One of his goals in the Crimea is to kick out the Russian Navy and to convert Sevastopol into a NATO naval base. Loss of the lighthouses and other navigation equipment would undermine the Russian Navy’s self-sufficiency. The Kremlin has already angrily reacted to what it considers as another vagary by Ukrainian nationalists. Actually, Ukrainian radicals have been mounting tension in the Crimea and multiplying anti-Russian escapades since the Orange Revolution in 2004. Russia said that courts have no rights to make pronouncements on matters of interstate relations. The Navy is refusing to leave lighthouses. However, according to some reports, lighthouses situated on the shoreline stretching from Balaklava to the Cape Fiolent are shut down. There are concerns that it would seriously endanger the navigation in the area.
Other reports suggest that Tarasiuk is following orders from the West. They point out to lighthouses in the Crimea operated by the Ukraine saying that special equipment was installed there to confuse Russian missile launchers. We could not get an independent confirmation of this assertion.
Many in Sevastopol say that if the lighthouses would be finally taken over by the Ukraine they would be most probably abandoned and boarded up as many other facilities that came under Ukrainian control after the partition of the Black Sea Navy in the 1990s.