I’ve been digging around my family history – the sad chapters of it, mostly. When you’re trying to understand some things about the present, the past can be a helpful place to start.
Then Yuri Nifatov, a family friend, contacted me and let me have a look at his archive. It features a lot of Crimea. Crimea remains a weird, magical place – no matter how many beer tents and high-rise hotels go up there.
My mother, Tatiana (right), and her twin sister Natalya, in Crimea in the 1970’s:
Lady of leisure (otherwise known as my mother):
My mother in Novy Svet, Crimea, the place that can change the trajectory of a person’s life, for better or for worse:
Yuri reads the ladiez a newspaper:
Hipsters are an ancient tradition. Here’s my aunt being one in the USSR:
She also wore ponchos (at least I think that’s a poncho):
And fished in the sea with Yuri (the Black Sea, to be precise. Please note the bathing suit):
When November came, she was known to pout:
But never for too long, because there were bikes to ride (actually, that’s her sister, my mom, riding the bike – but who cares, right?):
These pictures belong to Yuri, and I’m posting them here with his kind permission. If you know me well, you know I’m prone to Dramatic Speeches about my family history. This is the flip-side.
Natalia A. 
They are absolutely gorgeous. I can see you face there also.
When I was growing up we believed that Soviet women looked like Brezhnev’s mother, wore heavy boots and carried either brooms or rifles.
lol
🙂
Gosh ! you are so very much like your Mum or Aunt…and you say you don’t look alike.
They are absolutely ravishing, the one in the negligee I can’t take my eyes off, very 1970’s and turn of the Century, but so Russian too, love those pic’s