Leaf Arbuthnot

My summer of love with God’s gift

Studying in Russia in 1994, Viv Groskop falls in love with a Ukrainian rock guitarist named Bogdan Bogdanovich and accompanies him on a visit home

Viv Groskop. [Getty Images] 
issue 01 June 2024

When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’

The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year.

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