Glorious people

As a child, Lena longs to pick hazelnuts in the woods with her grandmother but is raised as a good socialist: sent to Pioneer summer camps where she’s taught to worship Lenin, and sing songs in praise of the glorious Soviet Union. But perestroika is coming, her corner of the USSR is now called Ukraine, and corruption and patronage are now the only ways to get ahead – to secure a place at university, an apartment, treatment for a sick baby. For Tatjana, the shock of the new means the first McDonalds in the Soviet Union and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops; it means terrible choices about who to love. Eventually both women must decide whether to stay or to emigrate, but the trauma they carry is handed down to their daughters, struggling to make sense of their own identities.