The fortified church in Rozsoki

"Curzon Line" re-visited. With hosts Mykhaylo and Maria (Professor at the Ivan Franko University of Lviv and just back from Canada) to visit Vira Nanivska, political analyst and former head of the Ukrainian National Institute of Public Administration. She lives in the hamlet of Rozsoki in the Carpathians, 4km from the Polish border. Maria's brother Ivan drives us down roads which seem not to have been resurfaced since this was part of the 30km exclusion zone along the pre-1991 border of the Soviet Union. At Vira's, the head of the local council describes how, by holding up marauding Tatars in the 13th century, Rozsoki saved Britain from invasion. He says the UK is responsible for western Ukraine becoming part of the Soviet Union after 1945 for proposing the "Curzon Line" at the Allied Supreme Council in Paris in 1919 and suggests, tongue in cheek, that we make up for it by spending some project money in Rozsoki. We visit a 13thC fortified church before heading for Vira's banya , where Ivan, who is a weight-lifter and qualified sports instructor, gives Mykhaylo and me a thorough going-over with birch-twigs. When we walk back to our accommodation at midnight, the sky in the remote mountain valley is a dazzle of stars. Next day Vira sets out her ideas for reforming Ukraine's civil service and talks me through a fat report on how to develop Lviv's economy – good Ukrainian practice.

Back in Lviv, Maria describes how in the 1940s different members of her immediate family were deported to Nazi Germany as slave labourers and sent to Siberia for resisting the Communists. She asks why Cambridge intellectuals supported the Communists in the 1930s. It's hard to answer this, but we talk about Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, which describes British Communists becoming disillusioned with the Soviet Union as late as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. She says that the UK is lucky to be situated at the other end of Europe and protected by the English Channel.