They showed Milla Jovovich on NTV news yesterday - she's in Crimea now, with her mama, attending Artek's 80th anniversary celebration. She looked very excited, spoke very cute but not too fluent Russian and said she was Ukrainian when asked about her 'nationality.' Her mama is very nice but looks like a more or less average woman from our part of the world, nothing American or even slightly foreign about her, very hard to believe she emigrated 25 years ago.

Here's more about Artek camp from BBC, and about the celebration from RFE/RL. Artek's site is in Russian, as far as I can see.

When I was 10 or 11, we were taken on tour of Artek by someone "with connections" - I remember a ride from Yalta in a black Volga (a car used almost exclusively by the party schmucks), and then I remember rooms with equipment used to train astronauts, authentic, we were told, and my mama, of course, decided to check if she could tame a centrifuge - and then I don't remember the rest, which probably means that mama with her courage scared the shit out of me, as usual, but everything ended well, as ever.

I don't remember the camp itself, rooms and stuff, probably because I've always hated camps. The only camp I was forced to spend 40 days at was not far from Moscow, near Vladimir and Petushki, and I barely survived it - but we had no choice then but to keep me there, because it was 1986, right after Chernobyl.

The worst part about camps is the idiotic discipline they impose on you - like, if they find a wet sponge in your drawer after you've taken a shower, all 15 or so people in your room are gonna be punished... Nineteen years later, I still don't get it - are you supposed to eat your sponge or what?