Contrary to how it works with Latin-derived languages, Russian nouns tend to possess a solid, fixed meaning, which is pretty impossible to shake off. And so the word Лагерь (pronounced “lager”) – meaning “a camp” - is so overloaded with memories that it is guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of any Russian.

They think of course of the “labour camps” - and the Gulag - where so many perished and where, by some estimates, one in three of the whole Soviet population were forced to pay a visit.

But that said, there was also another type of camp, as ubiquitous as the above and with a passing resemblance, but bringing with them memories that are somewhat sweeter. These were the "pioneer" camps.

Historically they varied but, by the time of my childhood in the sixties and seventies, they conformed to a standard. Fenced off and self-guarded chunks of countryside, with some forest (but no rivers or pools - for safety reasons), brick neo-Victorian dormitories, sparsely equipped play areas, very Spartan washing facilities and military style parade grounds, where a red flag was raised at the mast every morning to the sound of an old style brass horn.

Children, aged seven to 17, were segregated in class-sized groups and led (with that peculiar Soviet model of leadership) by the duo of teacher and a senior pioneer; the latter technically a clone of the Scouts’ head boy, combining the role with that of entertainer, cheerleader and informant.

The whole enterprise belonged to the trade unions as a humble proxy of the state; the entertainment and the quality of the sporting equipment marginally varied according to the standing and wealth of those unions’ branches - and so did the relative boredom, amount of marching drills and brainwashing. Otherwise it was all pretty universal, very safe and, bar the occasional friendships forged, pretty tedious. A logical appendage of universal schooling, those holidays were virtually free.

This greyish empire of child-rearing had its brightly coloured flagship. It was called Artek.

​Artek was launched in 1925, right after the end of the civil war, on the Crimean Peninsula, famous, above all, for its unique climate. Sandwiched between the spectacular green and rocky mountains and a beautiful lagoon with crystal clear turquoise water, this model Pioneer Camp had the best teachers, the best equipment, best weather and, open all year round, hosted, ostensibly, the best of the best of the pioneer flock.

It is widely forgotten today that the Communist project as a whole was set on the default mode of the Old Testament - in particular on the chapter of Exodus, a long, perilous march to a place where everything is good and free and the weather is always perfect; call it Paradise, Jerusalem or Communism - it’s all the same.

Featuring regularly in movies and later on TV, Artek was a skilfully designed model of just such a place, crafted for generations of Soviet children. “Be good, obey orders, march in columns – and one day you will be there”. Visiting in 1928, the French novelist and Stalin admirer Henri Barbusse quipped: “Artek is the true paradise.”

It just so happened that, when I was eight or nine years old, I was offered a customary three week placement there. My father worked at the time as a director for Children’s Programmes on Leningrad TV - the rough equivalent of BBC2. He wasn’t a Party man, far from it, but it was the early sixties and his position alone qualified me as a model pioneer. I flatly refused.

I don’t think the reason was that the true meaning of the word “camp” had finally permeated the popular conscience; after all, I had already been to a regular pioneer camp at least once by then. Probably, I had already developed that dreadful allergy to being among those “more equal than others”.

The second invitation came about half a century later. It was to visit this famous camp, now refurbished and re-launched, dropping the word “pioneer” from both title and description. I was to join a delegation of foreign correspondents from Vietnam, China, Syria, Germany, India, and news agencies of the world.

This time there was only a pang of a doubt – but curiosity got the better of me, so, taking as a companion my twelve year old son, a keen student of all things Russian, I hit the road. Children, when not discouraged, are famously good at sniffing out when something is phoney – or when it is not; the boy was to prove himself a good asset.

In its terrain and climate Crimea is like a small separate planet. Similar to the territories of Israel/Palestine, tiny though it is, it has various climate zones, its own mountains, valleys - even the desert and an ancient, long silent volcano. The north shore is ascetically arid and somewhat epic, while the south - where we are - is lush and green, a perfect picture-postcard wherever you look.

Descending on the zigzagging road to a lagoon hosting Artek and then passing through the gate, manned by the polite-but-firm members of Artek’s own security force, in their slightly stylised bespoke uniforms, it is impossible to escape the feeling of entering a separate little country - the sensation magnified by two brass bands on a vast square, surrounded by tinted glass buildings, in the blazing sun and 40 degree heat, playing for us an old march, elegant, pompous and sentimental. The musicians, from the full range of Artek ages – 7 to 17, wear full dress uniforms, with golden braids and epaulets.

With my own brains seemingly melting under my hat with the heat, I look into their faces - and see no sign of distress. Their eyes are sparkling; they all seem to be – how should I call it? – happy.

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And when, after profusely thanking them, in some confusion, the small crowd of us start beating the retreat towards the palatial air-conditioned building of the canteen - they - about a hundred or so musicians, plus two conductors, in perfect harmony carry on trumpeting away.

The food was simple, plentiful and rather delicious too: green leafy salads (Russians have them for starters) soups, beef, chicken or fish, with potatoes or veg. On the service tables everywhere - huge bowls of fragrant seasonal fruit. “It’s important,” comments the Director later. “A lot of kids from provincial orphanages or very poor families take it as a surprise – and a massive treat. We humbly aspire to make it a habit. After all, apples in Russia grow everywhere.”

The professorial canteen manager gave us a very highbrow lecture on the nutritional values, schedules, Kosher and Halal options... This kind of briefing waited for us at every facility we visited in those few days of travel up and down this amusing little country.

It was, we were relieved to be told, officially no longer “camp” but the International Children’s Centre. But the sodden word kept popping up, though its instrumental value here was hard not to understand.

The kingdom of Artek consists of nine provinces – separate camps, defined by age and specific activities with names like- Amber, Seaside, Turquoise, Forest, Field, Lake, River and Crystal. Each has its own architectural style and separate uniform (crafted by the designers for the Russian Olympic Team, with a long posh Italian-sounding name, Artek’s glossy booklet proudly states in a rare faux pas). We try our best to visit most of them.

A crew of 10-14 year olds do some rock-climbing on the tall artificial walls under the steep real one which, we are told, will be theirs to conquer a bit later; not far away, under the beautiful olive groves, kids in a slightly different uniform, sitting in a circle, compete in reciting poetry – and a hundred yards down below, on the sparkling surface of the sea, two huge white life-boats, with two pairs of rowers each, are racing, and one can hear yelps and shouts from the spectators.

In a well equipped laboratory, teenagers, tongues sticking out in concentration, are soldering monstrous devices – allegedly a next-generation computer, with a mechanical charging handle and capable of sending and receiving messages by radio and in Morse code – “who knows how soon it may become handy”, comments the instructor with a wry smile.

Next door another bunch is merrily assembling a huge drone, its body forged out of something extremely light and strong. “Graphene?” asks Aleksey, feigning the look of an expert. “Something like that,” says a bespectacled boffin of the same age, a bit condescendingly.

Right outside, under the small awning, a shoal of girls are messing with some fruit and what looks like a tangle of assorted wires. “What’s that?” asks the guide, and a chorus of voices explain: “Plants all possess some small electrical charge. Our supposition is that it correlates with how ripe they are, here’s the draft table. If we get it right, wouldn’t it be very handy when buying a watermelon?!” They giggle shyly.

And then there are classes of nano-tech, robotics, space exploration, studios for ceramics, weaving, 3D painting and printing, advanced chemistry and physics, laboratories where children, from scratch, study Water and Air and Light. There are even cheerleading and golf classes – there is simply no space to mention all the activities on offer. But what fascinates here most is that the children we see, practically all of them, are excited, happy, deeply engaged; these kind of things are impossible to forge or stage.

And another memory flash: on an open roofed terrace facing the sea about a couple of hundred children of all ages – some of whom are the members of the establishment’s own news agency - discuss reality (politics, terrorism, day-to-day life, amongst the topics) with Artek’s highly intelligent and charismatic director, Alexei Kasprezhak (Phd Econ.) a man of 38 in pale blue denim jeans, a crisp white shirt and a well-cut linen jacket; the fluency and libertarian spirit of the dialogue is quite awe-inspiring. Then he leaves and the children thoroughly interrogate us, the journalists. “What’s your attitude to the concept of truth?” asks a 10-year-old boy.

Intentionally, I came unprepared, the well-written and printed literature still in my shoulder bag. The thing is, I already had a hypothesis, perhaps not very different from that of most of my colleagues, but slightly more personally prominent, due to some obvious Soviet Union roots. After all, I spent in that Atlantis the whole of 33 years – still most of my life. Artek was one of the multitude of features – no matter how peripheral and minute, of that small life-time. But it was important in another sense.

It’s necessary to say that for hundreds of thousands of children, who spent some time there over the years, that old “pioneer camp” was probably utterly wonderful; but that bygone Land, or rather the System which kept it together, that Arte was an ultimate Potemkin Village and nothing else.

Yes, we know today that the term itself was invented by a travelling Jesuit spy, his amusing anecdote about Prince Potemkin - merely an early sample of “fake news” (concocted, coincidentally, at the time of the original acquisition of Crimea in the late 18th century) – but as a metaphor of a beautiful facade pulled as a screen over nothingness – or over some unpleasant dreary mess – the term still works very well.

So, the Soviets did it - is the new Russia trying to pull the same trick all over again? That was the supposition, easily readable on the faces of my distinguished colleagues, both foreign and Russian.

The sparkly eyes of those boys and girls and especially the unhampered sincerity with which they freely spoke about war and peace and all the problems big and small - unimaginable in a Soviet child - already gave an alternative answer.

It slowly dawned on me that, far from being a fancy facade for anything in the present, the project we were introduced to may be nothing less than an openly proclaimed revolution, all be it quiet, entirely peaceful and very slow.

I’ll try to explain what I mean.

“No Generalissimo or Field Marshall poses as much power as a humble school teacher” – Mr Kasprzhak likes to repeat, quoting Churchill – or was it on Clausewitz?

His ambitions are clear, well articulated and utterly benign, though necessarily a bit megalomaniac, in the sense that, according to him, Artek must be seen and understood as a seed (or, perhaps, a detonator) of the widest possible educational reform.

And what’s the foundation for this reform? It is, believe it or not, kindness.

“The economics of the future is that of open possibilities; it can only be built successfully by an individual with strong self–confidence, that is - the one who graduated in the educational system, which is based on praising the achievement, rather than constantly punishing for under-achievement as is the case with the present day schooling system,” says the director during an informal farewell press conference.

“The phenomenon of Artek is in the mere fact that we compliment children for their successes. We consider education as a means of motivation, challenging the kids to do their best, then show the results to the hundreds of other children and harvest some applause.

Vladimir Putin addresses children at the Artek centre in June (Getty Images)

“The core of Artek’s educational programme is the plot, the story, the uniting theme of every three week shift, structured on the basis of Artek tradition and the game principle to give each and every kid what we call ‘the conditions for individual success’.”

These principles both permeate and keep together the whole sophisticated structure of Artek as a “class without borders” (practically expanding to the whole of Crimea and, potentially, to the whole of the country, continent, planet), united, despite the distinctions of ages, separate camps and sporting or scientific collectives.

There is also a special integrating principle, a sort of technique, which allows their secondary school, with its own bespoke proprietary education system, to work in concert with the virtually endless numbers of clubs, studios and workshops on offer. They call it the Network Educational Module - admitting it sounds a bit like scientific gobbledegook - meaning a genuine effort to create a web-like connection of meaning between the child’s activities, topics learnt and experiences gained - and then creating conditions for him or her to share those with others.

“But tell me – how does that work in practice?” begged my son, visibly wobbly with tiredness from digesting all so much information – and instantly he got his answer. Take the small poem by Boris Pasternak which everyone knows: “...The candle that flickered on the table, the candle that flickered...” – a wonderful image that exists in literature and the historical context of its time; but the teacher of chemistry will give you the analysis of the process of burning, whilst the specialist in optics will show you a few tricks too; then comes the psychologist, who may use the circle of light as an allegory for Artek’s class – and that’s just at school. Later, at the class of supplemental education, yet another teacher will show how to make candles. Or maybe, before that – how to look after the bees – and then collect the wax. Primarily, it’s about waking up your natural curiosity. Curiosity is the ignition for everything and currently, perhaps intentionally, its battery was made very, very flat. We are trying to remedy that.

Crimea, the tip of a very cold sub-continent, is soaked in history and culture: here, slightly to the right, lived and died Anton Chekov, here young Pushkin was up to some mischief, there right in the middle, Feodor Chaliapin, a legendary Opera singer, tried to build a temple to Apollo… and a few miles to the left, in 1854, Turkish troops, under Franco-British command, on a binge of pillaging and rape burnt down the museum of unique antiquities. The lessons, many of them conducted on the spot – in a dock yard or on the top of a mountain - not only open up the multitude of historical contexts, but invite the pupil to follow the vector of any of them under the careful guidance of the specialist.

In essence – another councillor puts it - we are trying in our own humble way to stop and, hopefully, reverse the catastrophic infantilisation of grown-ups, which has been going on for at least the last half a century, simply by allowing children to grow up and turn into proper adults - organically.

This is the core substance of what I see as the “Artek Revolution”, and the rather complete rejection of my hypothesis. Far from being a sleek, ultra-modern and sophisticated facade to the messy and problematic reality of the now, we are presented here with a concerted, conscious effort to change it, to sculpture out of it an alternative future: the didactic alternative - kick-started in the Artek way and, hopefully, continued as an inner-process within a student. In the outside world it would simply not allow the resulting grown-up to conform peacefully and meekly to the thoroughly corrupt, cynical, ecologically and militaristically suicidal system, run by tiny, malicious, self-interested cliques. Organically, naturally, they’ll have to change it. That is the plan. And it’s not just about Russia.

And so there were just a couple of questions left.

“Anyway, how does one get a place here?” Aleksey, severely blushing, asked one of the councillors who looked after our expedition. For all those days, out of a corner of my eye, I was watching his growing interest and excitement. It was a precious litmus test.

“Well, here is the instruction manual,” - she answered, pulling a printed page out of a file. “But it’s mostly about the prizes and awards you may have – for if you don’t there is one line right here: you are supposed to have a gift.”

“But I don’t think I have any,” mumbled the boy, an accomplished pop-Sculptor, pop philosopher and passionate post-modernist chef; that answer made me a bit proud.

“Ah, but that’s the thing! Everyone has a gift,” retorted the lady with very clear conviction. “You simply have to find it and articulate it in your own way – then put it on the web. That may be enough. We then will make sure to help you to focus it and turn it into something useful.”

And then that other question, the last one - how does it tick in a practical sense?

Artek works all year round; its territory occupies 218 hectares, about half of which is parkland, with seven mile of coastline. Its popularity and capacity experiences staggering growth: in 2014 it received 6,000 children, in 2015 - 19,000, in 2016 - 31,000 and by 2020 it plans to look after 45,000 kids. Its nine camps, with ultra modern – or belle époque, freshly modernised – dormitories, with rooms to accommodate, on average, 4-6 children each (the figure, scientifically calculated to avoid “leadership problems”), which are equipped with all the modern conveniences, gym equipment, multi-media libraries and, more often than not – with swimming pools outside.

These are the little countries, carefully built into the precious and fragile environment with a lot of care and consideration - as a part of the general eco-sustainability programme which, in turn, is a major part of both the curriculum and extra-curricular work and study in their own right ,and also a show piece for their Russian National Children’s Environment Forum, a programme under the patronage of Moscow State University and The Ministry of Natural Resources’ and Ecology. The list of this kind of partnership/sponsorship deals between the State of Artek and various ministries and giant corporations - from Rosnano, the National Space Agency, to cultural entities, which, among other things, help to run its own jazz, rock and film festivals, is virtually endless.

Nevertheless, all of that, almost certainly, ought to be done by means of generous subsidies - only five per cent of Artek vouchers are distributed on a commercial basis and, although they are pretty dear and in high demand, the revenue obviously would be able to cover only a fraction of the budget. What helps, I suppose, is that we are still talking about a “developing country” and some astute, financially literate - yet honest – people; so the major building and reconstruction, which took place in 2014, costing an astronomical amount of money in roubles which, translated into pounds, makes up a sum closely comparable to that spent on the beautification of one Grenfell Tower.

There is of course hope that the joint research programmes with the likes of say, the United Aircraft Corporation will start at some point bringing in commercial returns. However, the steady stream of eminent guests, coming here on a pilgrimage - ranging from government ministers and senators to the pop, sports and movie stars (not to mention the top-ranking scientists of all sorts, who come here to work) assures that all those generous subsidies, which in fact are an investment – and with a highest possible return - are not about to dry up anytime soon.

And so this beautiful project, in the best sense elitist, yet thoroughly egalitarian and classless, with kids from every walk of life and virtually every country in the world being invited and embraced - together with local children from neighbouring cities and towns, currently 300 pupils in all, who are getting their regular education there - is set to go on and prosper into the foreseeable future.