When the warm season finally broke the grip of the lifeless Leningrad winter , my parents schlepped me around to an endless series of dachas in the Soviet Union : a mushroom-ridden village near Daugavpils , Latvia ; beautifully wooded Sestroretsk , not far from the Gulf of Finland ; the infamous Yalta in the Crimea -LRB- Stalin , Churchill and Roosevelt signed some kind of real estate deal here -RRB- ; Sukhumi , a wrecked Black Sea resort in what is today a restive part of Georgia .