FAULTY TOURS
Stephen Handelman experiences
the frustrations of travelling in the Soviet Union
Moscow EVERY Soviet establishment catering for foreign tourists contains a large, usually dusty, book reserved for complaints. The name for it in Russian — knyga jhalabi — gives it a touch of oriental mystery, like some ancient epic poem. I owe this discov- ery to a Hungarian journalist with whom I happened to find myself last spring in the Georgian capital of Tblisi.
Dining in the upstairs restaurant of one of the Intourist-operated hotels, we observed a species of insect life swimming in our sauce. This was promptly pointed out to our waiter, who seemed to take it in his stride. 'I don't know how it got there,' he shrugged. Neither, apparently, did the kitchen help who, when pressed, similarly denied responsibility.
Their attitude infuriated my Hungarian friend. `Bring me', he demanded, `the knyga jhalabi'. There was an immediate change of mood. Apathy turned to a fawning attempt at reconciliation, then to anger. The restaurant manager appeared, to deliver a lecture the main point of which seemed to be that this sort of thing happens in all the best resorts, even in Hungary, he added maliciously. It was all to no avail. The knyga was brought out. My friend wrote his account of the episode, on a numbered page, and we departed to with- ering looks of hatred from the entire kitchen staff.
The Hungarian later explained his mo- tives. 'Whenever there is a complaint, the entire staff risk losing their bonus for the 'Thanks to Dan Quayle the gooks never made it to Indiana.' month, the same thing once happened to me on the Baltic, and the management offered me everything they could think of, even a free meal. I felt sorry for them, and didn't sign the book. But this time, I decided that if someone isn't forced to take responsibility, they will never change.'
I have no way of knowing whether his assessment of the reformative power of the knyga jhalabi is accurate. But it is worth noting if you are among the thousands of tourists expected to come to Mr Gor- bachev's Russia over the next few months. The political changes under way here have triggered a laudable increase of visitors who are anxious to taste first-hand the fruits of perestroika and glasnost. Unfortu- nately, it must be said, tourism has not kept up with politics.
As they have been for centuries, physical discomfort, bureaucratic hassles and a lingering suspicion of foreigners are indis- putable facts of life for the modern traveller. Most visitors, unlike my Hunga- rian colleague, don't seem to mind. The foreign tourist in the Soviet Union is more serious than your holiday-maker in Spain or on the Riviera. He wants to learn, not luxuriate, and his willingness to put up with discomfort perfectly matches his hosts' propensity to inflict it.
He will, of course, be amply rewarded for his pains. The opportunities for travel in this fascinating, enormous country have expanded as a result of the Soviet author- ities' eagerness to display the advantages of reform, not to mention their enthusiasm for foreign currency. More cities are being opened to foreign tourists, there are grea- ter opportunities for individual, as opposed to group, travel, and even the guides seem friendlier. Needless to say, the authorities themselves are well aware of their failings.
'Our level of service lags behind Western standards, not so much because of the professional incompetence of guides, chefs or maids, but because of our outdated management structures,' V. Pavlov, chair- man of the USSR state committee for foreign tourism, acknowledged recently. Mr Pavlov is the man to blame, or praise, for the changes in Intourist, the massive state monopoly which controls every aspect of a foreign tourist's life.
Intourist is promising its own Gorbachev-style revolution. The relatively 'modest' figure of 1.8 million annual fore- ign tourists, Mr Pavlov said, is entirely due to the continuing lack of available hotel rooms in the main cities. There are only 40,000 rooms in Moscow, of which 9,000 are allocated to Intourist. Pavlov pledged that 30 new hotels would be built or restored in the near future, and that his agency would begin applying economic penalties against hotels or restaurants which gave bad service. The upward trend in service and attention, he leads us to assume, is a logical consequence of the Soviet Union's programme of introducing Western ideas of profit-and-loss accounta- bility to other, more crucial areas of its economy.
Well, perhaps; real reform in the tourist field requires a measure of de- centralisation, as it does in the larger economy. But if the corrective principle of the knyga jhalabi were applied to the entire system, the 'command economy' of Soviet tourism would long since have collapsed. Instead, it is likely to be the last pocket of resistance against perestroika.
Part of the problem is sheer size. The Soviet tourist infrastructure is the largest and most complex in the world. There are giant hotels capable of holding 3,000 guests, the globe's biggest airline (in volume of traffic and passenger-miles), and one of the most intricate networks of package travel ever devised. In reality, the system is in a state of paralysis. Stories of lost bookings, missed trains, and inexplic- ably closed facilities dog the traveller's path outside the capital. Stopping off one night on my way to Moscow in the ancient Russian town of Novgorod, I discovered my carefully arranged advance reserva- tions were worthless. 'This hotel is broken,' said a smiling clerk in English. 'We have already made you reservations somewhere else. You must go there.' The obvious question is, why have a tourist monopoly at all? The threat of domestic and foreign competition would be likely to do more to shake up Intourist complacency than any number of stern directives from the top. But this would challenge embedded attitudes which re- quire the illusion, if not the fact, of keeping curious foreigners manageable. The standard Soviet explanation for the 'special treatment' accorded foreign tour- ists is the need to protect them from the rigours of travel in Russia and the complex- ities of communication. There is some logic to that, but it often translates into a system which requires foreigners to pay two or three times more than Soviet citizens for similarly flawed services. And, through some infuriating law understood only by Soviet bureaucrats, it can some- times make things more complicated. Arriving once at Moscow's domestic air- port, I and fellow foreigners were escorted off the plane ahead of the Soviet passen- gers, only to watch them later retrieve their luggage while I was still lingering behind. After a prolonged wait, my own bag, which had been slowly channelled to the foreign section, was handed to me. Queries about why it took so long only elicited a shrug and the non sequitur, 'Foreigners are different.'
One of the more encouraging things about such incidents, however, is the back- ground grumbling from Soviet fellow tour- ists. The new age of glasnost has left its mark even on Soviet leisure living. Letters to newspapers regularly complain about the 'privileges' accorded foreign tourists. One woman claimed that her summer holiday on the Black Sea coast was ruined when her family was arbitrarily evicted from their hotel to make way for some foreign guests. 'All for hard currency,' she sniffed. The new Homo Sovieticus, long since freed from Stalinist restrictions on travel and mobility, has his own frustra- tions with poor service. When G. Pyatov, an official in charge of the Aeroflot regional office in Crimea, found himself forced to respond to custom- ers' complaints about an increase in penal- ties for cancelled flights last year, he explained that one fifth of the airline's 260,000 passengers were foreigners. 'We have to maintain a whole staff of airline workers providing both tickets and depar- tures for foreign tourists,' he said. 'Not without reason have they been considered spongers until now. There is no profit from them at all.' It makes you want to reach for the knyga jhalabi.
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