Describe your most memorable vacation.
In the closing years of the Soviet Union, wherein the West began to be hopeful about the effects of Mikhail Gorbachev as a new kind of leader in charge, Geoff and I set off a package trip offered by the Soviet state tourist organisation, Intourist. The classic tour involved a flight to Moscow for a stay there with various tours, a train journey overnight to the then Leningrad with more tours and a flight back home there.
Of course, the sights were wonderful, but the memories that stay with me are not the onion domes of St Basil’s in the Kremlin, the Winter and Summer Pace in Leningrad, and so much else but the feel of the people and the place. Riding a public trolleybus was strange but fascinating. 5 kopecks, a vanishingly small amount, bought any journey in Moscow then. It was bought by purchasing a ticket on an automated box by the doors. Most could not get near the box, and the automatic response of Moscow citizens was for huge quantities of 5 kopeck coins to be passed across the bus and tickets passed back. How each coin married to each ticket seemed a mystery but it worked even though the air above the multiple heads seemed a network of interchanging hands.
Of course, in Red Square, we saw the Kremlin and St Basil’s whilst declining to jump the queue of patient but obviously disgruntled Soviet citizens, at the privilege given to foreign currency bearing Western tourists, herded through by Intourist workers, to see Lenin in his tomb. But the memorable highlight was the GUM shopping mall over the square from the Kremlin, not only for its exterior but its interior of Soviet public manners and rituals:
Inside a department store in GUM the air was filled by the mechanisms of retail in the 1950s in the West, air tubes carrying money between different parts of the system and incredibly long triplex queues – for you queued first to secure the item from a salesperson, securing from them a note of purchase, and then queued again to pay for it, securing a note of sale and then queued again to secure the item. The system was more than bizarre and frustrating. Meanwhile Soviet citizens queued patiently. And, of course Western tourists had Intourist shops that only tourists could use in which foreign currency alone was usable.
In Leningrad and Moscow, the highlight was walking the wide boulevards (and using the Moscow Metro of course), especially at night where the absence of the light that is shed by commodification and the neon advertising by which it was lit up streets in London and New York with branded glare.
This was truly memorable. It has gone – its replacement the real nightmare.
With love
Steven xxxxxxx
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