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If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Kiev
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12611 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1987 |
2,596 Words |
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John H. Fund
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USSR
From an Original Idea By Karl Marx
Marc Polonsky and Russell Taylor
Boston: Faber & Faber, 1986
178 pp., $8.95
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's announced policy of glasnost, or openness, is certain to attract renewed American interest in travel to the Soviet Union. Intourist, the official Soviet tourist agency, reports that eighty thousand Americans visited last year and predicts the number will rise substantially this year.
But to many Americans, a trip to the Soviet Union is still almost as exotic as paddling down the Amazon. Tour books tend to blandly describe monuments and museums and rarely capture the real flavor of the country. Unanswered questions abound. What is it like there? Who do you actually get to meet? What will you see? Will I be spied on? Do I have to stick with my tour? Finally, courtesy of two young British writers, there is a way of finding out what the Soviet Union is really like before one hits the tarmac in Moscow.
Marc Polonsky and Russell Taylor studied Russian as students in Britain. Unsatisfied with the student tours of the Soviet Union they were taken on, they decided to form their own small travel company called Soviet Union Travel, which would specialize in "real life" tours to the USSR. Shunning the country-according-to-Intourist approach wasn't easy, but the authors gamely kept their small business afloat for over a year until the impersonal forces of history - namely the declining dollar and Chernobyl - forced them to follow consumer preferences and close up shop.
But while you can no longer take a Polonsky-Taylor tour of Mother Russia, you can profit immensely from their collected experiences and frustrations. In their book, the authors have collected a priceless treasure trove of insights and observations from their tours. This distillation is not only a definitive guide to the real Soviet experience but a hilarious tongue-in-cheek satire that pokes largely good-natured fun at the foibles of socialism. Whether you are an inquisitive tourist planning a two-week tour of Potemkin villages or a Marine who wants to learn how to spot femme fatales before you have surrendered the U.S. embassy's codebooks, this slim volume is the best guide to the turf.
"We wanted to write a book about the Soviet Union that people would actually read," says Polonsky. "Using the format of a travel book we were able to put together a step-by-step introduction to Soviet life that we feel is much closer to the actual reality than any tour book."
The Ludicrous Reality of Soviet Life
Originally published in Britain, the book has already won a seal of approval from The Banana Republic, the eclectic retailer of unusual travel products and safari clothing. The Banana Republic catalog calls the book "indispensable" and informs prospective purchasers "this book is written in a light tone, but that does not mean that it isn't practical."
The authors of USSR: From an Original Idea by Karl Marx also engage in the kind of
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