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Street-Level Perestroika
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13580 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1988 |
3,008 Words |
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Larry Moffitt
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We were all sitting naked as jaybirds in a public sauna in Leningrad. Our new acquaintance smiled and said in thickly accented English, "So, vat you think of Red menace?"
The comrade is a mechanical engineer who had taken the day off to visit the sauna with a group of friends and a bucket of warm beer. The routine there, at least in the men's section, is to endure the torturous dry-heat sauna and then walk through an ice-water shower on the way to the steam bath. To further test their machismo, the men sit on the hottest level in the bath and flail each other's backs with birch branches.
The final ritual is to retire to semicomfortable wooden recliners and sip beer. Russian public saunas have none of the homosexual associations of American bathhouses and are a popular weekday gathering place for anyone one who can find an excuse to leave work for the afternoon.
Our engineer friend acted as an interpreter for the dozen or so others who joined in an animated conversation that touched on Afghanistan, Vietnam, wife-beating, Joan Baez, and the need for better Soviet ice cream, among other topics--including our eagerly awaited thoughts on the Red menace.
The tone was friendly and candid, ending with a toast as our friend said in Russian, then in English, "You're not afraid of us and we're not afraid of you. So here's to that."
Visitors to the USSR usually fall into one of two groups: tourists who visit the museums and czars' palaces of "guidebook Russia" and official delegations of professionals, government leaders, or clergy on political fact-finding tours. The latter groups' days are filled predictable sermons by official spokesmen.
A third group, composed of members of the first two, are those who opt out of their printed itineraries to ride the subways and streetcars, poke their noses in shops, and talk with the many people who, wanting to meet a foreigner, simply walk up and introduce themselves.
Out with Intourist
The objective for these street-level tourists is to get lost and, through the process of getting unlost, meet the average Ivan and learn as much as one can about daily life in the USSR. The process is unscientific and subject to misleading conclusions, but otherwise highly worthwhile.
Guides from Intourist (the government tourist agency) learned long ago that American and European tourists do not like being told they can't take a bus by themselves or visit a coffee shop on their own, so the agency now makes a point of announcing which buses go from the hotel to various places of interest.
Several years ago Intourist guides were required to make nightly reports about suspicious activities such as who strayed from the group or who met a Soviet citizen, etc. But things have loosened up and now they only have to make note of a tourist who is fluent in Russian or is conspicuously absent.
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