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Free and Flush, Russians Eager to Roam Abroad


Russian tourists enjoy the pool at a resort hotel in Antalya, Turkey, built to resemble the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral.

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: June 15, 2008

ANTALYA, Turkey — Yelena Kasyanova booked her trip at a local travel agency in about as much time it takes to drop by the market for a few groceries. She was soon lounging here by the Mediterranean, a working-class anybody from an anyplace deep in Russia, a child of the Soviet era who still remembers the humiliating strictures that once made it difficult to obtain a passport, let alone a plane ticket.

And all around the beach were so many just like her.

One of the most enduring changes in the lives of Russians in recent years has occurred not in Russia itself, but in places like this coastal region of Turkey, where an influx of Russian tourists has given rise to a mini-industry catering to their needs. A people who under Communism were rarely allowed to venture abroad, and then lacked money to do so when the political barriers first fell, are now seeing the world. And relishing it.

There is perhaps no better symbol of the growth in Russian tourism than the very resort where Ms. Kasyanova was staying, the Kremlin Palace Hotel, a kind of Las-Vegas-does-Moscow-by-the-shore extravaganza whose buildings are replicas of major sights at the Kremlin complex and nearby neighborhood. Why go to any old spot when you can frolic by the pool while gazing at the reassuring onion domes of a faux St. Basil’s Cathedral? (No need to bundle up against the cold, either!)

Ms. Kasyanova, 51, a health-care aide from the Kaluga region, 125 miles southwest of Moscow, has been to Egypt, Hungary and Turkey in the last few years and has Western Europe in her sights. For her and other Russians interviewed here, foreign travel reflects not just Russia’s economic revival under Vladimir V. Putin, but also how the country has become, in some essential ways, normal.

If you have some time and a little money, you can travel. Just like everyone else in the world.

“It is now so easy — buy a package tour for $800, and here we are, in paradise,” said Ms. Kasyanova, who, like many Russians here, was amused by the resort’s trappings but also interested in exploring the mountains and other places nearby. “It speaks of the high standard of life in Russia, of the improvement in life in Russia.”

The Russians are coming from all over. At the local airport here, the arrivals screen was like a primer in Russian geography, with charter flights from Moscow, Rostov-on-Don in the south, Kazan in the center, Novosibirsk in Siberia and other cities in between.

The number of Russian tourists visiting countries outside the former Soviet Union grew to 7.1 million in 2006, the last year statistics were available, from 2.6 million in 1995, according to the Russian government.

A record 2.5 million Russians visited Turkey in 2007, up 33 percent from 2006, Turkish officials said. Only Germany, that paragon of European wealth, sends more tourists to Turkey. (By contrast, in 1988, a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, all of 22,000 Soviet citizens visited Turkey.)

The Russian tourism boom is happening as new low-cost airlines in Europe have spurred a sharp increase in tourism across the Continent. But for the Russians, the chance to travel is especially prized.

For the first time in Russian history, wide swaths of the citizenry are being exposed to life in far-off lands, helping to ease a kind of insularity and parochialism that built up in the Soviet era. Back then, the public was not only prevented from going abroad; it was also inculcated with propaganda that the Soviet Union was unquestionably the world’s best country, so there was no need to leave anyway.

People who desired foreign travel in Soviet times typically had to receive official approval, and if it was granted, they were closely chaperoned once they crossed the border. Even before they left, they often were sent to classes to be indoctrinated in how to behave and avoid the perils of foreign influence. Those who were not in good standing with the party had little chance of going.

The controls on travel were particularly onerous given Russia’s long and dark winters.

“For us, it’s like a fairy tale to be here,” said Lilia Valeyeva, 46, a clerk from Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains who had never before been abroad when she visited Turkey two years ago. Since then, she has returned twice.

“We are seeing other countries with our own eyes, how other people live,” she said.

Many Russians interviewed here credited Mr. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, for their ability to travel, saying that he was responsible for Russia’s new prosperity.

“It is not like before, when we were afraid of everything,” said Larisa Kazakova, 32, a real estate agent from Yekaterinburg. “We travel, and we live a good life.”

These days, Russians can compare the services they receive abroad with those at home, and can mingle with tourists from everywhere. How these experiences will alter their perspective at home is an intriguing question.

The writer and commentator Viktor Yerofeyev said he had noticed that the more Russians traveled, the more they tended to lose some of the coarseness that at times characterized Soviet society.

“Through all this travel, we are seeing a change in mentality at home,” Mr. Yerofeyev said. “People are now seeking pleasure, whether it is in the night clubs of Moscow or in restaurants. Travel is a continuation of that pleasure. Just to have pleasant lives, not to suffer, to feel positive. Their life compass changes, from ‘I don’t care about anything’ to ‘I would like to have a better life.’ Travel is a part of this.”

“The world is becoming part of their lives,” he said.

The first major wave of Russian tourists after the fall of the Soviet Union did not necessarily do their country proud, sometimes acting like rowdy college freshmen getting a taste of spring break in Florida. There were tales of hotels limiting or even banning some Russian tour groups because of drunken behavior.

Hotel executives in Turkey said things had largely settled down, with many Russian families now vacationing here, and relatively few problems.

“Nobody believes me when I say this, but the Germans drink even more than the Russians,” said Ali Akgun, a manager at another hotel in the area, the Kemer Holiday Club. “It’s just that the Russians drink a little faster.”

The biggest struggle now for the Turkish hotels is to find enough staff members who speak Russian. Those in the tourism industry who had mastered German and English are returning to language school.

“Everybody is studying Russian now,” said Suat Esenli, a worker at the Kremlin Palace Hotel, which has more than 800 rooms and opened in 2003, just as Russian tourism began to soar. Typically, about 60 percent of the hotel’s patrons are from the former Soviet Union, with the rest from elsewhere in Europe.

Still, the effort to make Russian guests feel comfortable can go too far. For a time, one of the hotel restaurants served the sort of dishes — borscht, blinis and the like — that should have brought joy to a Russian’s heart.

The restaurant had to scrap the menu. It turned out that the last thing that the Russians wanted was the food they could get at home.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company