When you are shown a party headquarters, a palace of culture, a stadium, an auditorium, or such, ask when it was built. We discovered that, in the areas not occupied by Nazis, many of the biggest and fanciest were built right at the time Americans were dying to keep the Murmansk lend-lease route open.
There is new brick construction all over the Soviet Union. We asked repeatedly to be shown a brick yard, were never quite refused, but the request was never granted. We have since heard a rumor that this is prison labor and that is why a tourist can't see something as unsecret as a brick yard. So try it yourself—you may merely prove to yourself that Intourist exists to keep tourists from seeing what they want to see, rather than vice versa.
Offer your passport to casual acquaintances; they will usually offer theirs in return—
internal
passports. Intourist people have been coached to deny that such a thing exists but everybody in the USSR carries one and the owner must get a visa to go from one Russian city to another. It is a brown book with "ÏACÏOPT" (passport) on the cover. Try it when your guide is not around.
The USSR is the only country in which we were never able to get into a private home. Other tourists report the same but one couple from Los Angeles almost cracked this; they said to their guide, "
Why
can't we see the inside of one of those apartment houses? Are you people
ashamed
of them?" The next day they were shown through a not-yet-occupied one.
This could be varied endlessly, as it works on that Russian basic, their inferiority complex. The key word is "ashamed"—simply asking "Why?" gets you nowhere. I think it could be used to get into farms, schools, courts, factories, anything not a military secret. It tops my list of things I wish I had thought of first.
In meeting anyone, including guides, try to use "democracies" as an antonym for "Communist countries" as soon as possible—drag it in by the heels, i.e., "I think all of us from the democracies earnestly hope for peace with the Communist countries," etc. The much abused word "democratic" means "Communist" in Russia and it always introduces a propaganda pitch. If you deny him his definition by preempting the word, you leave him with his mouth hanging open, unable to proceed.
We got tripped on this several times before we caught on.
The official list of things you must not photograph is short but the unofficial list is long and ranges from old, broken-down buildings to old, broken-down women sweeping the streets. You can photograph such by having them appear "accidentally" in a background but if you are suspected of this, they have a silent counter to it. At some later time you will find that your film has been exposed to light, then respooled. You could keep all your film with you at all times and hope to get it across the border . . . but such behavior might cause you to be arrested on suspicion of espionage, as one American tourist was this summer. At best, sneaking a picture of one passed-out drunk risks losing
all
your pictures—too high a price even if you aren't accused of being a spy.
The most-used plane, the Ilyushin-14, flies very low; you can see a lot and compare it with elsewhere. Are railroads single or double track? How much traffic on the roads? On the rivers? How about factory smokestacks and other signs of industry? How busy are the airfields? Or a dozen other things. I think you will conclude that no Russian claim should be accepted as true until fully verified. A "great industrial center" often turns out to be a jerkwater town.
But don't make written notes about such things!
Don't!!!
Will your mail be opened? You must assume so. Will your rooms be bugged? It seems impossible to monitor every room of every Intourist hotel—but if the police get interested in
you
it takes just three minutes in these days of miniaturization to bug a room. I do know, from several incidents, that Soviet citizens
believe
that all hotel rooms are bugged.
I wish that a million of us would visit the USSR; the dollars the Kremlin would reap would be more than offset by the profit to us in having so many free men see with their own eyes what Communism is.
But go there with your eyes open—Intourist is as fully an agency of the Kremlin as is Gromyko or Mikoyan. Its functions are (1) to get your money in advance, (2) to deliver as little as possible by downgrading accommodations, by forced overcharges on food, and by clipping you on auto and guide service, (3) to waste your time so that you will see as little as possible, and (4) to see that what little time you have left is spent only on those things the Kremlin does not mind your seeing—"new construction" (from the outside), parks of "rest & culture" (filled with loudspeakers blaring propaganda), ballets, museums, stadiums, and the outsides of public buildings.
The first point you must accept; the game is crooked but it is the only game in town. Points two and three you can struggle against—I hope the tactics suggested in here will help. Point four is the toughest. After trimming you down to about three hours a day of useful time, Intourist can and will use up what is left in "stadium sightseeing" unless you fight it constantly. Even then, Intourist is adept in parrying with: "It's closed today—too bad you're not staying another day," and "That must be arranged in advance through the Ministry of Culture, etc." and "You should have requested that in Moscow."
The essence of Intourist tactics is: "Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today." The way to answer it is: "No! I will
not
look at the stadium, I do
not
want to see another subway station, I will
not
visit a museum to see another five hundred pictures of Lenin. I want to see thus-and-so and I want to see it
now.
Stop the car, get on the phone, and arrange it—or tell the Director that, as far as I am concerned, you're fired! I am keeping the car and the driver and will go on without you—I've got hours more of car service due me today and I
won't
be cheated out of it." You will find whether your guide is truly a guide . . . or a guard placed with you to make sure you see only the facade of this regime. Whether or not you see "thus-and-so" you are sure to learn a surprising amount about how a police state is run . . . and thereby get your full money's worth in education.
After twenty years it would seem logical for me to return to the USSR to see what improvements, if any, they have made in handling tourism. I could plead age and health but I shan't—one trip to the USSR is educational; twice is masochism.
If you have been to the USSR recently and if you know enough Russian that you could and did slip the leash occasionally and poke around and get acquainted without permission of Intourist, please write to me and tell me about it—what you saw with your own eyes, what you touched, what you counted, how you were treated. I am not interested in second-hand reports, not even from other Americans you trust, and I most emphatically am not interested in anything your guides told you.
If you know no Russian and took one of the standard Intourist trips—around the Black Sea, or the Leningrad-Moskva-Sochi trip—don't waste your time writing. I hope you had fun.
If you took the long railway trip, Vladivostok to Leningrad or Moskva—or vice versa—do please write to me. If you knew no Russian at first, I'm betting high odds that you spoke fluent (if ungrammatical) Russian long before you completed the trip. You will know many things I don't know as I have never been across Siberia. Alma Ata, KSSR, north of the Himalayas and just short of Sinkiang, is as far as I got.
Concerning believing what you see and ignoring reports:
In thirty-odd years of habitual travel, Mrs. Heinlein and I have not been simply sightseeing; we have been studying other people's ways. Sometimes trivia—e.g., in Peru they make far better apple pie than Mom ever baked (treason!), Chile has us beat all hollow when it comes to ice-cream sodas, and the Finnish ice-cream cone is a work of art that makes what we call an ice-cream cone look sad.
But usually we are dead serious. Lately I've been making a global survey of blood services—but that is another story. Two things we have done consistently throughout the world: 1) See the slums; 2) evaluate the diet.
The fancy hotels and the museums and the parks are much the same the world over—but the slums are honest criteria even though a traveller can't assign a numerical value. The street people of Bombay and of Calcutta tell far more about India than does the glorious Taj Mahal.
Two other questions give direct, numerical comparisons: Q: How many long tonnes of protein (meat, fish, cheese) does this country consume in one year? (Then, privately, divide by the population.) Q: How many minutes must a journeyman carpenter work to earn enough to buy one kilogram of the local standard bread?
The first question tells the quality of the average diet; the second tells you how rich (or poor) that country averages. If you have also managed to see the slums, you have some idea of the range of wealth. You can't tell by looking at the extremely wealthy; all over the world they are careful to dress like upper middle class, no higher. But slums are honest and the most extreme wealth range is to be found in India.
The range of personal wealth in Russia, in 1960, was high, possibly greater than the range in the U.S.A. But the range showed in "perks," not in money—privately-assigned automobiles and chauffeurs, summer houses, assigned living quarters. The Latvian Secretary (a Russian, not a Lett) of the Writers Union had as his offices a marble palace, extremely ornate inside and outside and loaded with sculpture and paintings (built—I was told—by the late Tsar for his favorite mistress. True? I don't know but I've never been in a more lavish palace and I have been in many). After meeting his colleagues—and living through a Russian drinking duel better left undescribed—we were taken by him out to the Baltic and shown his dacha . . . thereby showing us that he had a private car, a chauffeur, and a summer home, as well as offices literally fit for a king. No mention of money, no need to—I was convinced that he was not going home to a meal of black bread, potatoes, and boiled cabbage.
Yet he was merely writer boss in Latvia, a small captive country—not General Secretary of the Writers Union in Moskva. I was in the Writers Union general headquarters in Moskva, a large office building; I did not meet the General Secretary. I assume that he lived at least as well as his stooge in Latvia.
How many levels are there between this minor boss in Riga and the members of the Praesidium? How well does Khrushchev—excuse me; Brezhnev—live? I shan't guess.
In the USSR it was not politic (risky) to ask the two key questions that I always asked in other countries, and seeing slums was forbidden. Twice we saw slums by accident, were hurried on past—primitive log cabins just outside Moskva, 1st century mud huts in Alma Ata that were concealed by screening but from one elevation we could see over the screening . . . until we were seen and cautioned not to stop there and not to take pictures.
Since we couldn't ask our standard comparison questions, Mrs. Heinlein devised some "innocent" ones, and I concentrated on certain signs; both of us were sizing up population. At that time the USSR claimed a population of 225,000,000 and claimed a population for Moskva of 5,000,000+. (Today, twenty years later, they claim almost 300,000,000 and over 7,000,000.)
For many days we prowled Moskva—by car, by taxi when we did not want Intourist with us, by subway, by bus, and on foot. In the meantime Mrs. Heinlein, in her fluent Russian, got acquainted with many people—Intourist guides, drivers, people who picked us up on the streets, chambermaids, anyone. The Russians are delightful people, always happy to talk with visitors, in English if they know it (and many do), in Russian if they do not.
Let me add that, if it suited her, Ginny could charm pictures off a wall.
She was able to ask personal questions (but ones people anywhere usually are pleased to answer) by freely answering questions about us and showing warm interest in that person—not faked; she is a warm person.
But, buried in chitchat, she always learned these things:
How old are you?
Are you married?
How many children do you have?
How many brothers and sisters do you have? What ages?
How many nieces and nephews do you have?
Put baldly, that sounds as offensive as a quiz by a Kinsey reporter. But it was not put baldly—e.g., "Oh, how lucky you are! Gospodin Heinlein and I didn't even meet until the Great Patriotic War . . . and we have no children although we wanted them. But we have lots of nieces and nephews." Etc., etc. She often told more than she got but she accumulated, painlessly, the data she wanted, often without asking questions.
One day we were seated on a park bench, back of the Kremlin and facing the Moskva river, with no one near us—a good spot to talk; a directional mike would have to be clear across the river as long as we kept our backs to the Kremlin.
I said, "How big does that guide book say this city is?"
"Over five million."
"Hmmph! Look at that river. Look at the traffic on it." (One lonely scow—) "Remember the Rhine?" We had taken a steamer up the Rhine three years earlier; the traffic was so dense the river had traffic lights on it, just like the Panama Canal. "Ginny, this dump isn't anything like five million. More the size of Copenhagen, if that. Pittsburgh. New Orleans. San Francisco, possibly." (These are all cities I know well, on foot and by every form of transportation. In 1960 all of them were in the 600,000–800,000 range.) "Yet they are trying to tell us that this dump is bigger than Philadelphia, bigger than Los Angeles, bigger than Chicago. Nonsense."
(I have lived in all three cities. A big city feels big, be it Yokohama or New York.) "Three quarters of a million, not five million."
"I know," she agreed.
"Huh?"
(I think I must mention that Mrs. Heinlein is a close student of Russian history, history of the Russian Revolution, history of the Third International or Comintern, and so skilled in Marxist dialectical materialism that she can argue theory with a Russian party member and get him so mixed up that he's biting his own tail.)
She answered, "They claim to have finished the War with about two hundred million and Moscow at four million. Now they are claiming twenty-five million more in the Union, and over a million increase in Moscow." She thought a bit. "It's a lie. Unless they are breeding like flies everywhere outside Moscow, they have lost population since the War—not gained. I haven't found even one family with more than three children. The average is less than two. And they marry late. Robert, they aren't even replacing themselves."
She looked at that empty river. "Not quite as big as Copenhagen is my guess."
We stopped in many other cities—Alma Ata, Tashkent, Samarkand, Minsk, Vilno, Kiev, Riga, Leningrad, etc.—and she continued her gentle questioning but never found reason to change her opinion. Even out in the Muslim countries of Turkestan the birthrate was low, or the answers seemed to show it. She did not write down her figures (Well, I don't think she did; I warned her not to) but she has a memory that is effectively perfect as long as necessary . . . then she can wash out useless details, which I can't do.)
How was it possible for the Russians to claim that Moscow was seven times as big as it actually was? How could I be right and the whole world wrong? The World Almanac gave the same figures the Russians did, all news services seemed to accept Russian population figures—how could a Big Lie that big not be noticed—and denounced?
About a year later I had a chance to discuss it with an old shipmate, an admiral now retired but then holding a major command. I asked him how many people there were in Moscow.
He answered, "I don't know. Why don't you look it up?" (When a high brass answers, "I don't know," he may mean, "Don't be nosy and let's change the subject." But I persisted.)
"Make a guess. You must have some idea."
"Okay." He closed his eyes and kept quiet for several minutes. "Seven hundred and fifty thousand, not over that."
(Jackpot!)
I said, "Mister Ought Ought Seven, have you made a special study of Russia? Or shouldn't I ask?"
"Not at all. [His command] gives me all the trouble I need without worrying about Russia. I simply worked it as a logistics problem, War College style. But I had to stop and visualize the map first. Roads, rivers, railroads, size of marshalling yards, and so forth. You know." (I did, vaguely. But I wasn't a War College graduate. He is.) "That city just doesn't have the transportation facilities to be any bigger than that. Get much over three quarters of a million and they'd starve. Until they double their tracks and increase their yards they can't risk a bigger population. You don't do that over night. They can pick up some slack with the river—but it doesn't go where they need it most."
And there it stands. Either all three of us are crazy despite the fact that all three of us got the same answer to a numerical question using three entirely different but logical methods . . . or for many, many years the Kremlin lie factory has peddled their biggest and fanciest "Pravda" without ever being questioned.
Look—both the Pentagon and the State Department know exactly how big Moscow is, and the Kremlin knows that they know. We were high-flying 'em with the U-2 for four years; you can bet Moscow was carefully photographed many times. Our present Eye-in-the-Sky satellites are so sharp-eyed that they can come close to reading the license plate on your car; our top officials know precisely what the logistics situation is for Moscow—and every economist knows that one of the parameters that controls strictly the upper limit to the size of a city is how many tons of food it can ship in, week in and week out, never failing. Most big cities are only a day or two away from hunger, only a week or so away from beginning starvation and panic.
Moscow isn't even a seaport; she's a riverport and not a good one. Most food must come overland by train or lorry.
Maybe she's built enough more facilities since 1960 . . . but in 1960 she just didn't have what it takes. Since I can't believe the 5,000,000+ figure for I960, I don't believe the 7,000,000+ figure for this year.
I have one very wild theory. Our State Department may see no advantage in calling them liars on this point. Through several administrations we have been extremely careful not to hurt their feelings. I think this is a mistake . . . but I am neither president nor secretary of state; my opinion is not important and may be wrong.
("'But the Emperor is not wearing any clothes,' said the child.")