No Paris? No problem! Russian tourists holiday in the homeland this summer.
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Fred Weir Special correspondent
| Moscow
Despite six months of intense sanctions against Russia, the ruble is strong, incomes are buoyant, and domestic transportation is functioning well.
But Russians who want to go on vacation are finding traditional destinations less accessible, due to the increasing difficulty of obtaining visas, the closure of airspace to Russian airlines, and the fact that Russian bank cards no longer work abroad.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onAmid war and sanctions, Russians have been cut off from many of their preferred vacation spots this summer. That has spurred a boom in travel to destinations within their own vast homeland.
Hence, a rush to discover Russia is on.
Tour operators report a surge in bookings, especially for traditional destinations like Volga river cruises and beach holidays in the Black Sea resort centers of Krasnodar and Sochi. In Moscow, there are more Russians than ever walking around Red Square, wandering through museums and galleries, and taking selfies in iconic metro stations. Other rich cultural centers like St. Petersburg are seeing similar booms.
“We expect up to 45 million Russians to travel inside the country this year. That’s ten times the number going to Turkey, which is the major foreign destination that’s still open to Russians,” says tour agency director Sergei Romashkin. “We’re seeing people going to the Far East, to Siberia, the North Caucasus, Karelia [on the Finnish border], and Kaliningrad [on the Baltic Sea]. Completely new destinations have suddenly become quite fashionable.”
Each day, people from all over Russia tramp up several flights of stairs in an old apartment building in central Moscow. On the way, they often stop to gawk at the thick layers of fantastic, metaphysically themed graffiti, much of it dating from the Soviet era, scrawled by generations of Muscovites.
At the top of the stairwell is one of Moscow’s most popular tourist destinations, the memorabilia-stuffed former communal apartment where the author Mikhail Bulgakov lived and worked a century ago. Today it is a state museum, the graffiti on the stairs a sign of locals’ appreciation for Bulgakov’s beloved, sometimes absurdist, philosophical writings.
And there’s been a significant surge in visitors this year as Russians, increasingly frustrated in their hopes of traveling abroad, turn their attention to discovering their own country, says Alexei Yakovlev, deputy director of the Bulgakov State Museum.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onAmid war and sanctions, Russians have been cut off from many of their preferred vacation spots this summer. That has spurred a boom in travel to destinations within their own vast homeland.
Despite six months of intense sanctions, the ruble is strong, employment and incomes are surprisingly buoyant, and domestic transport networks are functioning well. But the vacation-minded are finding traditional destinations much less attainable than before, due to the increasing difficulty of obtaining visas in many countries, the widespread closure of airspace to Russian airlines, and the fact that Russian bank cards no longer work beyond the country’s borders.
Hence, an apparent rush to discover Russia is on. And the apartment-museum dedicated to Bulgakov – the most widely read author in Russian high school curricula, and whose focus on basic moral questions may resonate in these vexed times – is just one of those attractions benefiting.
“Bulgakov was concerned with what makes a person whole; his work is all about people on the verge, needing to make choices,” Mr. Yakovlev says. “He lived amid civil war, the coming of Stalinism, and some may feel that the times are similar. So, his importance is growing. We try to avoid addressing contemporary political issues head on, because there could be forces that might want to use us for their own purposes. We focus on literature, science, memory, and let Bulgakov’s legacy speak for itself.”
Exploring the motherland
Tour operators report a surge in bookings, especially for traditional destinations like Volga river cruises and beach holidays in the Black Sea resort centers of Krasnodar and Sochi – although wartime conditions and Ukrainian attacks have reportedly caused a sharp reduction in travel to the recently annexed territory of Crimea.
And in Moscow, there are a lot more Russians than ever walking around Red Square, wandering through the city’s famed museums and galleries, and taking selfies in its iconic metro stations. Other rich cultural centers like St. Petersburg and the central Russian “Golden Ring” constellation of ancient cities, with their ornate kremlins and fortress-like monasteries, are seeing similar booms.
“We expect up to 45 million Russians to travel inside the country this year. That’s ten times the number going to Turkey, which is the major foreign destination that’s still open to Russians,” says Sergei Romashkin, director of the Moscow-based Delphin tour agency. “In the past Russians have thought of travel mostly in terms of going abroad, because it seemed more exotic, and conditions were usually much better than at home. For a variety of reasons, a shift is taking place, and it might well become permanent.”
Tour operators also report surprisingly strong demand, especially among young people, for a host of domestic destinations that have never been regarded as places worth visiting by most Russians – and where local people have little in the way of hospitality industry and tourist infrastructure to receive them.
“We’re seeing people going to the Far East, to Siberia, the North Caucasus, Karelia [on the Finnish border], and Kaliningrad [on the Baltic Sea]. Completely new destinations have suddenly become quite fashionable,” says Mr. Romashkin.
Nation of destinations
If you had to be confined to a single country, Russia, the world’s largest nation by territory, wouldn’t be a bad choice – at least from a tourist’s point of view.
On its wild Pacific coast, the California-sized Kamchatka Peninsula is a land of virgin forests, volcanoes, and giant bears.
At the heart of Siberia is Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, which was once declared sacred by Mongol warlord Genghis Khan. Around its shores are flourishing communities of indigenous Buddhists and Old Believers who were once banished to Siberia by the czars.
Kazan, a Tatar city on the Volga, is fast becoming another magnet for Russian tourists attracted to its sandy river beaches and the only kremlin in Russia that features a giant mosque at its center.
Russia’s northern Caucasus region, until recently engulfed in war and terrorism, is emerging as an unexpected tourist attraction. Tour operators say that even Dagestan, until recently a virtual no-go zone where visitors were more likely to be kidnapped than welcomed, has become a major destination for young Russians attracted to its mountain trails, ancient ruins, and sandy Caspian Sea beaches.
Another newly popular region is Russia’s European Arctic, where adventurous tourists can view the Northern Lights or take a ride on a nuclear icebreaker.
Russia’s Baltic exclave of formerly German Kaliningrad boasts Prussian architecture and miles of Baltic Sea beaches.
“No one wants to be shut in”
Sarah Lindemann-Komarova is an American who’s lived in Siberia for almost 30 years. She resides in Altai, an impoverished mountain republic abutting the border with Mongolia. In 2019, it saw about 2 million tourists, including many foreigners. This year the number has doubled, but it’s only Russians who are coming, mostly on newly inaugurated flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Prices have gone through the roof, and infrastructure is challenged, she says.
“Our village of Manzherok was a sleepy, poor backwater when I first came here in 2001,” she says. “Only a few nature-loving visitors appreciated the region, which some people referred to as the Switzerland of Russia. Now those people are horrified by the traffic jams and the loss of solitude. ... But it is providing a real economic boon for local people. Many villagers have been transformed into small business owners, building cabins to rent, offering various services. This is a community in transition.”
It’s hard to know whether the trend will be a lasting one, especially if the world should open up for Russians again. Mr. Yakovlev of the Bulgakov Museum says it’s fortuitous that external pressures are forcing Russians to discover their own country, and it’s hard to argue with the economic stimulus tourism can bring to once-neglected far-flung Russian regions.
“Maybe for now people aren’t really feeling the effects of enclosure, because it’s all so novel and this is an awfully big country,” he says. “But eventually it’s going to have an impact. No one wants to be shut in and isolated the way we were in the Soviet Union.”
