Cracking the Russia Code

Tourism to Russia is plunging, even as it booms elsewhere in Eastern Europe. But once you dodge visa hassles and hotel scams, there is a rich reward -- and no waiting.

By STAN SESSER
July 8, Page:P1

MOSCOW - The great historic monuments are impeccably restored, landscaped and litter-free. Dozens of opulent new restaurants offer cuisines from around the world. Warm days breaking the long winter mean even the locals are smiling. All that's missing from this bucolic scene: tourists.

Even in the heart of the city -- in the grand Red Square -- it's quiet. At the entrance to the tomb of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, barriers are set up to rein in hundreds of visitors. But on a recent visit, a couple of dozen visitors wait five minutes to get in.

It's boom times in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, former Soviet Union countries that are now opening up to travelers. But not in Russia. In 2005, the number of tourists to Russia dropped 14% to 2.4 million. Almost one million more people went to the Czech Republic last year for tourism and business than to Russia -- which has about 14 times the population.

Travelers are being driven away by a severe shortage of hotel rooms in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as apartment-rental scams; prices that are shockingly high for food, hotels and private transport; and by a visa system so draconian that you can literally be snatched off the street by the police if just one stamp on the papers you're required to carry with you at all times isn't in order.

The upshot for travelers: Getting there and then getting around takes a lot of planning -- and patience. For many people, booking a group tour through a specialist agency will be the best way to explore the country. Those who want to go it alone should consider spending just a few days in Moscow and more time in St. Petersburg, which is the most tourist-friendly part of the country, with multilingual subway signs. To avoid dangers and scams, hire a driver recommended by a reputable hotel, and book accommodations only through a reliable travel agent or rental agency (see Trip Planner).

For Russia's leadership, tourism simply isn't a top priority at the moment. The country is on an economic rebound driven by surging prices for its main exports, oil and gas, dwarfing tourism as a potential source of Western dollars. While they're pushing to diversify the economy, including some investment in tourism projects like a ski resort near the Black Sea, most of the focus is on traditional industries. And with President Vladimir Putin cultivating an assertive and nationalist foreign policy, there's little appetite for anything that looks like favoring foreigners.

Russian officials don't attempt to hide the reality of how much tourism is hurting. Sergei Sinitsyn, adviser to the chairman of the Federal Agency for Tourism, points out the slight the government has given tourism. His agency until a year ago was part of the sports ministry. It still has only a small marketing budget -- $3.6 million last year for the entire world, at a time some countries spend more than $100 million to draw tourists.

Although I had done my homework investigating the pitfalls for this trip, my first to the country, I was impressed with what I found. Russia is a vast country, with the sites in Moscow and St. Petersburg exceeding what the most effusive guidebooks had promised. There are also towering mountains and interesting ethnic minorities in the south; Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake in Siberia; and the Golden Ring, a string of historic towns with medieval cathedrals and monasteries largely unchanged for centuries, within a day's drive of Moscow. Even Russian food far surpassed its dubious reputation as being leaden and greasy, thanks to some splendid new restaurants that have arrived in capitalism's wake.

Russia is so rich culturally that there are constant surprises. My first afternoon in St. Petersburg, I walked into a Russian restaurant called the Literary Cafe and discovered a pianist and violinist entertaining diners with classical music of concert-hall quality. At a monastery near Moscow, I entered a chapel and found a service in progress, featuring not only the priest, but also three women singing religious chants against a background of magnificent icons lining the walls.

But the pleasures of sightseeing can quickly turn to shell shock when it comes to prices. In Moscow, steep land costs give developers no incentive to build modestly priced hotels. "In the last year, Moscow lost 6,000 hotel rooms," says Sergey Shpilko, head of the Russian Tourism Union, a trade association of tour agencies. This included the gargantuan Moskva and Rossiya hotels near the Kremlin. "And our hotel prices are already the highest in the world," he says.

When I called the Baltschug Kempinski, one of Moscow's main luxury hotels, to see if they had an available room, they urged me to postpone my trip a few days to take advantage of a "special promotional rate" -- $573 a night plus 18% tax, without breakfast. The Kempinski offered an $80 Sunday brunch that didn't include drinks, as well as a three-hour tour of Moscow by private car for $347, which won't get you far in Moscow's notorious traffic jams. The Metropol, another of the grandes dames, where I finally managed to get a room for a more reasonable $280, said I could have access to high-speed Internet in my room for a $140 installation fee plus $40 a day.

Russian tourism continues to suffer from some remnants of the Communist era when visitors took their marching orders and didn't complain. Although the days of snarling stewardesses and missing seat belts are gone, Aeroflot, the national airline, still lives up to its reputation as one of the worst in the world. On the flight from my home in Bangkok to Moscow on board its Ilyushin 96-300 widebody jet, I couldn't read because there were no overhead reading lamps, I couldn't watch a movie because there was no entertainment system, and I couldn't sleep because several drunk Russian men were shouting at the top of their lungs.

At the Moscow airport, signs saying "passport control" led to a dead end, while signs saying "transit" led to passport control. Once in the city, it's hard to navigate. Moscow's street and subway signs are only in the Cyrillic alphabet.

The daunting visa process is another reminder of Soviet police-state days. It takes about two weeks for a regular tourist visa to be processed. You're required to have an invitation from a "sponsor," which can be a tour agency in Russia that has never head of you, but has connections to the travel agency in the U.S. you use to obtain the visa. (It's well worth the extra $100 or so to avoid going through the paperwork and delays imposed by the Russian Embassy, which will still ask you to go to a U.S. tour agency to get a sponsor.) When you get your passport back, the sponsor is identified only by a long number on the visa certificate.

Mr. Sinitsyn, from the Federal Agency for Tourism, explains that the hassles in the visa process are "based on the principles of equality." The length of time it takes for visas to be processed for Russians entering the U.S., he says, is about equivalent to the time it takes for the American visa process for Russia. U.S. authorities confirm that it can take up to a month for Russian applications to be processed for travel to the U.S.

While in Russia, you're required to carry your passport with you at all times to show police if they demand to see it. I just missed being checked on Moscow's Arbat pedestrian street, a favorite hangout of tourists, when a policeman stopped the foreigner in front of me instead. Travel guides warn that police will sometimes extort money from you, as much as $150, even if your papers are in perfect order.

Mr. Sinitsyn acknowledges that extortion happens, "but not that often." In response, a spokesman for Russia's Interior Ministry says police stop people to check documents only when they think they might be involved in criminal activity. He says he isn't aware of any cases of foreigners filing complaints with the police about extortion or bribes involving document checks.

It's no surprise that with obstacles like this most American tourists choose to visit Russia on group tours, whose flag-waving leaders deal with all the problems. "Everyone kept telling me you can't do this on your own," says Karen Zorn, vice president of academic affairs for Boston's Berklee College of Music, who in fact was doing it on her own in St. Petersburg -- her first trip to Russia. "I don't like being in a group when I travel, being herded around."

But being solo has its drawbacks. Ms. Zorn says she had booked a hotel for $120 a night several months in advance, and when she arrived, she discovered what $120 buys in Russia's second city. "The lobby is half demolished and smells of fried food," says Ms. Zorn. "The door to my room wouldn't lock." When I met her, she was looking for a new hotel -- and finding that everything else was full.

I also did it on my own, negotiating the Moscow subway system by painstakingly matching the Cyrillic letters against the bilingual metro map in my guidebook. With the help of a man who spoke English standing in line for tickets, I managed to take the 75-minute train ride from Moscow to the Golden Ring town of Sergiev Posad to see an impressive monastery.

But to get from Moscow to Suzdal -- an ancient Russian town in the Golden Ring filled with churches and monasteries of stunning beauty -- arranging a car and driver for the four-hour trip was the only alternative to two bus rides. Finding the right bus in Moscow and then changing buses in a small town without knowing a word of Russian was more than I wanted to risk. Here again the staggering Russian prices came into play; the Metropol's travel agency quoted me $1,000 for an overnight trip. But using a recommendation from an Australian acquaintance who lives in Moscow, I managed to get an English-speaking driver with a car for $300.

However, I had even less success than Ms. Zorn in attempting to find a low-priced accommodation. From my home in Bangkok, on the Internet I booked an apartment within walking distance of the Kremlin for $120 a night. The Moscow-based apartment booking agency, with toll-free numbers in the U.S. and England, photos of each apartment posted on their Web site, and mobile-phone numbers listed by everyone who contacts you, seemed impressive.

But after I followed their instructions and wired them a $100 deposit via Western Union, all communications stopped. Neither their mobile phones nor the main Moscow office number answered, and emails drew no response. In this country known for scams, I embarrassingly fell victim to one before I had even left home.

As soon as I landed in Russia, fears of scams were overshadowed by other sensations that were unexpected. Moscow and St. Petersburg are some of the cleanest cities I've ever visited; the streets and sidewalks are flushed and scrubbed daily, and there isn't a piece of litter anywhere. All the central buildings seemed either newly restored or undergoing restoration.

Oil and other riches aren't just confined to a handful of oligarchs. Hip restaurants and bars are jammed late into the night with the newly affluent middle class. It also spills out onto the streets. A supermarket on Tverskoy Boulevard, Moscow's premier shopping strip, looks like a room from a 19th-century palace, and the GUM department store on Red Square is in a historic, glass-ceilinged shopping arcade.

Then there were the people -- brusque on the surface, yes, but friendly and helpful underneath. And highly literate. One day I took an elderly pensioner I met at a St. Petersburg tourist site, who spoke fluent English, to lunch. Although he had to live on $35 a month, he displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, at one point discussing the recent political changes in Bolivia.

There are several ways of making a trip to Russia easier without joining a tour group. If it's your first time, stick to tourist-friendly St. Petersburg, a city as rewarding as Paris, Rome and other major European capitals. If you don't speak Russian and want to get a driver, it's much safer to rely on private transport arranged by hotels. Consider hiring a guide but inquire at modest hotels or at Russian tour agencies that guidebooks recommend as reliable, because the rates that major hotels charge can be extortionate. About $100 a day is reasonable.

And the combination of a good guidebook, a Russian phrase book, and a map that lists everything in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, will get you through almost any difficulty.

For future travelers, there are a few signs of progress. St. Petersburg now has subway and street signs in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, and apartment-rental agencies there -- honest ones -- are offering some good bargains relative to hotels. Lisa Kreutz, an American property consultant for Pulford Real Estate in St. Petersburg, which rented me an attractive, centrally located apartment for $150 a night, reports another sign of change: The police are shaking down tourists much less than they did five years ago. "I grew up in New York, but I feel safer here," she says. "I walk home in the dark through a park."