Travel then and now: Travel to the USSR and GDR

by Meg Nesterov on

This year is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union and 21 years since the reunification of Germany. While citizens of the USSR and GDR were unable to travel abroad and restricted in domestic travel, foreign travelers were permitted under a controlled environment. In the early nineties, if you were a foreigner looking to go abroad to the Eastern Europe or Central Asia, you called your travel agent and hoped to get approved for a visa and an escorted tour. After your trip, you’d brag about the passport stamps and complain about the food. Here’s a look back at travel as it was for foreigners twenty years ago and today visiting the biggies of the former Eastern Bloc: the United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Soviet Union/USSR (now: independent states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldovia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.)

Travel then: Before 1992, most tourists were only able to enter the Soviet Union with visas and travel itineraries provided by the state travel agency, Intourist. Intourist was founded by Joseph Stalin and also managed many of the USSR’s accommodations. Like North Korea today, visitors’ experiences were tightly controlled, peppered with propaganda, and anything but independent, with some travelers’ conversations and actions recorded and reported. Read this fascinating trip report from a Fodor’s community member who visited Russia in 1984 and a Chicago Tribune story with an Intourist guide after the glasnost policy was introduced.Travel now: UK travel agency Thomas Cook bought a majority stake in Intourist last year, gaining control of their tourist agencies, and many of the old Intourist hotels can still be booked, though standards may not be a huge improvement over the Soviet era. In general, the former Soviet Union now welcomes foreign and independant visitors with open arms. Even Stalinist Turkmenistan is softer on foreigners since the death of dictator Saparmurat Niyazov in 2006. Russia now receives as many visitors as the United Kingdom, the Baltic and Eastern European states are growing in popularity for nightlife and culture, and Central Asian states have a lot to offer adventurous travelers (including Azerbaijan’s contender for New 7 Wonders, the Mud Volcanoes). This year, Estonia’s Tallinn is one of the European Capitals of Culture. While a few FSU countries are now EU members, several still require advance visas, letters of invitation, or even guides; check the latest rules for Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan before you make plans.

German Democratic Republic/East Germany/DDR (now: unified state of Germany)

Travel then: After 40 years apart, East and West Germany were reunited in 1990. Like the USSR, travelers to the GDR had to deal with visas and an official state travel agency, the Reisebüro. Western tourists in West Germany could apply for day visas to “tour” the Eastern side but were very limited in gifts they could bring or aid they could provide (tipping was considered bourgeois and thus officially discouraged). Read this Spiegel article about the East German adventure travelers who snuck into the USSR to see how travel to inaccessable is often the most exciting, no matter where you are coming from.

Travel now: November 2009 marked the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Berlin is now consistently lauded as one of the world’s hippest and most vibrant cities. The city is full of museums, monuments, and memorials to document the time East Germany was walled off from the rest of the world, from the sobering Berlin Wall Memorial to the tongue-in-cheek DDR Hotel. Outside of Berlin, Leipzig’s Stasi Museum documents the gadgets and horrors of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police. For more on life in the GDR, Michael Mirolla’s novel Berlin deals with cross-border Germany travel and the fall of the republic, and film Goodbye Lenin! is a bittersweet look at life just before and after the fall of the wall.

Gadling readers: have you traveled to the USSR or GDR? Have you been recently? Leave us your comments and experiences below.

[Photo credit: USSR flags and GDR ferry postcards from Flickr user sludgeulper, Berlin Wall by Meg Nesterov]

World’s tallest tent opens in Kazakhstan

by Sean McLachlan on


When you think of Kazakhstan you probably think of nomads living in tents, but today’s Kazakhstan is rapidly modernizing thanks to an oil boom, so it’s appropriate that the Central Asian nation is now home to the world’s tallest tent.

Technically, it’s the world’s largest “tensile structure”, meaning something held up by poles and cables. A tent, in other words. At 150 meters (492 feet), it’s the also the tallest building in the capital Astana. It encloses more than 100,000 square meters, including a park, cafes, restaurants, 700 parking spots, shopping areas, even an artificial beach.

Called the Khan Shatyr, it’s a unique architectural wonder. One of the challenges of building it was Astana’s rough weather. The Khan Shatyr’s website proclaims, “What do you feel like doing everyday at Astana? It is -30C outside.”

Not the best slogan, but certainly realistic. Astana has the distinction of being the second coldest capital in the world (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), with freezing temperatures six months of the year and winter temperatures that have been measured as low as −40 °C (−40 °F). In the summer it can get up to 35 °C (95 °F). The tent’s skin is made from a special plastic that allows sunlight in while still acting as an insulator. Air vents keep ice from forming on the surfaces and keep the interior at a constant temperature.

Kazakhstan has large oil reserves and the government has been riding a wave of petrodollars that it has used to fund a massive building campaign in the capital. Astana is said to be the biggest construction project in the world, and taking a look at the huge structures in the gallery photos it certainly is a strong contender. The city is the brainchild of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Khan Shatyr was opened on President Nazarbayev’s 70th birthday.

The government has been trying to sell Kazakhstan’s capital as a tourist destination, and marvels like this will go a long way towards compensating visitors for the weather. With rugged scenery, Baikonur Cosmodrome (where Yuri Gagarin launched into orbit to become the first man in space), ancient mosques, medieval walled cities, and traditional folk who live in much smaller tents, Kazakhstan is a good choice for the adventure traveler.

Image courtesy Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.

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AirBaltic expands, spruces up

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Yesterday, Latvian airline AirBaltic launched two new routes: Riga-Madrid and Riga-Beirut.

Riga-based AirBaltic is an airline to watch. Little known in North America, the airline is notable for its low starting fares and the inclusion of most of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations on its route map. But what really sets the airline apart from the pack is its range of underserved destinations across Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the Nordic countries.

These less well-served destinations include Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan in the Caucasus; Almaty, Dushanbe, and Tashkent in Central Asia; Amman, Beirut, Dubai, and Tel Aviv in the Middle East; and destinations like Kuopio, Tromsø, and Visby across Nordic Europe.

The catch is that most routes fly in and out of Riga, a beautiful city that is sadly not exactly top-of-mind among most visitors to Europe. While AirBaltic’s fabulous range of destinations can best be accessed from a starting-point in the Baltics or the Nordic countries, the airline’s fares for connecting flights from cities across Western Europe can also be quite competitive.

In anticipation, no doubt, of the summer traffic to come, AirBaltic also upgraded its site yesterday. The visual changes are minimal, but they go some way toward making the site more streamlined and enjoyable to peruse.

(Image: Flickr/Londo_Mollari)

Russia pushes visa-free Russia-EU travel

by Alex Robertson Textor on

At the 25th European Union-Russia summit in Rostov-on-Don, Russia yesterday proposed that both parties mutually abolish visa requirements. Currently, the two entities impose reciprocal visa requirements upon each other’s citizens.

In the name of improving business and tourist links, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that Russia is ready to drop its visa requirements of EU citizens. He also tacitly acknowledged that several EU member states have reservations regarding any mutual lifting of visa restrictions.

As it now stands, Russian citizens have to apply for Schengen visas to visit the 27-country European Union, and citizens of European Union countries, in turn, have to apply for visas to visit Russia. Tourist visa costs are relatively low for all parties, at around €35 for Russians entering the EU, and also €35 for the citizens of most European Union states seeking to enter Russia.

Meanwhile, in an independent but fascinating development, Russia and Kazakhstan are moving toward a customs union. Starting July 1, the two countries will charge identical tariffs on trade with the external world while enjoying internal free trade on a bilateral basis. Originally, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus were supposed to join a three-country customs union, but Belarus has opted out over details related to oil export duties.

Russia is trying to coordinate its accession to the World Trade Organization in a small bloc alongside Kazakhstan and Belarus, a decision announced last year to widespread head-scratching among trade experts. Joint accession to the World Trade Organization is unprecedented.

(Photo: Flickr/timo_w2s)

Kazakhstan tries to sell its freezing capital

by Annie Scott on


As I write you from my parents’ home in the sub freezing winter wonderland of Minneapolis, I am pleased to report that this weather now apparently qualifies for envy.

Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev made his annual speech yesterday, and attempted to lure diplomats to move to the country’s capital city, Astana, on the basis of its face-breaking cold weather. “It only strengthens our spirit,” he said, on a day when the temperature was -22°F.

Nazarbayev (above right, with Nicolas Sarkozy, in front of the Astana skyline in October 2009) went on to praise the sanitary effects of the frigid environment, saying: “Even germs can’t survive in this weather.”

Astana is the world’s second coldest capital city (after Ulaan-baatar, Mongolia), but with all that oil and mineral money, you can bet they’re toasty warm inside their gold-tinted (seriously!) buildings.

[via Reuters]