what improvements, if any, they have made in handling tourism. I could plead age and
health but I shan’t-one trip to 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 Len ingradMoskva-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 Taf 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-privatelyassigned 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
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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