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If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Kiev
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12611 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
2,596 Words |
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John H. Fund
John H. Fund is an editorial writer for the Wall Street
Journal. |
USSR
From an Original Idea By Karl Marx
Marc Polonsky and Russell Taylor
Boston: Faber & Faber, 1986
178 pp., $8.95
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's announced policy of glasnost, or openness, is certain to attract renewed American interest in travel to the Soviet Union. Intourist, the official Soviet tourist agency, reports that eighty thousand Americans visited last year and predicts the number will rise substantially this year.
But to many Americans, a trip to the Soviet Union is still almost as exotic as paddling down the Amazon. Tour books tend to blandly describe monuments and museums and rarely capture the real flavor of the country. Unanswered questions abound. What is it like there? Who do you actually get to meet? What will you see? Will I be spied on? Do I have to stick with my tour? Finally, courtesy of two young British writers, there is a way of finding out what the Soviet Union is really like before one hits the tarmac in Moscow.
Marc Polonsky and Russell Taylor studied Russian as students in Britain. Unsatisfied with the student tours of the Soviet Union they were taken on, they decided to form their own small travel company called Soviet Union Travel, which would specialize in "real life" tours to the USSR. Shunning the country-according-to-Intourist approach wasn't easy, but the authors gamely kept their small business afloat for over a year until the impersonal forces of history - namely the declining dollar and Chernobyl
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