Buffets are cozy, friendly, little places run by cheerful, helpful, dreadfully overworked women. They won't know English and the menu will be in Russian - here a memorandum in English & Russian of your favorite foods is most useful. But even the buffet doesn't serve breakfast before seven and Russian transportation often leaves at such an hour that you must leave the hotel before then. Russian hotels have room service but not at such hours. If you have your own thermos bottle, room service can fetch you hot coffee and a cold breakfast the night before. (They've heard of thermos bottles - the word is the same - but the hotel won't have one.)
Keep iron rations in your room and carry food and drink on long flights and train trips. Both trains and planes often stop for meals but you can't count on it and usually can't find out in advance.
Minor Ways to Improve Your Score: Go for walks without your guide; you will usually be picked up by someone who knows English - but you will never be picked up while a guide is with you. This is your chance to get acquainted and to get answers which are not the official answers. Don't talk politics - but these venturesome souls may ask you political questions and you can learn almost as much by the questions they ask as by raising such issues yourself.
Your guide may not be a hard-shell Communist; he, or she, may open up once he thinks he can trust you. If so, be careful not to mention anything even faintly political when others are in earshot, especially the driver. The driver may be a political chaperone who knows English but pretends not to. More than one guide has told me this and all guides talk more freely when no one can overhear.
In this country children are brought to Moscow and decorated for having informed on their parents. Never forget this.
When you are shown a party headquarters, a palace of culture, a stadium, an auditorium, or such, ask when it was built. We discovered that, in the areas not occupied by Nazis, many of the biggest and fanciest were built right at the time Americans were dying to keep the Murmansk lend - lease route open.
There is new brick construction all over the Soviet Union. We asked repeatedly to be shown a brick yard, were never quite refused, but the request was never granted. We have since heard a rumor that this is prison labor and that is why a tourist can't see something as unsecret as a brick yard. So try it yourself - you may merely prove to yourself that Intourist exists to keep tourists from seeing what they want to see, rather than vice versa.
Offer your passport to casual acquaintances; they will usually offer theirs in return - internal passports. Intourist people have been coached to deny that such a thing exists but everybody in the USSR carries one and the owner must get a visa to go from one Russian city to another. It is a brown book with "HAC11OPT" (passport) on the cover. Try it when your guide is not around.
The USSR is the only country in which we were never able to get into a private home. Other tourists report the same but one couple from Los Angeles almost cracked this; they said to their guide, "Why can't we see the inside of one of those apartment houses? Are you people ashamed of them?" The next day they were shown through a not - yet - occupied one.
This could be varied endlessly, as it works on that Russian basic, their inferiority complex. The key word is "ashamed" - simply asking "Why?" gets you nowhere. I think it could be used to get into farms, schools, courts, factories, anything not a military secret. It tops my list of things I wish I had thought of first.
In meeting anyone, including guides, try to use "democracies" as an antonym for "Communist countries" as soon as possible - drag it in by the heels, i.e., "I think all of us from the democracies earnestly hope for peace with the Communist countries," etc. The much abused word "democratic" means "Communist" in Russia and it always introduces a propaganda pitch. If you deny him his definition by preempting the word, you leave him with his mouth hanging open, unable to proceed.
We got tripped on this several times before we caught on.
The official list of things you must not photograph is short but the unofficial list is long and ranges from old, broken - down buildings to old, broken - down women sweeping the streets. You can photograph such by having them appear "accidentally" in a background but if you are suspected of this, they have a silent counter to it. At some later time you will find that your film has been exposed to light, then respooled. You could keep all your film with you at all times and hope to get it across the border... but such behavior might cause you to be arrested on suspicion of espionage, as one American tourist was this summer. At best, sneaking a picture of one passed - out drunk risks losing all your pictures - too high a price even if you aren't accused of being a spy.
The most - used plane, the Ilyushin - 14, flies very low; you can see a lot and compare it with elsewhere. Are railroads single or double track? How much traffic on the roads? On the rivers? How about factory smokestacks and other signs of industry? How busy are the airfields? Or a dozen other things. I think you will conclude that no Russian claim should be accepted as true until fully verified. A "great industrial center" often turns out to be a jerkwater town.
But don't make written notes about such things! Don't!!!
Will your mail be opened? You must assume so. Will your rooms be bugged? It seems impossible to monitor every room of every Intourist hotel - but if the police get interested in you it takes just three minutes in these days of miniaturization to bug a room. I do know, from several incidents, that Soviet citizens believe that all hotel rooms are bugged.
I wish that a million of us would visit the USSR; the dollars the Kremlin would reap would be more than offset by the profit to us in having so many free men see with their own eyes what Communism is.
But go there with your eyes open - Intourist is as fully an agency of the Kremlin as is Gromyko or Mikoyan. Its functions are (1) to get your money in advance, (2) to deliver as little as possible by downgrading accommodations, by forced overcharges on food, and by clipping you on auto and guide service, (3) to waste your time so that you will see as little as possible, and (4) to see that what little time you have left is spent only on those things the Kremlin does not mind your seeing - "new construction" (from the outside), parks of "rest & culture" (filled with loudspeakers blaring propaganda), ballets, museums, stadiums, and the outsides of public buildings.
The first point you must accept; the game is crooked but it is the only game in town. Points two and three you can struggle against - I hope the tactics suggested in here will help. Point four is the toughest. After trimming you down to about three hours a day of useful time, Intourist can and will use up what is left in "stadium sightseeing" unless you fight it constantly. Even then, Intourist is adept in parrying with: "It's closed today - too bad you're not staying another day," and "That must be arranged in advance through the Ministry of Culture, etc." and "You should have requested that in Moscow."
The essence of Intourist tactics is: "Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today." The way to answer it is: "No! I will not look at the stadium, I do not want to see another subway station, I will not visit a museum to see another five hundred pictures of Lenin. I want to see thus - and - so and I want to see it now. Stop the car, get on the phone, and arrange it - or tell the Director that, as far as I am concerned, you're fired! I am keeping the car and the driver and will go on without you - I've got hours more of car service due me today and I won't be cheated out of it."
You will find whether your guide is truly a guide... or a guard placed with you to make sure you see only the facade of this regime. Whether or not you see "thus - and - so" you are sure to learn a surprising amount about how a police state is run... and thereby get your full money's worth in education.