Enjoying a freer era, Russians flock to vacation hot spots

Record number embrace chance to see the world

Russians participated in a dance contest in Antalya, Turkey, a coastal region where an influx of tourists has helped create a mini-industry catering to their needs. (Johan Spanner/The New York Times)

ANTALYA, Turkey - Yelena Kasyanova booked her trip at a local travel agency in about as much time it takes to drop by the market for a few groceries. She was soon lounging by the Mediterranean, a working-class anybody from an anyplace deep in Russia, a child of the Soviet era who still remembers the humiliating strictures that once made it difficult to obtain a passport, let alone a plane ticket.

And all around the beach were so many just like her.

One of the most enduring changes in the lives of Russians in recent years has occurred not in Russia itself, but in places like this coastal region of Turkey, where an influx of Russian tourists has given rise to a mini-industry catering to their needs.

A people who under communism were rarely allowed to venture abroad, and then lacked money to do so when the political barriers first fell, are now seeing the world. And relishing it.

There is perhaps no better symbol of the growth in Russian tourism than the resort where Kasyanova was staying, the Kremlin Palace Hotel, a kind of Las-Vegas-does-Moscow-by-the-shore extravaganza whose buildings are replicas of major sights at the Kremlin complex and nearby neighborhood.

Kasyanova, 51, a healthcare aide from the Kaluga region, 125 miles southwest of Moscow, has been to Egypt, Hungary, and Turkey in the last few years and has Western Europe in her sights. For her and other Russians interviewed here, foreign travel reflects not just Russia's economic revival under Vladimir Putin, but also how the country has become, in some essential ways, normal.

If you have some time and a little money, you can travel. Just like so many other people in the world.

"It is now so easy - buy a package tour for $800, and here we are, in paradise," said Kasyanova, who, like many Russians in the city, was amused by the resort's trappings but also interested in exploring the mountains and other places nearby. "It speaks of the high standard of life in Russia, of the improvement in life in Russia."

The Russians are coming from all over. At the local airport here, the arrivals screen was like a primer in Russian geography, with charter flights from Moscow, Rostov-on-Don in the south, Kazan in the center, Novosibirsk in Siberia, and other cities in between.

The number of Russian tourists visiting countries outside the former Soviet Union grew to 7.1 million in 2006, the last year statistics were available, from 2.6 million in 1995, according to the Russian government.

A record 2.5 million Russians visited Turkey in 2007, up 33 percent from 2006, Turkish officials said. Only Germany, that paragon of European wealth, sends more tourists to Turkey. (By contrast, in 1988, a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, 22,000 Soviet citizens visited Turkey.)

The Russian tourism boom is happening as new low-cost airlines in Europe have spurred a sharp increase in tourism across the continent. But for the Russians, the chance to travel is especially prized.

For the first time in Russian history, large numbers of the citizenry are being exposed to life in far-off lands, helping to ease a kind of insularity and parochialism that built up in the Soviet era. Back then, the public was not only prevented from going abroad, it was also inculcated with propaganda that the Soviet Union was unquestionably the world's best country, so there was no need to leave.

People who desired foreign travel in Soviet times typically had to receive official approval, and if it was granted, they were closely chaperoned once they crossed the border.

"For us, it's like a fairy tale to be here," said Lilia Valeyeva, 46, a clerk from Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains who had never before been abroad when she visited Turkey two years ago. Since then, she has returned twice.

"We are seeing other countries with our own eyes, how other people live," she said.