Tourist Ramblings in Leningrad

What’s it like to ramble about on your own in this historic Russian city that is home to 5 million people?

What does Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost program for more openness in Soviet life mean to the individual traveler?

And how do you travel inexpensively without being tied to a package tour or making a port stop from a cruise ship?

For most of four days my wife and I strolled around Leningrad, to get beyond the city’s museums and historic wonders and closer to the everyday life of its people.

We also paddled a kayak and rode ferryboats in this city of 42 islands, laced by canals and 400 bridges, encircled by the Neva River and its tributaries and bordered by the Gulf of Finland.

When we flew into Finland’s Helsinki airport from Los Angeles, we had no idea how or whether we might be able to spend a few days in Leningrad. We did have our Soviet visas, but we had no accommodations in Leningrad and we had not made any arrangements to get here.

Suggestion Declined

We had started negotiations while still in Los Angeles for a hotel in Leningrad and transportation to get here, working through a recommended tour company that also handles some individual bookings. But the prices seemed high. We declined the suggested arrangements and left only with the visas.

The prices we had been quoted added up to $1,472 for three nights of deluxe accommodations, plus the train fare. Our hotel would have been the new Pribaltiiskaya out on the Gulf of Finland, 15 miles from the heart of the city.

In Helsinki a friend suggested that we go through Finnsov Tours, a specialist in Soviet travel. The Finnish Tourist Office in Helsinki also recommended Finnsov.

By coincidence we found that Finnsov was putting together a rail trip to Leningrad for individual travelers and families arriving from various parts of Europe, the United States and, in the case of one couple, from Australia.

Finnsov was putting these travelers under a group umbrella to take advantage of low group rates, while still assuring them the freedom to experience Leningrad on their own. We were latecomers, but were squeezed under the umbrella.

The bottom-line price we were offered translated into $880 for the two of us. It covered a first-class hotel room for three nights and three meals daily in Leningrad. We could join our fellow travelers for any or all of these meals, which were mostly at the hotel, or we could go off to eat on our own.

The price also included round-trip train transportation, about seven hours each way, between Helsinki and Leningrad. Box lunches would be given to us, or we could eat on our own in the dining car. Bus transportation would be provided between the railroad station and our hotel in Leningrad. A variety of daily tours were likewise included in the price, and we could take any or none, as we preferred.

In the City’s Heart

We were all booked into the Hotel Leningrad, built in 1970 beside the Neva River and near the heart of the city. Because we had been the last to join this Finnsov trip, our first room was in the rear of the hotel, on the first floor overlooking a construction site with puddles of mosquito-breeding rainwater.

Hotel Leningrad is in the process of restoration. Our room had two armchairs beside the windows, twin beds, a desk, telephone and TV set, ample closet space and a complete bathroom.

We hadn’t been in Leningrad for a dozen years, and took the Finnsov city tour the next morning to reorient ourselves. The Soviet Intourist guide was a young woman art teacher.

As we bused and walked around the palaces, museums and golden-domed cathedrals of the czars she related the history of the city, from the time of Peter the Great through Lenin’s October Revolution in 1917 and the Nazi siege of World War II.

Just to sit on a park bench beside students or office workers with our copy of New Times, the Soviet English-language weekly, was often a door-opener to conversation. A few of the people we met knew some English, German or French.

The Tallest Structure

Within the Peter and Paul Fortress, across the Neva River from the Heritage Museum, we looked up at the spire of the 18th-Century cathedral. The spire soars to 122.5 meters, the tallest structure in the city.

Nevsky Prospect is Leningrad’s most famous boulevard and walking street, leading from the Hermitage, Palace Square, Admiralty Arch and St. Isaac’s Cathedral past monuments, statues, state-operated department stores, smaller fashion shops, Beriozka souvenir stores for visitors with foreign currency and some of the city’s 26 theaters and concert halls.

We decided to walk along the smaller streets around Kiroskij Prospect Avenue, reaching north from the main branch of the Neva.

It is a fascinating avenue of many small parks, shops, offices and street vendors. Free-enterprise street vendors included a young mother offering her crochet work, and a group of girls waving and demonstrating a variety of lipsticks.

At a dock area with many kayaks and small boats stacked along the shore, we didn’t have to leave a passport as security for a rental. A 10-ruble deal with a dockhand was enough for a paddling excursion.

When we got back to Hotel Leningrad we downed two steins of beer with dinner. Drinks at hotels are another Soviet source of foreign currency; no rubles are accepted. Our two steins cost about $6. Part of perestroika is to try to cut down on vodka drinking among the Soviet people, but this has nothing to do with the lucrative foreign-currency hotel bars.

We dined late in the evening after touring the art treasures of the Hermitage. Next evening we dined early to attend the Ukrainian Folklore program of songs and dancing in the Concert Hall next to Hotel Leningrad.

Our time seemed to go by quickly in Leningrad. We hadn’t spent many rubles, and we changed some back into dollars at the border crossing. Try for a window seat on the Helsinki-Leningrad train route to better enjoy the lake lands, towns and villages of eastern Finland and the forest lands of northern Russia.

For planning a trip on your own from Finland into the Soviet Union, start by having your travel agent contact Finnsov directly at Eerikinkatu No. 3, Helsinki 00100, Finland.