If a school is a microcosm of society, then the travel itineraries of teachers are probably typical. In the staffrooms I frequented, there was always chat about travel plans: to the UK and US and all over Europe, especially to France, Spain; Italy, Ireland and Germany. Closer to home, to Bali, to Thailand, to Fiji, China, Vietnam and Japan.

But not Russia. In all my years of listening to (and envying) dinner party and staffroom travel plans and post-mortems, I’ve only ever once met someone who’d been to Russia.

Well, we all know why. We grew up during the Cold War, and we (thought we) knew what Russia was like because we watched James Bond movies and we read the dissident literature of Solzhenitsyn and Koestler. So we knew there was nothing touristy to see. Nothing but propaganda soviet art or perhaps intimidating parades of military might in Red Square. Bad food, bad service, woeful hotels, and scary grey-faced officials poised to frogmarch us off to Siberia if we infringed on the rules of the totalitarian state. Nobody I knew ever wanted to travel to the USSR…

Return to Moscow confirms these depressing Cold War images. When author Tony Kevin went there as a junior diplomat during the Cold War it was tagged as a ‘hardship posting’ because of the bleak conditions, and Kevin makes it clear that it wasn’t just the weather that was bleak. He also tells us that the reason Russians weren’t keen to socialise with Westerners was because of the risk of being sent to the gulags for fraternisation. Diplomats lived in a bubble of embassy life, for everyone’s safety…

Well, things change, yet even when The Spouse and I went to newly capitalist Russia in 2012, every time I made my pathetic attempts at speaking Russian, the response was an incredulous and delighted “Avstrarlya? Long way!” The people I met in the cafés, shops, restaurants and museums in Moscow and St Petersburg had never met an Australian before. Even the immigration officials at the airport seemed a bit startled to encounter Australian passports, and from what we could make out in the empty echoing hall we two were the only tourists on our flight: all the rest were locals coming home or transit passengers en route to the US, shuffled off to a transit lounge somewhere else.

While tourists and locals alike struggle with summertime hordes in the rest of Europe and the UK, Russian tourism is low-key indeed. Yet Russia could be a popular tourist destination: it’s an art-lover, lit-lover and history-buff’s paradise, the weather (in August-September) is mild, there are lots of good restaurants and hotels, public transport is excellent and the people are friendly and helpful. The only time we encountered ‘Soviet’ service was in St Petersburg when we went to the hilariously retro Kvartirka Soviet Café which deliberately recreates the Soviet era with a very rustic menu and gloomy waitresses barking orders. It was one of many examples of the Russian sense of humour.

But Russia’s potential as a tourist destination looks doubtful these days. Putin’s Russia is demonised on a daily basis and Russian relations with the West have deteriorated spectacularly. Even when Russian air support helped to liberate the historic heritage city of Palermo from ISIS, nobody had a good word to say about it. Because I’m interested in Russia, and because I think we owe our freedom from the Nazis to the Soviets turning them back at Stalingrad in 1943, I was curious about this disdain. When I heard on the ABC that Tony Kevin – former diplomat and author of Walking the Camino – had written a new book about just that, I asked my library to get me a copy of Return to Moscow…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/02/return-to-moscow-by-tony-kevin/ ( )