Word: intourist
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...associate Grady Wilson, his male secretary and two U.S. businessmen-Printing Tycoon William Jones of Los Angeles, who had persuaded Graham to take the trip, and Charlotte (N.C.) Department Store Owner Henderson Belk, who was taking Bible instruction from Billy en route. Sightseeing with American reporters and an Intourist guide, Billy did a double take at the large gold crosses atop the Kremlin churches. "There is a symbol I never expected to see here," he said. "I hope it has meaning for the future." Russian tourists, gaping at paintings of Jesus Christ in the Kremlin's Cathedral...
Capitalist Profit. Once the tourist reaches the Soviet Union, the hand that guides him is Intourist, a state monopoly whose official title is the All-Union Stock Company for Foreign Tourism. Founded in 1929, Intourist had shrunk to a shadow at the time of Stalin's death, grew like a weed in the tourist thaw that followed. Though all its stock is owned by the government, Intourist still uses the forms of a capitalist corporation, holds annual stockholders' meetings attended by representatives of Soviet ministries. It also turns over to the U.S.S.R. Bank of Foreign Trade a healthy...
From its grey stone headquarters at 1 Gorky Street, Moscow, Intourist is run by balding, stocky Vladimir Ankudinov, fiftyish, who has managed to hold onto his job for seven years. Says Ankudinov, with a gold-toothed smile: "I am what you would call a Soviet businessman." He has plenty of business. Intourist runs 18 hotels throughout Russia, has more than 8,000 employees, handles all accommodations, meals, transportation and incidentals for half a million visitors to Russia each year (most of them from the East European countries...
...Boat & Plane. Ankudinov has done his best to make travel to Russia easy. Intourist has a permanent representative in the U.S., books tourists through a dozen major U.S. travel agencies and 50 associated agencies. Chief among them: American Express, which now has its own office in Moscow, and Manhattan's Cosmos Travel Bureau. Six Western European airlines (SAS, Finnair, Air France, KLM, Sabena and British European Airways) fly into Russia, occasional boat cruises ply the Black Sea, and tourists can even enter Russia in their own autos...
...third of the Soviet Union is officially closed to tourists (the U.S. has retaliated by keeping an equal area closed to Russians), but the traveling choice is still wide. The tourist can visit 27 Soviet cities on any of 45 Intourist itineraries, ranging from five to 23 days. The main travel circuit includes Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi (the Eastern-flavored capital of Soviet Georgia), and the seaside resorts of the Black Sea (Sochi, Sukhumi, Yalta). More adventurous tourists can go to Riga, capital of Latvia; Irkutsk, the burgeoning capital of eastern Siberia; or far east to Tashkent and Alma...