When the person is privileged so that he/she can drive a German car, go everyday to good restaurants and can fly often to visit heavenly touristic places arround the world. Maybe is he a descendant of the one of those reformists of the traitor bureaucracy that dismouted USSR and reinstaured the capitalism.
Traveling is good and should be promoted. It promotes openness and internationalism and reduces chauvinism for many people. Party tourism (tourism of beach, discos, drugs and nothing more that rich assholes do at Ibiza, Amsterdam and so on) is cringe tho.
Soviet citizens did travel indeed, just not to western countries to reduce espionage and also because the USSR was low on western currencies. All soviet citizens had free guaranteed holidays, it was a basic right for all. Travel between COMECON countries was very common and quite easy, going outside COMECON was harder tho.
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Ill be honest, its not like ive never done party tourism (although on a cheap budget and definetely not in the Bahamas, im not dirty rich like this guy is). Party tourism is definetely fun, especially in your early youth. However its very destructive for the places where this type of tourism concentrates in. Locals have to pay triple the rent due to Airbnbs renting everything to tourists and also have to deal everyday with drunk/drugged morons doing noise, puking on the street and being annoying. It also floods the area with drugs, often of dubious quality due to tourists buying them anyway, which makes the drugs very dangerous. Just look at Ibiza in the 1970s and nowadays, it went from a rural quiet island with beautiful landscapes to a giant mass of noisey concrete filled with britons and drugs.
Which is why i think under socialism we should build party areas, very distributed along the country so that there is no mass influx of people anywhere. The areas should be far away from any residential areas, so as to not disturb people who are sleeping, but should also be well connected to the residential areas with public transport, so people dont drive drunk/drugged to and from the party. Ultimately, the final goal imo should be to have people do this type of entertainment locally, near where they live, instead of travelling somewhere else to do so. This avoids the carelessness of some party tourists, since they will live right next to whatever mess they made during the night. It also reduces unnecessary waste of fuel for unnecessary flights and so on.
A Hungarian professor of mine, who grew up under socialism during the 60s and 70s, said that in his experience, it wasn’t very hard to get to the “west.” The government didn’t really care if you emigrated or not; but they did want to reduce tourism, since the monetary systems of east and west weren’t compatible. Significantly, he said, the western countries themselves weren’t particularly keen on tourists from the COMECON bloc, since there was a fear that cheap goods from socialist countries would make their way into the black market and cause destabilization. That is, you could buy (say), ten cases of baby formula in Hungary, and sell them in West Germany for a fraction of their market value; and because of price controls in the east, you would still make a big profit. Thus, customs were very strict when you were going over the border.
The biggest fear of the US has been that socialist nations (1) surpass capitalism economically, and (2) engage in massive global trade. With China, that fear has basically been realized.
Didnt know that. How will the libs cope about the Berlin Wall now?