Travel: Comrades, On to Vegas

• Share

One of the silliest products of the cold war has been the extensive travel restrictions imposed on U.S. and Russian tourists visiting each other's countries. The Soviet Union put vast portions of its territory off limits to aliens before World War II; tourists who did visit the U.S.S.R. were assigned Intourist guides to keep them from straying. In 1955 the State Department finally retaliated by banning Soviet visitors from some 27% of the U.S. on a tit-for-tat basis (e.g., Pittsburgh was closed because the Russians forbade U.S. tourists to visit the Soviet steel center of Magnitogorsk).

Last week, in the hope that Russia might unbend to admit Americans to forbidden Soviet cities, among them Vladivostok and Sevastopol, the U.S. decided to allow any Russian tourist who could scrape up the kopecks to enter such once barred territory as the state of Massachusetts, most of Tennessee, and the cities of St. Louis, San Diego and Las Vegas. But the 400-odd Soviet diplomats and journalists in the U.S. will still be confined to the environs of New York City and Washington, D.C., just as their U.S. counterparts are still ordinarily confined to a few Russian cities.