Post-Stalin era
The scholar Alex Hazanov writes in his dissertation on Intourist that "in the alternate universe that was the Soviet Union, the 'giant squid' of the Soviet state [would] engulf the traveler.. [There were] myriad ways in which the Soviet tourist monopoly, Intourist, both hindered the foreigner and shielded him from the vagaries of Soviet material life, and above all, the psychological costs of 'routine surveillance'... and the barriers the Soviets erected between foreigners and unvarnished (and uncomfortable) truths about the Soviet Union." Hazanov propounds that the Soviet state apparatchiks at Intourist had a "commitment to authoritarianism and social discipline as an instrument of geopolitical resistance." Indeed there were ties between Intourist and the KGB.[4]
In 1953, after the death of Stalin, the decree banning Soviet citizens from marriage to a foreigner was abolished.[4]
Intourist began selling packages to foreigners in 1955. It was "charged with obtaining hard currency to be used for imports of machinery that would help make the Soviet Union independent of global markets."[4]
In 1956, the USSR received 56,000 tourists. In 1963, it received 168,000 tourists. By the early 1970s, it received 4,000,000 travelers yearly.[4]
Visits were subject to "prior coordination" and excluded "specifically designated zones" such as a limited number of neighborhoods in a limited number of cities. This is a "principle that would define Soviet regulation of foreign travel for all categories of foreigners until 1991" and beyond.[4]
Special note is taken in Hazanov's thesis of the 1957 Moscow Youth Festival, the 1959 Sokolniki Exhibition, and the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and he seems to accept the school of thought, "popularized by New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman’s paeans to globalization, ... that international exchange is the handmaiden of liberalization and erosion of authoritarian regimes", by which means ultimately Intourist can be seen as an unwitting cuckoo in the Soviet nest.[4]
One of Intourist's flagship properties was the Intourist Hotel in Chișinău, later known after the fall of the Soviet Union as the National Hotel.[5]
