War in Ukraine | Russia must bet on domestic tourism

In Saint Petersburg for a few weeks, Professor Yakov Rabkin gives us his impressions in a series of texts.

Yakov M. Rabkin
professor emeritus of history, University of Montreal, co-author of Demodernization: A Future in the Past

This year, my stay in Saint-Petersburg coincides with “white nights”, a few weeks around the summer solstice. For this city located at 60^e parallel, the joy of continuous daylight is meant to compensate for the gloomy and dark winter months.

This summer, the streets and quays are lively as usual. Couples young and old stroll along the Neva, coaches dump crowds with smart phones in front of the famous landmark Bronze Horseman in memory of Peter the Great, and the rivers and canals of this city, sometimes nicknamed “the Venice of the North”, are crowded with river boats. All this happens… in the middle of the night. No wonder an American colleague titled his book about St. Petersburg Sunlight at Midnight.

This summer, everything seems the same, but I no longer hear different languages ​​in the crowd during these night walks. Now it’s almost exclusively Russian. Europeans and North Americans have all but disappeared since air travel from Western countries has come to a standstill due to sanctions and counter-sanctions imposed following hostilities in Ukraine.

Chinese people, who used to flock to the city in large groups, are being held back in their country because of the pandemic. Citizens of Arab countries, Iran and India, all of which have maintained air links with Russia, make up the bulk of tourists from outside the former Soviet Union.

But foreigners represent less than 4% of the total number of tourists this year, compared to 47% before the pandemic.

In the absence of mutual recognition of COVID-19 vaccines, tourist traffic with Western countries had already declined. At the same time increased the number of tourists from the interior of Russia, with a large population and a tradition of domestic travel developed during the Soviet period.

Saint Petersburg expects 7 million visitors in 2022, a third more than last year. The high number of Russian visitors is helping tourism recover from the pandemic faster than in major European cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona and Prague.

The government introduced an incentive program that made travel within Russia more affordable. Still, some unusual projects seem less affordable, like a new itinerary called “Siberian Holidays.” The 8-day trip, which costs more than $3,000, follows Vladimir Putin’s favorite spots in Khakassia, the Krasnoyarsk region and Tuva, the birthplace of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who often vacations with President.

Middle-class Russians no longer travel to Europe as they used to. Russian credit cards are not accepted there, nor do their holders always feel welcome in the context of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.

So Finland felt it arguably more than the others, as Russians, mainly from St. Petersburg and Moscow, disappeared from the country’s hotels, chalets, spas and shops.

Some residents of St. Petersburg used to travel to Finland every month to buy food which they considered to be of better quality or at least of higher social standing.

“Some stores near the Russian border simply went bankrupt, depending on Russian customers for the bulk of their sales,” a friend who works in tourism in St. Petersburg told me.

According to him, Russian tourists more than make up for the absence of foreign tourists. “Many can afford the Grand Hotel Europe, hire private guides and buy the best theater tickets. Major museums are booked weeks in advance, as I discovered to my regret when, on a whim, I tried to see the exhibition of Mikhail Vrubel, a prominent Russian artist from the early XX^e century.

Domestic tourism is part of Russia’s policy of import substitution to offset the effect of sanctions. This tourism, too, faces the same challenges. A museum had to close part of its collection because it could no longer repair the ventilation system installed by a Finnish company, which left Russia a few weeks earlier.

The scarcity of spare parts for Airbus and Boeing planes as well as fast trains built by Siemens may, in the long run, slow down travel within the country. But, estimates my friend, “even if it takes seven hours instead of three to go from Moscow to Saint-Petersburg, the tourists will continue to come”. The pride of the inhabitants of this city is legendary. Will it be justified this time around?