MOSCOW (dpa) – If a long-haul flight doesn’t sap your joy for travelling, arrival at Moscow’s Sheremetevo international airport surely will.
A shabby, chaotic anachronism in a 21st century nation of over 140 million people, the impact of the two Soviet-era terminals on newcomers is overwhelming.Slow, snaking cues lead to understaffed passport and visa control booths where border guards meet you with open contempt.Baggage handling is haphazard and prone to pilfering, while slack concern for repairs leaves passengers to negotiate deep stairwells in near darkness.W.C.s can offer a single roll of toilet paper anchored by the washbasins for an entire row of cubicles, while a predatory mob of mafia-run taxi drivers waits to grossly overcharge travellers up to 100 dollars for a ride into the city.“Nearly ten years of reforms seem to have left few marks on Sheremetyevo-2, shopping potential notwithstanding,” wrote The Moscow Times English-language newspaper, which lately led calls for improvals at least to the second, main terminal.“The terminal, built for the 1980 Olympic Games, gives every impression of being stuck in the Brezhnevite era of stagnation when it was conceived.”“Dingy, poorly lit halls have a pervasive unpleasant smell and a bizarre tin-can ceiling that collects dust even more abundantly than the customs officials collect bribes.”Aesthetics aside, most disconcerting is the arbitrary rule that numerous federal law-enforcement agencies seem to enjoy there, from immigration to customs to the airport police.Examples include the sudden reintroduction of demands that departing passengers produce currency declaration forms that they supposedly received on arrival in the country.The practice is a derisable throwback from Soviet times, since there are no restrictions on how much money may be drawn from foreign accounts at ATM machines in modern Russia.Result: departing passengers are often forced to empty their wallets at the airport – except those who choose to resolve the issue by slipping a hundred-dollar bill to the officer in question.Recent conciliatory attempts by the State Customs Committee to allow foreigners to take as much undeclared money out of the country as the locals (Russians can carry 1,500 U.S. dollars with no red tape) were rejected by the Justice Ministry as “contravening federal law”.Another shock was the appearance of an odd – and fortunately shortlived – “regulation” which stipulated that arriving travellers must produce a Russian document authorizing use of their mobile telephones in the country.Persistent investigations by local media revealed that even the Communications Ministry had never heard of such a license.One non-resident denounced the scheme then as being “as clear as anything else in Russia…it gives an opportunity to milk foreigners”.Meanwhile, stony-faced customs officers for several weeks insisted that passengers surrender their cellphones at the airport on arrival or confiscated them on the way out if no license was produced.Presumably after such experiences many people vow never to return to the country, which in principal says it wants to open up to tourism as much as possible.Recent consultations of the Russian Association of Tourist Agencies (RATA) with foreign businesses and travel organizations identified conditions at Sheremetyevo as a main obstacle in developing Russia’s tourist potential.“Not to mention the taxi situation, the shady characters selling tickets by the airline desks and so on, our priority is the way passengers are first received,” said RATA president Sergei Shpilko.“Even just a basic clean-up of the premises would help. But it would be good if they would at least inform foreign consulates, Aeroflot, the main travel companies, us, about introduction of new rules.”The situation became so bad that some foreign operators like Swissair refused to use the airport altogether, choosing to fly instead to the smaller yet more modern Domodedovo airport on another edge of the capital.“But there is no sense in losing hope,” Shpilko said, pointing to new management at Sheremetyevo which may respond to calls to review the whole set-up together with the customs and border services, the FSB domestic intelligence service, the Interior Ministry and the state tourism authorities.So could revamping the airport’s premises and attitude really mark a break with old practices and how Russia is perceived by visitors?As The Moscow Times concluded, first impressions aren’t everything, but they certainly count for a lot.
