[Przemolog]

Originally Posted by Asick

From this point of view (transits) the land traffic is more important, since you can stay in the 'behind the border' zone at international airports making a connection there, right? So, it's just a year remaining... not bad.

Unless you have to transfer to another airport....

Originally Posted by Asick

Yes if you travel from Russia or Ukraine or any exUSSR. Trains and buses are much cheaper in this part of the world. Also, some people (like me) just like to travel by trains and buses because you can visit many interesting places on your way too.

Yes, I realise that, but you mentioned travelling by train from Russia to Turkey. Then you must travel via Romania and Bulgaria paying an international train tariff - it's not that low even in eastern Europe now.

Originally Posted by Asick

The cheapest service for sending her documents to Moscow and back that she found was about 150 Euros (while the visa costed about 35 Euros itself). You can imagine how much a person should pay for sending documents from Vladivostok to Moscow via a tourist firm, for example... I don't say it's the problem that can't be solved, eventually, but look, it would have even been possible to go abroad from the USSR, if you had been ready to get this as the purpose of all your life and to bother much. I mean there should be some more adequate instruments in 21th century, such as Internet visas, simplified procedures for those who has other EU visas normally used etc and now it's not the time for building new walls in Europe, eventually. Talking about Russian and Belarussian visas... well, it's just the reflection of the rules that EU sets, nothing more.

Yes, it seems crazy to me that I can travel without visa not only to most Europe but also to countries so distant as Japan, New Zealand or Argentina but I can't cross the border with Belarus 100 km from my home .
Now it looks incredible but there used to a strange time in Poland between October 1990 and April 1991 when despite freshly regained freedom and democracy it was possible to travel without visas, vouchers or invitations only to Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and... Argentina . Also 24-hrs transit was allowed via Czechoslovakia or the USSR.

Originally Posted by Asick

Oh, I can imagine this. GDR was known to be the most rich 'soclalist' country in the whole East Europe, USSR was spending MUCH money to support this rich state of them to keep the contradiction between two German economics not that huge. So, it's quite reasonable why it had been ruined being gathered with another budget.

Yes, they had better living conditions than we did. E.g., my aunt who lives in Świnoujście (the north-west "corner" od Poland) used to buy Polish toilet paper in GDR (because it was permamently missing in Polish shops)

Originally Posted by Asick

Oh, this is really interesting info that I have not heard here before. Surely, it could not be published in USSR in 80s, and now it's just the socialist Europe history detail which is not generally interesting for Russian media.

Well, the official propaganda was silent about this wave of emmigration (as well as any after 1945 emmigration in general - who wanted to escape from socialist paradise ?) - these are 1990's estimates.
However, even more Poles have emmigrated since the EU accession - but at least they are only economical emmigrants - not political ones.

Originally Posted by Asick

Which ones? One is surely Brest, and which was another road crossing?

Medyka-Shegini on the Kraków-Przemyśl-Lvov route. Railway crossing where Medyka, Terespol-Brest and Kuźnica Białostocka-Grodno (Warszawa-Vilnius-Leningrad route). There used to be a Dorohusk-Jagodin railway crossing on Warszawa-Lublin-Kiev route in the 1950's but it was closed and reopened only in 1988 or 1989. There were no border crossing with Lithuanian SSR and Kalinigradskaya oblast'.

Originally Posted by Asick

Also, if they allowed Soviet people to easily travel to Poland or to GDR, then millions and millions from here would have bought all the goods they find abroad, making the situation much worse that it was in 1972 with GDR-Poland. Remember, in 70s and especially in 80s Soviet people had much money that they could not spend (deficit).

Well, the same applied (perhaps even more) to Poland in 1980's. So, despite the ideological reasons, "friendly" socialist countries protected their economies from "invasion" of Polish "shopping tourists". This fear was so great that Czechoslovakia opened it's borders only in 1991 when it truned that Czech and Slovaks buy more in Poland than Poles in Czechoslovakia

Originally Posted by Asick

From the other hand, it was not very difficult to visit USSR for people from the West in 70s and 80s, here were many Finnish 'vodka tourists' in that time, for example, or even Finnish workers building some hotels and other things. Also, here were West German, French, Italian or even American tourists... Not millions of them, but quite enough to create special layer of services for them (hotels, shops selling western goods for dollars etc.).

They were source of precious convertible currencies - it was more important than ideology