82 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
advertised to the Baltic ports of Riga and Tallinn as well as for package
holidays that took in Kiev, Vilnius or the cities of the south Caucasus.
The other half of the policy was that the tourists were treated like
sheep who could only move around in a carefully controlled herd.
Guides delivered paeans to the wonders of the USSR’s achievements.
Each day was filled with a programme that would so occupy the
visitors as to leave them no time to make a nuisance of themselves.
Lithuanian KGB officers could still see no end of problems. It was
as if the sacred soil of the USSR would be defiled whenever people
came into the country by land, sea or air.^21 Vilnius, despite being a
jewel of European urban architecture and culture, attracted only 7,335
holidaymakers from capitalist countries in 1983. The KGB claimed to
have discovered scores of troublemakers among them: eighty mem-
bers of anti-Soviet émigré organizations, twenty representatives of
Zionist bodies, ten Christian ‘sectarians’, twenty-one priests and eleven
nuns.^22 The number of such holidaymakers rose to 15,449 in 1984, still
a pathetically small number for a country twice the size of Belgium.^23
But this was how the policemen liked things: fewer foreigners meant
less trouble. Even travellers from other communist states caused palpi-
tations in the KGB, which reported that its efforts to prevent ‘the
uncontrolled crossing’ of Poles into Lithuania were far from totally
successful.^24 The ending of martial law in Warsaw in summer 1983
had made a bad situation worse by increasing the number of people
travelling from Poland and opening a dangerous human ‘canal’ of sub-
version.^25 In Andropov’s last years as KGB Chairman, he reported that
more than seventy Solidarity activists had been deported for trying to
stir up strikes. Thirty anti-Soviet groupings had been broken up in
Ukraine, the Baltic and Armenia. Foreign-inspired strikes in Estonia
had been crushed.^26
The KGB liked Soviet people to move around as little as possible
inside the USSR. The proposal for a car rally across the boundaries of
Soviet republics caused trepidation. The counter-intelligence agencies
were alert to the potential for trouble.^27 Quite what they suspected
might happen, they did not explain.
As regards Soviet citizens travelling abroad, even scientific
exchanges with the West were thought dangerous. While the USSR
gained technological benefits, the entry of foreigners and the exit of
Soviet citizens for lengthy periods could never be contemplated with
equanimity.^28 The Party Secretariat drew up ‘Basic Rules of Behaviour’
for everyone about to make a trip across the border: politicians, diplo-