Foreign tourists’ entertainment in the Soviet Union. The story of a bartender

Moscow Hotel Intourist has always been the synonym of the Soviet perversion. The hotel was supplying foreign tourists with first-class Russian prostitutes. This hotel will soon be leveled, but there are other places on the outskirts of Moscow, which can easily outshine Intourist in Tverskaya street with their odious fame. Legendary Moscow bartender Valery Kazimirov knows a lot of very curious and shocking things about campsite Solnechny (Sunny). Kazimirov used to earn minister’s monthly wages just within a day. Now he is living in a secluded place in his house on the road from Moscow to St.Petersburg. Here is what he had to say.

Before I started working in Solnechny, I worked at Hotel Cosmos (Space), and this hotel used to be one of the coolest places to work at: it was filled with all those things, which were banned in the Soviet Union. A waiter could earn a fortune within one day, but there were not many people in the hotel, who could work there for long. Big money was driving people crazy: some of them were put in prison, others were fired. I remember a funny story with a cook, who was arrested at the moment, when he was taking some food out. Police officers put him in the van and off they went. The cook managed to throw everything out, shoving his foodstuffs between the bars, he even got rid of a big piece of butter. But a raw chicken was a problem: it was too big, so he had to eat it all up, in order to be able to deny all the charges. He cannot eat chicken since that time.

Campsite Solnechny was not a profitable place, but you could witness a lot of weird things there. There were a lot of freaks there – foreign tourists, who came to the USSR to have a good time. We basically had tourists from Austria, Germany, England. Those folks had their favorite entertainment: “celebration of love.” They would rent a bar, order tons of alcohol and food, and then they would “elect” their “king” and “queen.” It was not hard to elect the queen – the most beautiful girl with long legs and big boobs, but when it came to the king, they simply measured his penis with a ruler. The king had the longest one, and he was awarded with a “prize” – a condom necklace. Those guys, who took the second and third places, became the king's servants. And then they would put the queen on the table and banged her. And just try to image that it was happening in 1982! And the people were watching those scenes! Gross!

I used to have rather a negative impression about English tourists. It seemed to me that it was good for England to get rid of those people even for a while. We also had a very weird girl from Finland – her boss awarded her with a trip to the USSR for her good work as a milkmaid. She was 23, but she weighed some 120 kilos and was almost 2 meters tall. To crown it all – she was bold-headed. This scarecrow would come to the bar two hours before it was opened, she would wait for the opening time for two hours, and then order vodka and did not leave the place except when she had to relieve herself and eat. She would drink almost four liters of vodka there, and then she would walk around looking for a man. One of our waiters, Nikolay, fell her victim once. Nikolay’s nick was Mujahideen – he served in Afghanistan, he was always silent, and always tipsy. I remember he was once serving the table, which had been removed from its usual place in the restaurant hall. He came up to that place, holding a big tray of food and drinks, and “put it on the table,” I mean that he just dropped it on the floor, turned around and walked away, without even looking back. Only this guy could sleep with our milkmaid. In the morning he was very sad.

The tourists from the social countries were not at all different. For example, German girls were the most lustful, and they were very young, teenagers of 14-16 years old. They were coming to Moscow on some exchange program. I once saw a group of them sitting up late in the bar, so I came up to them and said that it was time they should go to sleep. And they showed me the keys to their rooms. I did not get it at first, until a friend of mine explained to me that they were showing me, which way to go to sleep. OK, we went upstairs, and I saw that they took their mattresses out in the corridor, and turned the music on. When I talked to them I found out that their biggest hobby was to win a who-drinks-more-vodka competition with a big Russian man, and sleep with him. I accepted their challenge and started drinking with them. But as it turned out, they won.

Speaking about professional prostitutes – we had them too, of course. There was a gorgeous chic Marina. She was often carrying a white plastic bag in her hands, and you could see her underwear, 50 and 100 dollar notes, pounds, franks, marks through the bag. She had a little child and a big goal – to save money for a three-room apartment. And she succeeded! To be perfectly honest, almost all maids and waitresses of Solnechny campsite were ready for sexual services – you just pay them first, and it’s done. There was a slangy expression for “one hundred rubles” – Katya, which is actually a typical Russian name. And we had a popular joke about this expression: “Hey, girl, what’s your name?” – “Katya,” – “And what’s your friend’s name?” – “Two Katyas.”

The only waiter, who was a member of the communist party, was our Vadik Zaytsev guy. He would do weird things sometimes, like, he would put on very tight trousers made of thin fabric, and when he was listening to what his client was ordering, he would bend over graciously, and the seat of his pants would burst at the seams very loudly. The chiefs were shocked and furious, but they could not fire him, because he was a member of the communist party. So they simply asked him to have a rest for a week or so. It was a good time of my life, but it’s a different story.