To Russia With Love - Hope Your Bags Make It!
From the Moscow Times:
“Airlines Barred From Delivering Lost Bags”
I think this is just plain stupid. If the airlines or the airports loose your bags why do you have to continue to be punished? Many people transit through Moscow on the way to other places (mainly in the former Soviet Union) and if you are already in another country or even across Russia in Siberia how do the Russians expect you to get back to Moscow to collect your bags? I have been to Moscow many times and it takes so long trying to get through the traffic to get to/from the airport and inside the airport (at least at SVO) it is hard to get to the airline check-in counters or customs. The only reason I can see for this “new rule being enforced” is that the Russian Government is trying to make it harder for foreigners to come/leave Russia (and the same for Russians.) It makes no sense. Russian Customs (and any other Customs for that matter) has every right to X-ray and/or open your bags to make sure you don’t have anything undeclared in them. If they find something then I could see them forcing you to come back to the airport and explain or pay the fee, but to make everyone who looses a bag do that doesn’t make any kind of sense. Russia should be opening it’s doors and treating foreigners like people rather than isolating itself and treating foreigners as second-class - I mean foreigners already have to pay huge sums more for museums and other public places (ie when I was in Russia visiting the Peterhof Palace in St Petersburg a Russian had to pay 15 Rubles for the basic tour while a foreigner had to pay 520 Rubles - 520 Rubles was around $20 at the time. - Even if you don’t know the amount in Dollars you can tell that 520 is much higher than 15.)
It seems to me that Russia is constantly moving backwards in time. They are looking more and more like the Soviet Union rather than the Russia I knew when I visited or lived there. It is as though they miss the old Cold War days and are doing everything in their power to bring them back. I really hope that doesn’t happen. Russia has so much great things that should be shown to the rest of the world and the Russian Government should be working hard to encourage foreingers to come and feel welcomed in the country - as of now they are not doing that and continue to make it difficult everyday for a non-Russian to come to Russia.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com
/article/600/42/373633.htm