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"Dollar Shops." The Moscow Metro, prime example of Russia's cleanliness, with its magnificently mosaicked underground stations, is another must, as are the museums of art (particularly the Pushkin and the Tretyakov). Americans who drop into GUM, the mammoth department store, must be prepared for elbowing crowds and the Soviet system of shopping: the customer prices the item he wants, then pays for it in advance at the cashier's desk, returns to the display counter with receipt in hand to claim his purchase. Much better bargains are available to Americans at the "dollar shops" (called Beriozka), which accept foreign exchange only, in return offer large discounts on everything from black caviar (81¢ an ounce) to folk art.
Aside from a few tame youth cafes and sedate "Western-style" ballrooms from out of the 1930s or so, there is nothing resembling a nightclub in Moscow or elsewhere in the U.S.S.R. More interesting places to go in the evening: the Moscow Circus (bike-riding bears, acrobats on horseback) and the Bolshoi Ballet (6:30 p.m. sharp).
"White Nights." For most tourists, Leningrad, the old czarist capital of St. Petersburg and cradle of the Revolution, with its superb setting on the Neva River, is the handsomest city in the Soviet Union. Number one draw is the Hermitage Museum, which contains a dazzling art collection of nearly 3,000,000 works that includes a whole room of Rembrandts, and the world's finest assemblage of Gauguins, Matisses and early Picassos. Two other great sights: the Peter and Paul Fortress housing the tombs of all the Romanovs from Peter the Great to Alexander III (except Peter II), and the baroque gardens of Petrodvorets, the old Summer Palace, 40 minutes outside town on the Gulf of Finland. A delightful summertime consequence of Leningrad's northern location is the "white nights"—it stays light until around midnight and never gets totally dark. Another consequence: summer evenings as chill as 40°.
For a warmer and sunnier climate, there is ancient Kiev, 490 miles southwest of Moscow, on the Dnieper River. The Ukrainian capital, known as the "Mother of Cities," dates back to the 5th century. It was Christianized by Vladimir I in the 10th century; the main shopping area is still called Street of the Cross. Today a garden city with many parks and chestnut trees, Kiev draws tourists to the gold-domed St. Sophia Cathedral, one of the great masterpieces of Russian architecture, and to the nearby ravine of Babi Yar, the infamous spot commemorated in Evtushenko's poem, where some 200,000 Jews and Soviet prisoners were exterminated during the German occupation.