It isn’t easy to like Russians. Some days it seems like they are out to skim, scam, overcharge or shortchange you every time you sit down.

Of course, foreign tourists are ripped everywhere, but Russians just haven’t learned to do it sneakily or slimily, like their Western counterparts. They’re not even two-faced about being barefaced.

Andre Gide, afer touring the Soviet Union:
“Russia Is The World’s Most Fraudulent Society”

A good example is the system of ‘Russian tipping’. This is where you sit at a restaurant table waiting for the change from your bill only to discover that the waiter isn’t coming back ever. Here at Kaliningrad’s ‘Hotel Deima‘, I’m charged a different amount for the same coffee and pack of Marlboro every day. Hilarious. You might conclude that ripping is a Pavlovian reflex.

So now I read in Newsweek that Moscow doesn’t agree that it’s the most expensive capital in the world and wonders why tourism is in decline. Surely it’s all about perception. A tourist only needs to be ripped a couple of times to think ‘overpriced’. But instead of tackling the issues, Moscow plans to spend several millions challenging the rating agencies. Is this wise?

Anyone who visits Russia will notice that the country still hasn’t grasped the idea of tourism at all. Just the presence of border guards outside every town should tell you that it’s positively discouraged. You still need a passport to buy a simple train ticket and therefore both to get past the security cordon around the loo at Moscow’s Kazan station.

Kazanski Voksal has recently been refurbished with ‘people in mind’. When you do finally find the loo, it’s up five flights of baggage-heaving stairs and guarded by a retired KGB toenail puller. The alternative is to buy yet another ticket for the ‘comfort suite’, where you can indulge the world’s most expensive pee.

Another delight for unsuspecting tourists is pricing structures. Many cafeteria items are marked in roubles per 100 grammes. So unless you are good at ‘guess the weight’ or ‘guess the number of beans in a jar’ competitions, you can’t really tell the price of anything. ‘Exactly’, explained my Russian friend. ‘This way, fraud is built-in’.

In St Petersburg recently, I took in a sample of bars that sold wine in ‘units’. The unit prices were roughly the same, but some bars needed 1 unit to fill a glass while others, mysteriously, needed two or three. Bars with no marked prices have another method. Someone punches into a calculator in the first number they can think of, adds a few zeros and holds up the result ‘in your face’. Bar tabs of 1234,5 roubles are not uncommon in St.Petersburg, I discovered.

Ripping foreigners is still official policy, of course. Two-tier pricing is everywhere, from trains to museums. When I was buying a plane ticket in Chelny, only one Aviacassa was authorised to sell tickets to foreigners - naturally at above the quoted fare. By the time I got to the departure lounge at Nizhnikamsk I had three vouchers of unexplained surcharges.

If you ever ask for an explanation for charges in Russia, you are usually met with a shrug and ‘Sorry, Russia”. Russians who rip you always expect you to feel sorry for them.

After visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Andre Gide described Russia as the ‘world’s most fraudulent society’. The funny part is that Andre didn’t get ripped at all. In fact, he didn’t put his hand in his pocket once. Intourist paid for the best of everything, in the hope that Gide would write nice things about Communism when he got home. But Andre didn’t like being bribed and the experience turned the former left-leaner into a fervent anti-Communist. Moscow’s current plan simply to buy good PR seems equally misguided.