The hunt for Red October: how the Bolshevik Revolution turned into a Chinese tourist trap

On a recent cloudless morning, a group of people from Urumqi, in northwestern China, emerged bleary-eyed from the dimly lit mausoleum on Red Square.

For the European tourists who wait out the long line that snakes along the red brick walls of the Kremlin, Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body is a curiosity. For the Chinese visitors, however, he’s much more.

“Coming here, exactly 100 years later, is extremely important for the older generation,” said the group’s 32-year-old tour leader, Wang Lin. “For the youngsters, not so much,” he told me as he shepherded away tourists of various ages.

Even before this year, Russia was already growing in popularity as a destination for Chinese tourists: Last year saw a record 1.3 million Chinese visitors spending almost US$3 billion, according to the Russian tour agency World Without Borders, which caters exclusively to people from China. Chinese tour groups have become a regular fixture on Moscow’s resplendent, chandeliered metro, which was a showcase for the Soviet Union, as have the Chinese tourists regularly thronged around Moscow’s various Lenin statues taking selfies.

But 2017 has seen a surge in Chinese tourists who want to mark the centennial anniversary of the communist revolution that swept the Bolsheviks into power and changed the course of not just Russia but China, too. For the first six months of this year, the number of visitors from China was up by 36 per cent compared with the same period last year, according to the Russian Federal Agency for Tourism.

The agency attributed the increase to “red tourism,” an initiative by the Chinese government to encourage travel to places of importance in communist lore, both inside and outside China, that has been encouraged and promoted by President Xi Jinping himself. Red tourism is being “actively expanded by the Chinese government so that its people don’t forget the value of communist ideology,” said Vladimir Petrovsky, a scholar of Far Eastern studies with the government-linked Russian Academy of Sciences.