Short tale from the Soviet Union

Or, more precisely, about some visitors to the Soviet Union: It was in the 1980s when my grandmother and some coworkers from her LPG (East German agricultural cooperative, roughly equivalent to negdels in Mongolia or kolkhozes in the USSR) for made a touristic trip to Leningrad. I'm not sure about the background, it may have been some kind of award, or they just wanted to go there.

In any case, in these days foreign tourists in the Soviet Union, even from socialist brother countries, were usually kept under watch, only led around in groups, only allowed to see what they were supposed to see etc. My grandmother's group came from a Mecklenburgian village and for some rather natural reason also were interested to see what villages, or agricultural cooperatives, in Russia looked like. But when they asked their guide if this would be possible, she flatly rejected, and quite angrily.

The conclusion left was rather devastating - "they are so ashamed of their villages that they can not even show us one". East German villages were never particularly tidy, and some of the male members of the group might have seen Russian villages back in WWII, so the impression probably was all the worse. In any case, I am sure that what their relatives remember to this day are not the pictures brought home from the trip (nice or not, altered or not, wrongly labeled or not), but the information that the Russians were so embarassed by the state of their countryside that they did not dare to show it to East German visitors.