Passport Delays Stymie Russians Hoping to Go Abroad : Travel: The Foreign Ministry says it will try to help. But officials see no early end to logjam.

MOSCOW —  In the repressive old days, Soviet citizens could not freely get exit visas to travel abroad. In these reformist new days, Russian citizens no longer need exit visas--they just need new passports.

But they cannot get them.

Bureaucratic delays and hassles have become so harrowing for Russians trying to travel abroad that the Foreign Ministry is stepping in to help, officials announced Monday.

They held out little hope, however, that average Russians will be able to realize the long-held dream of easy foreign travel in coming months.

Passport officers “are in an avalanche situation,” said Vasily Vinogradov, chief of the Foreign Ministry’s consular service. As of Jan. 1, virtually all Russians gained the theoretical right to travel abroad. But their new freedom coincided with Russia’s introduction of new passports--for which they must wait more than a month, sometimes three or four.

In the resulting confusion and delays, business executives, sports teams and even a director with a movie playing at the Cannes Film Festival have found themselves stranded in the Motherland, unable to get passports in time for key events. Even some journalists who cover President Boris N. Yeltsin on his foreign trips have had passport problems.

And passport troubles have created a new genre of travel horror stories for would-be voyagers who never even get to leave the country.

Andrei, a doctor who works for a Finnish pharmaceutical company here and had planned a trip to Pennsylvania to visit colleagues, feared that he had no time to get a passport through his local police station, where most are given out, so he answered an ad for a company promising special visas making his old passport valid.

He paid $70 for the privilege and set off happily to catch his Lufthansa flight. He passed through customs and checked his baggage, only to find himself stopped at the passport control booth by guards who said his visa was not valid. His trip, including a training course he had planned, had to be canceled.

In early April, schoolteacher Nina Rozhnova was invited by some friends to visit them in the United Arab Emirates on May 1. She paid a company about $75 in hopes of getting a passport in time. On April 28, they told her things had not worked out and gave her back her money.

“And I was already making such plans,” she lamented. “To be by the ocean, and relax like a real person.”

For Russia’s travel agents, the passport tangle is a major disaster.

“For the tourism industry, this just means going bust,” said Lyudmila Prokhorova of the Moskovsky Sputnik travel agency. “We have to cancel groups right and left.”

She estimated that 90% of her clients have not been able to take their trips in recent months.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Russia’s latest passport saga is that the new passports being issued differ only negligibly from the old passports they replace. They still carry the crest of the Soviet Union on the cover, still are colored a Communist red and still say Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the title page.

“What distinguishes this symbol of the civic freedoms of new Russia from its predecessor? Nothing,” the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper said. “No scholar can ever convince me that there was a point to this exercise.”

Russian lawmakers can’t decide on a new state symbol, so a new-look passport cannot yet be issued. But in the meantime, Vinogradov said, Russia had to redo its passport system because under new freedom-of-travel rules, it no longer will be issuing exit visas.

Formerly, even criminals and holders of state secrets could get passports to travel to Eastern Europe. If they were free to use those passports now to travel, the reasoning goes, that would violate state security.

It sounds like a logical explanation, but most Russians remain absolutely baffled by what seems the latest exercise in bureaucratic absurdity.

“It’s always like this for us Russians,” Rozhnova said. “This is just the luck we have. We live any way we can, and who knows what new problems lie around the corner?”

For VIPs, things should get easier. The Foreign Ministry announced Monday that it will soon begin using its consular facilities to issue emergency passports to make sure that performers, business executives and officials can make their foreign dates on time. Patients requiring urgent medical care can also apply for quick passports.

But Vinogradov emphasized that the Foreign Ministry will handle only emergencies--and only for those with clout, like the Academy of Sciences or the gas industry.

“Let’s say the Bolshoi Theater goes on a foreign tour and a dancer or singer has fallen ill,” he said. “A replacement is needed, and they can’t wait a month and a half for it.”

Meanwhile, most Russians will end up feeling almost as homebound as they did in the pre-reform days of the old Soviet Union, when thousands of citizens known as refuseniks were denied permission to emigrate or visit abroad.

Long pressured to adhere to human rights norms requiring freedom of travel, Moscow finally relented in 1991, easing exit procedures and announcing that as of 1993, virtually anyone who wanted to could leave.

Vinogradov and other officials emphasized that the current period of heightened demand and confusion will end. But he did not say when.

And even if it does, travel agent Prokhorova said skeptically, “once everybody has the new passports, they’ll probably change them again.”