Safety as a priority

Unlike in the West, Soviet training schools, led by enthusiastic activists, taught their students free of charge. The quality of education was similar to that offered by Western outdoor courses, but the curriculum was broader and more comprehensive to prepare individuals for expeditions across remote and uninhabited regions. The Soviet search and rescue service was ineffective from its foundation to the end of the Soviet Union, in part, due to objective factors, such as remoteness of tourist trails, coupled with poor communications equipment, but also because of procedural ambiguities and underfunding. In the absence of effective means to assist teams who had suffered an accident, most search and rescue stations viewed their main mission as the enforcement of illegal restriction on travel. In consequence, tourists often perceived the search and rescue service as an annoying obstacle and sought to limit contacts with them.