In Soviet Russia, the street vendors browse YOU! It’s not exactly untrue—generally young, seemingly well-fed, and relentlessly enterprising, the vendors who orbit urban Russia’s tourist haunts scout out potential clients for their inventories: elderly women for nesting dolls, middle-class serial tourists for icons of the Pieta, and trendy young people of all stripes for ersatz Soviet tchotchkes. Once they’ve found their demographic, they greet you, point you towards the wares they’ve identified you with, and try to be as pleasantly unobtrusive as possible in their best approximation of the civilized shopping experience they assume Americans want (somewhere between the hard sell of Islamic bazaar-keepers and the sterile impersonality of American retail stores).

They all hawk the same things: fur caps with hammer-and-sickle pins on them, flasks affixed with red stars, saluting-Lenin figurines, and strips of worthless rubles. And we snap it all up, all those onetime symbols of grim oppression and global threat, reconstituted as hip-to-be-square souvenirs for kids younger than glasnost, for whom the Soviet Union is an inert thing, a European History lesson.

Why did I bargain down that “KGB: Spies are watching you” t-shirt and pack it away with my Soviet Navy ensign’s cap when I was in St. Petersburg recently? In some ways, Communistiana evokes the same counterintuitive retro-inverted-trendiness that, say, sewing your old Boy Scout merit badges onto your backpack might. Once divorced from the vital and radical spirit that first excited the Bolsheviks, Soviet Communism became almost a caricature of itself in its palette of grays and browns, with its graceless, angular architecture, and suppression of all things vibrant and free-spirited: in short, the USSR was majorly lame. Now, twenty years on, we’re breathing new, thoroughly ironic life into the comically ham-fisted Party imagery of the Soviet world.

This is not a uniquely Russian phenomenon, though. All across Europe, from Italy to Ireland, Communist chic is very fashionable. Young Europeans and American tourists alike must be buying this stuff, because it is everywhere—not Lenin and the KGB emblazoned on t-shirts now, but Che Guevara’s stoic mug, that of Communism’s Golden Boy, who died before he had the chance to become a bad guy. Che, to us the great idealist and the purest of commies, sells cheap souvenir crap like no one else because we invest him with all the righteous indignation it’s hip to feel now. “Yes, I’m flaunting a shirt with a picture of a flagrant pinko,” such a statement says, “but I’d take that—with the full verboten force of its taboo—over Bush.” The naïve optimism of Soviet propaganda posters, also popular, indicate the same: Communism was deeply flawed, but at least someone was trying to stand up for the little man. Whether we’re judging these images right or not, I can’t say, but I am certain that if Castro had been executed and Che had faced the intricate realities of ruling Cuba, Castro’s face would be selling t-shirts instead.

Russia’s Communist legacy, however, extends far beyond the confines of makeshift souvenir bazaars. But as a visitor, you wouldn’t know it. You see, in St. Petersburg, at least, I was afforded the opportunity to tour the Hermitage, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Peterhof palace, and other tsarist monuments to Western European refinement. They are beautiful and historic, to be sure, but not so dissimilar to the Louvre, St. Peter’s, and Versailles, the etiological and aesthetic antetypes of St. Petersburg’s sights. The European legacy, of course, is unavoidable, as St. Petersburg was intentionally modeled on the capitals of the West, and, indeed, the city is characterized with such appellations as “The Venice of the North” and “The Gateway to Europe.”

But our tour guide, though obviously enamored of romantic tsarist Russia, hardly made mention of that other part of Russian history through the two days of my tour. On the bus ride from Peter the Great’s palace to the pristine city center, she advised us to close our eyes and catch some sleep. Those of us who did not saw the exurban landscape: gray, severe twentieth-century tenements and offices, deteriorating at best, dystopian at worst. Outside a few cordoned-off tourist-acceptable zones, even Russia’s most European city still looks very, very Communist. Why didn’t we visit any of it?

Turns out we weren’t alone: a quick online search revealed no travel agencies that book tours exploring, or even touching on, the physical legacy of the Soviets. It is not for lack of monuments, nor are other former Eastern Bloc countries so hesitant to educate about their darker times. In Warsaw, one can follow the packaged “Communism Tour” (in notorious Trabant Soviet-era automobiles, no less). In recent years, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan have all rededicated their former KGB headquarters as memorial museums. Lithuania’s Gruto Park, a cemetery for statues once lionizing Party leaders, is a popular destination. Hell, you can even book a tour to Chernobyl, provided you wear a gas mask. Communist landmarks are becoming a tourist draw in their own right, rather than an off-the-beaten-path trophy for ambitious travelers. Fallen empires are lucrative, and Americans, for our part, are curious to glimpse our long-vilified enemies at their hearts: Nazi Berlin has been a huge boon for Germany’s tourist industry.

But nowhere else in any hemisphere is the imprint of Communism so indelible as on Mother Russia, a country now ironically incandescent with the spirit of free enterprise. In gestures supposed to herald republican openness, Moscow opened the Lubyanka KGB headquarters and prison to visitors, but aside from small concessions like this, no Russian companies or state initiatives have really seized on the obvious selling power of perhaps the most uniquely Russian attractions in Russia. That is to say, tsarist European replicas and Byzantine imports are powerful testaments to Russian architectural virtuosity, but the absolutely compelling history behind what remains of Soviet Russia would attract a different type of tourist seeking something available only in Russia. Young Americans, especially, are fascinated by the now-improbable notion that not fifteen years ago, the US was rivaled by another nation for global influence. Russia should restore the state machinery that accomplished that to a dignified place in its history.

Unlike the nations that surround it, however, Russia is not yet ready to do that. Communism, which does have a peculiar, almost anti-, aesthetic, can be hard on the eyes, not traditional Neuschwanstein tourist fare to be sure, so on one level, Russians simply write it off as unmarketable, a notion that can be easily corrected.

More difficult to extirpate, though, is Russia’s very active complex of mixed feelings about its still-historically-recent past. The Communist Party in Russia still holds 51 out of 450 parliamentary seats, President Putin is more than a little Red himself, and the Federation years have been economically dire and hard on the nation’s pride. While most Russians have someone within their extended family who has been “interrogated” by the KGB or languished in Siberia, the legacy of Communism in Russia is much more complicated than that of Nazism in Germany, which was decisively eradicated and quickly accepted as unequivocally shameful, or of the Iron Curtain in Soviet satellite states, which was largely an oppressive foreign influence easy for the liberated people to condemn and put behind them. Without the same overwhelmingly negative legacy, Communism in Russia has been much more difficult to consign to ancient history. And what exacerbates the situation more is the modern Russian insistence on pretending that that is exactly what has been done, that Russia is “over it,” just another European vacation hotspot with baroque palaces and wide avenues, and that no tourists want to be reminded of such a harsh, dreary part of history.

Both these pretenses are mistakes, of course, but they are preventing the Russian tourism industry from cashing in. Russia is intimidating in size, so the market for tourism around, say, long-secret Plesetsk, one of the Soviet era’s two primary space launch facilities, or into Siberia, where remains of many gulags still mark the lowest point of Russia’s twentieth century, will always be niche. But Moscow and St. Petersburg are full of neglected Soviet heritage in their own right. If the state were to renovate and advertise many of the sites of the Party apparatus, or Russian travel agencies were to book tours like “In the Footsteps of the Bolsheviks” or even “Stalin’s Moscow”—his ambitious building campaign created much of the city’s current look—like they do for the tsarist monuments, Russia would get a kick to its tourism economy, much needed in the wake of Chechnya’s brutal putdown and Moscow’s shady liaisons with China and North Korea, which have created a mild Western perception that Russia is a shifty, backwards, and perhaps even dangerous place to visit. Only by reframing their Communist legacy as a historically formative part of Russian identity and embracing its relics as important and worthwhile showpieces of the past can Russians really capitalize on this surge of interest in all things Red. And after seventy-four years of Communism, they ought to give capitalizing a try.