> Not necessarily ruling but definitely highly privileged. You definitely could not just travel on a whim inside the USSR. You needed special permission from the government, which was most commonly (but not exclusively) given to people whose job depended on travel.
No, you did not need permission to travel inside the USSR. I don't know about Estonia, but we were living in Tashkent and before I was 13 I have visited Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Alma-Ata, Vilnyus, and several other places. All that travel was pretty much leisure.
My parents were engineers - very not elite.
On business my mom traveled to Tbilisi, Talinn, Baku and god knows where else.
And yes, we lived in "the middle of nowhere in Asia" (aka Tashkent) and had been in pretty much every corner of a huge country.
No, you did not need permission to travel inside the USSR. I don't know about Estonia, but we were living in Tashkent and before I was 13 I have visited Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Alma-Ata, Vilnyus, and several other places. All that travel was pretty much leisure. My parents were engineers - very not elite. On business my mom traveled to Tbilisi, Talinn, Baku and god knows where else. And yes, we lived in "the middle of nowhere in Asia" (aka Tashkent) and had been in pretty much every corner of a huge country.