IN COMMUNIST times a summer break usually meant a trip with workmates to a stony beach or a bracing mountainside—within the Soviet motherland. When the red flag came down, Russians flew off en masse on exotic forays to Turkey or Thailand. Now the pleasure of holidaying closer to home is perforce being rediscovered by an ever-growing category of citizens who, to use a very Soviet term, are nevyezdniye: forbidden, by virtue of their state employment or access to secrets, from going abroad. As the Kremlin’s extreme froideur with the West enters its second year, the number of nevyezdniye Russians may surpass 4m.

That is a change from the early years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, when the means as well as the right to travel were hailed as benefits of his rule. In Soviet times travel abroad, usually in highly controlled groups, was rare. But after the Soviet Union fell in 1991, most Russians could freely leave, including officers in the army, police and intelligence services. Many opened bank accounts and bought property abroad. Foreign travel rocketed.

That began to change in 2010, says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist, when America uncovered a network of Russian spies who had lived in America for years. That fiasco made the Kremlin nervous of what footloose, well-connected Russians might give away. The Russian state began to curb the right of those with state secrets to roam the world.

The ranks of Russia’s nevyezdniye swelled even more last year after Crimea was annexed and war broke out in eastern Ukraine. Russia’s foreign ministry warned that American agents were “hunting for Russian citizens”. It advised against travel to countries with extradition treaties with America. That put Europe off-limits. The same applied to Egypt and Turkey.

Then it became still harder for an array of state employees. At the interior ministry, workers at a certain level had to hand over their passports. A Communist member of parliament said all his colleagues should be barred from going abroad without special approval. News reports suggested that even railway workers were cancelling trips at the suggestion of higher-ups.

Police without security clearance are given a “recommendation” not to go abroad, says Mikhail Pashkin of Moscow’s police union. But there is talk of changing the contracts signed by all officers, even traffic cops, to oblige them to get permission for foreign trips. Mr Pashkin adds that other factors may be at work. The thinking, as he puts it, is that even if money is stolen, “let them spend it here and not there.”

Russian tour operators, already reeling from the weak rouble, have been hurt. “We underestimated how many [securocrats] there were,” says Irina Tyurina of Russia’s Tourism Industry Union. “But they want to have a vacation all the same.” So demand has risen for Russia’s few seaside resorts, such as Sochi, the site of the Winter Olympics in 2014, and Anapa on the Black Sea—and Crimea. Operators of package tours to Egypt and Turkey have begun organising similar trips to Sochi: charter flights, air-conditioned buses, all meals included. “If a person is used to package tours, he or she won’t be disappointed,” says Sergei Tolchin of NTK-Intourist. “It’s the same model, only if the beaches in Turkey are sandy, then in Sochi there are pebbles.”