That would greatly vary depending on what their purpose for travelling was (ie. business, tourism, political and so on) and in what era.

So for example Alex Shishin's observations of travel in the Brezhnev era, which was a mixture of tourism and Shishin wanting to visit the land his family was from is one thing. Paul Robeson's trip for political purposes (and IIRC he performed while there?) in the Stalinist era, would be another thing all together.

General observations from Shishin's Rossiya - he generally found the people he met helpful and friendly, though a number he met in passing saw him as a source of hard to obtain goods for trade (cigarettes, jeans and such). He thought the staff of some of the hotels etc. were terrible, but he thought they were terrible to everyone and that the Russian approach to customer service was just a different mind set rather than it being his foreign status. The behaviour of Russians when the service wasn't right was something different too, since they were more likely to carry on, shout etc. Is that the sort of thing you meant?