Any unsuspecting tourist arriving in Moscow should be ready to get down on their knees and pray to the Lord for a little help in choosing which hotel to stay in, or more to the point which to avoid. And by introducing a star system for the capital's hotels, Mayor Yury Luzhkov has answered those prayers.


If that is true only up to a point, then surely it is because Luzhkov is not God, whose peculiar talents would be demanded to cure the ills of Moscow's hotels overnight or even in the space of seven days.


No hotel got the top five-star rating, apparently in an acknowledgement that most of Moscow's wholly Russian-owned hotels have some way to go before they reach standards of excellence.


But four-star ratings have gone to the Intourist, Kosmos and Ukraina hotels, all of which enjoy reputations less for excellence than for their richness in prostitutes and lack of security for residents' belongings and, on occasion, their personal safety.


But since all ratings systems are relative, even this much is useful to know for the skeptical hotel guest. For if the Intourist is a four-star hotel, then what must a hotel with only one or two stars be like?


The star system also has to be helpful because it sets out criteria by which hotels can improve themselves and thereby move up the rating scale. Provided the city's stars are distributed fairly and stringently, they must in the long term help to improve general standards.


On this score, however, it seems that there were a few hiccups in the distribution of honors. Four-star hotels, for example, are supposed to have swimming pools, toiletries in every bathroom and a fluffy terrycloth robe in every room. None of the hotels nominated for four-star status meet these requirements.


The Ukraina, for example, is already making admirable strides to leave behind its reputation for poor security and dingy ambience and begins to look like a bargain. Yet neither the swimming pool nor the terry-cloth bathrobes are anywhere to be seen, making the city's judges appear a little lenient.


The claims to international standards are also lost by this lenience, as the Radisson Slavjanskaya Hotel just across the way from the Ukraina is also a four-star hotel. It does have a swimming pool and many other amenities that put it in a different class -- and an altogether different price range -- from the Ukraina.


But to demand international standards would in any case be too picky. Luzhkov's star system can only be welcomed as a sign that both the city and Russia's tourist industry are at last beginning to pay attention to the needs of the consumer.