Proletarian Tourism 85woman, hikers with backpacks, resting on a seaside overlook. Down below,
an automobile whisked travelers along the corniche, and out on the ocean, a
cruise ship could be seen in the distance. Soviet tourism here speaks of plea-
sure (the views, the young man and woman) as well as vigor. But the bulk of
the ad provided information on routes, prices, and means of transportation.
Advertising returned to the pages of Trud in May and June 1941, but again
this was purely informational, announcing the availability of tours and of
tourist bases.^71 These ads, so poignant in light of our knowledge of the com-
ing German invasion on 22 June 1941, shared Trud ’s back pages with offers
of putevki to various rest homes and sanatoria.
Why the sudden fl urry of advertising? A mobilization interpretation might
suggest that even though the clouds of war were visible on the horizon, the
regime wished to assure its citizens that normal life would continue. The ear-
nest effort of the TEU to generate tourist revenue suggests a more commercial
interpretation. The experience of the 1930s had taught the tourist agencies
that they needed to advertise in order to fully utilize their facilities outside
the peak vacation season. The fear of impending war may have produced
a decline in the purchase of summer leisure travel, leaving rest homes and
tourist bases without a sure source of income for the summer of 1941. These
ads, placed by individual proprietors of leisure spaces (such as the Union
of State Trade Employees), refl ected an effort to drum up demand for their
specifi c locations, not to promote the good life of leisure more generally. The
authoritarian Soviet regime spoke with more than one voice: the centrally
planned economy harbored many niches for institutional enterprise.
The Two Sides of Proletarian Tourism
From the Commissariat of Enlightenment to the Komsomol to the trade
unions’ Tourism-Excursion Authority, a basic fault line divided the tourist
movement. The purists believed that Soviet tourism should be a mass move-
ment with millions of members, and they stressed the physical culture as-
pects of tourism—doing—over the sightseeing elements. They believed that
hardship and hard work rewarded the tourist far more richly than being con-
veyed passively in a sightseeing bus. They scorned both market and manage-
rial considerations: as a mass movement, tourism would be self-sustaining
and inexpensive, fi nanced through the dues and contributions of its millions
of practitioners in addition to state insurance and transportation subsidies.
They insisted that independent touring, not the package tour, was the most
authentic and valuable touristic experience. The managers, castigated as
aliens in their Sovetskii Turist form, reproduced themselves in the voluntary
Society for Proletarian Tourism and Excursions and later in the trade union
TEU. They may have paid lip service to proletarian tourism as a mass move-
- NSNM , no. 5 (1939), inside back cover; Trud , 21 May 1941; 28 May 1941; 17 June