86 Chapter 2
ment, but they focused on the business, not the romance, of tourism. They
worked less to expand the numbers of the touring public than to provide
comfortable and predictable programs for those Soviet citizens who could
afford to take the trips they sponsored. They recognized that Soviet tourism
would have to fi nance itself not through the dues of millions of members but
by the revenue generated from prepaid package tours, and so they concen-
trated their energies and resources on this most lucrative and manageable
side of the business. They took consumer preferences seriously, and they
devoted their attention to improving services and increasing the comforts
available to Soviet tourists on the road. Working within the system of the
planned economy, the tourism managers recognized the utility of market
considerations and adapted accordingly. For them the promise of proletarian
tourism required fulfi llment through comfortable and predictable conditions.
Even as the commercial variant of Soviet tourism gained hegemony in the
second half of the 1930s, the purists still sought to preserve some of the vol-
untarist, enthusiastic fl avor of the early years of the proletarian tourist move-
ment. Responding to the increasing bureaucratization of the TEU, contribu-
tors to On Land and On Sea advocated the creation of tourist clubs that would
serve the much-neglected independent tourists. Such clubs would provide a
space for volunteer enthusiasts to share experiences and provide advice and
consultation to aspiring cyclists, alpinists, canoers, and backpackers. They
could serve in the same way the OPTE cells were meant to function before
1936, as centers of tourism mobilization. The fi rst such club opened its doors
in Rostov-on-Don in 1938, although because of “unsuccessful leadership”
and the unwillingness of the TEU to provide subsidies, this and other tour-
ist clubs did not even survive to the beginning of the war.^72 The purists also
touted the superiority of volunteer ( obshchestvennye ) instructors over the
paid professionals employed by the TEU’s tourist bases and alpine camps.
Only tourists themselves, not bureaucrats, they wrote, could inspire others
to join the mass movement. Only an army of volunteer instructors could pro-
vide training for the millions of tourists the movement hoped to attract.^73
Tourist enthusiasts also stressed the value of local tourism as an inex-
pensive alternative to the more celebrated package tours. Tourist clubs and
volunteer instructors could organize outings for small groups on holidays
and weekend days off, winter and summer, training for longer trips and in-
troducing beginners to the pleasures of the outdoors. In its regular column
of responses to readers’ questions, On Land and On Sea applauded one Len-
ingrader’s aspiration to spend his summer vacation kayaking in the north
but recommended he begin with one-day trips close to home in order to de-- NSNM , no. 9 (1936): 2; no. 11 (1936): 2; no. 1 (1937): 6; no. 2 (1937): 29; no. 5 (1937):
4; no. 6 (1937): 26; no. 1 (1938): 2; no. 1 (1941): 2. - NSNM , no. 8 (1934): 3; no. 16 (1934): 4; no. 15 (1935): 7 (which lauds the unpaid
water tourism activist Pokrovskii, who spent three to four hours daily on tourism affairs);
no. 11 (1940): 4.