The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 95objects of sightseeing.^11 Here the Society for Proletarian Tourism and Excur-
sions could assist the independent tourist, offering guidebooks, maps, and
advice on technique and itineraries from experienced instructors. Each group
of independent tourists need not reinvent the itinerary or construct the gaze
anew.
A small fl ow of handbooks beginning in the 1920s offered aspiring tourists
basic instruction on the value of and methods for independent tourism. Each
of them emphasized the importance of individual initiative, motion, and col-
lectivity: the self-actualizing tourist selected and planned a suitable route
through nature, sharing this experience with an immediate tourist group and
also through written and pictorial records of the journey that could be shared
with future tourists.^12 Such methods and prescriptions bear a close resem-
blance to the advice offered by the well-developed German hiking move-
ment, which by the early 1920s had produced a socialist hiking society, the
Friends of Nature, as well as the more nationalist Wandervogel (ramblers).^13
The philosophy of the German nudist movement evoked similar principles of
health, the body, and a prescribed regimen.^14 Although independent tourism
allegedly required autonomy and developed initiative, the regime that these
handbooks advocated served to channel this independence along quite struc-
tured lines. Independence produced value only as long as it conformed to the
broader prescriptions of healthy, safe, and socially productive mobility.
The journey began with the formation of the group, not too small, not too
large. One handbook writer recommended an optimal size of four to six peo-
ple, large enough to deal with hazards on the route, small enough to require
only one tent for sleeping. Above all, the members of the group should share
similar interests and levels of skill: ideally, they would be experienced mem-
bers of local tourist groups, known to each other through work and weekend
- John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London,
1990), 1, 45–46, 3. - Bergman, Otdykh letom ; Bergman, Pervaia kniga turista ; Barkhash, Sputnik tur-
ista ; Arkhangel'skaia, Rabota iacheiki ; Arkhangel'skaia, Samodeiatel'noe puteshestvie ; O.
Arkhangel'skaia, Kak organizovat' turistskoe puteshestvie (Moscow, 1947); Iv. Musovskii,
Sputnik turista (Moscow, 1937); B. B. Kotel'nikov, Sputnik turista , 2d ed. (Moscow, 1941);
Turist-aktivist , no. 9 (1931): 7; no. 4 (1932): 25–26. - Scott Moranda, “Markers and Bodies: Hikers Constructing the Nation in German
Forests,” http://www.nationalismproject.org/pdf/moranda.pdf, 2000; John A. Williams, Turning to
Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford, 2007). Refer-
ences to French academic studies on the physiology of hiking practice appear in one of the
early Soviet handbooks as well. Bergman, Pervaia kniga turista , 68. - Williams, Turning to Nature , 52. The enthusiasm for nudism among German hik-
ers seems not to have migrated to the USSR, except perhaps in an underground form. The
eminent mathematicians P. S. Aleksandrov and A. N. Kolmogorov, for example, who became
lifelong friends on an OPTE independent boating trip along the Volga, were fond of skiing
cross-country (and doing their mathematical work) clad only in their shorts or even nothing
at all except “dark glasses and a white panama.” Aleksandrov, in particular, who had spent
time in Germany in the 1920s, was a fervent nudist. A. N. Kolmogorov, “Memories of P. S.
Aleksandrov,” in Kolmogorov in Perspective (Providence, RI, 2000), 150.