98 Chapter 3
acquired from touring. On Land and On Sea offered examples of tourist dia-
ries from its very fi rst issues. These and other early accounts refl ect the way
in which tourism both disciplined the tourist gaze and liberated the traveling
individuals. Tourists recounted the awe-inspiring sites of socialist construc-
tion and described their own earnest social-political work in bringing culture
to the local inhabitants. They also described the “indescribable impressions”
of the natural landscape, the unbounded expanses through which they trav-
eled, the “fairy tale realms” of frozen lakes and labyrinthine caves. They
reported on practical matters such as what equipment worked well, how to
cover their boats to protect them from high waves, and how to fi nd lodgings
in wet and stormy weather. These early accounts also conveyed the pride in
accomplishing these diffi cult journeys: “We felt ourselves to be real Colum-
buses,” discovering “if only for ourselves, the never-before-seen ‘America’ of
the Soviet north.” A group of young women from a Moscow sewing factory
reported on their challenging trip through the Caucasus, each carrying four-
teen kilograms of food and equipment over two hundred kilometers of moun-
tain trails. In the face of those who doubted that women could fi nd their way
through the mountains, they wrote in their trip diary, “Let them laugh, let
them not believe. We accomplished our task.”^22
By 1930, On Land and On Sea had begun to offer advice about how best
to share these experiences through the trip diary, now emphasizing record-
ing as well as doing. Each group diary, supplemented by personal diaries of
group members and by photographs, would constitute the archive for the
tourists who followed. Consequently, tourists should make detailed notes on
the entire course of the trip, especially where the group had found maps to
be incorrect or incomplete. In writing, tourists should exercise care to avoid
the bookish language of the old intelligentsia, to employ the language of the
“toiling class” yet without condescension, cliché, or sentimentality.^23 These
instructions became even more rigid with a 1934 invitation for tourists them-
selves to write trip reports that could be assembled into a guidebook for indi-
vidual proletarian tourist groups. On Land and On Sea prescribed a standard
template for trip reports, to include information on the basic geographical,
natural, historical, and socialist features of the route; its length and means of
travel; diffi culties that might be encountered along the way; and practical ad-
vice about suitable equipment and where to obtain food and transportation.^24
The rules for the trip diary emphasized the ways in which this writing proj-
ect would extend individual knowledge to the whole collective of proletarian- “Real Columbuses,” NSNM , no. 1 (1929): 13–14; “Let them laugh,” Proletarskii tur-
izm , 45–47. - NSNM , no. 21 (1930): 2; no. 7 (1930): 20. On the proper form of proletarian language
that echoes these prescriptions, see Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues. - NSNM , no. 16 (1934): 10. A collection of reports was compiled in 1935, but because
of the fi nancial and organizational diffi culties of the OPTE, it did not appear until 1938, as
Puteshestviia po SSSR , a compendium with information on thirty-one routes, all following
the model prescribed in the NSNM 1934 article.