The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 101pieces of sugar for the four of them. Grateful for their rescue the next morn-
ing, they acknowledged the importance of study and preparation for safe and
successful tourism.^30
The diffi cult distinction between the self-actualizing merits of proletarian
tourism and impetuous nonproletarian individualism found expression in
a loud campaign against the practice of tramping, brodiazhnichestvo, men-
tioned above. Hundreds and maybe thousands of individuals in the Soviet
Union had responded to the call of the wild and the possibilities of seeing
the broad Soviet land by launching their own extended and individual trav-
els. Celebrated in newspaper articles with titles like “Three Thousand Kilo-
meters on Foot,” the “touring tramps” ( turbrodiagi ) spent months and even
years on the road, supporting themselves by lectures on tourism or simply
appealing to local soviets for donations to continue their journeys. Although
the popular evening newspapers like Vecherniaia Moskva lent their columns
to these publicity-seeking wanderers, proletarian tourism activists found
danger in these exploits. Echoing Western European contempt for worker
tramps who aspired to a “commoners’ Grand Tour,” On Land and On Sea de-
nounced tramping as “petit bourgeois” in February 1930, at the height of the
regime’s assault on the petit bourgeois peasantry. The practice had danger-
ously spread from among the wrong sort—“counterrevolutionaries, people
deprived of voting rights [ lishentsy ], criminals, spies, and adventurists”—
to honest but misguided proletarian and student youth. Tourism activists
criticized these tramps for their lack of purpose, unlike a proper indepen-
dent tourist group: “Tourism without purpose—this is the path to tramping,”
wrote the weekly magazine Physical Culture and Sport in 1928. The length
of the journey particularly distinguished the Soviet tramp. A real proletar-
ian could achieve the purposes of a tourist adventure in a normal vacation
period. “To ‘wander’ during vacation is not tramping,” wrote Bergman in his
First Book of the Tourist. “But to abandon production, study, and all struggle
and work ‘for three years’—this cannot be tolerated.”^31
The campaign against tramping reached a crescendo in 1930 in the heat
of the cultural revolution, but echoes continued throughout the decade. On
Land and On Sea called on all local tourist organizations in 1936 to fi rmly re-
ject and unmask “tourist globetrotters” who carried out their tramping under
the fl ag of socialist tourism. Ironically, the campaign against tramping seemed
to rebound against genuine independent tourists as well: fearing to aid and
abet the unacceptable tourist tramps, local tourist bases found it easiest to
refuse service to all independent travelers, not only those “wandering from
base to base without any plan, moving only from one ‘beauty’ to the next” but
all self-actualizing travelers. The OPTE had to remind them that they should
- NSNM , no. 14 (1933): 9; NSNM , no. 5 (1935): 5–6.
- NSNM , no. 10 (1929): 15; no. 4 (1930): 1; V. Antonov-Saratovskii, “Doloi brodia-
zhnichestvo!” NSNM , no. 7 (1930): 1–2; Vecherniaia Moskva , 24 April 1930; NSNM , no. 4
(1936): 31; Fizkul'tura i sport , 5 May 1928, 3; Bergman, Pervaia kniga turista , 200.