102 Chapter 3
welcome all independent groups who had prepared their route in advance,
carried registration documents, and carried out sociopolitical work. To fur-
ther reward the organized and to discourage the tramps, the OPTE offered
loans of tourist equipment only to offi cially registered independent groups.^32
The phenomenon labeled “record breaking” ( rekordsmenstvo ) also devi-
ated from proper tourism practice. Tourism that focused on breaking bar-
riers—days in the saddle, kilometers on foot—took the tourist’s attention
away from close and informed observation of the world he or she encoun-
tered. “It is ridiculous to associate travel with attempts to set records,” wrote
Komsomol'skaia pravda in 1928. “Speeding along a route squanders the op-
portunity to carry out the fundamental task of the tourist—observation of a
locality, nature, and the life of the local population.” Chasing kilometers,
attempts to climb the greatest number of peaks or cross passes in the quick-
est time had contributed to a spate of accidents in 1932, some of them fatal.^33
Independent tourism came to be identifi ed as the most authentically pro-
letarian form of Soviet tourism, and it received the greatest amount of press
attention in the pages of On Land and On Sea throughout the 1930s. At the
same time, tourist activists lamented its orphan status within the larger am-
bit of the Soviet package tour operations.^34 Offi cial statistics throughout this
period are notoriously unreliable: tourist organizations tended to count and
double-count their travelers, including weekend day trippers and tourists
taking local excursions. As noted in chapter 2, the OPTE reported that 33,900
tourists traveled on all-union itineraries in 1933, 69,980 in 1934, and 83,680
in 1936. Published fi gures for “registered independent tourists” indicated
that 52,700 Soviet citizens toured in small groups in 1933, 82,900 in 1934,
and 127,500 in 1935.^35 Such fi gures would prove that independent tourism
was more popular and more “mass” than the package tours. In fact, unpub-
lished statistics from the OPTE suggest a much smaller number of indepen-
dent tourists: 26,690 traveled in 1934 (not 83,000 as later published), and the
plan for 1935 called for 38,000 independent tourists.^36 Yet while indepen-
dent touring did not engage the millions of proletarians originally envisioned
by the Society for Proletarian Tourism and Excursions, its ethos if not its real-
ity had become an indelible part of Soviet vacation norms in the course of the
1930s. In the 1960s, as chapter 6 will show, the new urban intellectual class
would enthusiastically embrace this type of tourism, a legacy that remains to-
day in numerous tourist clubs who archive their trip diaries and photographs
through the Internet.- NSNM , no. 4 (1936): 31; no. 13 (1931): 4 (quote); no. 5 (1934): 12.
- NSNM, no. 7 (1930): 1; Turist-aktivist, no. 3 (1932): 7; KP , 7 July 1928; Turist-aktivist ,
no. 1 (1933): 7. - Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd OPTE v voprosakh i otvetakh (Moscow, 1932), 26; Turist-
aktivist , nos. 8–9 (1932): 21–22; NSNM , no. 12 (1936): 4. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8 (central TEU materials, 1937), l. 56; NSNM , no. 2 (1937): 29.
- TsGA SPb, f. 4410, op. 1, d. 1078 (OPTE presidium, January 1934–December 1934), l.
- The planned 38,000 fi gure also appears in NSNM , no. 1 (1935): 4.