The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 107
tourists, socialist Moscow provided their fi rst encounter with electric lights,
department stores, and modern transportation. A group of students had writ-
ten to the Moscow Komsomol in 1926, “We, cultured youth of the twentieth
century, the century of radio, electricity, the century of achievements of tech-
nology and culture, we have never actually seen these achievements. You
might laugh, comrades, if we say that we have never even seen a tram....
Please help us to visit Moscow.”^48
Initially, Moscow accommodated its tourists haphazardly, usually in
student dormitories during the summer, but the OPTE had begun planning
the construction of a hotel as early as 1930. Designed by the architects I. A.
Golosov and D. D. Bulgakov, the House of Tourists belonged to the class of
monumental urban construction projects like the metro and the Palace of
Soviets. As envisioned in the early planning stages, it incorporated a com-
plex of four large buildings, situated at Smolenskaia Square, where the Arbat
intersected Smolenskii Boulevard. (It was later incorporated into a wing of
the Russian Foreign Ministry, one of the Stalin skyscrapers built in the early
1950s.)^49 Three nine-story buildings would house a tourist hotel, a restaurant,
a theater seating two thousand people, a conference hall, and meeting rooms
for tourist clubs and organizations; the main building of twelve stories would
include an observation deck overlooking the square. All amenities required
by tourists would be provided: tailoring and shoe repair shops, barbers and
hairdressers, showers, library, and billiards and game rooms. The ground
fl oor would feature a tourist department store plus parking for automobiles
and bicycles. The fi rst nine-story building, with rooms for fi ve hundred tour-
ists but no restaurant, was scheduled to open in 1933, but in fact it was not
completed until after the TEU took over the property in 1936. Despite its at-
tractive lobby, lined with palm trees and featuring mahogany elevator cabins,
the “fi rst-class hotel” lacked its own restaurant and bath facilities. Resident
tourists walked for their three meals a day to a canteen in the Park of Culture
and Rest, three kilometers away (later to the Prague Restaurant at the other
end of the Arbat), and they washed in public bathhouses.^50
Even the beaten path, whether to Moscow, Leningrad, or the south, offered
many wonders to the thousands of Soviet tourists who had never traveled
before. But the tourist organizations also endeavored to promote even more
exotic and challenging sites of splendid nature and socialist progress. The
Arctic north occupied an important place in the tourist imagination, and as
- Sovetskii Turist, Marshruty ekskursii na leto 1930 goda ; Vecherniaia Moskva , 9 Oc-
tober 1933; 1 October 1936; 19 January 1935; NSNM , no. 5 (1939): 2; Bergman, Pervaia kniga
turista , 18 (quote).
- http://wikimapia.org/10094328/ru/zdanie-byvshei-gostinitsy-“Obshchestva-prolet
arskogo-turizma-i-ekskursii.”
- NSNM , no. 4 (February 1930), inside front cover. A drawing of the planned com-
plex, with a monumental column-lined façade on the Smolenskii Boulevard side, appears
in Vecherniaia Moskva , 17 December 1933; see also Vecherniaia Moskva , 22 April 1936;
1 October 1936; NSNM , no. 25 (1932): 15; no. 7 (July 1936): 26.
