108 Chapter 3
early as 1929, the Russian Society of Tourists reported receiving hundreds of
letters asking it to organize tourist excursions to the polar region. “The north
plays for us the same role that America once played,” prompting children and
young people to run away from their families in order to realize their dreams
of the wilderness. Sovetskii Turist offered three itineraries to the Arctic in
1930, including a thirteen-day excursion from Petrozavodsk to Murmansk
and the Kola Peninsula, and the “grand northern” tour, a twenty-eight-day
trip by rail and sea, including stops in Arkhangel'sk and Murmansk, vis-
its to indigenous fi shing villages, mining sites, and spectacular lakes in the
peninsula.^51 The opening of the White Sea-Baltic Canal in 1933 (infamously
constructed by prison labor) made the north even more accessible. The 1938
tourist guide featured itinerary number 34, on which tourists could board a
ship in the canal port town of Medvezh'ia gora (Bear Mountain) at the north-
ern end of Lake Onega, travel two days along the canal to the White Sea, and
continue by train to Murmansk and Kirovsk on the Kola Peninsula. “Arctic
tourism” received a boost in 1937 when the TEU chartered the ship Vologda
to carry large groups of tourists, scientists, and journalists to encounter the
north. Special correspondents who accompanied the cruises wrote glowingly
about the rigors of weather and the social pleasures of the cruise, on which
scientists mingled with shock workers and all contributed their talents to the
evening amateur shows.^52
The tourist organizations also tried to promote other less familiar tourist
destinations, emphasizing the attraction of the wild and unpopulated spaces
of the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. In 1932, the OPTE sent a team of of-
fi cials to Iakutiia in Siberia to develop routes there, and they opened a new
all-union itinerary in Central Asia, with tourist bases in Tashkent, Samar-
kand, and Ashkhabad. On Land and On Sea regularly drew its readers’ at-
tention to tourist possibilities away from the familiar routes of the south, and
it devoted scant space to the standard destinations. A 1936 issue touted the
attractions of Kazakhstan, describing four different itineraries that would ac-
quaint the tourist with the history of tsarist colonization and burgeoning new
industries, providing encounters with an enormous variety of landscape,- Vecherniaia Moskva , 13 February 1929 (quote); Sovetskii Turist, Marshruty ekskursii
na leto 1930 goda , 175–176. On the economic development of the north and its role in the
cultural imagination, see John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the
North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939 (Oxford, 1998); see also Andy Bruno, “Making Nature
Modern: Economic Transformation and the Environment in the Soviet North” (PhD diss.,
University of Illinois, 2011), chap. 2, on the promotion of tourism on the Kola Peninsula. - Puteshestviia po SSSR , 7–11. The tour was fi rst introduced in 1935. NSNM , no. 9
(1935): 2. On the Vologda , Iu. Varankin reported in NSNM , no. 12 (1937): 17–18. Al. Terent'ev
contributed a series of dispatches, under the heading “Tourists in the Arctic,” to Vecherniaia
Moskva , 2 August 1937; 8 August 1937; 10 August 1937; 19 August 1937; 28 August 1937;
3 September 1937. D. Reizer reported on the second sailing of the Vologda in Vecherniaia
Moskva , 15 August 1937; 23 August 1937; 31 August 1937; 3 September 1937; 7 September