112 Chapter 3
vacation, whether for recuperation or pure pleasure. OPTE agents actively
marketed radial putevki, serving the unmet demand for places in sanatoria
and padding the OPTE’s coffers at the same time. Although most of these
putevki provided limited fi ve- or ten-day stays at a given base, vacationers
could buy them in multiples that would add up to a standard twenty- or
thirty-day resort vacation. A “disproportionate” number of putevki, wrote
Trud in 1936, sent travelers to these stationary destinations. In the peak
summer months, stationary tourists constituted as many as 40 percent of all
those traveling on OPTE package tours.^59
Active tourists heaped scorn on these pseudo-tourists, calling them
“radiators” and later pajama-people ( pizhamniki ). Satirical articles in the
tourism press depicted them as spoiled and privileged members of the
Soviet middle class, engineers and their wives who commandeered rooms
in the permanent tourist base buildings, leaving real tourists to lodge in
leaky tents. They spent “quiet hours” and evenings in the base’s club danc-
ing the foxtrot, even while insisting that their health would not permit
them to engage in strenuous activities like hiking or overnight camping.
They had come to rest and recuperate, not to listen to political lectures or
test their physical mettle. The pajama people complained about the noisy
comings and goings of proletarian tourists from the road, who arrived at all
hours of the night, staying for only short spells. Meanwhile, active tourists
bore the brunt of the overcrowding caused by the masses of radial tourists.
The trade union tourism organization hoped that its riverboat trips could
provide an alternative to the radial itinerary for those “elderly workers”
who wanted a quiet vacation away from home, but they were still adver-
tising stationary tours in 1939.^60 Radial tours generated profi t for the tour-
ism organizations because Soviet travelers wanted to obtain them, and so
the groups continued to offer the kurort vacation disguised as a tourist
putevka. The path of least resistance followed the demands of the travel
consumer.
Travel abroad occupied a special place in the emerging tourist move-
ment of the Soviet Union. Aspiring tourists deluged the Soviet press with
questions about the possibilities of making a foreign journey, inspired per-
haps by reports of epic tours publicized in the youth press, such as that
of Aleksandr Kniazev and Il'ia Freidberg. In 1924 these two students at
the State Institute of Physical Culture vowed to demonstrate the quality
of the new bicycles being produced at the Khar'kov bicycle factory by at-
tempting a circumnavigation of the globe. They departed from Moscow’s
hippodrome for the east on 2 July, traveling through Siberia, continuing- Turist-aktivist , no. 8 (1931): 42; Trud , 30 May 1936; 8 October 1935; NSNM , no. 19
(1934): 6. - NSNM , no. 19 (1934): 6–7, 12; GARF, f. 7576, op. 14, d. 123 (report on qualifying
marshruts, October 1955), l. 12; NSNM , no. 18 (1931): 14; no. 20 (1934): 10–11, 13; GARF, f.
9520, op. 1, d. 8, l. 51; Trud , 10 May 1939.