The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 113
to China, Japan, Mexico, Latin America, and fi nally returning to the USSR
through Germany and Poland. “All physical culturalists and tourists” of
Moscow greeted their return on 6 March 1927, after a journey of forty-fi ve
thousand kilometers, including twenty-fi ve thousand kilometers on their
bicycles. Both Sovetskii Turist and the Russian Society of Tourists advised
hopeful globe-trotters that foreign travel lay beyond their ability to pay, but
the organizers planned eventually to sponsor tourist excursions abroad,
funded, they hoped, by the hard currency income that would be generated
by foreign tourists visiting the Soviet Union.^61 On Land and On Sea re-
ported in August 1930 that it had received many requests from individuals
and groups inquiring about travel abroad, but the magazine suggested that
the foreign currency needed for such trips was better spent for imported
machinery and technology. Besides, the Soviet Union offered unlimited
domestic tourist possibilities, whether to scenic, cultural, or economic des-
tinations. This philosophy that tourism begins at home paralleled the “see
America fi rst” campaign in the United States, but the Soviet goal of acquir-
ing knowledge through travel did not exclude a broader internationalist
vision, in principle if not in practice.^62
Two notable foreign tourist journeys helped to imprint the lure of foreign
travel in popular tourist consciousness. They also remind us that the rise in
xenophobia associated with the 1927 war scare and the 1928 trial of “bour-
geois wreckers” did not translate into a complete cessation of foreign travel.^63
In November 1930, 257 “best of the best” Soviet shock workers received the
prize of a lifetime, a month-long cruise around Europe aboard the brand-
new Soviet-built ship, the Abkhaziia , on its maiden voyage from Leningrad
to its commercial destination, the Black Sea.^64 These purposeful and privi-
leged travelers would “see with their own eyes” the state of the capitalist
crisis of the West as well as gain production knowledge from workers abroad.
The shock workers, having observed the idle shipyards of Hamburg and the
residential areas of Hamburg, Naples, and Istanbul, carefully recorded every-
thing they saw in their notebooks, which became the basis of their published
eyewitness accounts. The trip received extensive coverage in the daily as
- KP , 5 March 1927; 8 March 1927; 15 March 1927; A. A. Bulgakov, ed., Velosipednyi
turizm (Moscow, 1998), 21; KP, 16 December 1926; 6 February 1927; Vecherniaia Moskva ,
28 March 1929; KP , 29 November 1927; GARF, f. 2306, op. 69, d. 1826 (Russian Society of
Tourists, December 1928–January 1929), ll. 28, 33; GARF, f. A-2306, op. 69, d. 2068 (corre-
spondence on two tourist societies, April–July 1929), l. 17.
- NSNM , no. 15 (1930): 2; Shaffer, See America First.
- See Michael David-Fox on the political climate surrounding international ties in this
period in “From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public’: VOKS, International Travel and
Party-Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period,” Contemporary European History 11,
no. 1 (2002): 14–28.
- Korabl' udarnikov : Sbornik ocherkov uchastnikov pervoi zagranichnoi ekskursii
rabochikh udarnikov na teplokhode “Abkhaziia , ” ed. M. Lias (Moscow, 1931). The trip was
originally scheduled to begin on 15 September, but the ship did not embark until 10 Novem-
ber. TsGA SPb, f. 4410, op. 1, d. 20, l. 17.
