114 Chapter 3
well as the tourist press; the fi lmmaker who accompanied the travelers later
produced a nine-reel documentary on the tour, with special emphasis on
the visible signs of collapsed economies in Germany and Italy: slum neigh-
borhoods and repeated images of shop windows plastered with “Marked
Down!” signs. A second cruise in July 1931 took shock workers aboard the
newly built Ukraina to Hamburg, England, and Italy, with a similar mix of
factories (Metropolitan Vickers in Manchester, Fiat in Turin), neighborhoods
(the brothel district in Hamburg again), tourist attractions including the India
Museum and Karl Marx grave (woefully uncared for) in London, and resort
hotels at Rapallo and Portofi no.^65
The promise of group travel abroad signaled by these cruises, however, did
not further materialize in the 1930s. In 1932 the OPTE approved in principle
a plan to send “vacation” cruises around the Baltic Sea without stopping
in any foreign port, but there is no evidence that such sailings took place.
Instead, the Soviet citizen imagined a cosmopolitan tourist world through
extensive and regular coverage of foreign tourism destinations in the pages of
On Land and On Sea , through which virtual tourists could visit exotic Mada-
gascar, the Amazon, and Alaska as well as Paris, Lourdes, the Swiss Alps,
and Chicago.^66 Exceptionally lucky individuals might also win a foreign tour-
ist trip through the lottery sponsored by the voluntary society to support the
chemical and aviation industry, Osoaviakhim. The fi tter I. Fokin won a world
tour in 1934, reporting on his travels through Europe and the United States
with letters to Vecherniaia Moskva.^67 A year later, the engineer Okhramchuk
turned his one-ruble lottery ticket into an eighty-day European trip, travel-
ing extensively through Germany, France, and England. Like the Abkhaziia
tourists before him, he studiously observed the “achievements of European- Korabl' udarnikov ; Pervyi reis , silent fi lm, dir. G. Gricher, RGAKFD, no. 9735; Turist-
aktivist , no. 1 (1931): 34; NSNM , no. 30 (1931): 3–7. Histories of tourism published before
perestroika omitted any mention of these fi rst Soviet package tours abroad. The fi rst ref-
erence I have found is in B. A. Kvartal'nov and B. K. Fedorchenko, Orbity “Sputnika”: Iz
istorii molodezhnogo turizma (Kiev, 1987), 25. The Abkhaziia trip is mentioned in Grigorii
Usyskin, Ocherki istorii rossiiskogo turizma (Moscow, 2000), 117, but not in an earlier book
that is otherwise very similar, V. V. Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR (1917–1983 gg.)
(Moscow, 1985). - TsGA SPb, f. 4410, op. 1, d. 398, l. 5 (presidium meeting 15 July 1932); NSNM , no.
21 (1932): 15; no. 7 (1933): 14; no. 2 (1931): 20; no. 10 (1930): 20; no. 23 (1930), inside back
cover; no. 1 (1931): 13; NSNM , no. 16 (1931), inside back cover; no. 9 (1940): 27–28. Virtu-
ally every issue contained articles about tourism or expeditions in other parts of the world.
Similarly, illustrated magazines like Nasha strana also covered the entire world even in the
late 1930s. - Vecherniaia Moskva , 10 July 1934, 12 July 1934. An advertisement in a 1932 river
guidebook announced that Osoaviakhim would award 92 European trips, and 166 trips to
“major foreign cities,” along with 720 trips around the Soviet Union, as well as 28 automo-
biles and tractors. The society to support water transport also advertised a lottery in this
guide, with winners receiving one of “75 foreign sea voyages.” The ocean liner illustrated
in this ad was much grander than the Abkhaziia that took the fi rst Soviet tourists abroad.
Fedenko, Spravochnik-putevoditel' po vnutrennim vodnym putiam.