The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 115
technology,” but in his free time he visited museums and other attractions
of the Western capitals. In that same year, a group of yachtsmen sailed to
Sweden via Helsinki and Copenhagen (“the Finnish capital was signifi cantly
more dirty than Leningrad in 1926”). We know that these yachtsmen were
debriefed upon their return, and so presumably were Fokin, Okhramchuk,
and other individuals who had traveled abroad: international travel created
knowledge that could be shared both privately and publicly, but it increas-
ingly generated suspicion.^68
Reports of tourist travel abroad disappear from the public record after
1935, and the charter of the trade union TEU, confi rmed in November 1937,
mentioned nothing about foreign travel. In the late 1930s, Soviet border pol-
icy began to refl ect fear of foreign infi ltration rather than the opportunity to
spread socialism abroad. Inturist continued to receive foreign tourists and
their hard currency, but the infl ux of these tourists peaked in 1936 at near
25,000, dropping to 14,000 in 1937 and further to 7,500 in 1939 and 1940.^69
Cultural and diplomatic exchanges also declined in the increasingly xeno-
phobic climate created by mounting political arrests and show trials. Spend-
ing on domestic tourist travel continued to increase in the second half of the
1930s, but it now fi rmly supported the principle of tourism in one country.
Tourist travel beyond Soviet borders would remain only a hopeless dream or
a clandestine privilege until the mid-1950s.
Bad Trips: The Group Tourist Experience
Tourist organization brochures and illustrations painted the package tours
as a stylish and comfortable mix of sightseeing, education, and rest, the thick
descriptions of the itineraries promising a wondrous and well-planned travel
experience. Direct accounts of the package trips are extremely rare for the
1930s, but the tourist agencies monitored complaints, and these unhappy
encounters provide a picture of both expectations and reality.
For public consumption, at least, these tourists had a grand time, as did
the lucky patients who wrote back to home newspapers about their sana-
torium or rest home vacations. Writing to her factory newspaper in 1936,
Skorokhod shoemaker Pania Fedorova reported on her tour of the Caucasus,
noting the sights of Moscow (Lenin’s mausoleum and the metro) and the plea-
sures of the Park of Culture and Rest, although she had to prolong her stay in
Moscow because of the diffi culty of getting an onward train ticket to Sochi.
- Vecherniaia Moskva , 27 March 1935; NSNM , no. 21 (1935): 22–23; TsGA SPb, f. 6276
(Leningrad Trade Union Council), op. 277, d. 139 (conversation with yachtsmen, October
1935).
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 1–2; Salmon, “To the Land of the Future,” 103; Heeke,
Reisen zu den Sowjets , 48. By the late 1930s, Inturist was increasingly marketing its under-
utilized deluxe hotels to a domestic consumer clientele. See advertisements for Kislovodsk
and elsewhere in Vecherniaia Moskva , 4 July 1937; 10 October 1937; 7 March 1938; 14
March 1938; 22 October 1938; 17 May 1939; 14 September 1939; 19 October 1939.
