116 Chapter 3
They “merrily” journeyed south, and having arrived in Sochi, her group was
looking forward to a long bus trip to Krasnaia Poliana, high above sea level,
and then hiking down to the sea at Sukhumi. Another group sent their greet-
ings from the road, also commenting on the sights of Moscow, and announc-
ing their intention to hike 126 kilometers through the passes and ravines of
the Caucasus, whose “beauty we cannot describe in a letter. Our horizon, of
course, has been expanded several times over.” Vania Makarov and Ania Ka-
rachinskaia wrote from their journey on the Baltic-White Sea canal: they had
reached the starting point and were about to begin their cruise. Greeting their
fellow workers who had chosen to spend their vacation at the factory dacha,
Vania and Ania chided them for missing out on the kind of remarkable trip
they were experiencing. Another group of ten sent a similarly enthusiastic
letter from the Crimea, outlining the trip they were about to begin, the towns
they would visit, and the sights they would see.^70 Although the sense of ex-
citement and wonder in these letters is palpable, it is signifi cant that they
were sent before the completion of the trip, and the itinerary described was
based on the guidebook rather than personal experience. The many reports
received directly by the tourist organizations suggest that these tours did not
always proceed as smoothly as the guidebooks or fan letters might promise.
Soviet tourists faced an anxiety common to many tourists even today, fear
of the unknown.^71 The Abkhaziia shock workers had left the port of Lenin-
grad to the martial airs of brass bands but also with some trepidation. As
the lucky travelers boarded their trains to Leningrad, spouses and children
remained weeping on the platforms, “sending us off as if we were going to
the front.” Other shock workers worried that their absence from their facto-
ries would endanger the fulfi llment of the fi ve-year plan—were they in fact
deserting their posts?^72
More pressing dissatisfaction emerged from the inability of the OPTE
and TEU to deliver the organized tours they promised. The fi rst tours fol-
lowing the formation of the OPTE in 1930 produced particularly dispiriting
complaints, fostered by the organizational shortcomings of the tourist agen-
cies, a low culture of service, and the mounting food supply crisis caused by
the disastrous collectivization campaign. Group 278, having completed its
Volga cruise in June 1930, compiled a detailed list of grievances about the
tour, whose abnormalities had begun from the start. Their printed putevki
stated that the cruise would follow the itinerary Moscow-Nizhnii Novgorod-
Astrakhan-Moscow, but when the travelers embarked in Moscow, they
discovered the cruise would extend only as far as Saratov, well north of the- Skorokhodovskii rabochii, 15 July 1936; 3 August 1936 (quote); 13 August 1936.
- Koshar, German Travel Cultures , 8; Igor Duda, “Workers into Tourists: Entitlements,
Desires, and the Realities of Social Tourism under Yugoslav Socialism,” in Yugoslavia’s Sun-
ny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s) , ed. Hannes Grandits and Karin
Taylor (Budapest, 2010), 53; Kopper, “The Breakthrough of the Package Tour,” 67–92. - Korabl' udarnikov , 14–15.