The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 119although they regretted that tour leaders failed to connect excursion themes
to contemporary political events.^76 Tourists, however, like vacationers in rest
homes, may have appreciated the opportunity to escape the climate of fear
brought about by the arrests and trials of an escalating number of friends,
family, and coworkers.^77
Who Was the Proletarian Tourist?
The proletarian tourism movement had begun in the 1920s on the prin-
ciple that socialist tourism would offer a superior form of rational and
knowledge-producing leisure travel. Tourism activists also assumed that it
would bring the greatest benefi ts to those segments of society—production
workers and agricultural workers—that had been unable to undertake leisure
travel before the revolution. These same activists, however, also recognized that
traditional tourism held few attractions for proletarians, that a tourism vaca-
tion remained alien to those social strata for whom the Society for Proletarian
Tourism and Excursions had been created. Vecherniaia Moskva ’s correspon-
dent acknowledged in April 1930 that industrial workers still showed a very
weak desire for tourism, and that the Society for Proletarian Tourism and
Excursions was “not, in fact, proletarian.” Most of the country’s “proletarian
tourists” consisted of student youth, not production workers. On package
tours, society offi cials acknowledged that at most, 20 percent of travelers
came from the true proletariat. Factory workers needed to be encouraged and
taught to engage in this formerly bourgeois pastime: hence the creation of
factory-based cells that would agitate locally for the spread of tourism among
the proletariat. But even in the OPTE, the largest number of members turned
out to be students and factory white-collar workers. Of Moscow’s 300 OPTE
cells in 1930, only 129 were located in factories, and production workers
constituted only 58 percent of the society’s membership. In the proletarian
citadel of Red Presnia, workers numbered just 39 percent of OPTE members.
In setting its goals for mass expansion of proletarian tourism, the society
dictated that 80 percent of Moscow’s future membership should consist of
production workers, 60 percent in the country overall.^78 These arbitrarily
round fi gures corresponded closely to the proletarian targets for rest home
and sanatoria vacationers, a goal that had little basis in social, cultural, or
economic reality.
Beyond propaganda, the OPTE applied a fl exible pricing scheme to in-
terest production workers in tourist travel. Putevki came in three price
categories, depending on the social status of the tourist, and only workers
and students with the lowest incomes could receive the half-price railway
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 47–48, 11–12.
- See Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia , 121.
- Vecherniaia Moskva , 24 April 1930; Biulleten' , nos. 7–8 (1930): 9; NSNM , no. 3
(1930): 20; no. 8 (1930), inside front cover.