The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 121
on the Black Sea. Admiring a young family traveling the coast by bicycle,
he regretted that he would return home having seen nothing of the majestic
scenery of the Caucasus.^82
By the middle of the 1930s, the OPTE seemed to be failing in its mission
to expand the proletarian component of socialist tourism, and this became
another cause of the transfer of the tourism business to the trade unions. The
trade union paper Trud had reported the results of a survey among industrial
workers that revealed their desires to spend their vacations traveling to see
the notable sights of the Soviet Union: the Caucasus, the Dnepr Dam, or the
Urals. But few workers received this opportunity, even after the creation of
the trade union Tourist-Excursion Authority. Ordinary workers could not af-
ford to purchase putevki with their own limited funds. In 1937, the average
price of a ten-day trip, exclusive of transportation, was 215 rubles, and the
average wage for all those employed in industry, both white-collar and blue-
collar workers, was 253 rubles a month. Few workers could afford to spend a
month’s salary on a tourist vacation: although the TEU advertised the sale of
tourist putevki to individual consumers, this market did not include factory
workers. If workers wanted to travel, they had to hope to receive a putevka
through their trade union as a reward for good work, but even this oppor-
tunity remained limited. In 1937, individual trade unions distributed their
tourist putevki primarily to white-collar employees, just as they had with
vouchers for health spas. Only 20 percent of tourist coupons went to work-
ers (and one half of one percent to collective farm workers). As before, noted
the TEU, the largest number of Soviet tourists were teachers—26 percent in
1937, followed by white-collar workers (20 percent), students (16.5 percent),
and technical personnel (11 percent.)^83
Despite the unequal allocation of such tourist vouchers, distinctions
among tourists according to social position received little emphasis in the
tourism press. Nor did gender ratios cause explicit concern. In the late 1920s,
to be sure, some activists feared that women might be excluded from tourism
because of their perceived frailty. Accounts in On Land and On Sea often
featured groups of women (especially in each year’s March issues, dedicated
to International Women’s Day), but the proportional distribution by sex did
not receive public attention. The best people, Soviet people, participated in
tourism: shock workers, Stakhanovites, Komsomol members, soldiers, party
members, geologists, and engineers. As On Land and On Sea reminded an
inquiring reader, there was no such specialization or occupation as “tourist.”
Anyone could be a Soviet tourist who preferred active travel to passive rest.^84
- NSNM , no. 3 (1930): 20; no. 4 (1930): 1; Turist-aktivist , no. 8 (1931): 42; Trud , 30 May
1936, 8 October 1935; NSNM , no. 19 (1934): 6, 12; nos. 5–6 (1931): 2.
- Trud , 12 March 1935; Janet G. Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia since 1928
(Cambridge, MA, 1963), 109; Puteshestviia po SSSR ; Trud , 16 August 1938; 23 June 1939; 28
March 1940; 21 May 1941; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8, l. 22.
- See, for example, the feature on Stakhanovite-tourists in NSNM , no. 8 (1936): 15;
no. 4 (1937): 2.
