122 Chapter 3
“To Fail—Meant Death”
According to offi cial TEU policy, all Soviet people should become tour-
ists, and tourism was the best form of rest. But the small independent group
remained the best of the best. Here one could fi nd authentic proletarian tour-
ism, whether the tourist was a metal fi tter or a mathematician. The authentic
proletarian tourist developed a Soviet individual self—self-disciplined, self-
actualizing, self-reliant—through cooperation with the group and voluntary
submission to the trip regime. The independent tourist learned to take initia-
tive, prepare, exercise leadership, and practice self-restraint and discipline.
The group offered the safety of numbers, comradeship, and the pleasures of
teamwork. Yet there existed a tension between the goal of self-actualization
and the practice of small group travel. If a proletarian tourist had truly mas-
tered the discipline and regime of touring, then he or she should also be
capable of touring alone, possibly the ultimate test of the tourist’s skills. The
much-despised tourist tramps may also have seen themselves as ideal Soviet
subjects. Consider the story of Gleb Travin, who bicycled alone around the
perimeter of the USSR from 1928 to 1931.
As Travin recounted in a short memoir published in 1975, the idea of a
trip around the USSR began to take shape in his mind with the arrival of a
Dutch cyclist in his hometown of Pskov in 1923. Thereafter, the young Travin
trained assiduously so that he could perform a similar feat of bicycle daring.^85
His father, a forester, had taught him outdoor survival skills, and Gleb man-
aged to acquire a secondhand bicycle to train for a journey around the world,
eastward from Pskov and fi nishing in Moscow. He even learned Esperanto in
hopes that he could converse wherever he went, and he had already ordered
his visiting cards for the trip that was to begin in 1925, but army service inter-
vened. Instead of cycling across North America and Africa, he found himself
in Leningrad, where he continued to prepare for his journey, studying ge-
ography, zoology, botany, and photography and training physically through
swimming, weight lifting, boat racing, and cycling. At some point, his bicycle
dream turned away from a trip around the world to a journey along the entire
border of the Soviet Union. Upon his demobilization in 1927, he requested
permission to move to Kamchatka in the Far East so that he could test his- Gleb Travin, “Bez skidki na vremia,” Vokrug sveta , no. 11 (1975): 59. Adolf de Groot
was probably one of many thousands of young Europeans who took their bicycles to the
roadways in search of adventure; although he posed for pictures and gave an interview to
the newspaper Pskovskii nabat , his feat went unrecorded in the annals of Dutch cycling. A.
Kharitonovskii, Chelovek s zheleznym olenem: Povest' o zabytom podvige (Moscow, 1965),
39–40; personal communication from Otto Beaujon, chairman of Oude Fiets (Veteran Bicycle
Society, Netherlands), 9 October 2003. In his published account, Travin did not acknowl-
edge the widely publicized global circumnavigation of the cyclists Kniazev and Freidberg
(see text at note 61), whose exploits received considerable press attention in 1925. In a 1977
interview with the newspaper Sovetskii sport , however, Travin admitted that he had wished
to follow their example. See http://www.tct.ho.ua/travin/travin_interv'iu.html.