The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 123cycling skills in unfamiliar surroundings. Here he found employment as an
electrician at a power station construction site, and he continued to train.
“And having determined that there was no place that a bicycle could not take
me, I headed off from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka to Vladivostok.”^86
Travin’s route would take him forty thousand kilometers along the perim-
eter of the country, passing through major cities and tiny settlements in Sibe-
ria, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus. He stayed well clear of the western
border, however, traveling north from the Crimea to Khar'kov to Moscow and
then to Leningrad by October 1929, a year into his journey. From Leningrad,
his path headed north to the Arctic, where he spent nearly two years cycling,
sometimes on the frozen sea, crossing rivers, enduring avalanches, recuperat-
ing from injuries, and dwelling with polar explorers, local inhabitants, and
Russian settlers. In September 1931, he arrived at a cultural base in Chukchi
territory, the northeasternmost reach of the Soviet Union. Still plying his
electrician’s skills, he repaired the local radio transmitter and sent a mes-
sage back to Kamchatka: “The journey around the USSR is completed. Gleb
Travin.”^87 But since he could not get a ship home, he continued by bicycle,
returning fi nally to his starting point on 24 October 1931, three years after he
had begun.
The story of Travin’s journey reads like a fi rst-class adventure yarn, and
Travin himself emerges as an intrepid one-man-against-the-elements hero:
precisely the kind of solo wanderer so loathed by the Society for Proletarian
Tourism. He carried very little with him besides his bicycle: the clothes on
his back, a few tools, a supply of dried meat and chocolate, a rifl e that he ac-
quired in Arkhangel'sk, an album in which he collected offi cial stamps from
the points along the way, and a thick belt on which copper letters spelled
out his name, Gleb Leont'evich Travin; this could serve to identify him if he
met misfortune along his route. He also carried a printed card that identifi ed
him as “Bicycle traveler Gleb Travin.”^88 In Dushanbe, he stopped at the local
newspaper to ask for a translation of his card into Tajik, and the closest that
could be found for this unfamiliar object was shaitan-arba , or devil wagon.
Travin would be taken for a devil again on the western shore of the Arctic
island Novaia Zemlia. In the midst of a storm, he had given up on reaching
a settlement and had camped on the ice. During the night, a crevasse opened
up, the water freezing around Travin’s sleeping body. In the morning he man-
aged to hack himself free with the knife kept in his belt, and he hauled him-
self and his bicycle to a Nenets settlement. Realizing that gangrene had set in,
he proceeded to amputate his toes right in the hut where he had taken shelter.
When he showed no pain during this operation, the women in the hut ran
out screaming that he must be “Keli!”—an ice devil. Later, still recovering,
- Travin, “Bez skidki,” 59.
- Kharitonovskii, Chelovek, 188.
- In its attempts to discourage brodiazhnichestvo, the OPTE proposed a ban on the
private printing of such cards. Biulleten' turista , nos. 4–5 (1930): 6.