The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 127good life: if authentically proletarian tourism could be experienced only
through the rigors of the independent group (or by the unheralded exploits
of solo travelers like Travin), the tourist with the yellow suitcase also found
joy and wonder in natural landscapes and the socialist-built environment.
“In sightseeing, all men are equal before the sight,” writes MacCannell.^95 In
the end, the more capacious vision of tourism represented in the 1920s by
the joint-stock company Sovtur had triumphed. Travin rejected the tourist
label because of its association with leisure and holiday making. Most So-
viet tourists preferred comfort over adventure, and the successive tourism
administrations found the package tour easiest to provide: the path of least
resistance found willing and enthusiastic takers among both offi cials and the
public. By the end of the 1930s, proletarian tourism remained attractive to a
small minority, and it was proletarian no more in either composition or form.
Soviet tourism, instead, came to offer a relatively inexpensive, tourist-class
opportunity for urban women, students, offi cials, and other members of an
upwardly mobile emerging elite to experience a pleasurable spa vacation.
But Soviet tourism, too, like its proletarian rival, emphasized purpose as well
as pleasure.
The good life of Soviet tourism also gave Soviet citizens the opportunity to
select their own path of exploration, their own route through the nation. Yet
whether the tourist journey was hard or soft, guided or autonomous, Soviet
tourism helped to instill values that came to be identifi ed with a particularly
socialist form of vacation travel. In their own accounts, Soviet tourists in the
1930s celebrated the way in which tourism offered self-knowledge and phys-
ical recuperation. The tourist regime taught every tourist to be a self-reliant
atom in the collective molecule. “Let them laugh,” as the group of women
from the Moscow textile factory asserted. “We accomplished our task.”
Soviet tourism, as it developed in the 1930s, reveals the origins of “Lefort’s
paradox” elaborated by Alexei Yurchak. Expected to cultivate a collectivist
ethic, the Soviet citizen became at the same time an independent-minded in-
dividual.^96 By following the strict rules for proper Soviet tourism, the prole-
tarian tourists could achieve authentic Soviet self-realization. Traveling away
from the masses on pristine mountain glaciers or rowing along the Volga took
them on their own personal journeys of discovery, but at the same time they
were performing their duty to state and society to improve their health, their
work abilities, and their minds.
- MacCannell, The Tourist , 146.
- Yurchak, Everything Was Forever , 11.