Restoring Vacations after the War 141
and Georgia in 1945; in 1946, authorities were established in the newly So-
vietized republics of the Baltics and Transcarpathia. Crimea did not return
to the roster of active tourist destinations until 1947, and Ukraine not until
- Tourism had disappeared from the pages of the central press, com-
plained offi cials: Trud published nothing about tourism between September
1945 and March 1948, and only in September 1949 did an editorial appear
criticizing the failure of trade union organizations to properly provide for the
tourist exploration of the vast native land. Economic scarcity explained only
part of the problem, complained tourism activists: the truth was that neither
trade unions nor physical culture authorities considered tourism an activ-
ity worth caring about. One of the founders of the proletarian movement, N.
Adelung, concluded in 1948 that tourism had collapsed because of offi cial
indifference. As late as 1953, activists (Adelung among them) continued to
complain that the Central Trade Union Council refused to support tourism.^34
Debates over tourism in the late 1940s and early 1950s echoed the terms of
the initial confl icts between rugged proletarian tourism and the vacation-ori-
ented package tours of Sovetskii Turist. In the frugal postwar years, veterans
of the proletarian tourism movement saw an opportunity to rehabilitate the
vision of mass, voluntarist, enthusiastic grassroots tourism that had provided
the initial model for the Society for Proletarian Tourism. They talked about the
importance of creating local cells and clubs to spread by word of mouth the
allure of the tourist vacation. If only they could revive On Land and On Sea ,
they insisted, they could reach those millions of travelers who wanted more
than a rest home vacation. They aspired to nothing less than the kind of
conversion experience reported by fi rst-time tourist and schoolteacher Raisa
Sergeevna Kareva, who wrote about her 1949 stay at the tourist base in the
Caucasus: “I came here without any special desire or interest, all I wanted
was to spend some time in the south. But the result turned out differently. At
fi rst we were not much interested in activities of a tourist nature, but after les-
sons in rock climbing, the stories of groups returning from their trips irresist-
ibly pulled me to the march, to the mountains, to confront their diffi culties.”
Some called for the revival of an independent tourist society to make tourism
a movement once again and not a service (or enterprise) of the trade unions.^35
To enthusiasts and propagandists, mass tourism meant self-reliant, self-
propelled, and patriotic leisure travel, a vacation that would strengthen the
body and the spirit, reinforce habits of teamwork and comradeship, and pro-
vide unforgettable impressions of the majesty of nature. Millions of Soviet
citizens desired to engage in this fascinating and enlightening travel around
the country, editorialized Trud in 1949. As in the 1930s, the task of organiz-
ing hundreds and thousands of independent tourist collectives was assigned
to the Central Committee on Physical Culture and Sport, with its network
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 69, l. 12; f. 7576, op. 14, d. 63 (tourism section conference,
May 1953), ll. 57, 68–69, 87, 136.
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 117 (tourist base comment books, 1949), l. 18; d. 69, l. 21ob.
