144 Chapter 4
Activists celebrated these new signs of tourism’s popularity, but they re-
fused to acknowledge that Soviet tourism had come to represent different
kinds of travel and vacation experiences, each with its own supporters and
clients. As in the 1930s, a large source of the demand for tourist putevki
came from those pajama people who had been unable to secure a rest home
pass but could purchase a tourist trip from the TEU. Such tourists refused to
go on rigorous overnight trips; they badgered offi cials to allow them to stay
on the coast. Even local day trips proved too strenuous for some. These self-
identifi ed “kurortniki” intended all along to seek the pleasures of the seaside
resorts, and then they complained when the tourist bases did not provide
enough amusement for them. “Such people are not interested in excursions,
but only want to lie on the beach, interfering with service for genuine tour-
ists.”^40
At the same time, the critics responded tacitly to the demand for a poor
man’s kurort vacation by expanding the number of itineraries that most close-
ly mimicked a rest home or sanatorium stay. Radial tours, such as itinerary
number 32 to Sochi, provided vacationers with ten- or twenty-day stays in- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 217 (Krasnodar TEU reports, 1952), ll. 108, 29, 24, 70ob.,
109–110; d. 260 (Krasnodar tourist base reports, 1953), l. 42.
“Tourist of the USSR” badge. Badge in author’s possession.