Club Red. Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream - Diane P. Koenker

(singke) #1
Introduction

Vacations, Tourism, and the Paradoxes


of Soviet Culture


I


n November 1966, leading Soviet personalities described their ideal
vacations for a feature in a central newspaper. The economist Abel
Aganbegian, who would become one of the architects of perestroika, wrote
about rafting down the rivers of Siberia as a strenuous but restorative encoun-
ter with wild nature. The poet Rimma Kazakova lamented that people of her
generation (although she was born in 1932, the same year as Aganbegian) did
not really know how to vacation: you have to learn how to do it, she wrote,
whether relaxing on the beach or skiing through the woods on a winter’s day.
S. Antonov, a metal fi tter and hero of socialist labor, rejoiced in his access
to vacations. “I receive my vacation once a year,” he wrote, “and I try not to
waste a single day of it in idleness. Of course, it’s important to restore your
energy, but the vacation should also be used to produce memories that will
last the whole year.” He recalled with great satisfaction his tourist trip of two
years earlier to the Caucasus, where he explored the region’s mountains, val-
leys, and cities. Wherever he traveled, he always brought along his mandolin
so that there would be music, and he traveled with friends so there would
always be good company.^1
This feature appeared at the end of a year in which the newspaper had
polled its readers about how they too wished to spend their summer vaca-
tions, whether in stationary repose at sanatoria or rest homes or on the road as
tourists in search of sights and adventure. This concern with the annual vaca-
tion was part of new attention devoted by sociologists, economists, and polit-
ical leaders to the “problem of leisure,” a signal that the time of sacrifi ce had
ended, that work was not an end in itself but a means to a more beautiful and
rounded life, that free time was just as important as work in shaping the Sovi-
et personality, and that the promise of communism would be fulfi lled when
Soviet citizens’ leisure and consumer desires could be completely satisfi ed.^2



  1. Komsomol'skaia pravda (hereinafter KP ), 23 November 1966.

  2. L. Gordon and E. Klopov, Man after Work: Social Problems of Daily Life and Leisure
    Time , Based on the Surveys of Workers’ Time Budgets in Major Cities of the European Part
    of the USSR , trans. John Bushnell and Christine Bushnell (Moscow, 1975), 10; B. Grushin,
    Svobodnoe vremia: Aktual'nye problemy (Moscow, 1967).

Free download pdf