Restoring Vacations after the War 145single location: a kurort vacation without the morning medical treatments. In
1950, seventeen of the TEU’s thirty-two itineraries took the radial form, and
descriptions of these tours emphasized their resort characteristics. “Among
the health resorts of our native land, Sochi is celebrated as one of the best,”
began the description of the Sochi “tour”; Khosta “is a resort settlement, lo-
cated on the shore of the Black Sea 20 kilometers to the south of Sochi.” The
new itinerary number 49 in 1952 took tourists to “the best kurorts” in the
country.^41
Between the prospect of the pseudo-spa tourist base vacation and the quest
for tourist glory was a huge middle ground that tourism offi cials seldom ac-
knowledged but that gained new popularity after the war. Soviet tourists en-
joyed the opportunity to visit museums and archeological digs and botanical
gardens. They waxed rhapsodic about nighttime hikes through pine forests
and meeting the dawn around a campfi re. Many on radial tours actually
wanted to use their tourist bases as starting points for excursions throughout
the region. They yearned to encounter nature; they wanted to savor the aro-
mas of food cooked over an open fi re but not every night; they wished to walk
the dizzying heights of the Ossetian Military Highway but not necessarily for
180 kilometers. These average tourists wanted to see new sights and to learn
new things, but they also desired comfort, recreation, varied entertainment,
and rest.^42 Tourists themselves spoke for these aspirations in the comments
they left after their visits, but tourist offi cials continued to squabble over the
proper approach, to ask “Who answers for tourism?” without acknowledging
that Soviet tourism came in different variants.
Competing visions among tourism administrators and indifference by
higher trade union organizations led to offi cial neglect of tourism as a le-
gitimate vacation option. Since they were not subsidized through the trade
unions’ social insurance fund, and since state resources were directed to-
ward expanding medicalized spa vacations, tourist vacations actually cost
more than a rest home stay. Tourists also found surprising added costs in
the form of fees for registration and for attractions like boat rides and pho-
tographs to commemorate their stays. But tourism remained a poor man’s
vacation in terms of the services tourists could expect: sleeping in fi eld tents
rather than hotels, dancing to scratchy phonograph records instead of a live
jazz band. But this minimalism was also part of tourism’s special allure: “I
need to add that tourists are generally very undemanding people,” wrote one
1949 visitor to the Sochi tourist base. “We have a quite popular saying: we
are tourists, not kurortniki, how can we demand anything, we ought to suffer
and become hardened.”^43
- “Among the health resorts,” Turistskie marshruty po SSSR , ed. O. A. Arkhangel'skaia
(Moscow, 1950), 183–184, 66 (quote), 68; “best kurorts,” GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 217, ll.
20–22. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 80, ll. 2, 5, 186; d. 217, l. 21; d. 167, ll. 59, 24, 58; d. 117, l.
18; d. 165, ll. 15–16. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 117, l. 146ob. (quote), l. 146.