2 Introduction
From 1970 to 1975, Soviet investment in vacation and leisure travel facilities
would quadruple, and the number of its citizens enjoying an annual vacation
away from home, whether domestic or foreign, would continue to increase.
As the testimony of the Soviet celebrities noted above indicates, individuals
were able to vacation in different ways, and they could assign different mean-
ings and values to their vacations.
This book explores the history of socialist vacationing, including tourism,
in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the mid-1980s, a sixty-year span. So-
viet histories rightfully emphasize dramatic episodes of violence, repression,
and fear, and these histories reveal the magnitude of the horrors of war, of
political purges, and of the Gulag. The Soviet regime notoriously controlled
the mobility of its citizens through passport restrictions and incarceration,
and it forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands in the name of economic
development. But there is another side of Soviet history that requires telling
in order to explain the relationship between the state and its people as well
as the resilience of the communist regime and its values. This history of tour-
ism and vacations is a story of the system and society that the original com-
munists aspired to build, how they envisioned and implemented that society,
and how people lived their lives under socialism.
This history explores three key aspects of the Soviet experience. It demon-
strates the contested transition of that country from a producer to a consumer
society, revealing how the regime and its citizens negotiated the search for
the “good life” and how both cooperated to implement this transition. It em-
phasizes a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation poli-
cy and practice. And fi nally, it explores a fundamental paradox of the Soviet
idea: how and why an authoritarian state promoted the individual autonomy
and selfhood of its subjects through the instrument of vacations and tourism.
Histories of tourism and vacations in the West speak to the role of con-
sumption in modern capitalist societies, and like them, this book explores
the growth of a maturing consumer culture in the Soviet Union. Consump-
tion itself is both a means of individuation and an economic activity that
promotes national economic growth. As Adam Smith famously wrote, “Con-
sumption is the sole end and purpose of all production,” and even in the
Soviet Union’s earliest years, it was the vision of the good life of abundance
and comfort under true communism that justifi ed short-term sacrifi ces and
the involuntary suppression of living standards that characterized the Soviet
economy until the 1950s.^3 Theorists of consumption speak about the “use
value” and the “sign value” of commodities: both are intimately bound up
in consumer choices.^4 Early Soviet consumption policy privileged utility: by- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , ed.
Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937), 625. - Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology
of Consumption (New York, 1979); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New