Vacations, Tourism, and the Paradoxes of Soviet Culture 3emphasizing only useful consumption it would eliminate wasteful “conspic-
uous” consumption and maximize the welfare of Soviet citizens. Yet early
in the Soviet regime, access to consumer goods became an essential part of a
system of incentives that encouraged citizens to make choices that benefi ted
both them and the state. The best workers and state actors received privileged
access to goods and services, including leisure. The state also used consumer
goods, again including leisure travel, to help craft a model Soviet person, a
cultured consumer and cultured citizen.
By the 1950s, when the post-Stalin regime elevated consumption to a pri-
mary goal of the state economy, that economy had diversifi ed to the point
that Soviet consumers had the luxury of choice, and as Susan Reid has ar-
gued, they used the goods and services that they chose to project an image
of themselves, to distinguish themselves not invidiously but as modern, self-
activating individuals.^5 This book demonstrates that the process of becom-
ing tourists, learning how to take a socialist vacation, constituted one of the
paths toward consuming the Soviet good life.
At the same time, this look at Soviet tourism over the span of the country’s
existence reveals how the centrally planned economy thwarted and shaped
the aspirations and everyday practices of its people. The economic mecha-
nisms of socialism, although they produced historic levels of growth and a
rising standard of living, especially after 1945, never managed to satisfy the
growing demands of the Soviet people. The economy of shortages affected
the consumption of leisure as well as of goods. The regime’s inability to sat-
isfy its citizens’ consumer desires led to the reform era in the 1980s known
as perestroika, which paradoxically hastened the end of the search for utopia
through socialism and central planning.
What we think of in our modern capitalist context as “tourism” or “vaca-
tions” existed in the Soviet Union in two distinct forms. Rest, or otdykh , was
meant to be taken in a stationary, medicalized institution such as a sanato-
rium in a health spa, the kurort , or in a rest home located in a natural area,
preferably near water. Turizm initially connoted a physically active form of
leisure, involving travel to see natural wonders and social attractions through
self-locomotion, by foot, bicycle, canoe, or rowboat. From the 1920s and well
York, 1899); Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the House-
hold Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008); Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer So-
ciety: Myths and Structures (London, 1970).- Susan E. Reid, “Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home,”
Cahiers du Monde russe 47, no. 2–3 (2006): 227–268; see also Elena Osokina, Our Daily
Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (Armonk,
NY, 2001); Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the
Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford, 2003); Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade:
Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Lewis H.
Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cam-
bridge, 1988), chap. 6; Marjorie Hilton, Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–
(Pittsburgh, 2011).