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

(singke) #1

4 Introduction


into the 1950s, the health spa vacation was the norm. Before 1917, it was the
habit of aristocrats to take the waters in Kislovodsk or savor the sea breezes
in Yalta, and the revolution sought to make these pleasures accessible to the
laboring classes. In establishing its own system of annual leisure, the Soviet
Union built on the models already known to it, and the Soviet spa vacation
tried to capture the aura of this imagined aristocratic legacy.
Yet unlike their aristocratic predecessors, both Soviet tourism and Soviet
spa vacations were distinguished by a high degree of purposefulness. In the
beginning, the point of the vacation was not to provide individual pleasure
but to allow the vacationers to recover their health and energy and return
to production stronger than before. The productive, medical side of vaca-
tions, even for tourists, remained strongly embedded in Soviet travel culture,
and the balance between pleasure and purpose usually favored the latter.
Sunbathing, for example, was a medical procedure, strictly monitored by
medical personnel. Tourists on hiking trips needed a medical certifi cate to
guarantee their fi tness for the journey. The success of a rest home vacation
was measured by the number of kilograms the vacationer had gained through
the home’s healthy diet. Soviet vacationers expected to receive cultural uplift
and education: in this respect, they had much in common with Western tour-
ists today who seek to learn about the cultures and places they encounter.
“It is not enough to see,” writes the sociologist Jean-Didier Urbain. “It is also
necessary to see well .” Only though travel can the tourist learn to appreciate
what is different and what is beautiful.^6 Domestic tourism, both capitalist
and socialist, helped to inspire patriotism, whether through visiting sites of
natural beauty like the Grand Canyon or the mountains of Dagestan, or sites
of national remembrance such as the battlefi elds of Flanders or the trails of
the Crimean partisans. Soviet tourist bases and health resorts favored cul-
tural programs over “mindless” entertainment as essential accompaniments
to their daily routines, but in this they shared the larger agenda of modern
self-improving tourism.
The quest for meaning in leisure travel, in both tourism and rest, consti-
tuted an important part of the purposeful Soviet vacation experience. The
cultivation of Soviet values and norms would eliminate “vulgar” or “bour-
geois” consumer practices, and it fell to the tourism activists and health spa
managers to defi ne and police appropriate norms and behaviors. Indeed, one
element of the history of Soviet tourism, as we shall see, was a running battle
between activists who favored energetic, rugged, and purposeful travel, not
wasting “a single day in idleness,” and offi cials who believed that calm re-
pose was the appropriate form of recuperation from the working year. By the
late 1960s, however, offi cials began to defer to the consumers themselves as
the arbiters of taste and choice, confi dent perhaps that the new Soviet person
had been fully formed and could be trusted to apply Soviet norms on his or
her own.


  1. Jean-Didier Urbain, L'Idiot du Voyage: Histoires de Touristes (Paris, 1991), 65.

Free download pdf