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

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Vacations, Tourism, and the Paradoxes of Soviet Culture 5

Historians of tourism emphasize the nation-building aspects of leisure
travel, whether under democratic or authoritarian systems. Even in liberal
democratic regimes, tourism and vacations occupied an important place on
purposeful national agendas. Marguerite Shaffer argues that in the period
from 1880 to 1940, the U.S. government actively promoted tourism as a key
element of American citizenship and that the middle-class tourist experience
gave birth to a national culture in the United States.^7 In many places, state
agencies took an active part in promoting tourist travel as an engine of eco-
nomic growth as well as a means of projecting national power.^8 In his study
of the post-1945 United States program to develop France as an American
tourist destination, Christopher Endy shows how even travel abroad could
support domestic and national goals. Sending Americans to Paris was part
of the Marshall Plan’s project to rebuild European economies and thereby to
stave off communist infl uence. But paradoxically and perhaps by plan, he
writes, foreign travel “did not necessarily yield new transnational identities
but more often reinforced distinctly national identities.”^9
In the twentieth century, militantly nationalist regimes actively promoted
tourism and leisure travel as a means to consolidate a national community
inclusive of previously stratifi ed elements. In fascist Italy and Nazi Germany,
state-affi liated agencies, the Dopolavoro (After Work) and Kraft durch Freude
(KdF, Strength through Joy), organized and coordinated an extensive range of
leisure activities. KdF, Shelley Baranowski writes, became a mass packager
of tourist travel for middle- and working-class Germans in the 1930s.^10 In
its programming the organization rejected the quest for personal pleasure
but emphasized collectivity: “one was to contemplate the sublime, cultivate
comradeship with one’s fellow tourists, improve one’s education by study-



  1. Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–
    (Washington, DC, 2001), 2–6; see also Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations
    in the United States (Oxford, 1999), 130; Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional
    Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC, 1995); and John F. Sears, Sacred Plac-
    es: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst, MA, 1989).

  2. John Beckerson, “Marketing British Tourism: Government Approaches to the Stimu-
    lation of a Service Sector,” in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the
    British Experience, 1600–2000 , ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and
    Christopher Harvie (London, 2002), 133–157; Jill Steward, “Tourism in Late Imperial Aus-
    tria: The Development of Tourist Cultures and Their Associated Images of Place,” in Being
    Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture and Identity in Modern Europe and North America ,
    ed. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), 108–134.

  3. Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill, NC,
    2004), 6, 49.

  4. Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the
    Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004), esp. chap. 4; see also Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of
    Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981); Kristin Semmens,
    Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (Houndmills, UK, 2005); Aldis Purs,
    “ ‘One Breath for Every Two Strides’: The State’s Attempt to Construct Tourism and Identity
    in Interwar Latvia,” in Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism
    and Socialism , ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 97–115.

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