Vacations, Tourism, and the Paradoxes of Soviet Culture 7that consumption had always been a central element of the Soviet dream.
It explores the paradoxical combination of pleasure and purpose in Soviet
vacation practices. But the paradox that lies at the heart of this book is the
way in which tourism and vacation policies and practices explicitly encour-
aged the celebration of individual autonomy in a state founded on collectiv-
ist principles. The book provides insight into the development of the “new
socialist person,” Homo Sovieticus, normally understood to be an educated,
enterprising, collaborative, and collectivist self: indeed, the primary goal of
Soviet tourism was to create that Soviet self. These experiences helped to
forge a loyal citizenry that acknowledged and valued the regime that facili-
tated the quest for new experiences and personal development.
Histories of tourism in the West emphasize its importance in the formation
of an independent and confi dent middle class.^14 Tourism created citizens—
“aesthetic cosmopolitans” in John Urry’s words—who believed they had a
right to travel anywhere, who approached travel with curiosity and open-
ness, and who cultivated an ability to locate their own society in terms of
broad historical and geographic knowledge.^15 These middle-class travelers
distinguished themselves from their aristocratic predecessors on the Grand
Tour by emphasizing effort and purpose. Rudy Koshar reminds us that the
word “travel” is derived from “travail,” meaning suffering or labor. “Tourism
fi nds its meaning through effort, contact, and interaction.”^16 For Koshar and
the sociologist Orvar Löfgren, tourism is above all an “individuating prac-
tice” in which displacement and the experience of being elsewhere consti-
tute new and often expansive selves. Löfgren writes of vacations away from
home: “I view vacationing as a cultural laboratory where people have been
able to experiment with new aspects of their identities, their social relations,
or their interaction with nature and also to use the important cultural skills
of daydreaming and mindtraveling.... Vacations remain one of the few man-
ageable utopias in our lives.”^17
Soviet tourism differed from the middle-class norms explored by Löfgren
in that it emphasized group travel and the role of the collective. This was
true even for spa vacations, which brought strangers together from all corners
of the Soviet Union (trumpeted the propaganda) to get to know one another
and share in the collective purpose of cultured recuperation. Tourist travel
was always taken in groups, whether small, self-chosen collectives of rugged
- Douglas Peter Mackaman, Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa
in Modern France (Chicago, 1998); Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford, 2000);
Aron, Working at Play ; Baranowski and Furlough, Being Elsewhere ; Jan Palmowski, “Travels
with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Eng-
land,” and Patrick Young, “La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring
Club de France and the French Regions, 1890–1918,” both in Histories of Leisure , ed. Rudy
Koshar, 105–130, 169–189 (Oxford, 2002). - John Urry, Consuming Places (London, 1995), 167.
- Koshar, German Travel Cultures , 8.
- Ibid., 204; Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley, 1999), 7.