chapter six
Post-proletarian Tourism
The New Soviet Person Takes to the Road
W
hen Komsomol'skaia pravda surveyed its readers in 1966 about
what kind of vacation they preferred, the polling specialists were
surprised to learn that 72 percent of the respondents favored an “Onegin-
esque” vacation, traveling from one place to another. One reader, a mechanic
from Ul'ianovsk, wrote, “Of all the types of rest, I consider tourism to be the
most valuable. Its merits are indisputable. You are completely free to choose
your place of vacation and the method. Even ‘wild’ resort vacationers cannot
boast of such advantages.” A Khar'kov engineer concurred: tourism provided
the most valuable form of vacation.^1 In espousing the tourist movement’s
longtime slogan “Tourism is the best vacation,” the newspaper’s readers also
emphasized the need for more and better facilities, maps and guidebooks, and
a new culture of vacationing that would allow them to travel intelligently and
comfortably. Suddenly tourism, which had been the preserve of the physically
active and perceived by others as a second-class form of vacationing,
had acquired new status and respect.
The respondents specifi cally juxtaposed a vacation on the road to the
sedentary sojourn in sanatoria and rest homes. All the goals of the annual
vacation—to restore work abilities for the coming year, to improve health, to
break away from customary routines, and to expand horizons and learn new
things—could be better accomplished in travel than in sitting in one place.
“When I am at a rest home or sanatorium, I feel—this is not what I really
want. I want to be in as many places as possible, get to know new people,
simply to wander about the earth,” wrote the cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktis-
tov.^2 This chapter explores the rise and development of this new tourist sen-
sibility, which became an essential component of the lifestyle of the Soviet
intelligentsia and a marker of Soviet economic and cultural progress.
The attempt by Communist Party leaders to move beyond the Party’s
Stalinist past had generated a transformation in the country’s economic goals
and methods. As the preceding chapter has shown, consumption had become
- Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii , 154, 165; the original questionnaire appeared in KP ,
23 June 1966; KP , 8 July 1966. - KP , 23 November 1966.