Post-proletarian Tourism 211acknowledged as a valid and legitimate aspiration of the Soviet person. The
Twentieth Party Congress and, even more deliberately, the new program ad-
opted at the twenty-second congress in 1961 confi dently predicted a transfor-
mation in moral and cultural values. True communism, boasted the program,
would be achieved in twenty years, by which time the country’s abundance
and prosperity would create the material basis for a new kind of Soviet per-
sonality. In the decade of the 1960s, wrote its chroniclers Petr Vail' and Alek-
sandr Genis, Soviet citizens looked forward with faith in a progressive future,
and they could imagine achieving the communist utopia. “We were ready.”^3
Tourism played a role in producing and defi ning this new personality. In
the 1960s it fi nally shed its reputation as a poor cousin of the health spa and
became an increasingly attractive form of active vacation, complementary to
the kurort but offering new forms of mobility and new destinations to discov-
er. Not coincidentally, tourism acquired its new status at the moment when
people living in cities came to outnumber those living in the countryside and
when educational levels had reached a new high. As befi tting a society on the
road to full communism, Soviet tourism would continue to serve the larger
purpose of the state: the education of the new Soviet person. The proletar-
ians of the 1920s and 1930s had produced children and grandchildren who
would be the architects of this new order, a post-proletarian utopia built on
knowledge and prosperity, expressed through leisure as well as work.
Managing Tourism on the Road to Full Communism
However optimistic they were about the communist future, offi cials and
participants of the Soviet tourist movement looked ahead to its expansion at
the end of the 1950s with many questions unresolved, a legacy of the com-
plicated and contested history of Soviet tourism. Was it a mass movement of
enthusiasts in the tradition of the voluntary Society for Proletarian Tourism?
Could trade unions, as “social” organizations, navigate a complex economy
on which tourism depended for transportation, construction of tourist bases,
equipment, and souvenirs? Would paid offi cials or volunteer instructors
respond better to the growing demands for tourism services? Despite increas-
ing appeals for the creation of a vacation industry, with direct control over
its own empire of transport and construction services, Soviet tourism never
found a stable institutional home within the larger universe of leisure travel.^4
The relationship between tourism and health vacations continued to pose
problems of authority and fi nancing. Tourist offi cials felt acutely inferior to
the normative health resort activities of the Central Trade Union Council.
- Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza , 62–65, 119; Petr Vail' and
Aleksandr Genis, 60-e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka , 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1998), 15. - See Azar, Ekonomika and Otdykh ; Turist , no. 9 (1969): 2; V. Gens, “Dokhody turizma—
pribyl' zdorov'iu,” Turist , no. 6 (1970): 11; Turist , no. 10 (1976): 13; “O dal'neishim razvitii i
sovershenstvovanii turistsko-ekskursionnogo dela v strane,” Turist , no. 2 (1981): 1.