8 Introduction
tourists or the groups of twenty-fi ve, one hundred, or two hundred that com-
prised the standard package tour. This was partly a logistical choice: tourist
offi cials found planning for units of twenty-fi ve much easier than managing
the choices and preferences of individuals. Group tourism facilitated surveil-
lance, especially on trips abroad. Group travel was also an ideological choice,
teaching tourists and vacationers not only how to pitch a tent or start a camp-
fi re but how to bond as a collective and learn to work harmoniously with new
acquaintances under challenging conditions. This emphasis on collectivism
might suggest that tourism and leisure travel should be seen primarily as a
technology of domination. Indeed, the editors of a collection of essays on
pleasure in Nazi Germany argue that amusements and popular pleasures can
serve the state’s interest in creating a stable and loyal racial community.^18
Yet paradoxically, learning to function as part of the collective also devel-
oped qualities of self-awareness and self-reliance, and the task of creating
the Soviet self assumed a key role in defi ning vacation norms and values.^19
Soviet tourism exemplifi ed “Lefort’s paradox,” as defi ned by Alexei Yurchak:
“The Soviet citizen was called upon to submit completely to party leader-
ship, to cultivate a collectivist ethic, and repress individualism, while at the
same time becoming an enlightened and independent-minded individual
who pursues knowledge and is inquisitive and creative.”^20 By following the
strict discipline of the party’s rules for proper tourism (as codifi ed, for exam-
ple, in the requirements for earning the “Tourist of the USSR” badge) or vaca-
tion behavior (as prescribed by the normative health spa regime), the Soviet
tourist could achieve authentic self-realization. This book reveals the tension
between leisure travel as a state tool for creating loyal subjects and individu-
als’ appropriation of that tool to cultivate their own autonomous well-being.
The history of Soviet vacations and tourism belongs squarely in the broader
modern touring experience, involving consumption, nation building, and in-
dividual self-fulfi llment. As the theorist Dean MacCannell has argued, “ ‘the
tourist’ is one of the best models available for modern-man-in-general.”^21
Yet “Soviet modern”—the quest for a socialist, communitarian path to mo-
dernity—also possesses its own distinctive characteristics and emphases.- Pamela E. Swett, Corey Ross, and Fabrice d'Almeida, “Pleasure and Power in Nazi
Germany: An Introduction,” in Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany , ed. Pamela E. Swett,
Corey Ross, and Fabrice d'Almeida (New York, 2011), 1–9. - On the nature of Soviet collectivity, see Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the
Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999). - Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Gen-
eration (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 11. Yurchak elaborates here on the work of the French philoso-
pher Claude Lefort, who investigates a general paradox within the ideology of modernity: the
split between the theoretical ideals of the Enlightenment and the practical concerns of the
modern state’s political authority and the need to impose an “objective truth” that appears
to be external to power (10–11). See Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureau-
cracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 1986). - Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, 1999), 1.