Post-proletarian Tourism 215press of these years frequently featured articles with titles like “The Romance
of the Distant Road,” beckoning tourists to move freely around the country.^15
For intellectuals in particular, tourism meant precisely these journeys with
rucksack, tent, map, and compass. The road provided all the answers to life’s
contradictions, wrote Vail' and Genis of the sixties generation. “Soviet tour-
ism is not only rest and not only a way to understand the world around us,”
the Moldavian doctor I. Kuliabko wrote to Turist in 1971, “it is also a test
of our physical and spiritual strength, it is in some sense a means of self-
affi rmation [ samoutverzhdeniia ].”^16 The very term “romance” evoked a sub-
jectivity that combined utopian dreams with physical mobility, not merely
an escape from the grit of city life but a perfect existence: the job and the road
together made one a whole person.
During the 1930s, as we have seen, tourism activists and advocates clashed
over the proper defi nition of the proletarian tourist: if the goal of tourism was
to expand horizons, learn about the great achievements of the country and its
citizens, appreciate nature, and restore health and fi tness, did this require the
tourist to independently construct a journey and carry it out using only self-
locomotion? Or could the basic goals of tourism be achieved with less rigor,
with the assistance of planned group travel and in the soft seat of a motorized
vehicle?^17 The development of Soviet tourism from the death of Stalin to the
very end of the regime continued to refl ect this fundamental debate.- These voices could also be heard in the mainstream press: Trud , 10 June 1959; 18
June 1960; 30 April 1964; 23 May 1965; 20 September 1966; 7 June 1967; 25 November 1969;
7 March 1972; 19 September 1972; 3 June 1973; 22 January 1974; 15 July 1975; 29 May 1976;
19 June 1977; 7 September 1979; 28 April 1981. - Vail' and Genis, 60-e, 128; Turist , no. 8 (1971): 13; another extended discussion in no.
12 (1973): 20. - These features of tourism were reiterated at a session of the Moscow tourism council
in 1965. TsAGM, f. 28, op. 3, d. 6, l. 1.
Table 6.1 Growth in tourist base capacity, 1950–1980YearPopulation served
in tourist basesPopulation in all health,
rest, and tourist basesVacationers in tourist
bases (%)1950 40,000 3,785,000 1.1
1960 562,000 6,744,000 8.3
1965 1,997,000 11,316,000 17.6
1970 5,041,000 16,838,000 29.9
1975 16,604,000 31,532,000 52.7
1980 22,503,000 40,040,000 56.2
Sources: Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1974 (Moscow, 1975), 616–617; Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v
1975 (Moscow, 1976), 606–607; Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 70 let. Iubileinyi statisticheskii ezhegod-
nik (Moscow, 1987), 602.