216 Chapter 6
For many offi cials and hundreds of thousands of participants, the real tour-
ist remained the independent, physical tourist. “Independent tourism is the
most vigorous and important form of tourism,” asserted a Moscow offi cial
in 1962. One could truly appreciate the beauty and power of nature only by
physically moving through it, not by merely viewing it from the porch of a
tourist base or the window of a bus. Tourists who came for a twenty-day vaca-
tion at the base of the mighty Caucasus Mountains in Kislovodsk would never
see those mountains unless they ventured out on the trail in overnight hiking
trips. “Tourism is about travel, movement, not sitting in one place,” insisted
another activist in 1965. There were too many tourist bases that served as
alternatives to rest homes, with hiking or boating trips optional. “The percent-
age of real tourists there is plainly visible,” she added. These were sitting tour-
ists, “mattress tourists,” but this was not tourism.^18 The independent tourist
could be recognized by the rucksack he or she carried, the enduring symbol
of proletarian tourism, and by the diffi culties overcome. The real tourist faced
rugged challenges and gained self-confi dence in meeting them. Six young
women from a Leningrad factory proved they were real tourists by marching
all day in the rain with their rucksacks and guitars and then setting up camp
in the pitch darkness. If someone lost all the group’s sugar while crossing a
stream or forgot to bring the kasha for breakfast, these were only transitory
setbacks remedied by the good cheer of collective song around the campfi re.^19
The closed nuclear city of Dubna, north of Moscow, with its physicists and
engineers, had become a hotbed of romantic independent tourists, devoted
to their campfi res, guitars, and sailboats.^20 Independent tourism celebrated
friendship as well as self-reliance. Engineer Nikolai Petrov averred to Trud
in 1966, “Tourism is a way for people of different professions and interests to
bond as a group. I could relate my adventures endlessly. Tourism as no other
sport marries physical and moral qualities. You never meet a bad person
among tourists.” An account of an independent tourist trip to Karelia by au-
tomobile marveled at the fi erce thunderstorm that “reminded us of the third
act of King Lear ” but also described tourist society. “The smoke of campfi res
rose up to the sky, we heard the sounds of transistors and saw fl otillas of fold-
ing kayaks. Nobody organized them, but they all followed the unwritten rules
of life on the road.” The newcomers asked those already there for permission- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 352 (tourism offi cials’ conferences, 1957), l. 50; “Independent
tourism is the most vigorous,” TsAGM, f. 28, op. 3, d. 2, l. 55; GARF, f. 7576, op. 30, d. 170
(physical culture and sport central committee reports on tourist bases, August–September
1956), l. 42; “Tourism is about travel,” Aristova, in GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 750 (central tour-
ism council plenum, May 1965), ll. 190–92. - Skorokhodovskii rabochii , 14 May 1968; Vl. Arkhangel'skii, “Dva rasskaza,” in Tu r-
istskie tropy. Al'manakh , vol. 2 (Moscow, 1959), 101–105. - N. Frolov (engineer), “Dubna—gorod romantikov,” Turist , no. 6 (1969): 10–11. On
the connection between tourism, song, and the guitar, see Christian Noack, “Songs from the
Wood, Love from the Fields: The Soviet Tourist Song Movement,” in The Socialist Sixties:
Crossing Borders in the Second World , ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloom-
ington, IN, 2013), 167–92.