Post-proletarian Tourism 219The best tourism was also “mass tourism,” not the mass excursions
of the 1930s with brass bands and hortatory speeches but the massive
participation of individuals, traveling in their small groups on Sundays
and weekends as well as during summer vacations. The real growth in
the numbers of tourists reported by the central authorities came through
the popularization of weekend outings, part of the mass tourism mission
that had originated in the 1920s. In 1964, whereas 2.2 million tourists em-
barked on multiday independent tourist trips, offi cial statistics reported
that 15.1 million took their rucksacks on one-day outings. By 1967 the
number of independent day trippers had increased to 27.6 million, com-
pared with 3.4 million on extended trips.^29 These travelers left their dusty
cities each Saturday and Sunday on the so-called health trains, carrying
tents, rucksacks, guitars, and—to the dismay of activists—often bottles of
alcohol. They camped anywhere and everywhere, many unsupervised and
uncounted. The most organized joined tourist sections in their enterprises
and participated in the offi cial rallies that celebrated tourism skills.^30 The
least organized caused increasing consternation as their tourist outings
often degenerated into weekend drinking bouts and sites for all kinds of
“amorality.” The wholesale destruction of exurban woodlands that tour-
ists wantonly utilized for their tent poles and romantic campfi res caused
particular concern.^31
Weekend outings and hikes had come to be associated with the lifestyle of
the Soviet urban intellectual, as depicted in fi lms such as July Rain (1967) and
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980), in which groups of close friends
traveled to their favorite spots in nature, built campfi res, grilled shashlik over
the coals, sang songs, and talked about life. They included groups like the
one I traveled with in 1973; on winter weekends, these scientists, editors,
and artists journeyed by train to the station Turist north of Moscow, where
they spent two days skiing, cooking, swapping partners, drinking laboratory-
distilled vodka, and playing charades or Monopoly. Fortunately for me, no-
body kept track of them, since as a foreigner I was not permitted to travel that
far beyond the city limits. The weekend trains were packed with tourists like
these.
This kind of tourism produced no profi t for the trade union tourist coun-
cils, and activists continually complained that central authorities ignored the
- GARF, f. 7576, op. 30, d. 176 (materials on tourist bases and camps, June–September
1958), ll. 54–58; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1297 (statistical data on tourism, 1961–69), l. 1. - One of these was the eminent mathematician and alpinist Boris Delone, whose letter
to Turist , no. 4 (1974): 1, boasted that at age eighty-four, he had spent every Sunday for the
past thirty years hiking out of town. On rallies, Trud , 19 September 1978; 24 May 1981; Mar-
tenovka , 2 June 1960; Skorokhodovskii rabochii, 13 June 1958; 15 July 1960; 22 May 1968;
19 June 1968; 19 June 1970; 19 June 1974; Znamia trekhgorki , 24 August 1960; 9 June 1976. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 578, ll. 136, 138; d. 921 (central tourism council plenum,
March 1966), l. 19; Trud , 14 September 1975.