Post-proletarian Tourism 223churches, and fortresses. Spending one night in the Georgian capital Tbilisi,
the group then traveled by train to the seaside tourist base at Zelenyi Mys,
where they enjoyed four days on the beach and received their Tourist USSR
badges.^38
Evenings around the campfi re memorably cemented group cohesion. The
campfi re, with its mysterious heat and light, its protection against the dark,
its link with the primitive, had a universal appeal, and organizations every-
where have built elaborate rituals around them, including the U.S. National
Park Service and the scouting movement.^39 For some, the evening campfi re,
with its guitars, songs, skits, and the romance of the fi relight, symbolized the
essence of tourism. Vail' and Genis recall that even the individualist poet Jo-
seph Brodsky had succumbed to the lure of the campfi re and commemorated
it in verse. Reluctant tourists became captivated by the campfi re ritual even
after just a day hike and vowed to join a group for more long-distance adven-
tures.^40 Her most memorable tourist moment, recalled a veteran independent
tourist in 1966, “was a trip on foot and by boat through the impassable riv-
ers of Karelia, the weight of my rucksack, portaging our boat from stream to
stream, and then the campfi re and song, song, song.” Traveling abroad, Soviet
tourists remembered their shared campfi re with local Czechoslovaks as one
of the highlights of their package tour.^41
Since the 1930s, the fi nancial base of Soviet tourism, however mass, had
rested on the sales of putevki for planned, packaged tours. Unlike the more
favored health spas and rest homes, tourist trips were rarely subsidized
through trade union social insurance funds, and tourists generally had to pay
the full cost of their journeys themselves. Central and local tourism adminis-
trations (and after 1962, councils) depended on this revenue to pay salaries,
to promote independent tourism, and to expand the very infrastructure of
tourism, which operated in the 1950s and 1960s on a strict cost-accounting
system. In 1965 the head of the trade union tourism authority, Aleksei
Khurshudovich Abukov, reported that 80 percent of the operating budget of
the central tourism council came from the sales of putevki.^42 Naturally, then,
- The tour is described in Turistskie marshruty po SSSR , ed. O. A. Arkhangel'skaia
(Moscow, 1958), 224–231, and was evaluated in 1958 by a TEU representative, GARF, f.
9520, op. 1, d. 361, ll. 16–20. - Van Slyck, Manufactured Wilderness , 183–188; evening programs that I attended at
national parks invariably invoked the “founding campfi re,” at which explorers of the Yel-
lowstone region asserted that such beauty should belong to the whole American people. - Skorokhodovskii rabochii , 14 June 1966; 25 June 1970 (“Burn, Campfi re!”); Mar-
tenovka , 9 July 1960; Vail' and Genis, 60-e , 128; TsAGM, f. 28, op. 1, d. 6, l. 39. - Trud , 20 September 1966 (quote); GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 865 (foreign travel group
leader reports, 1965), l. 37. (Hungarians had their own campfi re traditions, with song, of
course, and roasting onions and fatback on sticks. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1115 [foreign
travel group leaders reports, 1967], l. 39.) - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 167 (reports on the status of tourist bases, 1950), l. 7 (on his-
tory in 1930s); GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 631 (central tourism council plenum, April 1964), ll.
11, 27; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 750, l. 63.