Post-proletarian Tourism 225in the workplace. A prospective tourist could not simply write to the Sochi
tourist base, for example, to join radial tour number 32, twenty days in Sochi:
all these putevki would long before have been swept up by local councils and
trade unions. Still, given the low demand for most of the other itineraries,
plenty of putevki remained unclaimed. The Moscow tourism council reported
in 1965 that trade unions had purchased only 60 percent of the putevki
they had available, and the council needed to sell the remainder directly to
tourists in order to make ends meet. Unsold putevki meant that local coun-
cils would operate at a loss.^47
Tourism offi cials complained about the unwillingness of the social insur-
ance system to subsidize tourist putevki at the 70 percent rate applied to
health resorts and rest homes. The only alternative was marketing. In April
1957, the central TEU took out an advertisement in Trud. “A tourist trip
around the homeland is accessible to everyone,” it pointed out, listing avail-
able itineraries and the addresses of local TEUs where putevki could be pur-
chased. A 1957 poster by V. Govorkov hailed the allure of “taking the whole
family on vacation” by train (even though such family opportunities were
rare). The annual guides to itineraries, published in editions of fi fty thousand
and more, also helped to publicize tourism opportunities. Offi cials encour-
aged “tourist evenings,” in which past participants could talk about their
trips and entice others to join. The spreading network of tourist clubs could
also assist in this kind of publicity, and they sponsored evenings of slide
shows and home movies about tourist vacations. Tourist destinations could
also be publicized using radio, television, newspapers, and brochures.^48
The number of tourists unquestionably expanded in these years, although
precise fi gures are diffi cult to calculate. In 1964, roughly 610,000 putevki
were sold for package trips, while another 2.2 million tourists traveled in-
dependently, some using the services of tourist bases, others camping.
The TEU reported that it sent 50,000 tourists abroad in 1963 (a fi gure lower
than other estimates of foreign travel.) By 1974, categories of tourists had
collapsed: the secretary of the Central Trade Union Council reported that in
1969 there had been 7.2 million tourists; by 1974 the number had grown to
20 million, plus another 50 million weekend tourists and 300,000 traveling
abroad.^49
Part of the diffi culty in accounting for tourists arose because of the decen-
tralization of tourism work and the growing initiative of local councils, some-
thing that the reforms of 1962 and 1969 had been intended to encourage.
- TsAGM, f. 28, op. 3, d. 6, l. 17; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 632, l. 12; d. 2077 (central
tourism council meeting, April 1975), l. 191. - Trud , 3 April 1957, 6 June 1957; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 525 (central tourism council
plenum, April 1963), l. 60; d. 632, ll. 30, 82–83; Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel' i reformy ,
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1297, l. 72; d. 631, l. 16; d. 1910 (tourism offi cials’ confer-
ence, December 1974), l. 25. Another source reported 1.85 million foreign tourists in 1970.
Azar, Otdykh , 41.