Post-proletarian Tourism 227During the 1960s, the expansion of tourism opportunities took many forms:
new hotels and tourist bases, new routes, and the promotion of mass week-
end getaways. The desire of Soviet vacationers to explore new frontiers had
expanded signifi cantly since the immediate postwar years, when the great
majority of tourist itineraries merely mimicked the stationary resort vaca-
tions. The lure of the south with its sun and sea air remained powerful even
in the 1960s and beyond, but tourism also expanded through new destina-
tions and modes of travel, all for the purpose of making a tourist vacation
accessible to the growing share of the population that enthusiastically sought
these opportunities. Yet just as it failed to fulfi ll many other promises about
the communist good life, the Soviet economy was unable to provide vacation
facilities to meet the demand of an increasingly urbanized society, educated
wage earners with the fi nancial resources to make choices about how they
spent their leisure time.
Urban Destinations
Although most tourists yearned to travel someday to the Black Sea or
the Caucasus, Moscow was still itinerary number 1, as it had been since
the 1930s.^53 As the capital city of the Soviet Union, it held great appeal.
For tourists, writes Jean-Didier Urbain, “the city concentrates the values of
a civilization,” and tourist offi cials shared this judgment. “All roads lead
to Moscow,” wrote the 1959 tourist handbook. “No matter where you have
traveled, if you are not a native Muscovite, you will always dream of be-
ing in Moscow, on Red Square, in the Kremlin, to walk along its streets, to
encounter its grandiose and manifold riches.... For the tourist Moscow
is indisputably the most valuable source of knowledge.”^54 Moscow’s tour-
ist services also exemplifi ed urban tourism in the USSR: accommodations
continued to leave much to be desired, lodging tourists in makeshift hos-
tels far from the center. But Moscow offered a world of sightseeing pos-
sibilities with its socialist, patriotic, and cultural attractions. In 1959, all
of the 20,000 visitors staying at the Moscow tourist base visited the Lenin-
Stalin mausoleum, and almost all of them toured the Kremlin Armory,
newly opened to the public after the Twentieth Party Congress, and the
All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievements. Among other attractions,
the Tret'iakov Gallery, the Central Lenin Museum, and the Ostankino Palace
drew the most visitors. Over 12,000 visitors joined production tours of fac-
tories like Dinamo, Hammer and Sickle, and the children’s toy factory, and
tourists could also attend evening theatrical performances.^55 As discussed
- Puteshestviia po SSSR ; see also the discussion of Moscow in Gorsuch, All This Is
Your World , 36–38. - Urbain, L’Idiot du voyage , 145; Sputnik turista , 11.
- TsAGM, f. 28, op. 1, d. 6, ll. 112–134.