228 Chapter 6
below, almost all foreign tourist trips originated from Moscow; for many So-
viet tourists this provided their fi rst visit to the capital city, and they asked
to extend their journeys in order to see its sights (and browse in its shops).
“It is so diffi cult to get from Siberia to the center.”^56 After 1962, with the re-
organization of tourism institutions, the Moscow tourism council used the
signifi cant profi ts from its sales of putevki to invest in the construction of
improved facilities for visitors to the capital, beginning with the fourteen-
story hotel Druzhba in Moscow’s southwest district. By 1964, the Moscow
council hosted 650,000 visitors, meanwhile sending 40,000 Muscovites to
other cities such as Leningrad, Kiev, Volgograd, Riga, and Vilnius. “These
trips on buses and airplanes are achieving growing popularity,” asserted
Moscow offi cials.^57
The development of passenger air travel opened new possibilities for
accommodating urban tourism without providing accommodations. Tour-
ists also desired to visit Leningrad, but as in Moscow, the possibility for
tourist travel there was restricted by the shortage of beds. Before 1980, the
Leningrad tourism council operated only one tourist hotel in the city and a
handful of tourist bases in the suburbs.^58 Similarly, the Kiev tourism coun-
cil could not serve all of those passing through the city who wanted to stop
and visit. But passenger air travel made it possible to make one-day trips
between cities. A group from Leningrad’s Skorokhod factory fl ew to Mos-
cow in one hour aboard a TU-104 in May 1960. They toured the Kremlin
and the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum, and from the windows of their bus they
saw shop windows, boulevards and gardens, and the “pride of Moscow,”
the Moscow State University skyscraper. With nightfall, they boarded their
awaiting plane and returned to Leningrad. A one-day jet trip by shock
workers from Moscow’s Trekhgornaia manufacturing plant accomplished
a similar whirlwind tour in 1962: they saw all the sights of Leningrad plus
the fountains at suburban Petrodvorets before their return to the airport in
the evening. More economically, Skorokhod’s tourists increasingly trav-
eled on bus excursions to the capital cities of the Baltic republics in the
1960s.^59- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 407 (group leader reports, 1961), ll. 153, 155; d. 701 (group
leader reports, 1964), l. 86 (quote). In the fi lm Pechki-lavochki , the GUM department store
was one attraction for Vasilii Shukshin’s fi ctional Siberian couple, visiting Moscow on their
way to a spa vacation in the south. - TsAGM, f. 28, op. 3, d. 6, ll. 18–20.
- TsGA SPb, f. 2683, op. 1, ch. 3 (Leningrad tourism council, 1972–76), inventory de-
scription. The hotel Mir was built on Gastello Street, off Moskovskii Prospekt (nine miles
from central Leningrad), in 1964. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 525, l. 54; Skorokhodovskii rabochii , 20 May 1960; 1 June
1962; 28 July 1964; 15 July 1966; 14 August 1968; 20 August 1968; 18 August 1972; Znamia
trekhgorki , 14 July 1962.