234 Chapter 6
service of tourism to replace the cramped and schedule-driven freight boats
of the 1930s and early 1950s. Tourists often referred to them as “fl oating rest
homes” and considered them especially appropriate for older people, who
could gaze at the constantly changing landscape without leaving their deck
chairs. For the more agile, each stop along the river offered city excursions
(mostly on foot because of a perpetual shortage of tour buses), volleyball,
mushroom gathering in the woods, and swimming.^70 Local tourism councils
organized these river cruises, and their numbers expanded throughout the
1960s and beyond. In 1963, 55,000 tourists took organized train trips, but
274,000 passengers sailed on the forty-eight riverboat itineraries. By 1968,
thirty-eight local soviets offered eighty-fi ve different cruises along more than
a dozen rivers. Prices varied by class of cabin but generally ranged from 90
to 160 rubles for a twenty-day trip. Shorter weekend cruises also offered op-
portunities to enjoy nature, although these also became known as “fl oating
houses of love,” a way for illicit couples to spend a weekend in the complete
privacy of their steamer cabin, from which they did not emerge for the dura-
tion of the cruise.^71
Steamship sailings on the Black Sea had originally served to ferry pas-
sengers between the ports of the Caucasus Black Sea coast before railroad
and then road networks linked these emerging resort areas with central Rus-
sia.^72 The 1954 fi lm The Reserve depicts the particularly pleasing combina-
tion of travel to a destination with fun along the way. As passengers board
the Rossiia in Leningrad, en route to Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, one
advises another to take full advantage of the ship’s activities: outings and
excursions, dancing, lectures, reports, movies, concerts, quizzes, charades,
and medical treatments: “Don’t be lazy!”^73 Like the riverboat trips, the Black
Sea cruises combined the self-improving ambience of the spa with the added
feature of changing scenery and land-based excursions. In 1957 the ocean
fl eet launched the Admiral Nakhimov to navigate the route between Crimea
and the Caucasus shore; with 1,200 berths it was three times bigger than the
Rossiia. This sailing joined the list of all-union package tours as the eighteen-
day itinerary number 250, leaving from Odessa and calling at Sevastopol',
Sochi, Sukhumi, Batumi, and Yalta. Taking advantage of the invitation to- TsAGM, f. 28, op. 2, d. 150 (river cruise comment books, 1956), l. 21 (quote); d. 151
(river cruise comment books, 1956), l. 28ob.; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 385 (river cruise com-
ment books, 1960–61), l. 264a; Skorokhodovskii rabochii contains a lengthy travelogue of
one Leningrader’s cruise in 1970: 29 July 1970; 6 August 1970; 14 August 1970; Trud , 8 July
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 631, ll. 28–30; Turistskie marshruty na 1968 god , 110–125;
Popovskii, Tretii lishnii , 131. - Sovetskoe chernomor'e , comp. A. Ivanov and P. Mikhailov, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1955),
- Zapasnoi igrok ( The Reserve , shown in the United States as The Boys from Lenin-
grad ), dir. Semen Timoshenko, Lenfi l'm, 1954. More realistically, tourists would travel by
train to Odessa and take their ship from there, not from Leningrad.