10 Introduction
through the agencies of the trade unions, outside the formal parameters of
the state and market alike.
This book traces the development of Soviet vacations and tourism begin-
ning in the 1920s, with the development of the health spa network and the
origins of the Society for Proletarian Tourism. Chapter 1 examines the initial
premises of the Soviet spa vacation, which emphasized medical recuperation
in support of production. Over the span of the 1930s, however, the purpose
of these medical vacations began to yield to a more pleasurable experience.
Chapters 2 and 3 explore the beginnings of Soviet tourism in the 1920s and
1930s, from voluntary movement to trade union service. Chapter 2 pays close
attention to the ideological function of tourism, the efforts to assign mean-
ing to proletarian leisure travel, and its institutional history, demonstrating a
politics of institutional rivalries throughout the years of Stalin’s rule. Chapter
3 looks more closely at the practice of Soviet tourism, at the journeys them-
selves and the travelers who made them. By the end of the 1930s, I argue, a
modern leisure enterprise had begun to emerge, one most avidly utilized by
the new Soviet elite and rising middle class and one that subordinated medi-
cal purpose to personal pleasure. As other studies have noted, ideas of the
“good life” began in the 1930s.^22 In this respect, the Great Patriotic War that
began in 1941 interrupted this development but did not alter it. Chapter 4
takes up the story of vacations and tourism in the postwar years. The greatest
challenge for tourism and vacations in building on the patterns established
before the war was to recover from the economic devastation of wartime, and
little energy or effort was expended on reimagining the structure, content, or
meaning of these vacations.
The fi nal three chapters examine vacations and tourism from the mid-
1950s until the advent of perestroika. They trace a growing convergence be-
tween the conceptually separate spa vacation and active tourism. Chapter 5
explores the evolution of the health resort vacation from medical treatment
to an object of consumer desire. Despite the growth of tourism and the ex-
pansion of tourist itineraries, the spa vacation remained the gold standard in
socialist vacationing for many Soviet citizens and particularly for workers in
production.
Chapter 6 focuses on the expansion of Soviet tourism, which took off par-
ticularly dramatically in the 1960s, and it follows Soviet tourists in their
fi rst exposure to travel abroad. Beginning in 1955, tour groups began to visit
fraternal socialist countries and in some cases capitalist countries. While do-
mestic tourist and vacation travel would far outweigh foreign travel, I argue
that the exposure of Soviet tourists to foreign vacation practices decisively if
gradually changed the culture of Soviet vacations. What Soviet tourists en-
countered in Eastern Europe was the successor to a well-developed prewar- Gronow, Caviar with Champagne; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary
Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999); Crowley and Reid,
Pleasures in Socialism.