Post-proletarian Tourism 239trade union or tourism authorities. Fishing and hunting cabins proliferated
on rivers and lakes and in the forests, providing primitive accommodations
for outdoor enthusiasts. In 1965 there were 1.4 million users of fi shing and
hunting cabins, compared with 613,000 travelers on planned package tours.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, local collectives began to build informal “tour-
ist health” camps, places where students, workers, and families could spend
their vacations in inexpensive natural surroundings. In the early 1960s cen-
tral trade union authorities encouraged the expansion of these camps under
the rubric of tourism development; they monitored their proliferation and
included the campers in their overall statistics on the growth of tourism.^80
On the whole, these local camps received little other guidance and fewer
resources. The most successful of them began as tent camps and gradually
constructed more permanent dining halls and cabins. The Skorokhod factory
in Leningrad had expanded its prewar rest home into a sports base in 1960;
workers themselves built the cabins. Some camps operated very much like
offi cial tourist bases, with strict discipline and obligatory morning exercises;
they organized overnight hikes to battlefi eld sites and awarded the Tourist
USSR badge. There were bases that became so successful that workers from
their sponsoring enterprises preferred to spend their holidays there, with
their friends, rather than to take a putevka to the south. Some of these camps
worked better when they limited their clientele to student youth; others ben-
efi ted from bringing together vacationers of all ages. One camp belonging to a
technical institute appealed to all the segments of the institution of learning:
the students played active sports, while their professors played checkers and
gave talks about their trips abroad.^81 Such camps resembled the Chautauqua
movement of late nineteenth-century America or the Family Vacation Vil-
lages of post-1945 France, which offered vacationers of modest means the
opportunity for leisure in the aid of education and self-improvement.^82 All
together, the Soviet health camps offered an accessible and inexpensive vaca-
tion option for hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who were unable or
did not wish to procure a putevka to a local rest home or for a long-distance
journey.
Travel Abroad
The dream of Soviet tourism had long included foreign travel on the pur-
poseful knowledge-building agenda. Financial constraints made tourism
abroad impossible in the 1930s, and after the war the offi cial policy of the
Soviet Union turned its citizens’ gaze inward.^83 Only military personnel and- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 381, ll. 54–55, 81; d. 452 (materials on mass tourism, 1962),
and d. 1297, l. 72, provide statistical breakdowns of their usage. - Skorokhodovskii rabochii , 6 May 1960; GARF, f. 9559, op. 1, d. 1193 (materials on
sports health camps, 1969); d. 977 (health camp directors’ seminar, April 1967), ll. 30, 85. - Aron, Working at Play , chap. 4; Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations.”
- Anne E. Gorsuch, “ ‘There’s No Place like Home’: Soviet Tourism in Late Stalinism,”
Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (2003): 760–785.