Post-proletarian Tourism 241
combine sedentary rest in a spa or on the Black Sea coast with limited urban
sightseeing.
Travel abroad changed the culture of Soviet tourism. It opened Soviet trav-
elers’ eyes not just to different cultures, foods, and representations of history
but to new tourism norms and practices. Those who traveled to Eastern Eu-
rope (and the lucky few who went farther west) encountered the successor to
a well-developed prewar bourgeois tourist industry, where hotels and their
associated services, restaurants, and trained city guides constituted a normal
part of the tourist experience. Soviet tourism offi cials also learned from their
foreign travels and sought to apply these lessons to their efforts at home. The
fruits of this knowledge would be apparent as the Soviet tourism industry
continued to evolve into the 1970s, as chapter 7 will show.
From the beginning, foreign travel was complicated and expensive. Anne
Gorsuch has described how individuals were chosen for the plum trips
abroad: prospective tourists fi lled out questionnaires and were then vetted
locally by their employer, trade union organization, and party offi cials. “We
do all this verifi cation so that they will return from abroad.” Offi cials wanted
to ensure that the tourists selected for these trips would be worthy represen-
tatives of the Soviet Union, and they believed that sending homogeneous
occupational groups rather than random collections of tourists would help
enforce better discipline. Having been chosen for the trip, the tourist normally
had to pay out of pocket for the tour and transportation to Moscow, the start-
ing point, and this was hardly a trivial expense. In 1960, a twelve-day tour to
Czechoslovakia cost 1,250 rubles starting from Moscow; for a tourist in the
Far East, a trip to a European destination could cost as much as 5,000 rubles.
Even a four-day bus trip to Finland cost 800 rubles, the average monthly pay
for a Soviet worker.^88 Generally, tourists had to take the trip that was offered
at their workplace, but by the end of the 1950s, they had developed strong
preferences for the most familiar Slavic countries of Czechoslovakia and Bul-
garia, and many balked at trips to Germany and Poland. Others, even after
going through all the formalities of permissions and approval, would decide
in the end that the trip was not worth the expense and withdraw in favor of
a quiet rest home vacation.^89
Despite the cost, these trips were highly prized, and the numbers of Soviet
citizens traveling abroad grew consistently from the modest beginnings in
- Reliable statistics on foreign travel are notoriously elusive, since tour-
ists traveled under different sponsorships, among them trade union organiza-
tions, Inturist, and the Komsomol travel bureau Sputnik. The Russian historian
- Gorsuch, All This Is Your World , 82–86; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 375, ll. 51 (quote),
74, 56, 108.
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 375, ll. 1–13, 41, 26; Martenovka , 21 July 1960. Dolzhenko,
Istoriia turizma , 154, also acknowledges that Bulgaria is the most popular destination, but
the fi gures published for 1968–76 in Turist have travelers to Poland outnumbering those to
Bulgaria, at least in these years, by a factor of two to one. I cannot explain this discrepancy.
