Vacations, Tourism, and the Paradoxes of Soviet Culture 11bourgeois tourist industry, in which hotels and their associated services, res-
taurants, and trained city guides constituted a routine part of the tourist ex-
perience. Soviet tourists and tourism offi cials began to adopt these bourgeois
practices in their own tourism philosophy, responding more positively to
consumer demand for variety, comfort, service, and family vacations.^23
Chapter 7 looks at the evolution of Soviet tourism into an industry in its
own right, a response to models from abroad and to growing standards of
living at home. Still a work in progress at the beginning of the 1980s, this
transformation meant building hotels instead of sanatoria and following the
desires of consumers rather than trying to mold them. It notes a growing con-
vergence between sedentary and tourist vacations and a growing divergence
between the offi cial state values assigned to tourism and those ascribed by
tourists and vacationers themselves.
My story ends in the mid-1980s. The reforms launched in 1986 under the
rubric of perestroika led to a transformation of the economic structures of
Soviet leisure travel, beginning with the legalization of cooperative ventures
to provide many consumer services. Reform led next to the establishment of
joint capitalist-socialist ventures in the tourism, transportation, and other
industries that further changed the familiar basis of Soviet leisure travel. The
failure of these efforts at reform contributed to a plummeting standard of
living and a withdrawal of state subsidies for vacations. Perestroika, so hope-
fully launched by economists like Abel Aganbegian, had closed off the pos-
sibilities to engage in the kind of leisure mobility that he had celebrated in
- By the end of the Soviet regime, leisure travel had become fi nancially
almost impossible for most Soviet citizens, even while the state at long last
freely permitted travel abroad. This new paradox awaits its own historian. - In my treatment of post-Stalin tourism, I owe a great debt to Anne E. Gorsuch, whose
All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford, 2011),
analyzes the postwar Soviet effort to encounter and comprehend the West. Beginning with
domestic travel in the late Stalin years, then tourism to a “Europe-like” republic, Estonia,
and continuing on to Eastern and Western Europe, Gorsuch uses tourism as a lens to explore
the meaning of the Khrushchev period in opening the USSR to the world, and she analyzes
the reactions of Soviet citizens to these encounters with the Western Other. Gorsuch focuses
on tourism only, whereas my ambit here is broader: leisure travel that includes sedentary
vacations as well as active tourism. What became a cherished moment for Homo Sovieticus
was as much the annual vacation by the sea as that on the road.