Post-proletarian Tourism 251tourist travel that tourists seek the familiar as well as the exotic, whether it
is the Herald-Tribune in Paris, McDonald’s in Beijing, or Pravda in Prague.
On the other side of the coin were Soviet tourists who were equally sen-
sitive to their lack of tourist sophistication and knowledge but who were
curious about the wider world and eager to acquire tourist know-how. Many
made suggestions about how to become better tourists, acknowledging that
they should be better informed about local practices, prices, and customs.
They asked for more guidebooks, maps, and phrase books so that they could
prepare in advance for their encounters. Many expressed appreciation for the
briefi ngs on tourist etiquette that they received before and during their train
journeys west.^122
One of the original goals of sending Soviet citizens abroad (in the tradition
of Peter the Great’s journey to study Dutch shipbuilding) had been to acquire
useful knowledge to employ back home. The shock workers on the 1930 Ab-
khaziia sailing had confi rmed their worst fears about the inequalities of capi-
talism, but they also paid attention to the exemplary cleanliness at Hamburg
wharves. Soviet tourists in the 1960s and 1970s, especially those in the spe-
cialized groups, kept careful notes on the production sites they visited. Their
job was to compare, evaluate, and learn. Postwar Soviet tourists abroad also
paid attention to the organization of daily life and reported back home about
what they admired and what could be emulated. A Moscow textile worker
traveling to the GDR in 1958 noted that the metro was “not as deep as ours,”
but she liked the way mailboxes were all arranged on the ground fl oor of
apartment buildings and how residents cooperated in cleaning the stairs.^123
The consumer culture of other socialist countries also drew admiring com-
ments for the politeness of sales staff and the effi ciency of self-service stores.
Tourists to Czechoslovakia were especially impressed with the organization
of commerce, the array of specialized stores, the polite service, attractive
and informative shop windows, and the availability of goods. “Obviously
they don’t have the same typical feature of our retail trade, when they ‘throw
out’ something nice and it quickly disappears. Shoppers know that the goods
they need will be there both today and tomorrow in Brno, in Bratislava, and
in other towns. Therefore they don’t have to hurry to buy something, just to
have, in case it suddenly vanishes.” A group leader was even more candid
about his encounter with retail trade in Hungary. Noting that his group had
expressed embarrassment at the comparison between Soviet and Hungarian
material culture, he wrote, “Of course, many of our tourists fi nd it diffi cult to
understand why in countries like Hungary you can buy anything you need in
the stores, and we can’t; why here the salespeople are so attentive and polite
to the shoppers, and at home we are so often met with insulting indifference
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 701, l. 30; d. 716, l. 37; d. 878, l. 84; d. 1115, l. 41; d. 426,
l. 203. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 598, ll. 133, 141, 148; Znamia trekhgorki , 9 August 1958
(quote).