252 Chapter 6
and rudeness. This was the only negative impression that our trip to Hungary
produced among our tourists.”^124 Soviet tourists to capitalist countries may
have experienced even greater shock at the differences between socialist and
capitalist cultures, but these tourists were far fewer than those to the fra-
ternal democratic republics of Eastern Europe, and their superior consumer
cultures could be written off by pointing out all the fundamental inequali-
ties created by capitalist excess. Just as in 1930, Soviet tourists to capitalist
European countries made sure to mention slums and strikes, and they were
circumspect in what they chose to praise.^125Who Was the Post-proletarian Soviet Tourist?
The proliferation of opportunities helped to fulfi ll the activists’ dream of
a truly mass movement of tourists. Young tourists could vacation at tourist
health camps and travel by autostop; the more elderly could drive to their
destinations in their own cars or fl oat along the Volga on a tourist cruise.
Active young adults could organize their own adventure tourist trips, sign
up for a hiking package along the Georgian Military Highway, or take a train
around the country’s capital cities.
When trade union offi cials talked about tourism as a mass movement, they
continued to assume that the educated middle class gravitated naturally and
willingly toward tourism as a vacation option but that factory workers and
collective farmers required more acculturation and encouragement in order
for them to participate in tourism’s horizon-expanding experience. “There
was a time when tourism in our country was engaged in primarily by white-
collar employees, representatives of the intelligentsia, and students,” wrote
Abukov in 1983. “Among tourists one encountered few workers, and toilers
from the village were practically not there at all.”^126 Independent tourism,
in particular, had become the preserve of the intelligentsia. The connection
between academics and alpinism had already been strong in the 1930s. One
veteran tourist estimated that 98 percent of independent tourists and partici-
pants in tourist rallies in the 1950s came from the intelligentsia, and the con-
nection was so strong that he no longer remembered the original name of the
OPTE, which he recalled as the Association of Travel, Tourism, and Excur-
sions (Ob’’edinenie puteshestvii, turizma i ekskursii): the “proletarian tour-
ist” had vanished.^127- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 592, l. 73; d. 426, l. 221; d. 1323 (group leader reports, 1969),
ll. 15–16; d. 1342, l. 31; “Obviously they don’t have,” d. 598, ll. 149–150; “Of course, many
of our tourists,” d. 488, l. 5. - Gorsuch, All This Is Your World , chaps. 4–5.
- A. Kh. Abukov, Turizm na novym etape: sotsial'nye aspekty razvitiia turizma v
SSSR (Moscow, 1983), 72. - Vladimir Novikov, “Belyi list kievskoi avtorskoi pesni,” Graffi ti , no. 2 (8) and no. 3
(9) 1997, http://bards.ru/press/press_show.php?id=993&show=topic&topic=9&page=1.