Post-proletarian Tourism 253Although comprehensive data are lacking, individual trip reports did pro-
duce statistics on the social composition of groups, especially in the late
1950s and early 1960s, the moment when the new Party program announced
boldly that imminent economic and social development would eliminate the
last vestiges of class distinctions.^128 Moscow’s 1960 tourist trains consisted
predominantly of white-collar workers and students. Workers comprised 12
and 14 percent of the passengers on two trips for which we have information;
students were nearly one-third of the groups on each trip. By contrast, two
years later, workers comprised about 40 percent of the tourists on seven trips
of itinerary number 187; professionals and intelligentsia (including students)
numbered 47 percent, and white-collar employees and bureaucrats came to
16 percent of the passengers.^129
These data are fragmentary, but they reinforce conclusions proffered by
tourism offi cials. Social insurance did not subsidize tourist putevki, unlike
those to rest homes and resorts. “Workers are not in a position to purchase a
putevka to the south for full price; it costs 65 or 70 rubles, and then they have
to pay extra for transport there,” said the representative from Perm at a 1961
conference of TEU offi cials. Although wage differentials had diminished in
the 1960s, offi cials still assumed that production workers’ reluctance to take
tourist vacations was due to price rather than preference.^130
Price and its effect on the social composition of international tourists posed
an even bigger concern. Scattered local reports suggest that in 1960 workers
comprised between 9 and 25 percent of the tourist groups sent abroad to so-
cialist countries, but they were very few on tours to capitalist countries.^131 This
low number worried trade union offi cials, particularly because of the expec-
tation that tourists abroad would bring back new production ideas. Offi cials
discussed ways to improve the ratio, such as giving free foreign putevki as
rewards for exemplary workers. But they acknowledged the deterrent effect of
the high cost of foreign travel. On the other hand, workers constituted 60 per-
cent of groups who traveled abroad explicitly for rest and medical treatment
(a fi gure suspiciously close to the old targets set in the 1930s). Because these
trips had a medical purpose, participants paid only 30 percent of the total
cost. As travel abroad expanded and became more normal and as living stan-
dards rose, the number of workers in foreign tour groups appeared to increase.
Abukov reported that over 40 percent of tourists abroad in 1977 were factory
- Vail' and Genis, 60-e, 13; Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza ,
62–63. - TsAGM, f. 28, op. 1, d. 9; d. 10; d. 31.
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 381, l. 60 (quote); Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Econ-
omy , 65; Hewett, Reforming the Soviet Economy , 48. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 379 (materials on foreign tourism, 1960); d. 374 (group
leader reports, 1960), ll. 27–28, 37–38, 40–41, 82, 90–91, 114–116; d. 631, l. 16. See also Gor-
such, All This Is Your World , 82–86, on workers traveling to Eastern Europe, and 109–113
on travel to capitalist countries.