254 Chapter 6
and collective farm workers, many traveling in groups from single enterprises
in order to exchange production knowledge with counterparts abroad.^132
There was a close connection between educational attainment and tourist
participation, and the increasing share of the population that fi nished sec-
ondary school helped to swell the ranks of Soviet tourists. Abukov seemed
satisfi ed to report that in 1980 workers constituted the largest group of Soviet
tourists, at 28 percent, followed by engineering and technical personnel (25
percent), white-collar workers (23 percent), students (13 percent), and cre-
ative intellectuals (writers, artists, musicians, etc.) (5 percent). He reported
without comment the fact that only 0.5 percent of tourists were agricultural
workers.^133 As noted in chapter 5, workers constituted 45.3 percent of vaca-
tioners in sanatoria and rest homes in 1963 (table 5.2). If only 28 percent of
tourists were workers, the sons and daughters of the proletariat remained
underrepresented in Soviet tourism. The heirs of proletarian tourism turned
out to be the educated middle class, the Soviet intelligentsia.
Although the expansion of tourism incorporated an ever-increasing share
of the Soviet population, this expansion did not necessarily produce greater
social homogenization. On the contrary, discussions about tour groups abroad
note the desirability of constituting groups according to social position, since
mixing workers and intellectuals was “not completely successful.” Tourists
from different professions had different interests and habits and needed their
own particular programs, advised more than one trip leader. The properties
of the social stratifi cation of Soviet vacationers lack satisfactory evidence,
but the data from fragmentary studies suggest some contours. The social elite
commanded the most desirable locations and times: high offi cials, creative
intellectuals, and leading scientists took precedence in the south and during
July and August. Manual laborers tended to vacation near home. Another
study from 1985 indicated that students, intelligentsia, and engineering-
technical staff were most interested in active forms of rest at tourist bases;
workers preferred the more passive journey aboard tourist trains.^134 Travelers
with tourist putevki, whether at home or abroad, were more likely to come
from the educated middle classes than from the laboring classes.
Was this stratifi cation the result of choice or economic realities? The dis-
comfort reported from socially mixed groups on foreign tours suggests that
intellectuals and workers may not have welcomed each other’s company. But
there may have been other sites—fi shing and hunting cabins, river cruises,
factory rest camps—where social distinction mattered less.^135 The American
journalist Wright Miller commented on the absence of class distinctions he
had observed by the late 1950s. There was a wide respect for a kind of egali-- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 375, l. 4; d. 390, l. 34; d. 422, l. 3; Abukov, Turizm segodnia
i zavtra , 244. - Abukov, Turizm na novym etape , 72.
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 468, ll. 155, 166, 216; d. 491, l. 84; d. 878, l. 150; d. 865, l.
30; d. 1315, l. 55; A. Ivashchenko, “Izuchaem spros,” Turist , no. 8 (1985): 7. - Personal communication with Galina Yankovskaya, 2004.