Post-proletarian Tourism 255tarian culture, he noted. “Thus the intelligentsia have less reason to feel a
class superiority because of their interests and abilities. ‘Specialism’ is felt
to be something open to almost everybody; in the lightest of contemporary
comedies (Mikhalkov’s Dikari ), a diplomat and a vet, on a camping holiday
by the Black Sea, take up with a police girl and a female lion-tamer, also
camping, without the slightest hint that there is anything but a functional
distinction in the status of any of them.” The 1980 fi lm Moscow Does Not
Believe in Tears emphasizes the immateriality of class distinction in portray-
ing the laboratory technician Vova as both the salt of the earth and the equal
of the scientists with whom he works.^136 On a tourist outing over shashlik,
the men of learning praise his “magic hands.” Here we have the ideal of mass
tourism, which brings all classes together without distinction of background
or education.
There were, however, distinctions by gender. On the road, the post-
proletarian tourist, at least on the package tours at home and to Eastern Europe,
was twice as likely to be a woman as a man.^137 This sex imbalance in part
refl ected postwar demographic realities: women constituted 55 percent of the
population in 1959, and as late as 1987, they still made up 53 percent.^138 But
the share of women among tourist groups was greater than this, often two-
thirds or more. A study from Kazan' in 1966 suggested that men and women
chose to vacation differently: 25 percent of the women in the sample had
spent their most recent holiday visiting other cities; only 10 percent of the
men had. Ten percent of the women but only 1 percent of men went to the
seashore. Men were more likely to go to the village (24 percent to 11 percent),
to sanatoria or rest homes (16 percent to 7 percent), or to the countryside or
along the Volga (14 percent to 5 percent).^139 Planners and offi cials seemed
indifferent to the consequences of this imbalance in their considerations of
the expansion of tourist facilities: none of the published survey data pay at-
tention to the possibility of variable consumer demand by sex.
Needless to say, they also do not discuss tourism in terms of a consumer
demand for sex. As with rest homes, tourist trips also provided opportuni-
ties for women to fi nd themselves a man, either temporarily or as a mate.
The sexual ambitions of women tourists received little comment on domestic
tours, with the exception of the report on the two women who ran off with a
group of Georgian men. Such behavior abroad raised concerns when women
- Wright Miller, Russians as People (New York, 1961), 139. The Mikhalkov play was
the source for the tourist fi lm Three Plus Two. Moskva slezam ne verit ( Moscow Does Not
Believe in Tears ), dir. Vladimir Menshov, Mosfi l'm, 1980. - See Gorsuch, All This Is Your World , chap. 3, on the composition of tourists to East-
ern European as opposed to capitalist destinations. - Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 70 let , 379.
- William Moskoff, Labour and Leisure in the Soviet Union: The Confl ict between
Public and Private Decision-Making in a Planned Economy (London, 1984), 126, citing G. T.
Zhuravlev, “Svobodnoe vremia i kul'turnaia zhizn' rabotnikov promyshlennogo predpri-
iatiia,” in Sotsial'nye problemy truda i proizvodstva , ed. G. V. Osipov and Ia. Shchepan'skii
(Moscow, 1969), 388.