256 Chapter 6
sought liaisons with locals: the reports of trip leaders are rife with disap-
proval of a woman’s going off in a car with a local man or spending the night
away from the hotel. But some also disapproved of traveling Soviet citizens
sharing a room as if husband and wife. Anne Gorsuch notes that offi cials also
feared the excessively consumerist drives of women tourists: “It is also pos-
sible that more women traveled to eastern Europe precisely because it was
such a good place to shop.” If women drew disapproval for their excessive
consumerism and fl agrant sexuality, male tourists were more likely to engage
in heavy drinking, a double crime because they were then in no condition to
police the behavior of the women.^140 In the 1930s, some offi cials believed that
including women in independent tour groups would help to civilize men
and curb such antisocial behavior, but women were not observed to perform
the same role in the postwar discussions considered here.
In fact, the appeal for women of organized package tours was widespread
across economic systems in the second half of the twentieth century. Writ-
ing of American tourists to postwar France, Harvey Levenstein notes, “For
women traveling alone, [package tours] solved the vexing problem of what
to do at dinner and in the evening.” And the group protected them from the
potential advances of lecherous men. “Braving the new and unknown ter-
ritories outside, for sightseeing, lunches, hotel beds, or rest rooms, became
much easier because of the reassuring familiarity of ‘our bus,’ with its own
odors and unique little details,” notes Löfgren, and this reassuring familiarity
might have been more appealing and physically necessary for single women
travelers than for men. Single women in West Germany opted for package
tours to avoid the marginalization they faced in more traditional, upscale,
and family-oriented resorts.^141
On the whole, then, the stereotypical tourist in a Soviet group tour was an
educated woman, and in the independent sporting tourist groups, the tourist
was most likely to be an educated man. Families, as we have seen, were dis-
couraged from vacationing together at all, and until late in the Soviet period,
as the fi nal chapter will show, there were few options available for them.The Meaning of Soviet Tourism: To Create a New Socialist Person
By the 1960s Soviet tourism had transcended its proletarian origins and
now offered vacationing practices and experiences to appeal to an expanded
urban and educated population. But if it was post-proletarian in composi-
tion, its advocates continued to insist that tourism in the Soviet Union re-
fl ected and shaped a distinctive set of socialist values of purpose, knowledge,- TsAGM, f. 28, op. 1, d. 10, ll. 14–15; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1323, l. 40; d. 1315, ll.
53, 67, 43; d. 878, ll. 43, 102; Gorsuch, “Time Travelers,” 221. - Harvey Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since
1930 (Chicago, 2004), 143; Löfgren, On Holiday , 171; Kopper, “Breakthrough of the Package
Tour in Germany.”