Post-proletarian Tourism 261elite, the Soviet intelligentsia made tourism its own. Those virtues that had
been ascribed to proletarian tourism in the 1920s—purpose, health, knowl-
edge, self-actualization—were now embraced by a post-proletarian mass of
intellectuals, the new Soviet ruling class. Distinctions would remain in the
allocation of health spa vacations, elite Communist Party institutions would
continue to maintain their own closed networks of rest homes and sanatoria,
and foreign travel remained highly rationed by merit and reliability as well
as by price, but domestic tourist travel had become widely available to those
with money and not just connections. As living standards rose, the new Soviet
intellectual classes were amassing disposable income, which many chose to
spend on tourist travel.
The expansion of tourist demand and facilities by the 1970s led to new
economic challenges. Soviet tourism had begun as a social movement in the
service of production in the 1920s, but by the 1960s tourism had become an
object of consumer demand and a complex economic enterprise rather than a
social movement. Chapter 7 evaluates this transformation from movement to
industry in the 1970s and later and shows the growing convergence between
tourism and health spa vacations as twin entitlements of the Soviet citizens’
right to rest.