264 Chapter 7
vacationed as families in Bulgarian and Romanian health resorts and won-
dered why they could not do this at home.^9
The international culture of tourism that taught these lessons was also
evolving at this time. Scholars generally acknowledge that mass tourism in
Europe did not really take off until the end of the 1950s and beginning of the
1960s. In West Germany the watershed came in 1958, when the number of
its citizens traveling abroad exceeded the number of foreign tourists arriving.
Thanks to the expansion of automobile ownership, nearly one-third of West
Germans took a vacation away from home by the end of the 1950s. By the late
1970s, 41.3 million West Germans, two-thirds of its population, had traveled
outside the country, and in smaller countries like Austria, Netherlands, and
Belgium, the proportion of international travelers approached 100 percent.
In France the transition to mass tourism occurred over several decades in
the mid-twentieth century: in the 1930s, 5 to 10 percent of French people
took vacations, a number that reached 60 percent by the 1980s. International
receipts from tourism increased 47.6 times between 1950 and 1984. In the
USSR, by 1980 40 million people took their holidays in organized vacation
places, with 22.5 million staying in tourist bases (see table 6.1 in the previous
chapter). If we accept the economists’ estimates that unorganized vacationers
exceeded the 17.5 million staying at spas and rest homes by a factor of ten,
the total number of domestic vacationers reached approximately 188 million.
In addition, 4.3 million tourists traveled abroad in 1979. The Soviet popula-
tion had been measured in 1979 at 262.4 million: these fi gures suggest, then,
that in 1980, as many as 80 percent of Soviet citizens had taken a vacation
away from home. If we accept a more conservative estimate of unorganized
travelers at four times the number of offi cial stays, the total comes to 114.3
million vacationers, or 43.6 percent of the population. If a vacationing popu-
lation of at least 30 percent of a society’s adult population signifi es a “mass
tourist society,” then Soviet leisure travel had assumed a mass character in
world terms by the end of the 1970s.^10
Even if these fi gures are undoubtedly infl ated by double counting, faulty
estimates, and other bureaucratic sleights of hand, the sheer growth in the
scale of Soviet tourism is undeniable, and it paralleled the growth of tour-
ism and vacations in the capitalist West. The introduction of passenger jets
radically transformed the economics of international tourism, making long-
distance vacations accessible to new strata of the population. The Soviets’
TU-104, a twin-engine jet, entered commercial air service in 1956. The Boe-
ing 707 made its appearance in 1959 and launched a new era of transatlantic- Skorokhodovskii rabochii, 23 August 1974; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 866 (group leader
reports, 1965), l. 18; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 592 (group leader reports, 1963), l. 22; Trud, 25
October 1975. - Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 172–175; Donald E. Lundberg and Carolyn B. Lund-
berg, International Travel and Tourism (New York, 1985), 10; Furlough, “Making Mass Va-
cations”; Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 47; Turist, no. 2 (1981): 23; Kopper, “Breakthrough of the
Package Tour in Germany.”