The Modernization of Soviet Tourism 265mobility. The inexpensive accessibility of sunny coastal resorts on the
Mediterranean doomed the old British seaside resorts, whose decline had
begun with the emergence of passenger jets. Capital investment in resort
complexes along the Mediterranean coast soared to attract these newly mo-
bile budget tourists. In France, a centrally planned complex at La Grande
Motte, launched in 1968, aspired to provide both an affordable tourist
destination for all French people and an economic stimulus for the under-
developed region of Languedoc.^11 It is signifi cant that the focus of postwar
Soviet tourist facility expansion was the consumer rather than local economic
development.
The rising expectations for comfort and service of the mass tourist society
now prompted tourism authorities to transform their own models. Beginning
in the 1960s, tourist bases replaced their stationary tents with permanent
structures, both small prefabricated cabins and comfortable hotels in the most
popular “zones of rest.” The tourist hotel, once thought to be necessary only
in cities, now arrived at the seashore. Plans called for the development of
new zones of tourism and active rest, with facilities for downhill skiing and
sailing. The zones would offer roads, comfortable hotels, pansions, sporting-
tourism bases, motels, restaurants, cable cars, and gondolas. By 1967 chair-
man Abukov boasted that buildings had replaced 80 percent of tourist base
tents. The expansion of tourist trains and cruise ships also responded explic-
itly to consumers’ demands for comfort, mobility, and service.^12
Trade union offi cials now realized that the existing structure of the tour-
ism organization could not serve these changing demands. The voluntary
tourism councils that brought together factory committees, sports societies,
tourist clubs, and Komsomol organizations were ill equipped to manage a
million-ruble business. As self-fi nancing enterprises, the tourist authorities
had funded all their operations from the revenue earned from the sales of
putevki. After 1969 direct state expenditures augmented these funds, which
in turn generated more revenue. By 1974 the tourist authority was bringing in
eighty-four million rubles from sale of putevki, a volume too large for factory
committees to handle as part of their basket of social services, said one of-
fi cial in 1974. Tourism had become a “multi-faceted economic system,” said
another offi cial, incorporating tourist bases, hotels, restaurants, and souvenir
- Thomas Kaiserfeld, “From Sightseeing to Sunbathing: Changing Traditions in Swed-
ish Package Tours; from Edifi cation by Bus to Relaxation by Airplane in the 1950s and
1960s,” Journal of Tourism History 2, no. 3 (2010): 149–163; Wikipedia, s.v. “Tu-104,” http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-104; Wikipedia, s.v. “Boeing 707,” http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Boeing_707; Urry, Tourist Gaze, 33–38; Ellen Furlough and Rosemary Wakeman,
“La Grande Motte: Regional Development, Tourism, and the State,” in Baranowski and Fur-
lough, Being Elsewhere, 348–372. - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d 750 (central tourism council plenum, May 1965), ll. 51–52;
d. 1061 (central tourism council plenum, June 1967), ll. 78–82, 19; d. 631 (central tourism
council plenum, April 1964), ll. 56–57; Trud, 14 January 1964; 27 November 1964; 21 May