The Modernization of Soviet Tourism 275Divergence: The Message Loses Focus
As the practice of Soviet tourism and vacations matured in the 1960s and
1970s and reached new millions of participants, tourists and vacationers be-
gan to demonstrate more distinctive and varied preferences about their vaca-
tion choices. Purpose remained important, but tourists interpreted their goals
in multiple ways. The 1969 decree had stipulated that tourist routes would
provide Soviet travelers with experiences that would enhance their “love of
their native land, and loyalty.”^34 Even as an industry, Soviet tourism would
retain the purpose of its original creation.
As tourism expanded, it became more diffi cult to contain the ideological
meanings that the regime meant to instill. Although historical destinations pro-
liferated on tourist itineraries, history itself had become a source of confl ict
and ambiguity in the aftermath of the Twentieth Party Congress. Professional
historians had begun to question the shibboleths and certainties of Stalin-era
interpretations, and tourists too were increasingly able to choose their own desti-
nations and select their own narratives.^35 Celebrating the positive achievements
of the Soviet past, Abukov pointed out in 1973, would fulfi ll the intention of
the 1969 directive on patriotic tourism. But the Soviet past was becoming con-
tested. A revival in interest about ancient Russia, sponsored by newly formed
societies for the protection of ancient monuments, threatened to undermine
the Communist Party’s antireligious ethos. Under the guise of “historical cul-
ture,” worried offi cials, some tour guides were including too many monaster-
ies, churches, and mosques on their excursions and not enough monuments to
Soviet culture. As an example of historical tourism losing its socialist message,
tourists in the Siberian city of Orenburg heard about Tsar Alexander II’s visit to
that town. Mention of the local connections to the last Romanov tsar, Nicholas
II, began to appear on excursions from Smolensk in the west to Barnaul in the
east. And worst of all, to those who saw the presocialist past as irrevocably
corrupted, some tours celebrated the exploits of nineteenth-century capitalists,
such as the excursion in Buriatiia labeled “Ulan-Ude—Merchant City.”^36
Others sought to protect ancient Russian monuments from encroachment
and degradation by tourists. Central offi cials had begun to develop, in the
1960s, a set of tourist itineraries based on the ancient Russian cities surround-
ing Moscow, an itinerary they promoted as the Golden Ring, with an eye to-
ward the international as well as the domestic tourist market.^37 The ancient
town of Suzdal', with its kremlin and churches, emerged as the center of this
- Trud, 26 June 1969.
- On historical controversies at the start of the 1960s, see Nancy Whittier Heer, Politics
and History in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA, 1971); E. N. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Sec-
ond Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd, ed. and trans. Donald J. Raleigh
(Bloomington, IN, 1987); Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics
of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (New York, 2001). - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1746, ll. 29–31.
- Trud, 17 December 1970, described in detail the sights along a twenty-day automo-
bile itinerary around these cities.