282 Conclusion
regime, a state in which the individual’s interests were subordinated to the
needs of the collective and the state. Soviet vacations and tourism originated
in a spirit of state purpose, to provide healthy alternatives in order to disci-
pline unruly youth and to restore the health of workers so they could become
more productive. Along with this purposeful mission of medical prophylaxis
came a cultural agenda, in which the annual vacation became part of the
overall civilizing mission of the Soviet regime.
The illiberal history of the Soviet Union compels us to acknowledge the
persistence of stratifi cation and the ways in which privilege dominated over
egalitarianism. Privilege continued to assert itself in gaining access to tourist
and health spa vacations, and in many ways, leisure travel reinforced social
distinctions that an ideology of equality had meant to overcome. The right
to an annual tourist or health spa vacation became one of the perquisites of a
new Soviet elite, a fact that contradicted the socialist society’s original prem-
ises. The history of tourism and vacations, furthermore, reveals the failures of
the centrally planned economy, its inability to manage its consumer and ser-
vice sectors. This inability was compounded by the structural barriers of the
command-administrative system and the inertia of the bureaucratic mindset,
so vividly illustrated by the repetitively boilerplate speeches of the tourism
and health resort chiefs year after year. Economic historians have questioned
whether the failures of the planned economy under Stalin were due more to
the jockey—inept managers—or the horse—the system itself.^5 There is evi-
dence here that both were responsible.
A history of the illiberal side of Soviet tourism might emphasize the ways
in which the regime controlled and restricted mobility, from the putevka sys-
tem that rationed access to tourist and health spa vacations to the extensive
vetting and monitoring apparatus constraining the trips of Soviet tourists
abroad. Enemies and “others” presented constant dangers to the touring pub-
lic, from the idle vagrants denounced under the label of brodiazhnichestvo
to the alarming proclivities of Soviet women tourists abroad to engage in
sexual relations with foreigners to the culturally offensive dancing that tour-
ists observed. The extensive network of medical personnel and excursion
leaders, of rules and regimes, served to cushion Soviet leisure travelers from
the responsibilities of independence and helped to reinforce a “nanny state”
in which discipline and dependence produced a population of obedience
and submission.
This book has shown how Soviet travelers and vacationers operated with-
in this orbit of constraint and ideology, but it is diffi cult to assess whether
their participation represented consent, complicity, and loyalty or whether
they consumed these vacations in a mood of alienation and tacit dissent. Did
the opportunity to travel and to vacation provide brief moments of escape- Paul R. Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret
Archives (New York, 2003).