chapter two
Proletarian Tourism
The Best Form of Rest
T
he classic Soviet vacation that took form by the end of the 1930s
combined rest, recuperation, and medical attention. Modeled on
the nineteenth-century Western practice of the leisure spa, the Soviet ku-
rort demonstrated the superiority of socialism by providing access to this
healing annual rest to the previously disenfranchised proletariat, at least in
principle. Western practice had also produced the exemplary modern tour-
ist, the self-actualizing individual who found satisfaction in encountering
new places, landscapes, people, and adventure. In the Soviet Union, tourism
as a distinctive type of vacation emerged separately from the spa-centered
vacation, but it shared with all Soviet leisure travel an emphasis on utility
and purpose. For the partisans of a Soviet tourist vacation, this was the best
form of rest because it engaged the vacationer actively in the encounter with
nature, people, and knowledge. These partisans pursued an active struggle
in the 1920s and 1930s to popularize and expand this most authentic form of
Soviet vacation, proletarian tourism.
The term “tourist” possessed two distinct meanings in the early Soviet
Union. A tourist could be anyone who traveled to see sights, following a lei-
sure-travel program of visual, cultural, and material consumption. But Soviet
tourism activists in the 1920s and the early1930s insisted that a proper tour-
ist ( turist ) could be only that traveler who embarked on a purposeful jour-
ney, a circuit (tour) using one’s own physical locomotion. Purpose and rigor
would distinguish proletarian tourism from its pleasure-seeking bourgeois
counterpart. But many Soviet vacationers preferred a softer, more relaxed
opportunity to travel, recognizing that they could expand their horizons and
return home invigorated for a new year of work or study whether on foot or
in a tourist bus.^1
These two understandings of Soviet tourism, rugged and soft, would trans-
late into two sets of tasks. Proletarian tourism as a social movement would
invite broad masses of workers, peasants, students, and intellectuals to be-
- G. Bergman, Pervaia kniga turista (Moscow, 1927), 11; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi
arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. M-1, op. 4 (Komsomol secretariat), d. 29
(“On Tourism,” 25 May 1927), ll. 113–117.