54 Chapter 2
come purposeful tourism activists, to develop tourist skills, and to choose the
rigors of the road for their annual vacations from work. Providing for a broad
range of tourism opportunities, however, required an economic outlook that
could fi nance and build networks of facilities and transport to serve all who
wished to spend their vacations in self-improving travel.
Focusing on tourism as a nascent industry, this chapter explores the un-
resolved balancing act between the two aspects of tourism: as a social move-
ment and as an economic enterprise. In the course of the 1930s, we can
observe a shift in tourism, parallel to that in health spa vacations, from a
strictly utilitarian and ideologically purposeful activity to an experience that
combined duty with delight. As the Soviet tourist vacation became more
pleasurable, it became more attractive to the emerging Soviet middle class
that possessed the social, political, and economic capital to acquire it. But
Soviet tourism in the 1930s, whether rigorously proletarian or comfortably
quasi-bourgeois, never achieved the mass proportions envisioned by the
founders of the movement. The poverty of its infrastructure would limit the
level of comfort that a Soviet vacation on the road could provide. This early
history reveals a landscape of rival agencies, each competing to represent the
best interests of domestic tourists, a picture of economic pluralism at odds
with the image of a centrally planned and one-party state. Beneath the veneer
of the monolithic Soviet system lay a chaotic mix of good intentions, inade-
quate resources, bureaucratic infi ghting, economic competition, and genuine
uncertainty about the proper way to build the socialist utopia.The Origins of Proletarian Tourism
Tourism had developed an enthusiastic following among the Russian mid-
dle classes before the revolution. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, the
Russian Society of Tourists (Rossiiskoe Obshchestvo Turistov) united groups
of hikers, alpinists, and cyclists, all partisans of active touring. The soci-
ety continued into the Soviet period but now faced competition from many
competing authorities who each sought to promote tourism. Local govern-
ments organized municipal excursion bureaus to facilitate travel and outings.
The Russian Republic’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) estab-
lished programs to train excursion leaders and constructed facilities for visi-
tors to Petrograd and Moscow. Starting in 1923, the commissariat’s Bureau of
Long-Distance Excursions organized tourist travel to Crimean and Caucasus
destinations, along the Volga, to the far north, the Urals, and beyond.^2
In late 1926 the Communist youth organization Komsomol adopted tour-
ism as its own cause. In the midst of anxious reporting about deviant and aim-- McReynolds, Russia at Play , chap. 5; S. Tarskii, “Rabochie i krest'ianskie ekskursii i
turizm,” Vsemirnyi turist , no. 1 (1929): 23; GARF, f. A-2306, op. 69, d. 2068 (correspondence,
July 1929), l. 18; G. P. Dolzhenko, Istoriia turizma v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii i SSSR (Rostov-on-
Don, 1988), 68–72.