62 Chapter 2
From the outset, proletarian tourism activists saw in Sovtur a competitor,
not a partner in promoting working-class tourism. Both organizations empha-
sized that they embraced socialist principles of purposeful travel, and both
endeavored to spread tourism to new groups and strata. Both engaged in com-
mercial activities: Sovtur renting beds in tourist bases and selling postcards,
the Society for Proletarian Tourism producing and selling tourist equipment.
The issue of discounted train tickets aroused fi erce complaint in the pages
of Komsomol'skaia pravda. Sovtur insisted on the sole right to distribute
these half-fare coupons received from the transportation commissariat, and it
reserved them for participants on its planned excursions, denying the small
independent groups organized under the aegis of the proletarian tourism so-
ciety the opportunity to travel cheaply to their tourism destinations. In this,
claimed the proletarian tourists, Sovtur favored the well-to-do strata of Soviet
society. Workers could not afford the high prices of the planned excursions,
with or without transport subsidies. Even with prices adjusted for income,
only 7 percent of participants in Sovtur-planned excursions in 1928 were
classifi ed as workers, while 60 percent were educators, and 22 percent white-
collar employees. Fighting to defend its turf, Sovtur sought to block the ratifi -
cation of the Society for Proletarian Tourism’s charter and then tried to limit
its competitor’s jurisdiction exclusively to propaganda for independent tour-
ing. Proletarian tourism should be a social movement, it proposed, charged
with developing mass individual tourism through cells of enthusiasts. Sovtur
demanded monopoly status as the state-funded tourist agency. But when it
announced its plan to serve eighty-one thousand tourists in 1929—of whom
forty-seven thousand would travel in independent groups—and then moved
to organize its own factory-based cells, the hallmark of the Society for Prole-
tarian Tourism, the proletarian tourists declared war.^24
Narkompros worked out a temporary truce between the two organizations
in 1929, encouraging Sovtur to share its discounted train tickets and to allow
proletarian tourism members to rent space in its bases during their indepen-
dent trips. Meanwhile, the trade unions, whose members furnished the tour-
ists, grew weary of the bickering between the two groups and urged them to
work out their differences. In late 1929, a high-level conference resolved that
the two organizations should combine forces as one, and in February 1930,
representatives from both sides met to work out the terms of their consoli-
dation.^25 Still at stake was the soul of Soviet tourism: would it take on the
socialist, voluntary form of the Society for Proletarian Tourism or the more
commercial, business-like functions of Sovetskii Turist?- KP , 11 January 1929; 26 January 1929; 6 April 1929; GARF, f. A-2306, op. 69, d. 1826,
ll. 27–40; Biulleten' Tsentral'nogo Soveta Obshchestva Proletarskogo Turizma , no. 1 (1929):
11–14. - GARF, f. A-2306, op. 69, d. 1826, ll. 18–19; d. 2068, ll. 22, 19–20; KP , 12 December
1929; Turist-aktivist , no. 7 (1931).