Proletarian Tourism 63As in other arenas of the cultural revolution of 1928–32, the players could
not be distinguished on the basis of their class or even political positions.
Tourism radicals rallied to Party organs like the Komsomol; state institutions
like Sovtur’s sponsoring Commissariat of Enlightenment emphasized their
administrative credentials. The Moscow Communist Party paper, Vechern-
iaia Moskva , took a populist line that minimized the importance of ideol-
ogy. The battle replicated the intensifying “Great Turn” over Soviet economic
and political policy. By the winter of 1929–30, when all-out collectivization
was raging in the countryside (and Sovtur asked for state funds to develop
collective farm tourist bases!), the Society for Proletarian Tourism and the
Soviet Tourist organization fought head-to-head for the tourism franchise
in the USSR. The proletarian activists stressed their ideological superiority:
“We were for a mass independent proletarian movement, Sovtur was for paid
excursions. We were for cells in enterprises, as the basic center; Sovtur was
for the center to be the excursion base. We were for subordinating business
[ khoziaistvennye ] services to the political tasks of the movement, Sovtur in
practice had raised business to an end in itself.”^26
In March 1930, while Stalin warned his cadres not to become dizzy with
the success of their collectivization effort, the Council of People’s Commis-
sars, encouraged by the Komsomol Central Committee, awarded victory on
the tourist front to the principle of class. Class war had ended, Stalin had
implied, the proletarians had won, and peace should now be restored. The
council ordered the state agency Sovtur to yield to the proletarian tourists,
and a new entity took the stage: the All-Union Voluntary Society for Proletar-
ian Tourism and Excursions (Vsesoiuznoe dobrovol'noe obshchestvo prolet-
arskogo turizma i ekskursii—OPTE). In assuming the identity of a voluntary
organization, Soviet tourism joined a proliferating array of such organiza-
tions, such as the Friends of Children, the Down with Illiteracy Society, and
the League of the Militant Godless, all designed to mobilize segments of the
population for the public good and to promote popular initiative.^27 Under its
new form, the tourism organization would continue to administer and ex-
pand the existing network of excursion itineraries, bases, and transportation
arrangements. It would also use its propaganda resources and local organiza-
tions to make proletarian tourism a truly mass movement, hoping to intro-
duce tens of millions of Soviet toilers to the pleasures of the tourist vacation.
- Turist-aktivist , no. 4 (1932): 10. Collective farm tourism in GARF, f. A-2306, op. 29,
d. 2070, l. 32. - There is an extensive literature on these organizations. Joseph Bradley has explored
the imperial-era voluntary organizations in Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Sci-
ence, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge, MA, 2009). For the Soviet period, see among
others, A. P. Kupaigorodskaia, ed., Dobrovol'nye obshchestva v Petrograde-Leningrade v
1917–1937 gg. (Leningrad, 1989); William E. Odom, The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization
and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization (Princeton, NJ, 1973); Daniel Peris, Storm-
ing the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Charles E.
Clark, Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia (Cranbury, NJ, 2000).