Proletarian Tourism 65Expanding the membership base became the most important priority for
the new organization. It noted with pride that by 1929, the Society for Prole-
tarian Tourism, the OPTE’s predecessor, had already grown from a few hun-
dred to 50,000 members, although actual tourists in 1929 already numbered
some 300,000. Acknowledging that the worker membership of the society
remained too low—42 percent in Moscow’s Presnia district and Leningrad,
36 percent in Vladivostok—its leaders announced its plan to enroll 200,000
members in 1930.^30 In Leningrad, offi cials in July 1930 addressed the low
fi gure of 9,318 members by ordering the important proletarian center to re-
cruit 50,000 members by October 1. Through such methods, the organiza-
tion reported 600,000 members by the end of 1931; unafraid to think boldly,
the organization raised its membership goal to 1.5 million for 1932.^31 Not
only would these recruitment efforts promote tourism locally, but members
would now receive fi rst priority for all OPTE excursions, including railway
and steamship discounts, and only members could receive ration books, ra-
tions, and equipment loans for their independent small group trips. Still,
most workers seemed reluctant to become proletarian tourists. They held on
to notions of tourism as “idleness” and “mere amusement,” conceded one
of the society’s offi cials in 1932. A representative from the city of Kalinin
(formerly Tver) admitted that workers did not take the movement seriously.
“Here in Kalinin the word ‘tourist’ has the same force as the word ‘ shalo-
pai ’ [good for nothing] and nobody utters it without laughing.”^32 For these
workers, tourism remained a bourgeois pastime unsuitable for the builders
of socialism.
Moreover, membership involved responsibilities beyond purposeful
tourism. Many OPTE factory cells spent less time touring than carrying
out various Communist Party campaigns, such as fi ghting absenteeism at
work, supporting the spring sowing campaign, fulfi lling the fi ve-year plan,
and studying Comrade Stalin’s letter on Leninism. Why join the Society for
Proletarian Tourism and Excursions when membership in the League of the
Militant Godless, the Society for Aid to Political Prisoners, or Friends of the
Air Fleet brought the same opportunities (and obligations) for public activ-
ism? In fact, it became clear that many of the hundreds of thousands of OPTE
members had little interest in the society but had been signed up by local or-
ganizers in order to pad the membership rolls, and very few of these members
engaged in any tourism at all.^33
- Ibid.; source of the data unknown.
- TsGA SPb, f. 4410, op. 1, d. 19 (OPTE provisional board meetings), l. 18; NSNM , nos.
32–33 (1931): 17; Turist-aktivist , no. 2 (1932): 2. Archival records report 716,700 members
at the start of 1932 and 936,700 a year later. Eva Maurer, Wege zum Pik Stalin: Sowjetische
Alpinisten, 1928–1953 (Zurich, 2010), 432. - NSNM , nos. 31–32 (1932): 2; Turist-aktivist , nos. 2–3 (1933): 5.
- Turist-aktivist , no. 2 (1931), 28; no. 8 (1931): 15–16; no. 9 (1931): 13; nos. 10–11
(1931): 22; no. 1 (1932): 7; no. 2 (1932): 20; nos. 2–3 (1933): 4–5; NSNM , no. 6 (1930): 1–3;
no. 12 (1931): 8; no. 7 (1930), inside front cover; no. 12 (1932): 6; no. 13 (1932): 12; no. 15
(1933): 9. On the compulsory activism of voluntary society members, see Peris, Storming the
Heavens , 157–158.