66 Chapter 2
Undeterred by any membership gap, the Society for Proletarian Tourism
and Excursions developed plans to expand Soviet tourism along three fronts:
package tours, individual trips, and local outings. Its excursion department
would continue to operate package group tours along the several dozen long-
distance itineraries acquired in the merger with Sovtur. This involved im-
proving and expanding the tourist bases on these routes, supplying them
with food and other necessities, and hiring guides to accompany the groups.
But the small capacities of tourist bases limited the expansion of package
tours. Consequently, the OPTE placed great emphasis on individualized
group travel, the mainstay of the original Society for Proletarian Tourism.
Individual factory cells would lead the effort to promote these kinds of trips
and to prepare members to carry them out. Finally, the OPTE sought to re-
cruit tourists to the cause by promoting “local tourism”—excursions to local
attractions such as museums, parks, and enterprises and one-day outings that
could teach tourist skills as well as provide recreation and escape from the
everyday. The Leningrad organization, for example, announced it had sent
841,000 tourists on local trips in 1931.^34
For most OPTE members, tourism meant long-distance travel. Although
the society proved unable to monitor the extent of independent group tour-
ism because too many groups failed to register their trips and communica-
tions between local cells and the central OPTE council remained weak, it
boldly announced that it planned for 400,000 independent group tourists
in 1931. A more realistic plan four years later called for the accommoda-
tion of 38,000 independent tourists in 1935.^35 Declarations about the scope
of packaged group tours fl uctuated just as wildly in the period, rendering it
impossible to develop any reliable benchmarks for the actual consumption of
tourist travel. According to one source, Sovtur planned to serve 17,390 tour-
ists on packaged routes in 1929, another 16,700 on “mass trips” (generally
trainloads of travelers sent to Moscow or Leningrad), and 47,180 individuals.
Detailed fi gures for package trips in 1930 suggest modest growth: between
23,000 and 25,000 tourists traveled on the “all-union” itineraries sponsored
now by OPTE: 9,250 to Crimea, 9,040 to the Caucasus (of whom 3,500 trav-
eled the Georgian Military Highway), and 4,600 to Moscow and Leningrad.
But in its publicity for the 1931 season, the OPTE contended that 50,000
tourists had traveled the planned routes in 1930 and that it expected to serve
350,000 travelers in 1932!^36 Retrospective data reported in 1937 reveal the
fantasy these plans projected. In 1933, the OPTE hoped to serve 53,400 tour-
ists on its all-union routes, but in the end, only 33,900 tourists actually trav-
eled. The real surge in package tour travel took place in 1934 (perhaps as a
result of the improving food supply situation in the country): 69,980 tourists
traveled the all-union routes in 1934, 61,250 in 1935, and 83,680 in 1936.- NSNM , nos. 22–24 (1932): 4.
- NSNM , no. 13 (1931): 3; NSNM , 1 (1935): 4.
- GARF, f. A-2306, op. 69, d. 1826, ll. 30–32; NSNM , no. 4 (1931): 8; no. 10 (1931): 2–3.