Proletarian Tourism 67These fi gures suggest a modest growth in organized tourism in the early
1930s, but they came nowhere near the aspiration for “massiveness” of the
original OPTE. The fl ow of tourists was not trivial, and the number of tourists
on all-union planned tours was comparable to the number receiving kurort
vacations. In 1934, 47,154 resters received kurort putevki, compared with
69,980 tourists on the main routes. For 1935, the planned kurort traffi c was
70,000 individuals, compared with 61,000 package tourists.^37
The OPTE’s grandiose proclamations of success in fact drew critical at-
tention from Communist Party organs. At the start of 1933, On Land and
On Sea reported that nearly 7,000,000 people were now members. “No one
now can say tourism is empty amusement.” But in fact, it was the society’s
coffers that were empty. Paper members provided no revenue. In Ukraine,
which listed 188,500 members in 1933, only 5 percent of these had paid
their dues. Nowhere did more than one-third of reported members actu-
ally pay anything. The mass movement had failed to attract mass participa-
tion. When the Party’s control commission and worker-peasant inspector-
ate investigated OPTE in the summer of 1933, investigators scoffed at the
society’s declaration of millions of members, tens of thousands of factory
cells, 80,000 alpinists, and 100,000 cyclists: “There are no such fi gures in
nature.” To the society’s promise that they would recruit as tourists half of
the entire adult population of the Soviet Union, the investigators asked, “Is
this not magnitogorstroimania?”—a reference to the infl ated boasts concern-
ing the construction of the Urals industrial center, Magnitogorsk. Chasing
after naked numbers had led the society to blatant self-congratulation ( al-
leluevshchina ), fi nancial shortfalls, unrealistic planning, mismanagement,
and embezzlement.^38
Created in 1930 to combine the functions of tourist agency and mass
movement, the OPTE did not adequately perform either of these tasks. The
Komsomol, which had initiated the proletarian takeover of tourism in the
1920s, had transferred its enthusiasm and attention by 1930 to other activi-
ties, such as collectivization. Its press had practically ignored tourism by
the start of 1931, and OPTE activists felt cut off and abandoned. Nor did the
tourist movement enjoy much backing from the trade unions, the institu-
tional bedrock of proletarian society. Local OPTE cells complained that they
received no support, fi nancial or otherwise, from factory organizations for
their tourists. The OPTE center hoped that the central trade union organiza-
tion would purchase tourist putevki and distribute them to enterprises in
much the same way they allocated them to rest homes and sanatoria. But the
unions were slow to salute, ignoring OPTE’s offer of forty thousand putevki
for tourist trips in 1934. The unions planned to send one million workers to
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8 (TEU materials), l. 56; f. 9493, op. 1, d. 30 (putevki materi-
als, 1935), ll. 19ob., 21. - “No one now can say,” NSNM , no. 1 (1933): 2; no. 12 (1933): 14; “There are no such
fi gures,” no. 16 (1933): 4–5.