68 Chapter 2
rest homes and sanatoria in 1934, complained OPTE offi cials, but only fi ve
thousand on tourist packages.^39
In its failure to become a mass movement in the 1930s, Soviet tourism did
not differ radically from practices in the developed world beyond its bor-
ders. Tourism and vacations elsewhere remained largely the prerogative of
the elite and upper middle class; the true expansion of mass tourism did not
take place until after the Second World War. In Europe, the labor movement’s
acquisition of paid vacations after 1936 only gradually led to an increase in
leisure travel. Even with special discounts for worker train travel, only 5–10
percent of French people took vacations away from home in the mid-1930s,
deterred by lack of money and the shortage of accommodations but also be-
cause of habit. Tourists in capitalist countries as well as the USSR needed
to be taught how to travel. In the United States, the trade union movement
had expressed little interest in paid vacations as a labor entitlement, focus-
ing instead on shorter hours. Tourist vacations there appealed mostly to the
middle class before the 1950s. In Great Britain, mass vacationing had become
more widespread: one estimate suggests that by 1938 40 percent of adults
took a one-week vacation. British holiday camps made their fi rst appearance
in the 1930s, offering working people a taste of luxury, but their real expan-
sion would come after the war. Nazi Germany, with its Strength through Joy
organization, came closest to achieving mass tourism in the interwar period.
Not only did the group send more than a million tourists a year on its cruises
and package tours, but a robust commercial tourist industry provided ad-
ditional vacation opportunities to members of the German middle class.^40 In
these countries, however, the development of mass tourism could build upon
a partnership of growing demand, a state perception of public good, and a
commercial tourist industry. The Soviet Union lacked the last of these three
criteria, and tourism activists rejected the idea outright.
Underfunded and ill equipped to manage its growing network of tourist
facilities, the OPTE lurched from crisis to crisis. Although created in 1930, the
society did not convene its fi rst (and last) congress until 1932. Here the del-
egates affi rmed the ideological principles of proletarian tourism and agreed
that independent tourism, not package tours, should be the movement’s foun-
dation. They also acknowledged the need to improve facilities and condi-- NSNM , no. 1 (1931): 2; no. 5 (1934): 5; Turist-aktivist , nos. 5–6 (May–June 1932): 17;
KP , 11 May 1934. The fi gure of one million must be taken with a grain of salt, since only
forty-seven thousand citizens utilized health resorts in 1934. - Ellen Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France,
1930s to 1970s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 2 (1998): 247–286; Gary
Cross, “Vacations for All: The Leisure Question in the Era of the Popular Front,” Journal
of Contemporary History 24, no. 4 (October 1989): 599–621; Michael Berkowitz, “A ‘New
Deal’ for Leisure: Making Mass Tourism during the Great Depression,” in Baranowski and
Furlough, Being Elsewhere , 185–212; Aron, Working at Play , 188–204; Christopher M. Kop-
per, “The Breakthrough of the Package Tour in Germany after 1945,” Journal of Tourism
History 1, no. 1 (March 2009): 67–92; Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy, Goodnight Campers!
The History of the British Holiday Camp (London, 1986); Baranowski, Strength through Joy ;
Semmens, Seeing Hitler’s Germany.