Proletarian Tourism 71The Trade Unions Take Control
The transfer of tourism affairs to the trade unions and physical culture com-
mittees reinforced the principle of mobilization as the primary mechanism
of Soviet socialist construction. Like the now-defunct OPTE, these groups
existed in parallel to the state, designed to organize and serve members at
their place of work. Unlike the OPTE, authorities believed, the trade unions’
superior administrative apparatus and experience would allow them to avoid
the pitfalls of bad management that had thwarted the expansion of Soviet
tourism up until 1936. However, the new trade union tourism administra-
tion, the Tourism-Excursion Authority (Turistsko-ekskursionnoe upravlenie,
TEU) faced the same challenge of the dual tourism mission that OPTE had
confronted earlier. On the one hand, it took on the responsibility to promote
and organize independent, small-group tourism as a form of “mass, cultured
rest of the Soviet working person.” In addition, however, its mission also
included “acquainting the working people with the economy, geography,
natural riches, the gigantic growth of the culture of peoples, and the popu-
lation of the USSR”—in other words, expanding Soviet citizens’ access to
tourist travel and sightseeing as an alternative to the rest home or health spa
vacation. This involved organizing all kinds of tourist travel and excursions,
both independent and packaged; the construction and maintenance of tourist
facilities; coordinating transportation; producing equipment; and conducting
scientifi c research on tourism methodologies.^44 As with the OPTE, this dual
mission pitted the tourism purists—independent travelers themselves who
sought to mobilize millions of other independent travelers—against the man-
agers, who concentrated their efforts on the material logistics of mass travel.
To these managers, often scornfully labeled kommersanty , or “businessmen,”
fell the opprobrious legacy of Sovetskii Turist, along with all the attendant
suspicions of an antiproletarian “commercial deviation.”
Like the Soviet Union, the new Tourism-Excursion Authority was federal
in structure. A central offi ce in Moscow, headed initially by the very same
offi cial who had directed OPTE, set policy, allocated funds, and supervised
a network of regional departments in whose territories were located the so-
called all-union, or national, tourist itineraries.^45 These local departments
bore the responsibility for staffi ng and supplying their bases, developing and
publicizing new local itineraries, and balancing their budgets. They were
also supposed to promote individual mass tourism in their regions, sending
tourists as well as receiving them. This federal structure and regional divi-
sion of labor would persist with minor permutations until the end of the
USSR.
If the trade unions assumed responsibility for the business side of tourism,
the physical culture committee became the ideological leader and organiz-
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 1–1ob.
- Ibid., ll.10, 33, 46.