72 Chapter 2
er of proletarian tourism, promoting its healthful, purposeful, and rigorous
agendas. The most avid proletarian tourist activists had always lauded in-
dependent tourism—especially mountaineering—as its purest, most sublime
form. Alpinists such as Nikolai Krylenko and Lev Barkhash had helped to
lead the proletarian tourism movement in 1927, and alpinism enjoyed a rar-
efi ed status as the most glamorous form of touring: new ascents of diffi cult
peaks became newsworthy items. The sport attracted notable participants
from across the social spectrum: the mathematician Boris Delone, an ardent
mountain climber, would serve in the 1930s as one of the leaders of the new
alpine section under the Central Committee on Physical Culture and Sport.
The sixty-four-year-old “tireless tourist” Maria Preobrazhenskaia, a scientifi c
worker and the fi rst female Russian alpinist, also produced the fi rst Soviet
fi lm on alpinism: she would climb the challenging Mount Kazbek eleven
times before her death in 1932. The chairman of both the Society for Pro-
letarian Tourism and its successor, OPTE, Krylenko, served simultaneously
as the Russian Federation People’s Commissar of Justice. He had earned his
tourism credentials as a notable mountain climber both in the Caucasus and
in exploratory expeditions in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. Prole-
tarian tourism extended the opportunity to test oneself in the mountains to
“sons of the working class,” who went to the mountains not for the bourgeois
purpose of escaping from life but to “strengthen their will, learn how to sub-
ordinate their interests to that of the collective, and gather new strength and
impressions.” By 1938 alpinism had become the most “fashionable” form of
tourist activity, and factory organizations and sports clubs increasingly spon-
sored their own alpine training camps. That year, twenty thousand people
participated in organized mountain ascents, by contrast with four thousand
in 1934. Once hooked, alpinists found it diffi cult to return to any other kind
of tourist activity: two university students in 1940 had vowed to trade their
mountain boots for an easy cycling vacation through the Caucasus, but once
in the mountains, they felt the pull of “the mountain disease,” set aside their
bikes, and worked for a month as volunteer instructors in an alpine camp.^46
Local sports clubs and voluntary sporting societies organized within trade
unions, enterprises, and educational institutions would provide the link be-
tween the independent tourist functions of the TEU and the physical culture
committee. With active interests in competitive sports like soccer, these or-
ganizations only grudgingly accepted their new responsibility to organize
tourist sections, and they allocated paltry sums for the purchase of tourist- Eva Maurer, “ Al'pinizm as Mass Sport and Elite Recreation: Soviet Mountaineering
Camps under Stalin,” in Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism
and Socialism , ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 141–162; and
Maurer, Wege zum Pik Stalin ; NSNM , 2 (1937): 25; Desiat' dnei v gorakh , 1930–1940, silent
fi lm, RGAKFD, no. 1863; NSNM , no. 5 (1935): 7; “sons of the working class,” Turist-aktivist ,
nos. 8–9 (1932): 34–35; NSNM , no. 1 (1938): 2, 4; no. 3 (1939): 5; “mountain disease,” Viktor
Korzun, “Gornaia bolezn',” NSNM , no. 9 (1940): 22–23.