74 Chapter 2
techniques. The magazine also offered detailed patterns for constructing
rucksacks, tents, and kayaks. In the absence of other handbooks, On Land
and On Sea had become the scouting manual for the independent tourism
movement. It also regularly reported on the activities of local tourist organi-
zations, sports societies, and groups of activists. In the late Soviet period, On
Land and On Sea would be fondly remembered for providing a window onto
the wide world of the Soviet Union and beyond. Yet often, in the 1930s, it
found itself “a hair’s breadth from catastrophe” when opponents of indepen-
dent tourism repeatedly tried to close it down.^51
These purists opposed the commercial side of Soviet tourism, the focus on
the planned package itineraries, and they had done so from the start, when
the Society for Proletarian Tourism had fought to eliminate Sovetskii Turist.
But the so-called operative deviation was both popular and profi table. The
income from the sale of planned trips provided the basic source of revenue
fi rst for the OPTE and then for the TEU. Trade unions and their members
preferred to purchase vouchers for these planned tourist excursions rather
than organize their own self-made independent trips. The same critics who
lambasted the TEU for “limiting itself to organizing paid itineraries, selling
putevki and services for tourists,” also demanded that the TEU run its opera-
tions effectively. Critics condemned commercialism, but they also admitted
that only economic effi ciency and profi tability could make tourism widely
available to the proletarian masses.^52The Business of Soviet Tourism
The TEU and tourism activists did not want to think of themselves as
engaging in a business, but the goods and services they intended to provide
required a businesslike approach to their task, and the economics of tourism
constituted a major challenge in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. The Soviet
tourist industry—quintessentially oriented toward service and consump-
tion—emerged at a time when economic priorities emphasized the construc-
tion of gigantic industrial projects, hydroelectric dams, and railroads. At the
same time, the last remnants of the small-scale private service sector had
been forced out of existence. The OPTE and then the TEU needed to cre-
ate from scratch a service industry combining accommodations, catering,- On memories of the journal, see I. I. Sandomirskaia, “Novaia zhizn' na marshe. Sta-
linskii turizm kak ‘praktika puti,’ ” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost' 4 (1996): 163–
172, and Evgeny Dobrenko, “The Art of Social Navigation: The Cultural Topography of the
Stalin Era,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space , ed. Evgeny
Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle, 2003), 163–200. Tourist veterans still spoke wistfully
of the journal in 1965, and nothing replaced it until 1966. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 750 (Cen-
tral Council on Tourism plenum, May 1965), l. 160; NSNM , no. 1 (1939), 27; GARF, f. 9520,
op. 1, d. 69, l. 26. - Biulleten' turista , no. 6 (1930); Turist-aktivist , no. 2 (1932); nos. 11–12 (1932): 23,
50–51; nos. 2–3 (1933); NSNM , no. 12 (1933): 8; no. 11 (1936); no. 5 (1937); no. 7 (1937): 4–5;
12 (1937): 6 (quote); Trud , 12 April 1938; 11 April 1937.