Proletarian Tourism 75specialized equipment, transportation, and skilled service personnel. This
industry had to be cost-effective, but it could not be commercial. It needed
to provide qualitative services in an economy measured by material units of
output. Coping with these contradictions and their own inexperience, tour-
ism offi cials failed to compete successfully with their vacation counterparts
in the medical leisure sector.
Providing accommodations for the tourist on the road generated one of the
greatest challenges for the young tourist movement and the tourist agencies.
The Soviet Union had inherited few hotels from its tsarist predecessor; in the
big cities, these had been converted to residences to augment scarce housing.
In the primary tourist destinations of Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea
coast, health resorts controlled the most attractive housing stock. Independent
tourists could bypass the problem of housing by carrying their own tents and
sleeping bags, or they were encouraged to seek inexpensive lodging with in-
habitants of the territory through which they traveled. Hosts and guests would
mutually educate one another.^53 In Moscow and Leningrad, the Commissariat of
Enlightenment had organized hostels for teachers who visited during their sum-
mer vacations. Tourists could receive a cot for fi fty kopecks a day in Moscow or
a cot plus bedding, three meals, and excursions around the city for two rubles,
eighty kopecks. Sovetskii Turist had offered visitors to Leningrad their choice of
a place in the newly acquired Mariinskii Palace, at eighty kopecks a day with-
out meals, or in the House of the Excursionist, a four hundred-bed dormitory,
for sixty kopecks. Construction of a grandiose nine-story tourist center at Smo-
lenskaia Square in Moscow had been a priority of the OPTE before its demise.^54
Sovetskii Turist reported in 1929 that it operated one hundred bases ac-
commodating ten thousand tourists for the summer season: most of these
consisted of rented school buildings, and they were available only during
the months of the school holidays. Noting that European governments gave
credits to tourist fi rms to build hotels, Sovetskii Turist offi cials proposed
that state subsidies for constructing a network of inexpensive tourist hotels
would help to attract foreign travelers and their hard currency. The rival pro-
letarian tourism society also organized its own tourist bases, most consisting
of tent camps in the popular tourist regions of Crimea and the Caucasus.^55
By 1932, the now-combined OPTE announced it had opened nearly three
hundred bases, some in its own buildings and others leased from government
organizations. In most of the bases, a few permanent structures provided ser-
vices such as dining facilities, while the tourists slept on cots in large and
crowded tents.
- Bergman, Otdykh letom , 55; Bergman, Pervaia kniga , 23–24; Proletarskii turizm , 93,
102; A. Vlasov, “Dargkokh-Sochi na velosipede,” NSNM , no. 10 (1935): 8; A. and M. Vlasov,
“Po goram i stepiam Kavkaza,” NSNM , no. 3 (1938): 7. - Sputnik ekskursanta-prosveshchentsa po Moskve (Moscow, 1928), 5–7; Putevoditel'
po Leningradu (Leningrad, 1929), 18–19; NSNM , 25 (1932): 15; 7 (1936): 26. - GARF, f. A-2306, op. 69, d. 2070, l. 10; NSNM , no. 6 (1929), inside front cover; NSNM ,
no. 21 (1930), inside front cover.