Proletarian Tourism 79A tourist hotel on the slopes of Mount Elbrus, at an elevation of 4,200 meters,
opened in 1939, with central heating, electricity, water, and space for one hun-
dred tourists. By the start of 1940, the TEU boasted of new bases at the Tolstoy
estate in Yasnaia Poliana, in polar Murmansk, and at the Borodino battlefi eld
outside Moscow. By May 1941, the TEU had opened more than one hundred
new tourist bases and tent camps, with a daily capacity of ten thousand, and
had upgraded dozens of the best tourist bases in Crimea, Kiev, Peterhof, and
the Caucasus to “comfortable tourist hotels.”^63 Just as with spa vacations, by
the end of the 1930s, Soviet tourism had begun to assert its more pleasurable
side. It is hard to evaluate the effi ciency of the tourist operation, but the sub-
stantial infusion of capital after 1937 produced a noticeable expansion.
TEU did less well in other areas of the tourist economy: transportation
and staff. As with food supply, the movement of tourists depended on the
allocation of passenger spaces by other agencies, notably the railway com-
missariat. Guidebooks listed the relevant railway timetables, but tourists
needed to book and pay for their own transportation. The commissariat
ended its discounts for tourist travel in 1932, despite the appeals of tourism
advocates. Finding a place on a train even at full price proved to be one of
the banes of Soviet tourist travel, before and after the war. Round-trip tickets
did not exist: tourists could not book their return trip until they had arrived
at their destination, and they might wait for days before they could exchange
their paid receipt for an actual place on a train. Overbooking was standard
practice, both on the railways and on passenger steamships on the Black Sea
route from Odessa to Batumi. The trade union tourist organization found it
unsurprising that 81 percent of tourist complaints in 1937 concerned prob-
lems with transportation. Locally, tourists depended upon buses and tour-
ing cars to take them from place to place. Here too shortages ruled the day.
Since buses seldom ran according to schedule, sometimes the most scenic
parts of the journey along the Georgian Military Highway were navigated af-
ter dark. In the absence of buses, some tourists made their journeys in open
trucks; others were forced to walk 150 kilometers on foot when their sched-
uled bus failed to appear. The lack of automobile transport also hampered
local excursions. Even in 1940, the TEU had only thirteen motor parks, with
69 buses and 118 automobiles, to serve its 130 tourist bases and 143,000
tourists.^64
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8, l. 37; d. 39, l. 163; Trud , 22 October 1937; NSNM , no. 11
(1937): 30. The hotel received extensive publicity in the Soviet press, a sign of the prestige
of Soviet alpinism and the regime’s commitment to tourism, but as a business venture its
operating expenses of seventy-fi ve rubles per person per day were unsupportable. Instead,
the TEU leased most of the hotel to the Academy of Sciences as a research base. NSNM ,
no. 6 (1940); Trud , 30 March 1940; 24 May 1941. - NSNM , no. 10 (1931): 2; no. 15 (1932); nos. 28–30 (1932): 31; Heeke, Reisen zu den
Sowjets, 278; Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomii, f. 7458, op. 1, d. 2885 (river pas-
senger service conference, September 1936), l. 14ob.; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 8, l. 12; Trud ,
27 August 1939; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 39, l. 53.