80 Chapter 2
As a service industry, tourism required trained and competent staff. A
well-run tourist base employed a full-time manager, bookkeeper, dispatcher,
cook, cultural organizer, and excursion guides. Alpine camps in addition
needed skilled instructors who would train and guide groups through the
mountains. The service and retail trade sectors in the Soviet economy were
notoriously neglected: having chosen to base their planning mechanisms on
the measurement of physical quantities, Soviet planners found service-based
activities diffi cult to administer. Moreover, socialist ideology linked service
and trade to the culture of the petite bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the Soviet re-
gime devoted considerable resources to developing its own “cultured” retail
sector. Socialist consumer culture meant a “modern, rational, and hygienic
retail environment,” with good manners and friendly service. Socialist ser-
vice would be effi cient, trustworthy, and attentive.^65 Cultured trade would
create the cultured consumer. These ideals, however, clashed with the reality
of shortages, the dream world of abundance subordinated to a real world in
which the salesperson or ticket agent enjoyed the power to dispense scarce
commodities according to his or her own whims or self-interest. This short-
age economy encouraged corruption.
Finding, supervising, and retaining capable and honest tourism adminis-
trators and accountants remained a major challenge throughout the 1930s.
Recruiting tour guides constituted an even bigger problem, for this work re-
quired political reliability as well as technical skill. Despite the aspiration of
the OPTE and then the TEU to professionalize their tourist cadres, the work
remained seasonal and tended to attract schoolteachers and students with
long vacations, or “random” people weary of city life who found jobs in tour-
ism as a short-term break from other occupations. The 1932 OPTE congress
dreamed of professionalization, proposing a technical school and university
programs to train excursion leaders. Periodic conferences of guides also at-
tempted to promote standardized political content and effective pedagogical
practice. Under the TEU, supervision of excursion work began to be sys-
tematized in a special methods department: as part of their training and ap-
plication for certifi cation, tour guides had to submit their written lectures
( besedy ) for review. These were carefully scrutinized for political, cultural,
and geographical correctness. A lecture on the Volga River, for example, “in-
correctly” referred to the ancient route between Bulgaria and Persia: it would
be better to use the term “Iran.” And the lecturer forgot to mention that Lenin
had been born on the Volga.^66
The fi ne line between socialist profi tability and crass commercialism
found a refl ection in the distinctive marketing strategy of Soviet tourism.- Amy E. Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the
1930s (Houndmills, UK, 2008), 39 (quote), 57, 95; Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet
Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, NJ, 2004). - Turist-aktivist , nos. 2–3 (1933): 20; NSNM , no. 5 (1935): 4; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 12
(lectures for the Seliger tourist base, 1938–39), ll. 16, 19.