82 Chapter 2
Promoting an unfamiliar leisure activity, tourism activists needed to create a
demand for their product, but these efforts took the form of agitation and pro-
paganda rather than commercial advertising. Early efforts to encourage tour-
ism adopted a mobilization strategy: the initial Society for Proletarian Tour-
ism followed the established Soviet pattern of exhortation and campaigns
to recruit its planned millions of proletarians into the tourism movement.
The promotional efforts of Sovetskii Turist consisted of publishing guides to
summer itineraries; it also produced posters listing itineraries for more tar-
geted audiences like textile workers and metal workers.^67 Words dominated
over images: informational and educational, the posters defi ned terms and
explained the methods of the tourist movement. The OPTE relied above all
on its members to spread the word about tourism through local exhibits in
factory clubs, evenings of reports of trips, and displays of OPTE activities in
public places like the Park of Culture and Rest. These messages promoted
proletarian tourism as an integral part of becoming a new Soviet person.
Journalism provided most of tourism’s publicity in the 1930s, including
daily newspapers like Vecherniaia Moskva with its regular “Tourist Corner”
column, but the tourist movement’s own magazine offered the most com-
prehensive coverage of this new leisure activity. Through stories, reports,
and photographs of Soviet tourists in exotic locations, On Land and On Sea
invited readers to share in the fulfi lling experience of active leisure. Else-
where in the Soviet economy, consumer advertising consciously adopted
Western forms in order to create a fantasy of what the socialist society was
becoming.^68 Soviet tourism seldom ventured into this form of marketing.^69
Formal newspaper advertisements of tourist travel did not begin until the
late 1930s, but even then they were primarily informational, inviting factory
committees, for example, to purchase tourist putevki for their workers. A
small drawing of a Black Sea shoreline (with palm tree) provided the only
visual hook. Occasional advertisements from the Moscow offi ce of the TEU,
adorned with small drawings of mountains, shoreline, or sailboats, invited
purchases of putevki on the standard itineraries. Although the TEU enjoyed
a theoretical monopoly on the Soviet domestic tourist business, the shipping
fl eet and Inturist also sought customers for their cruises and tourist hotels
through advertising.^70- Sovetskii Turist, Marshruty ekskursii na leto 1929 goda ; Sovetskii Turist, Marshruty
ekskursii po SSSR na leto 1930 goda ; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 3a (Sovetskii Turist excursion
posters). - Randi Cox, “All This Can Be Yours! Soviet Commercial Advertising and the Social
Construction of Space, 1928–1956,” in Dobrenko and Naiman, Landscape of Stalinism , 125–
- An exception is a 1930 postcard, issued in an edition of one million, advertising
Black Sea voyages on Sovtorgfl ot ships. George V. Shalimoff and George B. Shaw, Catalogue
of Propaganda-Advertising Postal Cards of the U.S.S.R. 1927–1934 , ed. Jean R. Walton (Nor-
folk, VA, 2002), 53. - Vecherniaia Moskva , 14 May 1938; 8 June 1938; 26 June 1938; 31 July 1938; 7 March,
1938; 19 March 1938; 15 November 1938.