106 Chapter 3
for administrative personnel.^46 The cost of tourism rose faster than average
earnings during the 1930s, putting proletarian tourism increasingly out of the
reach of proletarians.
By far the most popular destinations lay in the south, the same mountain
and coastal areas that had attracted spa visitors in the imperial period and
that offered the most desirable health resort locations to Soviet vacationers.
Refl ecting on the 1930 tourist season, an OPTE offi cial acknowledged that
“the pull to the south” still prevailed: 36 percent of that season’s tourists
took one of the Crimean itineraries, and 35 percent chose the Caucasus. Of
the nine thousand Caucasus tourists, all but one thousand chose the well-
trodden military highways. In other words, 70 percent of Soviet tourists in
1930 followed the Crimean and Caucasus itineraries that accounted for 35
percent of the total possible destinations. The Crimean trips took tourists to
the main southern coast cities such as Yalta and Bakhchisarai; variations in-
cluded hiking trips in the Crimean Mountains, visits to the eastern or south-
eastern portions of the peninsula, and specialized agricultural or industrial
tours. In the Caucasus in 1930, nine routes traversed the military highways.
The ambitious itinerary number 51 took more adventurous tourists to the
foot of Mount Elbrus; other routes could be traveled entirely by automobile
or horse-drawn bus, but hiking through the scenic valleys and ravines was
a large part of the experience. For the truly sedentary, itineraries 59 and 60
offered steamship cruises along the coast from Crimea to the Georgian Black
Sea port of Batumi. By 1938, these routes had diversifi ed in signifi cant ways.
The industrial and agricultural tours disappeared completely, as did special-
ized itineraries for tourists from Siberia or Ukraine. Only two Caucasus itin-
eraries featured the military highways, but many more tours offered tourists
the opportunity to base themselves in one of the coastal resort towns and to
take day trips to the surrounding attractions.^47 These packages increasingly
emulated the sedentary spa vacation.
After the Crimea and the Caucasus-Black Sea coast, Moscow and Lenin-
grad constituted the third most popular set of destinations, attracting 18 per-
cent of group tourists in 1930. As the capital and nerve center of the Soviet
state, Moscow combined revolutionary history, socialist progress, and world
culture, and tourists could select their own local itineraries to suit their inter-
ests. A 1930 Sovtur guidebook recommended that they include a general city
tour on their itineraries, along with excursions to revolutionary museums,
industrial enterprises, and art museums. As the reconstruction of Moscow
gathered momentum in the fi rst and second fi ve-year plans, tangible attrac-
tions of socialist progress, such as the metro and the All-Russian Agricul-
tural Exhibition, came to dominate the Moscow tourist itinerary. For many- Sovetskii Turist, Marshruty ekskursii na leto 1929 goda ; Trud v SSSR. Statisticheskii
spravochnik (Moscow, 1936), 16–17; NSNM , no. 9 (1935): 2. - NSNM , no. 4 (1931): 8; Sovetskii Turist, Marshruty ekskursii na leto 1930 goda ;
Puteshestviia po SSSR , 206–212.