6 Introduction
ing ancient art and architecture, regain one’s equilibrium in preparation for
the return to work, kindle one’s historical consciousness, and broaden one’s
horizons by leaving one’s village or region to visit exotic locales.”^11
In the Soviet Union, tourism was initially considered suspect precisely be-
cause of its association with play and pleasure. Therefore, early Soviet tour-
ism activists insisted that the only proper form of socialist touring should be
rugged, physical, and ascetic. Bourgeois touring—the package tour and the
hotel with its frivolous comfort—was rejected like so many other bourgeois
practices and labeled typically “petit bourgeois,” meshchanskii. Hotels were
a symbol of this bourgeois practice, and they went unbuilt. Like Western
aristocrats and Henry James, then, early Soviet tourism advocates rejected
normal tourism as vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.^12 Their authentic and socialist tour-
ism would be centered in the tourist base, consisting of economical sleeping
tents with central buildings for meals and cultural activities. The Soviet tour-
ist base well into the 1960s much more resembled a scout camp than Club
Med, let alone a Hilton hotel or an English bed and breakfast.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that such purposeful social-
ist leisure excluded pleasure or that pleasure was an alien emotion in the
USSR. As David Crowley and Susan Reid have argued, “Pleasure was in-
tegral to the utopian promise of communism, based as it was on notions of
future abundance and fulfi llment.”^13 In other words, consumption and plea-
sure constituted twin promises of the Soviet dream. The socialist difference
meant that pleasure would be not only attainable by the elite but accessible
to all citizens as one of the entitlements of the new society. The “right to
rest,” to a vacation, was explicitly enshrined in the 1936 Soviet constitution.
Vacations away from home offered not only a means to restore one’s physical
well-being but also an opportunity to expand one’s store of knowledge and
experience and the chance to inscribe oneself in the nation. Vacation travel
also created emotions of anticipation and excitement; the memories of the
vacation provided retrospective pleasure for an entire year, as the fi tter An-
tonov enthused. Breathtaking vistas, modern cityscapes, abundant food, sea
bathing in warmth and sunlight, exhilarating drives through mountain passes
or motorboat rides along the shore, nightly dances and cinema, and even
the chance for sexual adventure offered a resoundingly sharp break from the
everyday, and holiday experiences produced an outpouring of joyous and
grateful emotions in the comments left by Soviet vacationers and tourists.
This history of vacations and tourism addresses the paradox of socialist
consumption in a society dedicated to industrial achievement by showing- Baranowski, Strength through Joy , 143.
- James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to
Culture, 1800–1918 (New York, 1988); Urbain, L'Idiot du Voyage. - David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, “Introduction: Pleasures in Socialism?,” in Plea-
sures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc , ed. David Crowley and Susan E.
Reid (Evanston, IL, 2010), 3.