The Modernization of Soviet Tourism 273rest, she insisted.^31 This foreign resort travel helped to validate the notion
that rest and tourism need not be separate experiences: one could claim the
tourist label even if the travel destination was the beach.
The ultimate convergence between tourism and spa vacations can be seen
in the acknowledgment of the popularity of family tourist vacations and the
expansion of facilities for parents and children to travel together. As chapter
5 has shown, kurort offi cials objected to serving families. The movement to
include children on mobile tourist itineraries found even more resistance
because they were felt to be unable to handle the rigors of a hiking or boating
trip. As tourism and rest began to converge at the end of the 1960s, the need
to create conditions for family tourism vacations fi nally received support in
the 1969 decision to expand the scope of tourism facilities. Tourism offi cials
received instructions to accept children over the age of twelve on designated
itineraries, at the same price as adults, with the added stipulation that en-
terprises and trade unions should subsidize 50 percent of the price. Yet well
into the 1970s, despite offi cial instructions from above, tourist administra-
tors would still lament that “it was time” to resolve the question of family
tourism, to build new bases that would adapt to the needs of children. The
number of bases and itineraries taking children had expanded by 1974, with
300,000 parents and children traveling on all-union routes, and children over
twelve were now permitted on all train and boat trips. But in the same year,
a total of 13,218,000 travelers used tourist base facilities. Moreover, the pric-
ing structure for tourist putevki continued to discriminate against the family
vacation. The head of the Ukraine tourism council described the case in Yalta
in which an “autotourist” arrived at the base, registered his documents, and
received his key. Only then did he open his trunk, and “out popped two chil-
dren, hidden there during the registration process.”^32
Regardless of the expense, however, Soviet parents increasingly wanted to
“take the whole family on vacation,” as the 1957 poster had exhorted long be-
fore offi cial policy caught up (see chapter 6). The Krasnodar regional tourist
authority, whose mandate included both Sochi and the pioneer camp–wild
tourist complex at Anapa, opened the doors of eleven pansions and fourteen
tourist bases to families in 1975 as “an experiment.” Contrary to fears that
children would spoil the vacations of adults, the study found that all age
groups coexisted nicely as long as they were given the proper allocation of
space. In 1981, eleven tourist bases and hotels from Abkhaziia to Minsk “ex-
perimentally” offered spaces for parents and children as young as fi ve years
old. Opening tourist bases to families could even improve the moral climate,
argued the chairman of the Vladimir oblast tourism council. The older pat-
tern of parents vacationing individually and the children spending summers
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 491, l. 106; d. 421 (group leader reports, 1961), l. 20.
- Trud, 15 March 1969; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1910, l. 316; d. 2077 (central tourism
council plenum, April 1975), ll. 20, 57; Trud, 4 August 1973; Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v
1974 godu (Moscow, 1975), 617.