274 Chapter 7
at pioneer camps had yielded by the 1980s to the nuclear family vacation.
A Krasnodar survey reported in 1985 that 80 percent of the tourists at their
bases favored the further expansion of family tourism, and only 9 percent
preferred to send their children to pioneer camps. It is diffi cult to disen-
tangle the factors behind this preference without further exploration of the
pioneer camp itself. Catriona Kelly has suggested that the political content
of these camps had become muted by the 1960s, while the physical facilities
remained primitive.^33 So the strong preference for family vacations by the
1970s suggests not a rejection of ideology, which had already dissipated, but
the primacy of the Soviet family unit as an agent of consumption, pleasure,
and discovery. In this respect, too, Soviet tourism had converged with Soviet
spas and with tourism in the rest of the developed world.- Trud, 25 October 1975; 13 February 1981; Turist, no. 7 (1981): 20–21; A. Ivashchenko,
“Izuchaem spros,” Turist, no. 8 (1985): 6; Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in
Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT, 2007), 556–560.
Family camping at the Novo-Afonskoi tourist base, Abkhaziia, Georgian SSR, 1971. Photograph
by M. Al'pert. RGAKFD g. Krasnogorsk, no. 1–1650tsv. Used with permission of the archive.