Conclusion
Soviet Vacations and the Modern World
I
nterwar Europe saw the rise of “social tourism,” a particular va-
cation category introduced in 1936 when the International Labor
Organization adopted the Holiday with Pay Convention (Convention No.
52).^1 Social tourism aimed to provide inexpensive and purposeful vacations
for all social classes, but it implicitly privileged the working class, which
could not otherwise afford to engage in leisure travel. In 1936 Popular Front
France enacted the Lagrange Law, which provided for discounted transpor-
tation to vacation destinations, and a network of social tourism institutions
developed, emphasizing collectivism, purpose, and politics. Among them,
the Family Vacation Villages carried the fl ag of social tourism into the post-
1945 period, coming under the leadership of the French Communist Party
in the 1960s and continuing to offer family-centered leisure and collective
social and cultural events.^2
Socialist Yugoslavia also endeavored to provide social tourism opportunities
for its newly enfranchised working class in the late 1940s, offering discount-
ed travel, special accommodation units, and holiday allowances to support
the entrance of lower-income groups into the world of tourism.^3 Even in Yu-
goslavia, social tourism functioned alongside and often in competition with
commercial tourism organizations. In fact, by the early 1950s, it had yielded
to a largely commercial enterprise that targeted foreign visitors above all but
that increasingly came to serve the growing Yugoslavia middle class.^4
In the Soviet Union, from the beginning to the end, all tourism was so-
cial tourism. The state legislated vacation opportunities with the paid an-
nual vacation enacted into law in 1922. It subsidized vacation opportunities
through its provision of facilities, special rates for transportation, and the
social insurance payments administered by the trade unions. In content as
- This information is from the website of the International Organisation of Social Tour-
ism, http://www.bits-int.org/en/index.php?menu=1&submenu=1, which was founded in
1963 to unite independent social tourism organizations from trade unions to work councils. - Cross, “Vacations for All,” 611–612; Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations.”
- Duda, “Workers into Tourists,” 33–68.
- Ibid., 10; Rory Yeomans, “From Comrades to Consumers: Holidays, Leisure Time, and
Ideology in Communist Yugoslavia,” in Grandits and Taylor, Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side , 72.