Soviet Vacations and the Modern World 281well as structure, Soviet tourism and vacations emphasized collectivism, cul-
ture, education, and civic engagement. And if the rising Soviet intelligentsia
benefi ted more than others from the new vacation and tourism culture, by the
1960s and 1970s blue-collar workers in Soviet industry also enjoyed vacation
opportunities, whether in offi cial sanatoria, rest homes, tourist bases, and
cruises or in factory vacation homes, fi shing cabins, and sports camps. Agri-
cultural workers, a much larger category of the population in the USSR than
in the industrial West, still found access to vacations and tourism strange
and diffi cult to obtain. Both remained a prerogative of urban society. Un-
like social tourism in the West, however, Soviet tourism and vacation policy
privileged individuals and adults, who were then formed into collectives.
The idea of “family vacation villages” remained alien to offi cials and unavail-
able to families. The recognition of the demand for family vacations emerged
only grudgingly even in the late Soviet period, and a vacation from family
received support from a large segment of the Soviet public. Most family vaca-
tions took place in the Soviet Union outside the network of organized and
subsidized leisure travel, relying on informal networks and illegal market
relations.
My goal in this book has been to explore how the Soviet regime and its cit-
izens negotiated the search for the good life in the form of leisure travel and
to illuminate the lived experience of people under socialism through their
vacation practices and the meanings that they attached to travel. The Soviet
system, with its communist ideology, its centrally planned economy, and its
particularly harrowing outbreaks of political violence, might seem to refl ect
a unique historical formation, and yet much of the story of Soviet vacations
looks similar to patterns elsewhere in the twentieth-century world. By look-
ing at this history over the long duration of the Soviet regime, what can we
learn about the nature and historical trajectory of the system as a whole? A
history of tourism illuminates some of the factors that led to the regime’s
demise: an economic system that failed to fulfi ll the ever-rising expectations
of its urban consumer public, an unmet yearning for freedom to travel within
and beyond the nation’s borders, growing tensions among ethnic groups and
collectivities that the system failed to integrate. Indeed, there is much more
that tourism might reveal about the encounters among the peoples of the So-
viet Union and the quasi-imperial relationships that exploded in separatist
violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. On the other hand, this history
speaks even more assertively about how the system survived for as long as
it did and about the ways in which the institutions of leisure (among many
others) provided a sense of material and cultural well-being, created cohe-
sive collectives, and satisfi ed to some extent the desires of Soviet people to
expand their horizons.
This history of Soviet tourism and vacations reinforces an approach to
Soviet history that acknowledges its contradictions, its Janus face, and the
ambiguity between a glass half empty and one half full. One could empha-
size ways in which this history illuminates the illiberal aspects of the Soviet