Soviet Vacations and the Modern World 283
from the constraints of economic scarcities and political control, or did these
moments reinforce loyalty to the regime that provided the opportunities? In
a powerful passage from her 1981 memoir, the former political prisoner and
exile Eugenia Ginzburg explicitly referenced the freely won pleasure that So-
viet vacations and tourism experiences had provided. Recalling her walk to
freedom on the Kolyma highway, she wrote,
When I search my memory for moments of real, unthinking happiness, I can
recall only two. It happened once in Sochi. For no particular reason—simply
that I was twenty-two and waltzing on the veranda of the sanatorium with a
professor of dialectical materialism, who was some twenty-fi ve years older
than I, and with whom our entire class had fallen in love. The second time
I managed to grab the Firebird by the tail was the day I have just described,
February 15, 1947, on the Elgen-Taskan highway in a blizzard.^6
One could equally emphasize the ways in which vacation travel devel-
oped the capabilities of Soviet citizens to act as individuals and to develop
their Soviet selves as modern selves. This too belonged to the regime’s offi -
cial project. The development of a Soviet consumer economy permitted the
exercise of choice, the development of taste, and the utilization of consumer
goods and services to elaborate personal distinction. Soviet tourists and va-
cationers expressed clear preferences about the conditions of their vacations,
and vacation offi cials were expected to respond. “We exist for the consumer,
the consumer does not exist for us.” Even as international travel opened
new perspectives on the benefi ts of travel to see and do, the normative So-
viet vacation remained the sedentary sojourn at a spa or rest home, and dis-
tinctions between rest and tourism persisted throughout the Soviet period.
Consumer choice perpetuated these distinctions. A minority of Soviet vaca-
tioners engaged in active tourist trips, whether for physical exploration or
for organized sightseeing. The expansion of tourist facilities by the 1970s
sought to increase access to the normative stationary holiday facilities, espe-
cially for families. As rest and tourism converged, the ideal Soviet vacation
would be spent in a place something like Sochi, with grand hotels, sun, sea,
activities, good food, and evening pleasures. Even the medical emphasis of
Soviet vacations offered personal value for individuals. If the state benefi ted
from improving the health of its labor force, rest, recuperation, and physical
well-being attracted Soviet citizens as individuals and family members, not
only as workers. MacCannell argues that the tourist stands for “modern-man
in general,” and Soviet tourists also shared in this project through the free
- Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind , trans. Ian Boland, intro. Heinrich Böll (New
York, 1981), 183. For a further exploration of this juxtaposition between pleasure and puni-
tive travel, see Diane P. Koenker, “Pleasure Travel in the Passport State,” in Russia in Motion:
Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850 , ed. John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin (Urbana,
IL, 2012), 235–252.
