Proletarian Tourism 55less youth, epitomized in the trial of several dozen young Leningrad workers
for a notorious gang rape in Chubarov Alley, the newspaper Komsomol'skaia
pravda called for a new form of leisure travel, Soviet mass tourism: “What
is tourism? It is travel... you see what you have never seen before, and this
opens your eyes, you learn, you grow.... And then you go back to the city, to
work, to struggle, but the time has not passed in vain: you have become stron-
ger and richer. This is tourism.”^3 The Komsomol Central Committee devoted
minimal attention to the project, but its small coterie of tourism enthusiasts
worked to propagate the idea of proletarian tourism through newspaper ar-
ticles and handbooks. Trade union organizations only reluctantly jumped on
the tourism bandwagon. One union offi cial believed that a society for mass
tourism would appeal only to the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, citing the
fact that in 1926 even among trade union members traveling on Narkompros
tours, only 17 percent were “workers.”^4
As isolated groups of young tourists began to journey on their own, seek-
ing state assistance, the Komsomol proposed creating a bureau of tourism
and excursions to promote their travel. Despite its concern that this move-
ment might be exploited by “reactionary groups of the old intelligentsia,”
the Komsomol Central Committee nonetheless decided in June 1927 that this
movement was still too weak to justify creating an independent mass tourism
society. Local activists took matters into their own hands. Komsomol'skaia
pravda had already published regular reports on how to be a tourist through-
out 1927. Building on this momentum, a Komsomol group centered in Mos-
cow decided to take over the prerevolutionary Russian Society of Tourists
by fl ooding its ranks with new, progressive members. When the society held
a general meeting in December 1927, the activists had enrolled enough new
members to vote the old board of directors out of offi ce. The Komsomol cen-
ter now dropped its plans to organize a separate voluntary tourism society
and agreed that the newly democratized Russian Society of Tourists could
become the basis of mass tourism in the Soviet Union.^5
Student and worker youth provided the core of the new society. From
cells within educational institutions and industrial enterprises came the so-
ciety’s mainstay—small independent groups of tourists who embarked on
trips through mountain and river landscapes. The largest number of members
(twelve thousand by one estimate) resided in Moscow, and in January 1929
its conference decided to change the organization’s name to the Society for
- KP , 16 December 1926. See Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthu-
siasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 170–176. The Chubarov Alley trial
began on 16 December 1926. - RGASPI, f. M-1, op. 4, d. 29 (Komsomol secretariat, 1927), ll. 97, 113–118, 126–132;
Bergman, Pervaia kniga, 182; this handbook was issued by the Komsomol publishing house.
See Koenker, Republic of Labor , 280–283, on the echoes of the movement in the trade union
press. - RGASPI, f. M-1, op. 4, d. 29, ll. 97, 115–118, 126; KP , 10 December 1927; Turist-
aktivist , no. 4 (1932): 8–9; RGASPI, f. M-1, op. 3, d. 44 (Komsomol bureau, 1928), l. 3; f. M-1,
op. 4, d. 34 (Komsomol secretariat, 1928), ll. 203, 207.