56 Chapter 2
Proletarian Tourism of the Russian Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics
(Obshchestvo proletarskogo turizma RSFSR). “Russian Federation” better
conveyed the expanse of national destinations than “Russia,” explained the
group’s leaders, and although its ranks were open to everyone, the promotion
of proletarian culture constituted its guiding principle. Regional sections
soon appeared in the Soviet Far East, in Azerbaijan, and in the North Cauca-
sus. In Moscow, the Bauman district organization became especially active,
with 1,660 members by 1929. In 1929 the society began to publish a popular
journal, Na sushe i na more (On Land and On Sea) , dedicated to “travel,
adventures, local study, tourism, science fi ction, invention, and discovery.”
Quickly moving beyond simply agitating for mass tourism, the Society for
Proletarian Tourism opened its own shop in Moscow, which sold domestic
and imported tourist equipment, and it began to develop bases for tourists’
overnight stays along the most popular routes in Crimea, the Caucasus, and
elsewhere.^6
The fi rst years of the fi rst fi ve-year plan, from 1928 to 1931, coincided with
a well-known class-based assault on institutions and values deemed bour-
geois: outmoded, lacking vigor (“vegetarian”), and potentially counterrevo-
lutionary. In literature and music, groups labeled themselves “proletarian” in
order to seize control of the ideological ramparts and to obtain a greater share
of state resources to support their art. Critics and scholars have disputed
what characteristics in fact distinguished proletarian music or proletarian
literature from modern, European, or bourgeois art forms, and the meaning
of proletarian tourism was similarly ambiguous.^7 Combining patriotic nation-
building efforts with the development of the self-actualizing individual, the
desire to travel and encounter new people and places constituted a natural
trait of humankind, argued tourism activists, who emphasized the purpose-
ful value of tourism for the country’s citizens. Publications and programmat-
ic statements in the late 1920s and early 1930s emphasized several attributes
of specifi cally proletarian tourism in the USSR, but the boundaries between
“humanistic” and “proletarian” remained fuzzy.- Dolzhenko, Istoriia turizma , 73–77; Na sushe i na more (hereinafter NSNM ), no. 3
(1929): 10; Proletarskii turizm (Iz opyta raboty baumanskogo otdeleniia obshchestva pro-
letarskogo turizma). Materialy k X baumanskoi raikonferentsii VLKSM (Moscow, 1929), 6;
NSNM , no. 3 (1929): 1. A more specialized monthly publication, Turist-aktivist , made its fi rst
appearance in August 1929 as the Bulletin of the Central Council of the Society for Proletar-
ian Tourism ; KP , 15 September 1928 (the Turist store was located at the corner of Kuznetskii
Most and Petrovka, the heart of the city’s fashionable shopping district); KP , 1 May 1929; 28
July 1928; GARF, f. A-2306, op. 69, d. 1826 (Russian Society of Tourists, December 1928–
January 1929), ll. 16–17. - Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Soviet Literature, 1928–32 (New York,
1953); Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington, IN,
1978); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1988); Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and
Power in Early Soviet Russia (University Park, PA, 2004); Michael Gorham, Speaking in So-
viet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb,
IL, 2003).