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“There’s No Place Like Home”: Soviet Tourism in Late Stalinism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anne E. Gorsuch
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Abstract

In this article, Anne E. Gorsuch explores the nature and meaning of tourism in the difficult and hungry years of late Stalinism. In this period of Cold War anxiety, tourism was seen as a means of reinforcing Soviet identity. Moscow was a particular focus of Soviet patriotic education, but tourism also contributed to the construction of Soviet identity on the larger collective level of the Soviet Union. Tourism was also offered as part of the cultured "good life" due loyal Soviet citizens. In every case, tourists were reminded that it was only within the borders of the socialist homeland that Soviet citizens could let down their guard and be confident of a warm welcome.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 4: Tourism and Travel in Russia and the Soviet Union , Winter 2003 , pp. 760 - 785
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

I would like to thank Diane Koenker and Susan Reid for their constructive criticism and encouragement. An early version of this article was presented at the workshop “Observing and Making Meaning: Understanding the Soviet Union and Central Europe through Travel” at the University of Toronto and I am grateful to the organizer, Susan Solomon, and to the participants for their suggestions. I would also like to thank the participants and audiences at seminars and lectures where I presented various versions while on sabbatical in England, including St Antony’s College, Oxford; the Oxford Russian Graduate Seminar; the School for Slavonic and East European Studies; the London School of Economics; the University of Birmingham Centre for Slavic and East European Studies; and the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield.

1 This, of course, evokes George Kennan’s famous arguments in 1946 and 1947 about “containment.” In addition to containing an external threat, Kennan noted that a “diplomatic victory” also depended on the United States’ ability to “improve [the] selfconfidence, discipline, morale, and community spirit” of its own people. Kennan, George, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (New York, 1967), 559.Google Scholar

2 Vokrugsveta, no. 1 (January 1946): 63; Vokrugsveta, nos. 3–4 (March-April 1946): 16, 20, inside back cover; Vokrugsveta, no. 7 (July 1946): 48–51.

3 Vokrugsveta, no. 1 (January 1947): 2–4; Vokrugsveta, no. 9 (September 1947): 2–3, 8–11. On Zhdanov, see English, Robert D., Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000), 46–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Nikita Khrushchev, in his memoirs, described his ignorance about the west with evident frustration: “We'd been cut off, we didn't know anything.” Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, 1970), 79.

4 Later issues returned to international portrayals, but often for propaganda purposes. Articles from 1950 about Italy and Cuba described the horrible effects of American policy on these countries. Vokrug sveta, no. 4 (April 1950): 13–14; Vokrug sveta, no. 7 (July 1950): 10-16.

5 On Soviet views of America, see Brooks, Jeffrey, “The Press and Its Messages: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Rabinowitch, Alexander, and Stites, Richard, eds., Russia in the Era o/NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, 1991)Google Scholar, and Brooks, , “Official Xenophobia and Popular Cosmopolitanism in Early Soviet Russia,” American Historical Revieiu 97, no. 5 (December 1992): 1431–48;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Denise Youngblood, “Americanitis: The Amerikanshchina in Soviet Cinema,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 19, no. 4 (Winter 1992); English, Russia and the Idea of the West.

6 The need for further research on tourism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe is specifically mentioned in an excellent recent book, Baranowski, Shelley and Furlough, Ellen, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, 2001), 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 The Society of Proletarian Tourism (OPT) was founded under the initiative of the Komsomol in the late 1920s following the liquidation of the (still functioning) prerevolutionary Russian Society of Tourists. It coexisted unhappily with the joint-stock company Soviet Tourist, run through the Commissariat of Education. In 1930 these two battling groups were combined to form the All-Union Voluntary Society of Proletarian Tourism and Excursions (OPTE). The travel journal, Na sushe i na more (On land and on sea) was extremely popular in the 1930s until it was closed in 1941. See Diane P. Koenker, “Good Travel and Bad: Creating the Proletarian Tourist” (paper presented at the workshop, “Observing and Making Meaning: Understanding the Soviet Union and Central Europe through Travel,” University of Toronto, 18-20 October 2002); I. I. Sandomirskaia, “Novaia zhizn’ na marshe: Stalinskii turizm kak ‘praktika pviti,’” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, no. 4 (1994); B. B. Kotel'nikov, ed., Sputnik lurista, 2d ed. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1941), 6–7.

8 N. Makarov, “For Mass Touring,” Trud, 27 May 1951, 4, in Current Digest of the Soviet Press (hereafter CDSP) 3, no. 21 (7 July 1951): 28.

9 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF), f. 9520, op. 1 (Central Soviet for Tourism and Excursions). Also useful were GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, 2 (Central Administration for Spas and Sanatoria) and Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 1, op. 47 (Komsomol records on the development of youth tourism). Also see the collection of archival documents in Kiselev et al, A. A.., Moskva poslevoennaia, 1945-1947: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 2000).Google Scholar

10 Koshar, Rudy, German Travel Cultures (Oxford, 2000), 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze, 2d ed. (London, 2002), 2–3.Google Scholar

12 On the distinction sometimes made between the “mass” tourist and the “sophisticated“ and superior traveler, see, for example, James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford, 1993).Jean-Didier Urbain introduced the question of tourism’s relationship to the “vacation.” See Jean-Didier Urbain, Sur la plage: Moeurs et coutumes balnéaires XlXe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1994). On this point, see also Löfgren, Orvar, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 252,11. 2–4 (touristjournals, 1952).

14 Trud, 29 February 1952, 4, in CDSP4, no. 9 (12 April 1952).

15 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 252,11. 2–3.

16 Ibid., II. 2–9, 13–16.

17 Efremov, Iu., “Kvoprosy o kul'ture turizma,“in Turistskietropy (Moscow, 1958), 12.Google Scholar Much of the practical work of tourism was led by local tourist, sports, mountaineering, and Komsomol groups. See, for example, RGASPI, f. 1, op. 47, d. 424,1. 29, and Sbomik materialovpo turizmu (Moscow, 1958), 158–61.

18 Geldern, James von, “The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s,” in White, Stephen, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, Eng” 1992), 71.Google Scholar

19 Aksakoff, Serge, Years of Childhood, trans. Duff, J. D. (London, 1916), 7–8.Google Scholar

20 McCannon, John, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932-1939 (New York, 1998), 83.Google Scholar

21 Arkhangel'skaia, O., Kak organizoval’ turistskoeputeshestvie (Moscow, 1947), 4, 6.Google Scholar

22 Fedenko, I.I., Volga — velikaia russkaia reka (Moscow-Leningrad, 1946), 35.Google Scholar

23 Dobkovich, V. V., Turizm v SSSR (Leningrad, 1954), 10.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 11.

25 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 252,1. 2. Tourism had a toughening quality. The trip recorder of one extremely rainy hike insisted that “everything went well” and that “nobody paid any attention to [the pouring rain].” Of special note was the “fortitude” of the girls. In Moscow, “all of the girls would have sheltered under newspapers or umbrellas, but here they paid no attention.” Ibid., 1.14. Others were more honest about the dampening effects of rain. Ibid., 1.30.

26 von Geldern, “The Centre and the Periphery,” 71.

27 Steinbeck, John, A Russian Journal (London, 1949), 37.Google Scholar

28 Urry, Tourist Gaze.

29 Ibid., 128.

30 Arkhangel'skaia, Kak organizovat'turistskoe puteshestvie, 32.

31 von Geldern, “The Centre and the Periphery,” 71.

32 Zelenko, G. A., “Chto takoe turizm,” in Turistskie tropy (Moscow, 1958), 8.Google Scholar

33 At least one observer condemned rest homes as places of slothful indulgence: A “young, healthy man whose organism craves physical activity … falls into the hothouse environment of a dom otdykha where he spends idiotic … numbing hours of fattening and obesity, putting on weight.” GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 69, 1. 7 (transcript of a 1948 Tourist-Excursion Bureau meeting about the development of mass tourism). The supposed “hothouse“ environment of the resthomes may refer to their reputation as places of illicit sexual encounter, fostered in part because husbands and wives so rarely traveled together due to the challenges of obtaining authorized passes for the same tourist base or rest home. This was true for both rest homes and sanatoria before the war. See Leder, Mary M., My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back (Bloomington, 2001), 121, 132-33.Google Scholar Anna Rotkirch explores the possibilities tourism and business trips provided for intimate encounters and private space from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Information is insufficient to confirm whether the same was true for certain in the postwar period. Rotkirch, Anna, “Traveling Maidens and Men with Parallel Lives—Journeys as Private Space during Late Socialism,” in Smith, Jeremy, ed., Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture (Helsinki, 1999).Google Scholar

34 GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 302, 11. 64–76, 106–8, 143–45 (medical reports on how to heal various conditions). In 1937 there were more than 60,000 All-Union and republic health resorts of various kinds. GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 3,1.1 (report on desired expansion of kurorty). During the war, those health resorts that were not destroyed in the fighting served as hospitals for wounded soldiers and civilians. Health resorts were also slowly rebuilt as part of postwar reconstruction efforts.

35 On sanatoria as vacation resorts in the late imperial period, see McReynolds, Louise, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, 2003) ,171.Google Scholar On the same in the 1930s, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), 246n50.Google Scholar

36 See, for example, Hingley, Ronald, Under Soviet Skins: An Untourist’s Report (London, 1961), 45.Google Scholar In 1919 the new Soviet state published a decree on sanatoria and health resorts that nationalized prerevolutionary resorts and opened them to a wider public. Special sanatoria for the cultural and political elite, including members of the Academy of Sciences and the Union of Soviet Writers, still existed, however. In the 1970s, the “thirteenth month” bonus Soviet elites took home was sometimes called “hospital” or “cure” money. Kurashov, S. V., Gol'dfail', L. G., and Pospelova, G. N., eds., Kurorty SSSR (Moscow, 1962), 10–11;Google Scholar Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 101; Matthews, Mervyn, Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite Life-Styles under Communism (London, 1978), 36.Google Scholar

37 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 24, 1. 85 (1945 report on the status and expansion of tourist facilities).

38 Ibid., 11. 87–89. In 1940, there were 35 regional authorities of the Central Trade Union Tourist-Excursion Bureau, 113 houses of tourism and tourist bases, and 3 enterprises for producing special tourist equipment. The Tourist-Excursion Bureau claimed to have provided tours of museums and other places of cultural-historical interest in the countryside and in cities for more than two million people. Ibid., 11. 85–86.

39 GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 302,1. 56 (medical inspection of a kurort), and op. 2, d. 3, 11. 6–7 (report on sanatoria). There were organizational struggles as well. See Kurashov, Gol'dfail', and Pospelova, eds., Kurorty SSSR, 12. See also Dvornichenko, V. V., Razvitie turizma v SSSR (1917–1983gg.) (Moscow, 1985), 40.Google Scholar Some tourism did continue during the war. According to Trade Union records, in 1943 there were 1,402 excursions in areas unaffected by the war, with 287,827 people participating. Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR, 41.

40 “Informatsiia orginstruktorskogo otdela MGK VKP(b) G.M. Popovu— o rabote fabrichno-zavodskikh klubov,” in Kiselev etal., Moskvaposlevoennaia, 646–47.

41 The railroad authorities were unprepared, for example, for the enormous number of people using the trains simply to return home in 1946 and 1947. Hunter, Holland, “Successful Spatial Management,” in Linz, Susan, ed., Thelmpacl of World War II on The Soviel Union (Totowa, N.J., 1985), 55–56.Google Scholar

42 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 69,1. 8.

43 Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, 120.

44 Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR, 44. Soviet experts admitted that not every worker could afford to pay for a trip, especially to places other than the discounted rest homes. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 69,1. 29.

45 Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR, 44.

46 As cited in Zubkova, Elena, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1951, trans. Ragsdale, Hugh (New York, 1998), 42.Google Scholar

47 Interview by research assistant, Victor Zatsepine, of his great-aunt, June 2001.

48 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Postwar Soviet Society: The ‘Return to Normalcy,’ 1945–1953,” in Linz, ed., The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, 137.

49 Nonetheless, the number of individuals who could be accommodated was still under ten thousand. RGASPI, f. 1, op. 47, d. 412, 1. 11 (1957 Tourist-Excursion Bureau report for TsK KPSS). Tourism expanded most dramatically after Stalin's death. In 1961 there were 297 tourist bases and ten million people were said to have participated in official trips and excursions. RGASPI, f. 1, op. 47, d. 498,1. 4 (1962 protocol of the Central Trade Union on the further development of tourism).

50 Trud, 13 December 1951, 4, in CDSP2, no. 50 (27January 1951): 30.

51 Dobkovich, Turizm v SSSR, 3–4.

52 Aleksandr Shinskii, “Zdravnitsa ugol'shchikov,” Ogonek 38 (September 1947): 23–24. The Komsomol also earmarked places for its members. “Vosem’ tysiach putevok dlia studentov,” hvestiia, 23 May 1946, 1.

53 Dunham, Vera S., In Stalin’s Time: Middle-Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976), 5, 17.Google Scholar

54 According to Irina Corten, the expression tvorcheskaia komandirovka has been in use since the 1930s, referring to authors and other members of the “creative intelligentsia“ who took advantage of official permission and funding to travel to places otherwise unavailable because of cost or location. “Under Stalin, such projects were closely monitored and the unions were held responsible for [the] ideological ‘correctness’ of their members' work. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the system became more lax and was frequendy used as a means of obtaining free vacations.” Corten, Irina H., Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture: A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalinist Era, 1953–1991 (Durham, 1992), 148.Google Scholar

55 Gordey, Michel, Visa to Moscow, trans. Woods, Katherine (London, 1953), 381.Google Scholar Official travelers on state business, including the army colonel and the Komsomol teacher, often stayed in local hotels with their simple rooms, hard beds, and communal sinks in the corridor. Kelly, Marie Noële, Mirror to Russia (London, 1952), 51.Google Scholar

56 Kelly, Mirror to Russia, 195.

57 Corten, Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture, 41.

58 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 307.

59 Kessler, Gijs, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940,” Cahiers du Monde russe 42, nos. 2, 3, and 4 (April-December 2001): 495.Google ScholarPubMed At the same time we also know that registration procedures were selectively (and not always effectively) applied to satisfy the varying policing and purging urges of the regime in different periods. Hagenloh, Paul M., “‘Socially Harmful Elements’ and the Great Terror,” in Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), 286–308.Google Scholar

60 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 310.

61 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 79,1. 108 (1948 report on the Krasnodarsk tourist base).

62 Fitzpatrick, “Postwar Soviet Society,” 130–37.

63 Some soldiers expressed amazement that “over there” was nothing like what they “had been told for so many years before the war“; they discovered that westerners “lived more dignified, richer, and freer lives” than they did. As cited in English, Russia and the Idea of the West, 44. See also Zubkova, Russia after the War, 18, 33.

64 Zubkova, Russia after the War, 105–6.

65 Smith, Walter Bedell, Moscow Mission 1946–1949 (London, 1950), 280.Google Scholar

66 As summarized by Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR, 46.

67 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 24,1. 85. Battlefields have been objects of tourism in other times and places; some of the first battlefield “tourism” was to Waterloo. In 1900, Thomas Cook advertised tours to the sites of the Anglo-Boer war before the fighting had even concluded. Lloyd, David W., Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919-1939 (Oxford, 1998), 21.Google Scholar

68 Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR, 41–42; Loginov, L. M. and Rukhlov, Iu. V., Istoriia razvitiia turistsko-ekskursionnogo dela (Moscow, 1989), 38.Google Scholar Patriotic trips to war memorials or even excursions that recreated, for example, the Soviet army’s path from Stalingrad to Berlin, were common in the 1950s and 1960s as well. See RGASPI, f. 1, op. 47, d. 416,11. 66–72, and d. 551,11. 9–11, 63–72 (reports on youth tourism).

69 Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, 125. Postwar excursions often focused on historical monuments, on “establishments of socialist construction,” and on the “heroic work of Soviet patriots,” but tours were also organized to explore natural science, industry, culture, and agriculture. Arkhangel'skaia, Kak organizovat’ turistskoe puleshestvie, 3.

70 This growth continued at least through 1956. From a high point in 1941, the numbers of every other type of museum either stayed largely the same or decreased dramatically (for industrial museums and museums of revolutionary history, for example). Despite the increase in the number of memorial museums, the greatest number of people visited historical or revolutionary history museums. Kul'turnoe stroitel'stvo: Slatisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1956), 286–88.

71 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 23,11. 1, 5, 27–34, 35 (information on Moscow tours and a lecture for excursion guides).

72 Mikhailov, N. N., “Moia strana,” Vokrug sveta, no. 1 (January 1946): 10.Google Scholar

73 Sytin, P. V., Po staroi i novoi Moskve: Istoricheskie raiony, glavnye ulitsy i ploshchady velikogogoroda (Moscow-Leningrad, 1947), 7–8.Google Scholar

74 von Geldern, “The Centre and the Periphery,” 64.

75 “Privetstvie I. V. Stalina k 800-letiiu Moskvy,” in Kiselev et al., Moskva poslevoennaia, 249–50.

76 Sytin, Po staroi i novoi Moskve, 5–6.

77 Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, 114.

78 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 23, 1. 66 (instructions for Moscow theater excursion leader).

79 Ibid.

80 Loginov, Anatolii, Nasha Moskva (Moscow, 1947), 111.Google Scholar

81 Ibid., 112.

82 “Iz stenogrammy soveshchaniia sekretarei RK VKP(b) i predsedatelei ispolkomov raionnykh sovetovg. Moskvy—o podgotovke k prazdnovaniiu 800-letiia Moskvy,” in Kiselev et al., Moskvaposlevoennaia.,226.

83 Ibid., 225.

84 Savitskii, In., Moskva: Istoriko-arkhitekturnyi ocherk (Moscow, 1947).Google Scholar

85 Kuleshov, N. and Pozdnev, A., Vysotnye zdaniia Moskvy (Moscow, 1954).Google Scholar

86 Sytin, Po staroi i novoi Moskve, 8.

87 See, for example, Arkhangel'skaia, O. A., Turistskie marshruty po SSSR (Moscow, 1956), 280.Google Scholar

88 Vernye druz'ia, director M. Kalatozov (1954). I am grateful to Susan Reid for bringing this film to my attention. Katerina Clark traces the “reversal of the symbolic meaning of Moscow” in post-Stalin fiction with special attention to novels about the ‘journey away.“ Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3d ed. (Bloomington, 2000), 227–29.Google Scholar

89 A. Yerokhin, “Guide through Antiquity,” Pravda, 23 September 1951, 3, in CDSP 3, no. 38 (3 November 1951): 33–34. Yerokhin might have been happier with a children’s guide to the Volga, which discussed the history of the river and the nearby cities but also presented their revolutionary history and contributions to victory in World War II. Fedenko, Volga—velikaia russkaia reka.

90 N. Moskvin, “The Hospitality of Cities,” Lileralurnaia gazeta, 5 July 1951, 28, in CDSP 3, no. 28 (25 August 1951): 28.

91 G. Shirshov, “Pervyi vsesoiuznyi motoprobeg, hvestiia, 15 October 1947, 2.

92 Tourism, nationalism, and imperialism were intimately associated in other periods of Russian history. On the expansion of tourism and the Russian state into non-Slavic areas in the late imperial period, see McReynolds, Russia at Play, chap. 5.

93 Ilya Ehrenburg, “Ilya Ehrenberg’s America,” Harper’s Magazine (December 1946): 568. The portions of Erenburg’s travel account devoted to race relations were reprinted (with some of the more optimistic parts deleted) and accompanied by photos from Ebony, in Il'ia Erenburg, “Bel'ye i chernye,” Vokrugsveta, no. 1 (1947): 22–27.

94 Gerasimov, S., “Na beregu Tikhogo okeana,” Ogonek 43 (October 1947): 24.Google Scholar

95 “Rodnaia sovetskaia zemlia … ,” Ogonek 43 (October 1947): 28.

96 Kazandzhian, Khemaiak, “Amerikanskaia deistvitel'nost',” Ogonek 2 (January 1948): 3.Google Scholar

97 Rusanovoi, L., “Pervyi transatlanticheskii reis zakonchen,” Ogonek 28 (July 1947): 11.Google Scholar

98 “Rodnaia sovetskaia zemlia … ,” 28.

99 V. V.Pokshishevskii, , “Shestnadtsat'stolits,” Vokrugsveta, no. 11 (November 1947): 2–11.Google Scholar See similarly the photos of factory workers, electric stations, and textile machines in Shaginian, Marietta, Puteshestviepo Sovelskoi armenii (Moscow, 1951).Google Scholar

100 “Tadzhikistan's Oldest City,” Pravda, 1O June 1949, 3, in CDSP 1, no. 24 (12July 1949): 62.

101 “V novoi Mongolii,” Ogonek 51 (December 1947): 16; Aleksandr Gutorovich, “Na plotakh cherez vodopady karpat,” Ogonek 45 (November 1947): 23; Vladimir Dmitrevskii, “Na turetskoi granitse,” Ogonek 29 (July 1947): 7.

102 Kelly, Mirror to Russia, 211.

103 Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, 172. Of course, while the particular didactic intentions of the Soviet experience were unique, the fact that tourist sites were so similar was not true only of the Soviet Union. As Steinbeck wryly noted: “A visitor to [each] town in America is taken to see the Chamber of Commerce, the airfield, the new courthouse, the swimming pool, and the armory.” Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, 172.

104 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 361, 1. 10 (report from a tourist base in Georgia, June 1958).

105 Kelly, Mirror to Russia, 192.

106 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 307.

107 Jill Steward, “Tourism in Late Imperial Austria: The Development of Tourist Cultures and Their Associated Images of Place,” in Baranowski and Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere, 116.

108 In 1945 and 1946, according to Jeffrey Brooks, “agents and informers noted demands for religious and intellectual freedom, reduced work loads and rules, increased bread rations, the breakup of collective farms, and legalization of collective trade.“ Brooks, Jeffrey, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 1999), 196.Google Scholar Elena Zubkova argues that the public was willing to tolerate discomfort and “the idea of temporary hardship” immediately after the war, but by the early 1950s there was a “syndrome of expectancy.” Zubkova, Russia after the War, 97, 148.

109 See, for example, Reid, Susan E., “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Slalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 211–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

110 Baranowski and Furlough, eds., “Introduction,” BeingEhewliere, 20.

111 G. Rassadin and I. Filippov, “Gorod neboskrebov i trushchob: Pis'mo iz N'iu-Iorka,” Pravda, 7 April 1950, 4.

112 E. Litoshko, “V trushchobakh N'iu-Iorka,” Pravda, 23 September 1952, 3.

113 This is not dissimilar to the pacifying purposes of tourism in Nazi Germany. According to Shelley Baranowski, the leisure opportunities offered by the Nazi tourism agency, Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), were intended to “soften the contradiction between entitlement and sacrifice, present expectations and delayed gratification.“ Strength through Joy, Baranowski argues, was a “tentative but genuine flirtation with consumerism as a means of social pacification.” Shelley Baranowski, “Strength through Joy: Tourism and National Integration in the Third Reich,” in Baranowski and Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere, 215–16.

114 “V gorode-kurorte,” Izvestiia, 26 March 1946.

115 On the conflict between communist morality and consumerism in the Khrushchev era, see Kelly, Catriona, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), chap. 5, esp. 312–21.Google Scholar

116 Dobkovich, Turizm v SSSR, 4.

117 Ogonek 18 (April 1948): back cover. Figure 4 is from a postcard of a similar image, 1954.

118 Vokrugsveta, no. 9 (September 1952): back cover.

119 Mikhailov, L. and Shin, A., “Passazhiry ‘Chemomorskogo ekspressa,'” Ogonek 23 (June 1947): 10–11.Google Scholar

120 “Prodazhaavtomobilei,mototsiklovivelosipedov,“Og-oweA41 (October 1947): 12.

121 Encouraging “rational consumption” and the “rational use of leisure” were two of the policies specified in the 1957 recommendations of the Prague Conference of Advertising Workers of Socialist Countries. Hanson, Philip, Advertising and Socialism (London, 1974), 29–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar But the manipulation of public desire was not particular to the postwar period. Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkovhave argued that in the 1930s “the evolution of Soviet commercial culture [had] as much to do with the manipulation of desires as with their satisfaction.” Kelly, Catriona and Volkov, Vadim, “Directed Desires,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940 (Oxford, 1998), 293.Google Scholar

122 Keep, John, A History of the Soviet Union, 1945–1991 (Oxford, 1995, 2002), 23–24.Google Scholar

123 On vacationing as “an arena in which fantasy has become an important social practice,” see Lofgren, On Holiday, 7.

124 Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 46. On lamp shades and other consumer items, also see Julie Hessler, “Cultured Trade: The Stalinist Turn towards Consumerism,” in Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions, 182–209.

125 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 197.

126 Ibid., 198.

127 Gordey, Visa to Moscow, 354.

128 P. Ponomarev, “Letter to the Editor,” Izvestiia, 28 June 1951, 3, in CDSP3, no. 26 (11 August 1951): 28–29.

129 G. Osipov, “Sanitary Shower,“Izvestiia, 5 August 1951, in CDSPS, no. 31 (15 September 1951): 31.

130 I. Rudakov, “Neglected Resort,” Izvestiia, 22 August 1950, 2, in CDSP 2, no. 34 (7 October 1950): 53.

131 Moskvin, “The Hospitality of Cities,” 17.

132 Makarov, “For Mass Touring,” 28.

133 “Soviet Workers’ Vacations,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 May 1952, in CDSP 4, no. 23 (19Julyl952):33.

134 S. Makarov, “Behind a ‘Favorable’ Figure,” Trud, 24June 1952, in CDSP 4, no. 26 (9 August 1952): 32.

135 Makarov, “Behind a ‘Favorable’ Figure.“

136 See, for example, GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 54,1. 121 and d. 35,11. 49, 51, 61, 83, 89.

137 Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR, 45–46.

138 Wright Miller, Russians as People (London, 1960), 93.

139 Moskvin, “The Hospitality of Cities,” 2.

140 I have borrowed this very useful notion from Edelman, Robert, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

141 Dobkovich, Turizm vSSSR 3–4.

142 GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 252,1. 13. “Get to know [your country] and fall in love with everything about it,” concluded Mikhailov, N. N. in Nasha strana (Moscow, 1945), 100.Google Scholar

143 Boorstin, Daniel J., The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1961).Google Scholar In their anxiety about pleasure without purpose, Soviet experts had something in common with Daniel Boorstin and Paul Fussell, both of whom have mourned the loss of the “serious” traveler, medieval pilgrim, and European literary traveler and condemned the modern tourist who does not travel in search of “real” knowledge. That said, the British literary travel Fussell extols is a far cry from the mass tourism promoted by the Soviet regime. Fussell, Paul, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

144 MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

145 Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 8.

146 Lofgren, On Holiday, 7.

147 As cited in Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 8.

148 I have adopted the notion of travel as a “ritual of reassurance” from Linda Ellerbee’s account of her adventures rafting on the Colorado River. “Our travels are not always the voyages of discovery we say we seek. Often they are rituals of reassurance.” Ellerbee, Linda, “No Shit! There I Was …, ” in McCauley, Lucy, Carlson, Amy G., and Leo, Jennifer, eds., A Woman’s Path: Women’s Best Spiritual Travel Writing (San Francisco, 2000), 63.Google Scholar