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Travel to Work, Travel to Play: On Russian Tourism, Travel, and Leisure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Diane P. Koenker
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Abstract

In the introduction to this special issue, Diane P. Koenker discusses the interrelated categories of travel, tourism, and leisure, looking at contrasting definitions of the traveler and the tourist and situating Russian and Soviet experience in a broader literature. Among the themes raised in the issue's articles, she enumerates the quest for knowledge and the premium placed on knowledge-producing travel and leisure activities, the tension between normative values and the desire of tourists and travelers to create their own autonomous experiences, and the ways in which the socialist project revalorized the role of the collective touring experience. She also considers the ways in which travel created both national identities and cosmopolitan ones and discusses some of the implications of spatial and gender analysis for studies of travel, touring, and leisure away from home.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 4: Tourism and Travel in Russia and the Soviet Union , Winter 2003 , pp. 657 - 665
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

I wish to thank Anne Gorsuch for helpful comments and advice on this introduction.

1 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; reprint, Berkeley, 1999), 1,3.

2 Boorstin, Daniel, “From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel,” The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1964), 85.Google Scholar This distinction is key to Buzard's, James study, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

3 Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 65.Google Scholar

4 MacCannell, The Tourist, 8.

5 Urbain, Jean-Didier, L'idiot du voyage: Histoires des touristes (Paris, 1991), 25–26.Google Scholar

6 This was elaborated in the publications of the association, which may be consulted in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF), f. 9520 (Central Soviet for Tourism and Excursions), op. 1, d. 1 (Statutes, letters, and correspondence of the Society for Proletarian Tourism, 1930), e.g., 1. 84.

7 McReynolds, Louise, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, 2003), 167;Google Scholar Dolzhenko, G. P., Istoriia turizma v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii i SSSR (Rostov-on-Don, 1988), 41–45.Google Scholar

8 Na sushe i na more, no. 13 (July 1935): 6. To earn the badge, the tourist also had to exhibit knowledge of the rules of the road and the principles of rest and nutrition. Although announced in 1935, the tourist badge was in fact implemented only in 1939.

9 On the late imperial resort, see McReynolds, Russia at Play, 171-82. Kurorty S.S.S.R. Spravochnik (Moscow, 1923) discusses river cruising as “climate therapy” (18); see also touring opportunities enumerated in Burov, A. I., ed., Spravochnik-pulevoditel' po pansionatom i kurorttorgov (Moscow, 1955)Google Scholar, and Kozlov, I.I., ed., Zdravnitsy profsoiuzov SSSR: Kurorty, sanatorii, pansionaly i doma otdykha profsoiuzov, 3d ed. (Moscow, 1967).Google Scholar

10 McReynolds, Russia at Play.

11 For more on the Russian dacha, see Lovell, Stephen, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000 (Ithaca, 2003).Google Scholar

12 McReynolds, Russia at Play, 154–92.

13 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 6.

14 Arkhangel'skaia, O., Kak organizovat' turistskoe puteshestvie (Moscow, 1947), 13–17.Google Scholar

15 Dobkovich, V V., Turizm v SSSR (Leningrad, 1954), 3–4.Google Scholar

16 Subbotin, A. P., Volga i Volgari (St. Petersburg, 1894), 4.Google Scholar

17 Na sushe i na more, no. 1 (January 1929): 2.

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

19 See, for example, the periodicals Na sushe i na more (1929-1941), Turist-aktivist (1929–1933), Vsemirnyi turist (1928–1930), and such guidebooks as Ol'ga Alekseevna Arkhangel'skaia and Nina Andreevna Tiriutina, Puteshestviia po SSSR: Turistskie marshruty (Moscow-Leningrad, 1938) and Turistskie marshruty po SSSR (Moscow, 1956).

20 See the discussion of Russian travel writers in Schönle, Andreas, Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)Google Scholar and in McReynolds, Russia at Play. Na sushe i na more also featured the exploits of Russian travelers in its pages in the 1930s.

21 See Buzard, The Beaten Track; Schönle, Authenticity and Fiction; McReynolds, Russia at Play; and Dickinson, Sara, “The Russian Tour of Europe before Fonvizin: Travel Writing as Literary Endeavor in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Kost, N. A. and Iakhnin, I. D., eds., Kuban', chernomor'e, abkhaziia: Spravochnik po kurortam (Moscow, 1924), 182.Google Scholar

23 Korets, L. B., ed., Kurorty Abkhazii: Putevoditel' s prilozheniem kratkogo ocherka osennezimnikh kurortov S.S.S.R. (Sukhum-Gagry) (Moscow, 1925), 48–50, 111, 123.Google Scholar

24 Turist-aktivist, no. 1 (1931), 32–33; Nasusheina more, nos. 1, 2, 3 (January 1931); Turist-aktivist, nos. 10–11 (October-November 1931); M. Lias and Z. Kel's, comps., Korabl' udarnikov (Moscow-Leningrad, 1931).

25 Clifford, Routes, 90–91.

26 On Na sushe i na more, see Sandomirskaia, I. I., “Novaia zhizn' na marshe: Stalinskii turizm kak ‘praktika puti,'” Obshcheslvennye nauki i sovremennost', no. 4 (1996): 163–72,Google Scholar and Dobrenko, Evgenii, “Iskusstvo sotsial'noi navigatsii (Ocherki kul'turnoi topografii stalinskoi epokhi),” Wiener Slawistischer Almanack 45 (2000): 93–134;Google Scholar Urry, John, Consuming Places (London, 1995), 167.Google Scholar I am grateful to Thomas Lahusen for the Dobrenko reference.

27 Important Soviet and Russian exceptions are V. V Dvornichenko, Razvitie turizma v SSSR (1917-1983 gg.) (Moscow, 1985), Dolzhenko, Isloriia turizma v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii i SSSR, and Loginov, L. M. and Rukhlov, Iu. V., Isloriia razvitiia turistsko-ekskursionnogo dela (Moscow, 1989).Google Scholar Soviet histories of tourism have sometimes been commissioned to aid in the training of specialists in the tourist industry. Among other academies for the tourism industry, the history faculty at Moscow State University now offers a special cycle of courses in historical and cultural tourism designed to train tourism industry professionals. See http://www.hist.msu.ru/Program/tourism.htm (last consulted 28 August 2003). On leisure and everyday life, see Lebina, N. B., Povsednevnaia zhizn’ Sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii: 1920-1930 gody (St. Petersburg, 1999).Google Scholar

28 Rotkirch, Anna, “Traveling Maidens and Men with Parallel Lives—Journeys as Private Space during Late Socialism,” in Jeremy Smith, ed., Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture (Helsinki, 1999), 136–39.Google Scholar See also the recollections of Leder, Mary M. on the sexual culture of 1930s Crimean resorts, My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back (Bloomington, 2001), 132–33.Google Scholar

29 Erve Chambers, Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism (Prospect Heights, 111., 2000), 10.

30 “Observing and Making Meaning: Understanding the Soviet Union and Central Europe through Travel,” University of Toronto, 18–20 October 2002. The workshop, a discussion of work in progress, also included a paper whose revised version was presented at the 2002 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Pittsburgh, Diane P. Koenker, “The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s: Between Mass Excursion and Mass Escape.”

31 ABSEES is available through library subscription at http://www.libra17.uiuc.edu/absees/ (last consulted 28 August 2003).

32 A special issue of Annals of Tourism Research, no. 17 (1990) focused on eastern Europe. Another early post-1989 contribution to the field was Hall, Derek R., ed., Tourism and Economic Development in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

33 See Drace-Francis, Alex, “Travelling East, Travelling West: Paradoxes of Occidentalism in Ceaujescu's Romania,” in Hammond, Andrew, ed., The Balkans and the West (Aldershot, Eng., 2003);Google Scholar the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, embarked in 2002 on a collaborative research project, “East Looks West: East European Travel Writing on European Identities and Divisions, 1600–2000,” coordinated by Wendy Bracewell, David Chirico, Alex Drace-Francis, and Karin Friedrich.

34 Among important recent historical studies, see Baranowski, Shelley and Furlough, Ellen, eds., Being Elseiuhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, 2001);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Koshar, Rudy, German Travel Cultures (Oxford, 2000);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Furlough, Ellen, “Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s,” Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 40 (1998): 247–86.Google Scholar