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  • All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin
  • Johanna Conterio (bio)
Anne E. Gorsuch , All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 272 pp., ill. Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 978-0-19-960994-9.

In the past decade, Soviet history has increasingly crossed paths with international history. Recent monographs by Michael David-Fox and Katerina Clark have drawn attention to international exchanges that lay within the foundation of Stalinism. 1 This trend has been further bolstered by new research beyond the Stalin period. All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin, by Anne E. Gorsuch, adds to our understanding of the international context of Soviet cultural developments in the transition from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev era. During this period, Gorsuch argues, Soviet culture gradually opened up to the outside world and was integrated into the international circulation of people, ideas, and materials. All This Is Your World adds a transnational perspective to the development of Soviet culture by focusing on the experience of Soviet tourists to Eastern and Western Europe, building on the international approach to tourism in the Eastern Bloc featured in the 2006 volume Turizm: The Russian and East Euro pean Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism, which Gorsuch coedited with Diane Koenker. 2

The April 1955 Central Committee resolution allowing Soviet citizens to travel abroad as tourists constituted a radical reform of the Khrushchev era, and one that was never reversed. Gorsuch argues that the opening of the Soviet border to foreign travel reflected the emergence of a new relationship between the state and society. As she writes, "Soviet citizens were newly treated, if unevenly and within definite limits, as responsible and reliable, as individuals confident in their Soviet identity and trustworthy to send abroad" (P. 4).

Why were Soviet tourists allowed to travel abroad in 1955? Following Stalin's death in March 1953, the Soviet regime saw the international exchange of tourists as a tool for normalizing foreign relations. This was particularly true of tourism to capitalist countries, which served to support the doctrine of "peaceful coexistence," as Gorsuch [End Page 453] argues: "Tourists to capitalist countries would … travel as envoys for peaceful coexistence between the socialist East and capitalist West, reinforcing the ideological and economic goals of newly normalized relations through personal encounter and political performance" (P. 13). Tourism demonstrated the new, post-Stalinist way of life abroad.

This main argument is a counterpoint to recent scholarship about the "thaw," which has tended to emphasize the limits of reform under Khrushchev. At the same time, Gorsuch, too, points out the limits to reform, particularly the amount of anxiety and surveillance that surrounded and at times undermined it. The Khrushchev era was a new era of the state treating the Soviet people as if they were reliable, combined with a great deal of anxiety that they, in fact, were not. Building on a Stalinist tradition, moreover, the state continued to treat tourism as a means to the social and cultural integration of the Soviet citizenry.

All This Is Your World traces developments in domestic tourism in the late Stalinist period, expands in focus to the "near abroad" of Estonia, and then crosses the Soviet border to the socialist countries and capitalist West, before returning to the Soviet homeland in a final chapter dedicated to domestic film depictions of foreign lands. The main source bases are memoirs and the Soviet press as well as archival materials, particularly reports that trip leaders submitted after traveling abroad. The book includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

In Chapter 1, Gorsuch provides a stark picture of the isolationism of the late Stalinist period that puts the relative opening of the Khrushchev era into bold relief. With Andrei Zhdanov's campaign against "servility before the West," tourism abroad became a near impossibility for Soviet citizens, elite and everyday alike. In the late Stalinist period, even tourist publications such as the magazine Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) rarely offered glimpses beyond the Soviet borders. Instead, tourism in this period served Sovietization. Tours focused primarily on the center, Moscow...

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