Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream by Diane P. Koenker (review)

This solidly researched history of tourism concerns rest and recreation for the masses as well as outings by more privileged groups. As a labor historian, Koenker stresses links with work, including tourism as recuperation and self-improvement for the proletariat. Her big themes include the shift to a consumer society, tourism as part of a “good life,” and the late Soviet authoritarian state’s seemingly paradoxical promotion of individual touring (2). The book should interest historians and social scientists of the Soviet Union, as well as specialists of tourism elsewhere since she compares Soviet programs with Western tourism.

Koenker tracks the government’s determination to promote “a life of useful leisure” and “rational leisure” (89). She explains how the Bolsheviks’ initial emphasis on easing the lot of the proletariat paved the way to tourism as a reward for shock workers and technical personnel during the 1930s. She finds that the government during the 1920s and 1930s, however, condemned “travel by an individual for romantic glory or self-satisfaction” (90). She notes the introduction of culture as a priority after World War II, along with the promotion of films, music, theater, and other educational entertainment at sites such as Yalta and Sochi. This development paralleled the Cold War cultural competition, though the author does not explore this issue in detail. She mentions, however, that the press contrasted Soviet vacations with expensive capitalist holidays.

During the 1960s, a middle class began to replace workers as prime consumers; accommodations improved, with an eye toward Eastern Europe’s prewar experience; tourists gained more choice; and the press started to promote tourism as “romance.” Nonetheless, medical tourism remained important. Overall, tourism increasingly became a consumer good after Joseph Stalin’s death. Oddly, despite this turnabout, family accommodations remained in short supply. During the last Soviet decades, tourism by car grew more popular, as did the search for adventure and pleasure. Nevertheless, Koenker argues, Soviet tourism retained much of its original purposiveness.

Koenker’s focus in this fine book comes at a price, since she largely ignores the semi-dissident quality of the intelligentsia’s experience. Under Leonid Brezhnev, for example, venturesome intelligenty visited sites of genuine ethnic and folk culture, returning home not with official badges (znachki) but with bits of peasant costumes, clay toys, icons from Siberia, and other artifacts. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky prefigure this phenomenon in their 1964 novel Monday Begins on Saturday (Moscow, 1966). Their narrator, driving through Karelia out of Leningrad, picks up two hitchhikers who take him to a crazy world of actual living folk characters. He identifies himself as a “tourist” at the outset, downplaying the workaday world as do the authors in the novel’s title. Similarly disaffected would-be tourists considering foreign travel might also dream of fantastical freer worlds. The old Soviet joke, “A chicken is not a bird and Bulgaria is not abroad,” captures the expectation that in a bloc, travel to a loyal satellite would disappoint.