All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin by Anne E. Gorsuch (review)

In this fine monograph Anne E. Gorsuch sheds much light on the Thaw-era opening of the USSR to the outside world, a topic that has major implications for understanding the era of Nikita Khrushchev and the cultural Cold War. The title of the book derives from a quotation from Vasilii Aksenov's Zvezdnyi bilet (Ticket to the Stars), the 1961 novel so emblematic of the exuberant strivings of the Thaw's younger generation: "Dive into the depths of the sea, climb mountains, fear nothing, all this is your world" (p. 1). In 1955, the year the Soviet Communist Party adopted a resolution permitting foreign tourism for Soviet citizens after the severe restrictions of the Stalin era, only around 2,000 Soviets tourists left the country, Gorsuch estimates. This figure increased dramatically in the years ahead, with half a million tourists traveling in the decade from 1955 to 1964 (p. 18). The number reached 2 million by 1974 and 4.5 million by 1985 (p. 186). Although travel to the West remained mostly a privilege for elites, Soviet tourism to Eastern Europe became a mass phenomenon, extending into the middle ranks of Soviet society. Given the importance of this issue, it is surprising that no significant Russian or Western study has analyzed Soviet foreign tourism in the post-Stalin period. Gorsuch's book ably fills this gap.

Although All This is Your World begins with an overview of Soviet domestic tourism and foreign travel from the vantage point of the late Stalin period, Gorsuch's extensive archival research gathers pace with an illuminating chapter on the place of postwar Estonia and Tallin, which to Soviet eyes were distinctly European, as "our abroad" (nasha zagranitsa). This is followed by strong chapters on travel to the "fraternal" socialist countries of Eastern Europe and elite travel to the West. The book is rounded out by two imaginative chapters: "Fighting the Cold War on the French Riviera," an analysis of the Soviet experience of discovering Western society and material culture via memoirs and interviews; and "Film Tourism: From Iron Curtain to Silver Screen," a discussion of the more controlled and prescriptive depiction of travel and the outside world in Soviet cinema. As this structure suggests, the book is oriented mainly toward speaking about the Soviet-European relationship and what travel says about the Thaw-era apprehension of the West—ideologically, culturally, and economically. Gorsuch captures the ambivalence of the period, with the newly confident, reforming Soviet superpower still ready to stamp out bourgeois contagion. But Gorsuch chooses not to give the Soviet relationship with the West the broadest play in her overall conclusions and contextualizations (as opposed to treatment in the individual chapters). She aims to fit the Soviet case into the wider scholarship on tourism, necessitating a tight focus on tourism per se.

Occasionally, one finds a bit of a disjuncture between the abstruse and sometimes universalizing theoretical literature on travel (souvenirs, according to Susan Stewart, are desired for events "whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative") and the nitty-gritty of archival research (a Soviet tourist, far from losing track of materiality, agonizes over the choice of spending hard currency on a souvenir or a café). For the most part, however, these two aspects fit together harmoniously, with Gorsuch's immersion in cultural and transnational history enabling her to produce a subtle analysis based on a fine research effort in Russian repositories relating to tourism, travel, and youth tourism. The book is made even more illuminating through research in U.S. and Hungarian archives and, in particular, Estonian and British collections that give a sense of local perspectives and interactions with the incoming tourists.

Several master themes are adroitly handled in the book, adding to our understanding of the period. The first has to do with the dualistic Soviet view of foreign travel in...