Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism 9781501727238

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TURIZM

TURIZM

The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism

EDITED BY

Anne E. Gorsuch Diane P. Koenker

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2006 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 5 u East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2006 by Cornell University Press First printing, Corn ell Paperbacks, 2006 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Turizm: the Russian and East European tourist under capitalism and socialism I edited by Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-r3: 978-o-8014-4483-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-ro: o-8014-4483-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-r3: 978-o-8014-7328-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-ro: o-8014-7328-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) r. Tourists-Russian-History- 19th century. 2. Tourists-Soviet Union-History. 3· Tourists-Europe, Eastern, History-19th century. 4· Tourists- Europe, EasternHistory-2oth century. 5· Tourism-Russia-History-r9th century. 6. TourismSoviet Union-History. 7· Tourism-Europe, Eastern-History-19 century. 8. Tourism-Europe, Eastern-History-2oth century. I. Gorsuch, Anne E. II. Koenker, Diane, r 94 7- Ill. Title. Grss.R8T875 20o6 338.4'79147-dc22 2006023265 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorinefree, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing Paperback printing

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I

FOR BILL ROSENBERG

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker

IX I

Part I: Travels in Capitalist Russia and Eastern Europe r. The Prerevolutionary Russian Tourist: Commercialization in the Nineteenth Century Louise McReynolds

1

7

2. Russian Military Tourism: The Crisis of the Crimean War Period Susan Layton

43

3· From Friends of Nature to Tourist-Soldiers: Nation Building and Tourism in Hungary, I873-I9I4 Alexander Vari

64

4· Slavic Emotion and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism: Yugoslav Travels to Czechoslovakia in the I920S and I930S Noah W. Sobe

82

5. "One Breath for Every Two Strides": The State's Attempt to Construct Tourism and Identity in Interwar Latvia Aldis Purs

97

Part 11: Socialist Tourism

6. The Proletarian Tourist in the I930S: Between Mass Excursion and Mass Escape Diane P. Koenker

I

7· Al'pinizm as Mass Sport and Elite Recreation: Soviet Mountaineering Camps under Stalin Eva Maurer

J4I

8. "Where Each Stone Is History": Travel Guides in Sevastopol after World War 11 Karl D. Quails

I63

19

9· Marketing Socialism: Inturist in the Late I9 sos and Early 196os Shawn Salmon

I86

IO. Time Travelers: Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe Anne E. Gorsuch

I r. Books and Borders: Sergei Obraztsov and Soviet Travels to London in the I 9 5os Eleonory Gilburd

227

vu1

Contents r2. Adventures in the Marketplace: Yugoslav Travel Writing and Tourism in the 1950S-I96os Wendy Bracewell

248

13. East German Nature Tourism, 1945-196r: In Search of a Common Destination Scott Moranda

266

14. Coping with the Tourist: Planned and "Wild" Mass Tourism on the Soviet Black Sea Coast Christian N oack

28 r

List of Contributors Index

3o 5 307

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A longer version of Louise McReynolds's essay appeared as chapter 5, "The Russian Tourist at Home and Abroad," in her book, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003 ). It is reprinted here by kind permission of Cornell University Press. We are grateful to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Campus Research Board for providing a publication subvention.

IX

TURIZM

Introduction Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker

Consider the group tour as a metaphor for the modern world. The modern age of leisure travel allows hundreds of thousands of ordinary individuals to range widely across borders, pursuing sights and attractions that have been validated by generations of tourists before them, packaged conveniently by tour operators to make the most efficient use of the tourist's limited time and resources. Such mobility is liberating. The group provides safety in numbers, sociability, and efficiency. But it also constrains the individual, whose gaze is regulated by the collective wishes of the group as well as by the iron logic of the tour timetable. Yet even within the group, individuals encounter new sights and cultures, make meaning out of their spatial displacements as individuals, and try on new traveling identities, based on their own cultural makeup, life experiences, expectations, and fantasies. Together and apart, the modern tourist travels with the crowd, but mediates the travel experiences as an individual. The contradictions implicit in the "group tour" are embedded in scholarly contestation over the meaning of tourism as a human practice. The distinction between the traveler and the tourist, for example, is often cast in terms of high and low culture, of individual versus mass consumption, of authenticity versus superficiality. "The traveler, then," writes Daniel Boorstin in an often-cited passage, "was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him." 1 "Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way," writes Paul FusselJ.2 Anthropologists and historians, however, have rejected the model of the "tourist as degraded traveler" and have instead emphasized the emancipatory and democratizing effect of modern tourism. In his foundational text, The Tourist, the sociologist Dean MacCannell suggests that "tourism is the cutting edge of the worldwide exr. Daniel Boorstin, "From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel," The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, r96r), 85. 2. Paul Fussell, ed., The Norton Book of Travel (New York, 1987), 6 51· This opposition is the central theme of James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 18oo-I9I8 (New York, 1993); and Jean-Didier Urbain, L'Idiot du Voyage: Histoires de Touristes (Paris, 1 99 1).

I

Turizm

2

pansion of modernity." Tourist attractions, sights to be visited, become "the locus of a human relationship between un-like-minded individuals, the locus of an urgent desire to share-an intimate connection between one stranger and another, or one generation and another." 3 An historical approach to tourism indicates ways in which "tourism and vacations have been constitutive of class, social status, and collective identities," suggest Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough in their recent anthology on western Europe and North America.4 Tourism can be understood as part of the history of consumption and of the history of leisure, the antidote to work. But its distinctiveness arises from a "consciousness of displacement," 5 the sense of "being elsewhere." The ways in which individuals seek to make sense of their experiences of voluntary bordercrossings provide a powerful tool for understanding the culture of modern life. What questions arise when we turn east and investigate the history of tourism in what would become the socialist world of the twentieth century? For eastern Europeans inside multinational empires, tourism became one mechanism to help to define self and other, and it contributed to reifying nation-building projects. In the twentieth century, a new kind of internationalism forged by socialism competed with national distinctiveness, but tourism here also became an instrument of developing new national coherences. Socialism would bring access to tourism to the masses, sponsoring both collective tourism experiences and mass access to tourism for individuals. Socialist tourism sought to overcome the inequalities and inefficiencies of the market with rational, centrally planned guidance for individuals' encounters with new territories and new experiences. Socialist tourism was purposeful, and it perfected the socialist citizen by insisting on both the physically and the mentally restorative elements of tourism. Yet socialism too was part of the modern world, and socialist tourism also reflects the ineffable tension generated by traveling in groups, or according to officially arranged itineraries, in order to produce individual meaning. The very terms turist and turizm reflect this tension and the multiple meanings potentially generated by actual practice. The Russian word turizm possesses both a broad and a narrow definition: a tourist was anyone who followed a leisure-travel program of visual, cultural, and material consumption, whether the military travelers discussed in Susan Layton's chapter or the Khrushchev-era travelers to socialist eastern Europe explored in Anne Corsuch's contribution. But Soviet tourism activists in the I 9 20s and I 9 3os, as Diane Koenker and Eva Maurer point out, insisted that a turist could be only that traveler who embarked on a purposeful journey, a circuit (tour) using 3· Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, rev. ed., 1999), 184, 203.

4· Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, "Introduction," in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed. Baranowski and Furlough (Ann Arbor, 2001 ), 7· 5· Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford, 2ooo), 8.

Introduction

3

one's own physical locomotion. (As Scott Moranda notes, the German Democratic Republic adopted the same sense in its term Touristik.) Travelers in search of pleasure could take excursions; turizm was meant to involve work, the enhancement of one's intellectual and physical capital, not leisure. Travel to a destination to spend a holiday, whether or not it involved excursions, was labeled "rest" (otdykh) in Russian: rest could be recuperative, but it did not presume that resters would interact self-consciously with the world to which they had transported themselves. Nascent nationalist tourist societies in Hungary and Latvia, as Alexander Vari and Aldis Purs document, also adopted the purposeful definition of tourism: "Goal-minded tourism trains the body, freshens up the mind, deepens our knowledge, and could bring valuable benefits to numerous branches of science," wrote the Hungarian advocates. By the 1970s, distinctions between rest and tourism began to disappear, as Christian Noack's chapter on unplanned tourism on the Black Sea coast makes clear. In the late Soviet Union, the "tourist hike" (turistskii pokhod) was a euphemism for a boy and a girl's weekend getaway, with tent and sleeping bag, for sex. 6 In post-Soviet Russia, what used to be labeled "turizm" is now called "adventure tourism." The changing definition of the term, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, constitutes one of the elements of the history of socialist tourism. This volume reveals the innate historicity of tourism by focusing on differences and similarities between tourist practices under capitalism and socialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century eastern Europe, Russia, and the Soviet Union. Socialist-and other authoritarian-states may have sought to regiment and regulate their citizens' encounters with crossing borders, as many of the chapters in this collection acknowledge. But socialist tourists had their own agendas. By the 196os and 1970s, for example, they traveled to shop as well as to see. The adaptation of socialist states to consumerist and other demands of tourists helps to conceptualize socialism as a project with a history and provides an important lens through which to examine the interrelations of socialist states and their citizens. In both the capitalist and the socialist "East," tourism was too important to leave to the private sector alone. The rise of tourism is associated with the expansion of a middle-class consumer market in the nineteenth century in Europe, and as Louise McReynolds shows, Russian commercial tourist agencies followed the model of Thomas Cook in seeking customers among the empire's rising middle classes. But noncommercial tourism societies competed alongside businesses chartered for profit, reflecting a renunciation of market principles that would provide a cultural antecedent for socialist values in the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, the Russian Society of Tourists arose from an association of bicycle enthusiasts; as Maurer reports, societies of alpinists emerged in Russia around the same time, an integral part of the turist movement. Further to the west, competing societies in Hungary used tourism 6. Personal communication with Viktoriia Tiazhel'nikova,

2

April

2005.

4

Turizm

to the Tatra mountains to support a growing nationalist project/ Purs shows how in interwar Latvia, tourism became an essential state project, located squarely in the Ministry of Social Affairs. In fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, state-affiliated agencies, the Dopolavoro ("After Work") and Kraft durch Freude ("Strength through Joy"), organized and coordinated an extensive range of leisure activities. Strength through Joy, as Shelley Baranowski details in her recent book, became a mass packager of tourist travel for middle and working-class Germans in the 1930s. 8 In the Soviet Union, too, as Koenker and Maurer describe, quasi-independent tourist organizations, the Russian Society of Tourists and Sovetskii turist, merged in the course of the late 1920s and 1930s into agencies formally subordinated to the state economic apparatus. In short, whether under socialism, capitalism, or some form of corporatism, authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century found it useful to organize the opportunity for their citizens to experience leisure travel. State ownership of the tourism industry brought its own problems, as several of the articles in this collection reveal. The chronic deficits of the socialist economy are by now well known: tourism agencies never received the resources that they believed necessary to accomplish their goals. The planned economy might be able to pinpoint problems, as Noack and Shawn Salmon reveal, but acquiring resources and using them wisely stymied the Soviet tourist industry throughout its history. Access to tourism in the USSR came primarily through the grant of a travel voucher, the putevka, a nonmarket mechanism for the allocation of the scarce resource of a place on a tour or in a tourist destination. As Maurer, Noack, and Gorsuch all discuss, the economic organization of Soviet tourism revolved around the voucher, rather than disposable income, personal savings, or consumer demand. Shawn Salmon's discussion of Inturist's quest to maximize foreign convertible currency paints a vivid picture of the clash between market values and socialist practices: Inturist's desire to "sell socialism" using the unfamiliar techniques of capitalism led to inefficiencies, failures, and recriminations. Nor, as Noack shows, were tourism planners in the Krasnodar region any more successful in managing the flow of "freemarket" wild tourists who descended upon the Black Sea beaches every summer without regard to the limits of the infrastructure the state economy could provide. 7· Nor were Hungarian nationalists unique in seeking to exploit the Tatras for their national project. Tourism to the Polish Tatras also helped define Polishness within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and during independence. See Patrice Dabrowski, "Discovering the Galician Borderlands: The 'Discovery' of the Eastern Carpathians," Slavic Review 64, no. 2 ( 200 5 ): 3 80-402; and Daniel Stone, "The Cable Car at Kasprowy Wierch: An Environmental Debate in Interwar Poland," Slavic Review 64, no. 3 (wos): 6or-24. 8. Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004), esp. chap. 4; see also Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981).

Introduction

5

Authoritarian socialist regimes facilitated state control over the message tourists should receive and replicate. Guidebooks high lighted historical accomplishments and economic achievements. Travel accounts encouraged would-be tourists to imagine themselves sharing in the fraternal friendship of socialist peoples. Travel writing and tourism served to educate socialist citizens about the wider world within a framework that emphasized the superiority of socialism. Nonetheless, as several contributions point out, state agencies could not wholly manage the way in which tourists would receive these messages. Karl Quails delineates the acts of remembering and forgetting contained in a series of post-1945 guidebooks to the military city of Sevastopol, but there is no way to know which parts of these messages would-be tourists read and internalized. In Eleonory Gilburd's account of Sergei Obraztsov's cultural mediations between his personal travel to Great Britain and the Soviet reader, a disconnect between regime intentions and reader response similarly arises. Even in the 1930s, Koenker argues, proletarian tourism's emphasis on the independence and self-actualization of tourists allowed individuals to chart their own paths and make their own meanings, quite apart from state intentions. Histories of tourism in the West emphasize the importance of tourism for the formation of an independent and confident middle class. 9 Tourism created citizens, "aesthetic cosmopolitans," in John Urry's words, who believed they had a right to travel anywhere, approached travel with curiosity and openness, who cultivated an ability to locate their own society in terms of broad historical and geographic knowledge. 10 These middle-class travelers distinguished themselves from their aristocratic predecessors on the Grand Tour by emphasizing effort and purpose. Rudy Koshar reminds us that the word "travel" is derived from "travail," meaning suffering or labor. "Tourism finds its meaning through effort." 11 In advocating similarly purposeful tourism in the twentieth century, socialist tourist activists claimed they were creating a new kind of proletarian tourist, in direct contrast to the imagined bourgeoisie. In fact, the tourist practices celebrated as socialist-planned, purposeful, knowledgeproducing, rational, and efficient-mirrored those touted for Europe's nineteenth-century middle classes. Whether prescribing to Yugoslav and Soviet tourists how to behave in department stores, as Bracewell and Gorsuch outline, or vicariously to become an aesthetic cosmopolitan through reading l). Douglas Peter Mackaman, Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France (Chicago, 1998); Kosh