Abstract
Diane Koenker traces the development of Soviet vacation travel between the 1920s and the 1980s. She argues that the Soviet idea to provide vacation opportunities for all workers was innovative and radical, yet the state never fully realized its revolutionary promises. Analysing how the USSR and its citizens ‘negotiated the search for the good life’ (p. 281), Koenker illuminates the nature and limits of the revolutionary project and the lived experience of Soviet socialism.
Club Red provides fascinating insights into the mindsets of key decision makers and tourist activists who argued over the proper definition of a ‘socialist’ vacation. Their views were underpinned by competing notions of what it meant to be Soviet, with the major fault line between advocates of sedentary spa vacations versus mobile tourism. For spa enthusiasts, the Soviet vacation was to produce a healthy member of the workforce and, increasingly, to mark and reward white-collar workers as the most deserving category of citizens. Although these distinctions caused some unease among Communist Party and trade union leaders before 1941, postwar vacation policies were more brazenly geared towards the intelligentsia, reflecting stiffening social stratification. The idea that Soviet vacations were primarily a means of recuperation for the most important members of the Soviet community proved remarkably resilient throughout the twentieth century, which manifested itself in the continuing reluctance to open spa resorts for family holidays.
In contrast to spa visitors, tourists who spent their vacations on the move enjoyed much less financial and institutional support from the Soviet state. Still, Koenker reveals significant sources of popular enthusiasm about the Soviet vacation project, arguing that tourism flourished largely due to the efforts of enthusiasts united in amateur tourist clubs. This was especially true in the first two decades after the revolution, but even as late as the 1960s activists strove to create a ‘self-regulating society of equals’ (p. 217), reflecting the continuing importance of collectivist values in post-Stalinist society. Tourism activists stressed that the ‘Soviet’ vacation was not only to produce a healthy individual, but also an erudite and patriotic citizen. At the same time, the tourist movement was internally divided. While purists insisted that the Soviet vacationer was to become a self-made man who constructed his or her own itineraries, tents, and kayaks, more commercially oriented enthusiasts insisted that only the sale of pre-packaged tours would help to fund their activities. By the 1970s, commercial thinking won the day, as most tourist activists focused on the production of tourist experiences to correspond to the demands of consumers. This effectively undermined early Soviet socio-cultural hierarchies based on the notion that a vanguard of activists had the right to act as ‘arbiters of taste and choice’ (p. 4).
It is in the exploration of Soviet commercial thinking and practices across the twentieth century that Club Red is at its most interesting. Riddled with independent institutional entrepreneurs, the economy of Soviet vacation travel had to strike a fine balance between ‘socialist profitability and crass commercialism’ (p. 80). This meant that health spa and tourism activists sought ways to regulate supply and demand, and yet only reluctantly and partially resorted to advertising and variable pricing by the 1960s. Although attempts to make tourism both cost-effective and broadly accessible were largely ineffective, there were surprising reserves of entrepreneurial spirit in late Soviet society. Apart from the shadow sphere of private apartment rental that the author leaves unexplored, the Soviet vacation economy was shaped by regional apparatchiks and health spa activists who competed for guests (and thereby state subsidies) by building hunting lodges and themed restaurants.
Uncovering these increasingly commercial approaches to the Soviet vacation, Koenker nevertheless insists that her story demonstrates the ‘resilience of the communist regime and its values’ (p. 2). She argues that the ‘communist’ character of the Soviet vacation manifested itself in the medicalization of rest, official (if unrealized) priority for industrial workers, and emphasis on the group. At the same time, however, Koenker’s rich transnational comparisons reveal that these features were far from unique to the USSR or state socialism. In its ‘purposefulness’, for example, ‘Soviet tourism resembled organisations in the capitalist West, such as the Girl Scouts, that used individual self-actualisation to promote patriotism and citizenship’ (p. 59). Ultimately, Club Red does not make it clear what was ‘socialist’ about the Soviet vacation, especially as Koenker’s story enters the postwar era. The author’s assertion that ‘the Party remained the primary and unitary authority’ is unconvincing (p. 171). Her own evidence suggests that, far from speaking the language of ‘communism’, Soviet citizens adopted more diverse and creative approaches to vacation travel, defined by the lack of a clear ‘communist’ narrative of vacation travel and a sense of loyalty to the Soviet state and its institutions that must not be equated with deference to the Party’s ideological pronouncements.
Koenker shows that vacation travel reflected and fostered a sense of Sovietness defined in geographical and ethnic Russian, rather than explicitly ‘communist’, terms. But for a book that focuses heavily on ethnically mixed territories of Crimea and the Caucasus, it gives the reader very little sense of the USSR’s national diversity. Koenker’s attitude towards non-Russian territories is flippant as she places the Kyrgyzstani Lake Issyk-Kul in Kazakhstan and calls the inland Crimean Tatar capital of Bakhchisarai a coastal town. While hinting briefly at tensions over financing spa resorts that emerged between the Soviet centre and republican-level leadership in the Baltics, the book ultimately gives the impression that the meanings of Soviet vacations were consistent across national contexts. In analysing the ‘nation-building project of the USSR’ (p. 126), Koenker adopts mostly the Russian travellers’ views of the non-Russian peripheries and relegates non-Russians to the role of an exotic background. We thus learn that the Tajiks did not have a word for bicycle and that tourists wanted to taste the USSR’s different cuisines. Koenker further skims over surprising silences – travelling to Crimea in years after the mass deportations of Crimean Tatars, Koenker’s subjects seem to take for granted the transformation of the peninsula into an almost exclusively Slavic ethnic space. For Koenker, vacationers’ constructions of Sovietness were shaped by curiosity and new opportunities to travel, but it seems that colonial mindsets, indifference, or xenophobia were equally important in shaping travellers’ mental geographies.
Although Koenker frames the history of Soviet vacations as the search for a communist utopia, her book ultimately reveals more diverse and surprising sources of popular engagement with the Soviet project that are best understood outside the tired framework of ‘speaking Bolshevik’.