From International Activity to Foreign Tourism

Travel with Stalin: Ensuring State Security, Economic Savings, and Promotion of People’s Democracy

To better understand the shift in emphasis from individual to collective forms of travel, I will briefly sketch the historical context and the political purposes that public authorities associated with the mobility of particular societal layers, groups, and individuals in the years that preceded the policy of peaceful coexistence and the “consolidation of friendship” with youth from “capitalist” countries. Paradoxically, governmental and police officers drew legitimacy from much earlier, bourgeois, restrictions on travel such as passport act Nr. 55/1928, approved by the Czechoslovak parliament in April 1928. This had been criticized by the communist parliamentary opposition at the time, because it “made it impossible for members of the working class to travel to the Soviet Union . . . [and] prevented Russian workers from going to see conditions in Czechoslovakia.” ¹¹ However, it formed the basis for subsequent socialist legislation.

The immediate post-war reconstruction provided new reasons for political control of mobility: the hunt for Nazi supporters and war criminals, economic shortages, the black market and smuggling, the expulsion of the German population, political migrations, and the increasing confrontations of the Cold War. The majority of political representatives agreed: if foreign travel and international tourism did not directly benefit the national community, then they should be restricted. ¹² The 1928 passport act remained in force and most Czechoslovak citizens were not allowed to travel abroad to protect national security and economic interests.

After the communist seizure of power in 1948, the Czechoslovak parliament agreed a new passport act based on the 1928 act. This new passport act, Nr. 58/1949, restricted individual mobility, but at the same time the regulations implementing the act enabled collective travel abroad. While individual foreign travel depended on the approval of the interior ministry, which issued individual passports, collective trips were permitted through an approved list of participants [hromadné zájezdní soupisky]. ¹³

“Ensuring state security” was key in terms of the purposes associated with the 1949 passport act, as the communist deputies Květoslav Innemann and Pavol Popaďák emphasized in their report for the Czechoslovak parliament. According to Innemann, the Czechoslovak Republic had become the target of “hateful attacks” from the side of “class enemies in the West and related traitors who left the [Czechoslovak] motherland and struggled against it in the foreign soldier’s pay.” ¹⁴ Political authorities thus justified restrictions on individual travel abroad after 1948 through the notion of the “hostile capitalist West and traitorous emigrants”: political representatives were haunted by the notion that “seduced” emigrants who left the communist state could be “misused by foreign enemies in sabotage against [our] working people.” ¹⁵ The interior ministry’s restrictions on individual passports and visas were intended to prevent such persons from crossing Czechoslovak borders and conducting hostile activities against the “people’s democratic republic” abroad.

The deputies’ report did not explicitly mention collective travel abroad, but the 1949 passport act that restricted individual mobility also created a legal and semantic framework facilitating collective travel. In his speech, Deputy Innemann pointed out the regulations implementing this passport act. This regulation defined “emergency travel documents” i.e. an approved list of participants [hromadné zájezdní soupisky] for collective trips. ¹⁶ Henceforth, because of the emerging binary discourse of “friends” and “foes,” individual travellers who did not travel collectively and instead applied for passports were viewed as persons with potentially evil intentions and their applications for individual travel abroad were put to rigorous examination.

When the parliament approved the new passport act, the Czechoslovak government discussed the “report about foreign travel in the second half of the year 1948” and the “resolution on new travel regulations.” Because of the lack of foreign exchange, the government recommended its members not allow permits for private travel abroad and travel by as yet un-nationalized economic subjects. ¹⁷ Foreign travel for official purposes, for example, international delegations, meetings, congresses, and events as well as collective travel such as promotional, cultural, sport, and study excursions continued to be allowed, even though the number of participants was reduced. Delegates were now forbidden to take private dependents with them on foreign journeys, for example (and the authors of the resolution betrayed their unconscious gender bias, assuming that travellers abroad were mostly male, when they phrased this in terms of delegates’ “wives”). ¹⁸

While the discourse of parliamentary deputies and governmental members in 1949 associated restrictions on private travel with state security and economic savings, and gave collective travel abroad a strong functional meaning underlining international representation and the promotion of the people’s democratic Czechoslovakia, foreign travel by young people was linked to socialist education. In June 1949, the members of the ÚV ČSM discussed sending its delegation to the world congress of [democratic] youth in Budapest. The aim of the delegation was to show how the Czechoslovak youth helped to strengthen “world peace” and supported the struggle against “war agitators” and for the “better future of all nations.” ¹⁹ The preparation for the congress should “deepen solidarity with working people and youth from the whole world in the consciousness of our boys and girls” and “use principles of internationalism” in youth education. ²⁰ These internationalist principles, promoted through collective travel abroad, were a constant feature of official discourse throughout the 1950s and 1960s, even though the terms were sometimes slightly shifted: for example, when party authorities started to stress the policy of peaceful coexistence in the mid-1950s or promote proletarian internationalism in the late 1950s.

Besides preparations for travel to the world congress, the members of the ÚV ČSM also dealt with Czechoslovak participation in the world festival of youth and students that was held in August 1949 in Budapest. Unlike attendance at the world congress that included two dozen participants, the Czechoslovak delegation to the world festival in Budapest included almost two thousand members and was an example of collective travel par excellence. According to the chairman of the ÚV ČSM Zdeněk Hejzlar, the festival strengthened “the cooperation with youth and students from capitalist world” and spoke a “different language, about peace, friendship, freedom and hatred for oppression, than resolutions and proclamations can speak.” ²¹

Hejzlar (three years later the victim of Stalinist purges) used an early version of the Stalinist dichotomy of friends and foes that dominated discussions about collective travel abroad until Khrushchev’s promotion of peaceful coexistence in 1954. Hejzlar admitted that the meaning of collective travels abroad was “cooperation with [progressive] capitalist youth” and stated that “right-wing socialists” together with “clerical reaction” and “paid imperialist agents” were preparing alternative [international] events to the world festival. ²² He emphasized that the cultural, social, and political content of the festival depended on the “people’s democratic” youth who should “support youth from capitalist countries in its struggle for . . . peace and socialism.” ²³

This dichotomy of friends and foes, camps of peace and war, and socialism and capitalism started to differentiate after 1954. Youth from some West European countries, for example, organisations of Catholic youth from France or social democratic youth from Scandinavia were understood by officials of the ÚV ČSM as suitable partners for potential travel exchanges on the one hand. On the other, the changing understanding of international affairs also affected youth organisations from socialist countries: some of them became less desirable destination for collective travel than others. The reasons could be ideological, as in the case of the Polish and Hungarian uprisings in 1956, or political, as in the case of trips to East Berlin and Yugoslavia that were used as transit stations for emigration to Western Europe. ²⁴ Henceforth, officials in the international department of the ÚV ČSM carefully differentiated between particular socialist and capitalist counterparts: some youth organisations were “friendlier” and “less hostile” than others.

Between Ideological Ambiguity and Propaganda Show

As Anne E. Gorsuch, Diane P. Koenker, Eleonory Gilburg, and Wendy Bracewell have all recently stated, the preconditions for foreign tourism from and to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were established several months before 1956. ²⁵ In the Czechoslovak case, the rise of collective travels to and from Eastern and Western Europe could already be observed in 1954–1955. The twentieth Soviet Party Congress and Khrushchev’s policy of Peaceful Coexistence only increased the ongoing “international activity” of the Czechoslovak youth represented by the ČSM. The foreign trips and travel exchanges of artistic groups, cultural ensembles, and youth and sporting associations which were carried out after 1955 had been negotiated in the previous years.

The challenges of international development after 1954 can be demonstrated by the example of two different types of collective travel conducted by the international department of the ÚV ČSM. I will examine the travel reports from the world festival of youth and students in Warsaw in 1955 and from the artistic festival in Lille in 1956 to show how meanings associated with collective travel to Eastern and Western Europe in this ideologically turbulent period influenced the political, social, and cultural imagination of travellers. I will focus on the narrative strategies through which authors of travel reports assured potential readers of their Marxist–Leninist convictions and how they contrasted this conviction to the “ideological ambiguity” and “Western propaganda” of both their socialist and capitalist counterparts.

The first type, travel eastwards, is represented by the participation of the Czechoslovak youth delegation in the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw held during the reduction of international tensions and the consolidation of East–West relations in 1955. This historical constellation offered to the Czechoslovak representatives an opportunity to get in touch with their Western counterparts and to establish informal relationships resulting in negotiations about bilateral invitations, reciprocal visits, and exchanges. A foreign visit to Warsaw in summer 1955 did not yet give the Czechoslovak political leadership any reason to restrict travel from and to Poland as was done after 1956.

International events like the World Festivals of Youth and Students were organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and had been taking place since 1947. Importantly, these events were also visited by Western youth, most of whom were members of left-wing and communist youth organisations. ²⁶ Most of the world festivals took place in socialist cities throughout the 1950s and 1960s, except for those in Vienna (1959) and Helsinki (1962)—neither in states perceived by the officials of the ÚV ČSM as primarily hostile. ²⁷ World festivals perfectly fit the collective ideal of socialist travel, because they involved large numbers of people travelling together to fraternal countries. Support by the Czechoslovak political leadership for attendance at world festivals resulted in a high number of participants: 1,479 participants in the Warsaw festival in 1955 and 1,451 persons taking part in the Vienna festival in 1959. Participants had to be politically trustworthy, but the high number of participants, the official emphasis on the representation of persons of different educational, professional, and regional backgrounds, as well as the demand for good cultural and sports performances in the festival events opened foreign travel to more ordinary people than anyone could hope for two years after Stalin’s death.

The travel report from the 1955 youth festival in Warsaw was remarkable not only because of its perspective on a mass travel event of the Cold War. ²⁸ The author of the report was also confronted with the ongoing de-Stalinization in Poland. His reflection of ideological turbulences and changing canon of socialist realism was fully coincident with the official line of the Czechoslovak communist leadership. In his travel report, the author noted that “the embellishment of Warsaw showed the ideological ambiguity of Polish artists and . . . was against the spirit of socialist realism.” ²⁹ From the official’s point of view, Polish youth did not manifest loyalty to the party, people’s democracy, and the Soviet Union. Polish attendance at festival events was insufficient; the number of participants was three times lower than the overall number of youth in the city. ³⁰ When the author of the report noted that only young people from the central authorities—but nobody from industrial and agricultural companies—participated in the festival parades, he looked at the festival in terms of the meanings attributed by Czechoslovak youth officials to collective travel. The presidium of the ÚV ČSM emphasized that attendance at the world festival was not an exclusive matter for privileged officials of the ČSM central committee but was also for ordinary young people of different origins. Most of the proposed nominees came from industrial factories, agricultural cooperatives, small cities, villages, regional schools, and from among the “good officials” of the ČSM. ³¹

The second type of collective travel organized by the international department of the ÚV ČSM involved travel by Czechoslovak artistic ensembles to Western Europe. Officials of the ÚV ČSM understood travel by artistic groups into Western Europe as the promotion of socialist culture. The majority of the participants in these journeys were people with a high level of artistic skill, capable of creating sophisticated cultural performances; without these skills, they would not have been invited to participate in Western cultural events. In the words of Michael D. Fox, it would be possible to write about the “cultural diplomacy” of the ÚV ČSM and its efforts use such events to manipulate public opinion and entice new “fellow travellers” in the West. ³² Similarly, Anne E. Gorsuch has portrayed the performative function of Soviet tourism to Western Europe as “a theatre of diplomacy.” ³³ If Soviet tourists in Western Europe were objects of intense observation, followed by photographers and journalists, displaying “a new, post-Stalin, Soviet self” then the tours by Czechoslovak artistic ensembles in Western Europe after Stalin were a highly directed show with guides, interpreters, and tour managers acting as choreographers. ³⁴ Like Diane Koenker’s proletarian tourists of the 1930s, Czechoslovak socialist ensembles also served as “ambassadors of socialism,” bringing socialist culture to West European audiences and inviting them to participate in their evenings of music, dance, and performance. ³⁵

This type of travel is represented by the tour of the Moravian folklore group Hradišťan to Lille in April 1956. Cultural exchanges with France and cooperation with French youth and student organisations based on “special relations” took a privileged position in the international activity of the ÚV ČSM in the late 1950s. The organisations of French youth and students were much more open to cooperation and interaction with the ČSM than youth organisations from other European countries. Czechoslovak–French relations dated back to the interwar period and their tradition was further developed after 1956. ³⁶ In France, the society for Czechoslovak–French cooperation worked with a certain impact on public opinion. The strong position of the French communist and socialist parties, together with the great influence of the leftist and cosmopolitan-oriented cultural avant-garde, created suitable conditions for collective trips and travel exchanges.

Like other international activities organized by the ÚV ČSM in the mid-1950s, the folklore ensemble’s trip to a cultural festival in Western Europe was highly politicized. The international department organized a short-term training camp for the participants in the artistic tour to Lille. ³⁷ Controversies in the French press and political public about the results of the twentieth Soviet Party Congress prompted ÚV ČSM officials to discuss with the members of the folklore group the political issues that resulted from the congress. This political training was intended to create a common opinion and to supply participants with arguments and answers for potential political questions. Although there was some doubt whether the folklore artists’ language abilities and cultural interests would allow them to discuss political issues and similarly sensitive topics with their French counterparts, ÚV ČSM officials were haunted by the thought that, while they were abroad, the Czechoslovak performers might develop divergent opinions, establish contacts with Czechoslovak exiles, and start to admire Western lifestyles. ³⁸

As has already been noted, reports about foreign travels like the Hradišťan participation in the Lille folklore festival in April 1956 were written for potential readers from the international department of the ÚV ČSM. In the case of the Lille festival, the [political] head of the Czechoslovak delegation and the author of the subsequent travel report, Comrade Zelenka, depicted the Czechoslovak participation through the narrative of the hostile “conservative” organizers of the festival and friendly “progressive” youth that prevailed in the Stalinist discourse. While the French organizers of the festival were portrayed as trying to restrict the performances of socialist (e.g., Czechoslovak and Rumanian artists) to a minimum of twenty minutes in the common session of the final ceremony because of the belated arrival of musical instruments, the student audience in Lille responded to the Czechoslovak performances with a standing ovation. ³⁹

Potential readers from the ÚV ČSM international department were educated in Marxism–Leninism and the travel report perfectly fit the Marxist–Leninist narrative. In Marxism–Leninism, nobody could better represent the working class than miners. Therefore, it is not surprising that according to Zelenka, the Czechoslovak and Soviet delegations, together with the Spanish delegation, were asked by the management of the coal mining enterprise to perform one evening in a mining centre in Oignies where more than half the inhabitants (as well as the audience) consisted of Polish miners working there. Khrushchev’s recent promotion of Peaceful Coexistence at the twentieth Soviet Party Congress appeared in the language of the report when it claimed that after the official programme finished, the “politics of coexistence was manifested in full.” ⁴⁰

Czechoslovak–Soviet friendship was completed by cooperation with Spanish students, even though this kind of transnational interaction underpinned cultural stereotypes connecting ethnicity with gender. The report told the story of the Czechoslovak and Soviet accordionists, who, together with Spanish guitarists, played in a separate room for Spanish students who invited Czechoslovak and Soviet girls to dance. The Madrid students from Franco’s Spain requested ČSM and Komsomol badges, promising to smuggle them across the French–Spanish borders. Zelenka stated that Spanish students came to know “Czechoslovaks” and “Soviets” in another light than they were shown by Spanish propaganda. Moreover, he underlined that the Czechoslovak delegation was not endangered by free international mobility, but that free international mobility challenged the Spanish regime. In this respect, Zelenka did not use the idea of peaceful coexistence for the promotion of socialism but to advocate foreign travel.

Zelenka as the [political] head of the Czechoslovak delegation at the folklore festival in Lille was entrusted with the establishment, consolidation, and expansion of Czechoslovak–French cooperation at a cultural event that was used for politicized aims. Zelenka described how the Czechoslovak delegation organized its own reception in order to develop cooperation with its French counterparts while they were still in Lille. According to Zelenka, the official [French] reception was too “poor” and “embarrassing” and “we wanted to show them that even abroad we are able to organize such an event [reception] better than [they do it] themselves.” ⁴¹ During the reception, the attendees were treated to Prague sausages, beer, and plum brandy, which they consumed during a performance of the cimbalon music group. The evening thus intended to show the triumph of the people’s taste over bourgeois fineness.

It is very difficult to ascertain if this collective tour fulfilled its “political purpose” and positively influenced the attitudes of the French counterparts for possible future cooperation. Unfortunately, except for the detailed ten-page report submitted by “Comrade Zelenka,” no other documents and reports of individual participants have been preserved. The news about the trip published as short columns in the ÚV ČSM daily Mladá fronta indicated that official authorities at home did not pay much attention to it. ⁴² They were more concerned with turbulent discussions about the results of the twentieth Soviet Party Congress and the current visit of the “Soviet statesmen” to Great Britain, as the editorials and political comments in Mladá fronta illustrated. The series of published articles in Mladá fronta that did report the foreign tour did not significantly differ from the report of the political head. ⁴³ Both the report and the newspaper articles gloated about the success of the Czechoslovak ensemble. ⁴⁴ But the journalist on the tour, Jaromír Švamberk, was silent in his columns about the informal meetings with representatives of French cultural and education institutions that were described by the political head in detail and were used to negotiate future exchanges. ⁴⁵ As the author of the travel report noticed, the aim of foreign travel in relatively small artistic groups was to “gain entrance” into the West and approach “simple people” in regional halls which were visited by the “normal worker.” ⁴⁶ Informal meetings with plum brandy and irregularities in the itinerary did not fit with the prevailing meanings associated with foreign travels to Western Europe, and were passed over in public.

From the “Reform Movement” to a “New Turn of the Screw”

Based on annual reports of the international departments of the ÚV ČSM, in the next paragraphs I will sketch the broader historical and ideological context within which the meanings of collective travel abroad in the aftermath of Hungarian and Polish events in 1956 started to change. While Khrushchev’s proclamation of peaceful coexistence after 1954 opened the space for cooperation with capitalist youth from Western Europe, political and ideological turbulence in East Central Europe and the Near East in 1956 cut off this direct route from the East to the West and built unexpected detours, not only in travel exchanges with “friendly” organisations of capitalist youth but also with “brotherly” organisations of socialist youth.

After the party and youth authorities’ condemnation of the Polish and Hungarian events in 1956, youth officials of the international department were faced with Western rejection of potential cooperation and learned carefully to distinguish what groups of young people could be sent to which countries. Similarly, collective travels to and from Hungary and Poland were strongly politicized: their purpose was related to international “assistance” and the “consolidation” of the youth movement after the “counter-revolutionary” uprisings. Moreover, the start of decolonization processes and the mobilisation of national liberation movements in the Third World in the late 1950s provincialized the European orientation of youth officials and globalized their horizons.

Whereas the political transformations of 1956 are commonly associated with the liberalization of foreign travel and international tourism, the following year has been interpreted as a “new turn of the screw” in East Central Europe. ⁴⁷ What changed was the meaning and intensity of travel exchanges with the West. This shift can be documented through phrases used in the annual reports submitted by the international department of the ÚV ČSM. Throughout the period of 1954–1956, international activity, foreign travel, and interaction with the West were characterized by terms like “establishment,” “consolidation,” and “expansion.” The author of the November 1957 report on international relations of the ÚV ČSM did not hesitate to write about “imperialist activity,” “triggering a new war,” and the “distortion of the results of the twentieth Soviet Party Congress.” ⁴⁸ In addition to the shift in political language, the staff of the ÚV ČSM international department also changed. Jiří Loužil, the leading official of the international department and author of its yearly reports after Stalin’s death, ceased to work in the ÚV ČSM and as a supporter of cooperation with the West was replaced by followers of the party hard line. ⁴⁹

The development of foreign travel and international tourism to and from Czechoslovakia in 1957 differed from the Polish success story. ⁵⁰ Because of the Polish October and the Hungarian uprising as well as the “vacillation” of socialist and communist youth organisations in the West, the Czechoslovak party leadership was already approving restrictions on international interaction during the second half of 1956; these restrictions included the contraction of collective travel carried out by the ÚV ČSM. ⁵¹ As Table 1 illustrates, the number of exchanges, congress attendance, conference participation, artistic tours, study visits, excursions, and trips to and from Western Europe—with the exception of France—decreased. ⁵² Through the ÚV ČSM’s cooperation with French communist, socialist, Catholic, and folklore youth groups, young people were sent to and many persons came from France. ⁵³ Talks about possible cooperation with liberally oriented West German youth and student organisations [probably FDP] were interrupted, because East German FDJ leaders pointed out their “reactionary character.” ⁵⁴ Short-term excursions and visits to and from Austria, which were appreciated by both sides, were based on close cooperation between the ÚV ČSM and Central Committee of the Free Austrian Youth (ZK FÖJ) at the international level, but the Austrian Student Union refused any contacts with the ÚV ČSM after it criticized the events of the student carnival in May 1956. ⁵⁵ Cooperation with Italian youth and student organisations encountered rejection due to “lack of interest” by the Italian communist youth union. With the exception of the socialist youth union that opposed Nenni’s “revisionist” policy, no Italian youth organisations were interested in relationships with the ÚV ČSM. ⁵⁶ Although the leadership of the British national student union repeatedly declared the “necessity” of common cooperation, the student exchange proposed in 1953 was postponed many times, because there were not enough British students who wanted to attend. ⁵⁷ The regional label “Scandinavian countries” covered Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish student organisations that halted cooperation with the ÚV ČSM after the suppression of the Hungarian “counterrevolution.” ⁵⁸ Cooperation with the Belgian socialist youth union stopped for the same reason, and the “reactionary” attitude of Dutch organisations was attributed to the fact that COSEC, the rival structure coordinating national unions of students in the West, resided in Leiden. ⁵⁹

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Table 1

The Number of Foreign Visitors in Czechoslovakia in 1956

Austria	Denmark	Switzerland	Netherlands	Belgium	France	Norway	Britain	West Germany
18	24	12	28	14	43	10	12	4

Note: Zpráva o účasti ČSM v akci SFDM „Léto přátelství“ v r. 1956 a návrhy na mezinárodní turistickou činnost v roce 1957, in National Archive, f. ÚV ČSM–Prague, kr. 144/14, 3.

The number of visitors from the Soviet Union, some People’s Democracies, as well as African and Asian countries increased, however. ⁶⁰ In response to the growing dynamic of decolonisation and national liberation movements, the ÚV ČSM shifted its focus to India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Uganda, Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco, ⁶¹ because “ in these countries youth and students play the important role in the struggle for national independence.” ⁶² ÚV ČSM took care of Albanian, Chinese, Mongolian, Vietnamese, and Korean youth delegations for several days during their transition to the West, and promoted the “life of Czechoslovak youth” in China as well. ⁶³ With the exception of Ecuador and Bolivia, the international activity of the ÚV ČSM in Latin America clashed with the United States’ attempts to exert its influence in the region. ⁶⁴ As Table 2 shows, journeys to the GDR, Rumania, and Bulgaria contrasted with the limited exchanges between Czechoslovak youth and their Hungarian and Polish counterparts. As the annual report of the ÚV ČSM international department noted in 1957, the [political, social, cultural] “quality” of participants in collective foreign trips could not be guaranteed because the delegations were sometimes chosen seemingly at random, and at the last minute (thus not allowing time for the delegates to be fully vetted). ⁶⁵ Trips to the Baltic seaside were rerouted past Berlin because many participants used the stop there to leave the tour and emigrate to the West. ⁶⁶ The new form of collective travel to the Black Sea coast was represented by the operation of a summer camp in Rumania and tourist travels to Bulgaria. ⁶⁷

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Table 2

The Number of Visitors Exchanged between Czechoslovakia and People’s Democratic Countries in 1957

	USSR	Poland	Hungary	GDR	Rumania	Bulgaria
To	3,028 a	900	1	2,209	4,500	850
From	310	900	X	2,207	X	X

Note: The table includes only participants who were literally mentioned through the number in the yearly report and does not include visitors who were involved in the “visiting delegation” without the quotation of the exact number. Cf. National Archive, f. ÚV ČSM–Prague, kr. 147/12, 2 ff.

a

Foreign travels included 1200 Czechoslovak participants in the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow.

Although the party and youth authorities’ condemnation of the Polish October and the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 reduced the extent of foreign exchanges with Western Europe, they did open a new space for travel at a regional level. The Czechoslovak party and youth authorities were afraid of the “disintegration” of the Polish and Hungarian “comradely” organisations. According to the annual report of the international department, the ČSM could help with the “consolidation of the Polish youth movement” and recommended supporting cooperation with regional organisations from the border regions of Wrocław, Opole, and Katowice. ⁶⁸ The reasons for this “help” and “cooperation” were stated indirectly in the annual report: the successor organisations of Polish youth and students established in 1956–1957 were expanding cooperation with their West European, Yugoslav, and Chinese counterparts; some Polish groups expressed “nationalist moods” against the Soviet Union and the GDR; and the Czechoslovak–Polish exchanges were accompanied by “political discussions” with Polish students to whom “the issue of the Czechoslovak–Soviet alliance, control of [Czechoslovak] industry and socialisation [collectivisation] of the village” should be clarified. ⁶⁹ As with the Czechoslovak–Polish exchanges, Czechoslovak “help” in the renewal of the Hungarian youth organisation promoted regional mobility across Czechoslovak–Hungarian borders. Regional committees (KV ČSM) from Nitra and Košice, under the scrutiny of the regional committees of the Slovak communist party (KV KSS), sent their members to Hungarian border regions. ⁷⁰ However, at the central level, only one person visited Hungary in 1957 in order to get information about the state of the youth movement. For talks about continuing mutual cooperation, the ÚV ČSM international department preferred inviting their Hungarian counterparts to Prague. ⁷¹

Political Benefits of Foreign Tourism and Youth’s Rest after Work

The most significant change of meanings associated with collective travel abroad emerged in the late 1950s. Official discussions about foreign travels in the international department of the ÚV ČSM at that time were characterized by a semantic shift from “international activity” to “foreign tourism.” The reduction of international tensions and the building of stronger East–West relations after 1954 sparked a “boom” in the international activity of the ÚV ČSM. Collective travel abroad as a specific type of international activity was understood in distinctive political terms, with the purpose of “consolidating” friendship with youth from capitalist, colonial, and dependent countries. After the twentieth Soviet Party Congress and the promotion of peaceful coexistence in 1956, this consolidation was transformed into “establishment” and “expansion” of international cooperation with the West, conducted through travel exchanges of artistic ensembles, excursion tours, and study trips. Despite the interruption in foreign travel caused by Hungarian and Polish events, the concept of “foreign tourism” blossomed in official debates about collective travel abroad.

Foreign tourism might be seen as a part of post-Stalinist transformation that Diane Koenker called “contested transition from producer to consumer society.” ⁷² In its search for new sources of political legitimacy after Stalinism, party leadership took much more into account consumer demands and expectations of socialist citizens, including leisure time and leisure travel that emerged in the twentieth century as a major element of consumer society. ⁷³ As Christopher Endy argued in the context of American tourism in France, leisure travel has also been a profoundly international activity that depended on a transnational travel constituency, alliance of business groups, media elites, and government officials operating within and across national borders. ⁷⁴

In 1958, the international department of the ÚV ČSM established a travel section that operated as travel agency for youth with its own tourist facilities and international camps. The travel section was involved in the construction of the first “touristic infrastructure” and tried to invite foreign visitors into newly built summer camps. The staff of the travel section gained increasingly more influence on the international mobility of young people and took part in the activity of the governmental committee coordinating tourism in Czechoslovakia. ⁷⁵ Two divisions of the travel section dealt only with the planning and financial legal matters of foreign travels, whose organization and realization had become increasingly difficult. ⁷⁶ During three years, the number of members cooperating with the travel section within the so-called caucus grew ninefold and included many professionals and part-time employees who dealt with tourist guiding, instructors working in summer camps, office work, promotion, translation, etc. ⁷⁷

Officials in the international department of the ÚV ČSM viewed foreign tourism as a tool to educate youth and to strengthen their feelings for proletarian internationalism, the new international communist policy formulated in 1958. ⁷⁸ The sending of girls and boys to socialist countries and experienced ÚV ČSM officials to capitalist countries was considered to be “politically beneficial” for young Czechoslovak citizens, for these trips were meant to introduce them to the life and work of foreign youth, to consolidate “brotherly relationships” among the young generation of socialist citizens and to contribute to “peaceful understanding” among nations. Foreign tourism was considered a particularly valuable form of leisure—valuable “rest” for youth after work. ⁷⁹ As Tables 3 and 4 show, the number of foreign journeys to and from Czechoslovakia rapidly increased, even though the official statistics did not include trips and tours to Yugoslavia, which did not fall within the purview of the ÚV ČSM, because “Yugoslav youth and student organisations refused to deepen their partnership with their counterparts from the Soviet bloc.” ⁸⁰

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Table 3

The Statistical Overview of the Czechoslovak Youth Travelling to Socialist and Capitalist Countries

	1957	1958	1959	1960
Socialist world	10,201	9,325	10,820	17,710
Capitalist world	105	224	1,556 a	244

Note: National Archive, f. ÚV ČSM–Prague, kr. 156/7, 4

a.

Foreign travels included 1451 Czechoslovak participants in the World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna

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Table 4

The Statistical Overview of Foreign Visitors from Socialist and Capitalist Countries in Czechoslovakia

	1957	1958	1959	1960
Socialist world	3,397	4,398	12,633	15,038
Capitalist world	130	676	1026	1274

Note: National Archive, f. ÚV ČSM–Prague, kr. 156/7, 4

In 1961, the travel section of the ÚV ČSM published a “comprehensive overview” of foreign youth tourism in which the authors emphasized that foreign tours and trips are reserved in particular for collectives of young people between 16 and 26 years old (or a maximum of 30 years old in the case of ČSM officials) coming from one workplace or from one company. ⁸¹ The reservation of foreign travel for collectives was to “cement” grassroots organizations of the ČSM and to enable “mutual familiarization” of their members. ⁸² Working-class and peasant youth were especially welcomed on foreign tours because they, more than all other young people, needed “vacations on sunny beaches of the Black and Baltic seas.” ⁸³

The promotion of collectives of working-class and peasant youth in foreign travel indicated that young workers and peasants were not sufficiently represented in international tourism as youth authorities intended. According to the statistical surveys that were discussed by the ÚV ČSM the previous year, most of the participants in foreign travel from Czechoslovakia were workers, but people with higher education and students were also strongly represented (as Table 5 illustrates). ⁸⁴ The second problem that emerged from the surveys was that people older than 27 years constituted more than a quarter of the visitors (as Table 6 shows). Last but not least, men constituted 55.5 percent of all travellers to foreign countries whereas women comprised 44.5 percent. ⁸⁵ Officials of the ÚV ČSM admitted that they failed “significantly to influence the [social] composition of our trips and to include more young workers and peasants.” ⁸⁶

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Table 5

Participants of Foreign Travels in 1960 According Their Professions’ Background

Profession	Percentage	Profession	Percentage
Workers	38.4	Teachers	6.7
Peasants	1.7	Technical intelligentsia	15.3
Students	9.3	Other intelligentsia	10.1
White collar workers	8.5	Various professions	7.0
Political workers	2.9

Note: National Archive, f. ÚV ČSM–Prague, kr. 156/7, 7.

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Table 6

Participants of Foreign Travels in 1960 According Their Age Cohort

Age Cohort	Percentage
1940–1944	26.4
1934–1939	45
1931–1933	17.8
1930 and earlier	9.9

Note: National Archive, f. ÚV ČSM–Prague, kr. 156/7, 7.

The high percentage of older, well-educated men among travellers can be explained by their privileged position among officials of the ČSM. The caucus in the travel section handled the distribution of free places for foreign travel and the nomination of participants. Anne E. Gorsuch has observed that foreign travel was dominated by high-ranking party members and scientific and cultural elites who were mostly male. ⁸⁷ Soviet authorities were also anxious about “the lack of life experience” of young people who could not behave in compliance with expected norms, and thus places reserved for youth were sometimes taken by middle-aged officials and professionals. ⁸⁸ This appears to have been the case with the Czechoslovak authorities too: the author of an annual report noted that not all participants had the broad “political and general horizon,” and local committees of the ČSM often nominated their officials. ⁸⁹

Conclusions

This article has argued that the communist shift in emphasis from individual to collective forms of travel was intended to represent society-wide benefit and to balance particular interests and social contradictions. The article raised the question how the meanings of foreign travel after 1954 contributed to the transformation of the Stalinist discourse and to what extent these meanings affected the political, social, and cultural imagination of official youth representatives. It also asked if the political purposes that party and youth authorities associated with collective travel abroad were fulfilled, differences of opinion mitigated, and ideological consensus created.

Representatives of Czechoslovak youth, in particular youth officials and political heads of foreign trips who reported about their foreign travels after Stalin’s death, conducted international activities in the unique historical context of the post-Stalinist transition when the opening to the outside world and to the West in particular through travel and tourism exposed political, social, and cultural differences. The basic social difference drawn by youth officials and group leaders was defined by generation. In their reports, they considered themselves to be representatives of “Czechoslovak youth” and on behalf of “Czechoslovak youth” they wrote about consolidation and deepening “friendship” with youth from socialist, capitalist, and dependent countries. The term “youth” created together with the term “class” the important demarcation line of that time. The social difference based on generation and class underpinned ideological consensus: it was especially underlined during the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw 1955 where the author of the travel report contrasted “working class youth” from [Czechoslovak] factories, villages, schools, and youth organisations against their [Polish] counterparts who allegedly consisted of “youth from central offices.”

Although, “youth” remained for officials of the ÚV ČSM the basic social distinction that defined actors in foreign excursions and trips abroad, the important political and cultural difference was constructed through the dichotomy of the East and the West. Officials tried to strengthen “friendships with youth from Western Europe,” and thus imagined themselves as being in some unnamed space placed in contrast to Western Europe. However, in their reports they did not explicitly use the concept of “the East” or “Eastern Europe” or consider themselves to be part of such a place. What made the distinction between “them” and “us” really come alive was the political division between the “socialist” and “capitalist” world. Officials understood the “people’s democratic countries” as distinct from “capitalist” countries and from the hostile “West.” They did not perceive their difference from Western partners through the sense of belonging to the East, but through a negative imagination, being neither “capitalist” nor “Western.” Until 1960 when the Czechoslovak party leadership proclaimed the “victory of socialism in Czechoslovakia” and “overcoming contradictions during the transition from capitalism to socialism,” Czechoslovak citizens lived in the transitional regime of a People’s Democracy that was no longer capitalist, but not yet socialist either.

The notion of “progress” also played a small role in imagining the difference after 1954, because the officials of the ÚV ČSM as representatives of the people’s democratic youth mostly cooperated with West European counterparts from socialist, social-democratic, communist, and left-wing political parties that constituted the core of “progressive forces.” They understood themselves as being, together with their Western “progressive” counterparts, distinct from “other” young people in the West. Another aspect of this negative perception, of not being “capitalist” and being distinct from “Western” youth, was the attitude of West European “conservatives” who rejected cooperation with the people’s democratic—“communist”—citizens in general. In this regard, the political imagination of youth officials and group leaders was based on the negation of “conservatives” without explicitly saying what their antithesis to “conservative” was.

Moreover, the Polish and Hungarian events of 1956 brought a further differentiation of “progressive” youth in both capitalist and people’s democratic countries. The leadership of the ÚV ČSM observed with distrust the “vacillation” of “comradely” youth organizations in the West. International mobility to Poland started to be viewed through the prism of “revisionism,” and foreign travel to and from Hungary was jeopardized by the ghost of “counter-revolution.” These labels indicated that the officials’ imagination was sometimes confused by overlapping notions such as Western Europe, capitalist countries, and international reaction that intertwined in official discourse with images of disintegrated, revisionist, and counter-revolutionary displays in neighbouring countries. However, these notions appeared within the political imagination of that time rather than representing what György Péteri has called the “constitutive other” to which the Marxist–Leninist worldview was resistant. ⁹⁰

Political meanings and purposes associated with the foreign travel and international tourism conducted by the ÚV ČSM undoubtedly contributed to the ideological consensus of those who participated in these events on the one hand. On the other, participants’ individual perceptions, personal communications, and face-to-face meetings challenged the oversimplified images of “socialist,” “capitalist,” and “colonial” societies as they were depicted in Cold War discourse. The authors of the annual and travel reports could hardly go beyond the official point of view, but their emphasis on their political, social, and cultural differences with their foreign counterparts subtly revised established notions persisting from the Stalinist period. While the eroded canon of socialist realism in Warsaw in 1955 and the lack of loyalty to the party, people’s democracy, and the Soviet Union among Polish youth which the Czechoslovak participants of the Warsaw youth festival were confronted with slightly modified the Stalinist conception of socialist art and society, informal meetings with “guitar” and “plum brandy” during the foreign tour of Hradišťan in Lille in April 1956 revised the Stalinist dichotomy of “friends” and “foes.” Even though the meanings of collective travel abroad depended on the current state of international affairs and ideological principles, socialist citizens nevertheless undermined the Marxist–Leninist narrative—as youth officials admitted when examining the statistical representation of young “boys” and “girls” from working class and peasant backgrounds in foreign travel.