Turizm: the Russian and East European tourist under capitalism and socialism

Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds. Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. viii, 313 pp. Illustrations. Index.In one of his popular humorous sketches, Lev Rubinshtein records a conversation with a member of the younger generation about travel back in the Soviet days. Tell me, Papa, his daughter meditatively asks. Why did you never leave Russia before the 199Os? Was it money problems, or couldn't you be bothered? In the era of mass package tours to everywhere from Thailand to Turkey and of ubiquitously advertised goriashchie putevki (last-minute bargain trips), not to speak of unlimited opportunities for independent travel, it is difficult even for people who actually lived at the period to remember just how difficult foreign tourism was for most citizens of the Eastern bloc during most years between 1917 (in the case of Russia) and 1939 (in the case of other places) and the late 1980s. Indeed, at earlier periods of Russian history, leisure travel was not necessarily straightforward either, as both Louise McReynolds (in a general article about tourism in the mid to late nineteenth centuries) and Susan Layton (in an article about leisure travel among soldiers and officers) reveal. While travel to order (for the purpose of diplomacy, trade, or garnering information about foreign societies) has a long history, and received intensive state support during the reign of Peter the Great, it was only under Catherine II that cross-border leisure travel at will became a possible option for members of the Russian gentry and nobility, and even then rulers were capable of revoking mobility privileges at moments of crisis (as happened under Nicholas I, for example).Thus, Russia was in signal respects a special case. Yet here too, as in other parts of Eastern Europe (and indeed in Western Europe and America), travel abroad embraced both cultural and actual consumption-immersion in exotic landscape and exotic social practices alongside the acquisition of goods not available at home. In the post-war era, as Wendy Bracewell, in particular, reveals in an article on Yugoslav travel writing from the 1950s and 196Os, the theme of shopping gradually came predominant; as dramatically overstated by the writer Slavenka Drakulic, We traded our freedom for a pair of Italian shoes (p. 250). The main difference between Eastern European and Western tourists lay in the likelihood of being able to realize acquisitive desires: not only was the cost of travel extremely high (as Anne Gorsuch reveals in her Time Travellers: Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe, a trip to Romania might cost around a sixth of the average industrial worker's annual pay), but currency limits meant that spending money was tight. It was accordingly fairly common for tourists to take items with them for sale so they could create their own financial liquidity (as also discussed by Bracewell and Gorsuch), something rarer among Western tourists, even in the cash-strapped 1950s and 1960s.But consumerism was not the only motivation, even after 1945. As Eleonory Gilburd discusses in an article on the Soviet puppet theatre master Sergei Obraztsov, tourists also had cultural ambitions, testing their impressions against their knowledge of foreign literature (in this case London and Dickens), and writing for an audience that might prefer (or have to prefer) armchair travel to the real thing. In addition, the non-permeability of borders also placed a considerable onus on domestic travel, whether it was the many wild tourists (i.e. travellers without organizational credentials) who flooded to the Black Sea coast (here portrayed in an article by Christian Noack), or the East German members of hiking societies (discussed by Scott Moranda). …