The birth of “proletarian” tourism

Adventure tourism, widespread in the West beginning with the second half of the 19th century, was alien to Russian people. Only a handful of aristocrats and middle-class individuals practised it before the Bolshevik Revolution. However, in 1928, the year when Soviet leaders launched their massive programme of modernisation, several Bolshevik officials decided to contribute to this effort by transplanting Western outdoor culture in similar fashion to the way the Soviet state was importing foreign technology. They initiated Soviet adventure tourism project as a typical Stalinist campaign intended to facilitate the trend of rapid societal modernisation. The seeds of this foreign culture fell on a fertile soil: with guaranteed multiweek vacations and with communist ideology calling for feats, urban young people, lacking other affordable recreational options, rushed to the wilderness. The Association for Proletarian Tourism and Excursions (the OPTE) sought to develop a form of “proletarian” tourism distinct from its Western counterpart. This chapter examines the OPTE’s structure, as well as the outlook and ideology of its self-proclaimed leaders. The OPTE, formally a public association but in practice an instrument of the emerging totalitarian order, tried to keep an iron grip on the practice of adventure tourism.