ABSTRACT
In the symbolic economy of Cold War tourism, home visits, unofficial and unsanctioned, were valued as the ultimate off-the-beaten-track experience. Human rights tourism was one of the few modes of travel that regularly opened Soviet domestic space to the Western gaze. This chapter examines how Western organisations working to aid the movement for Soviet Jewish emigration rights provided thousands of tourists an opportunity to experience the Cold War from this unique vantage point. Human rights tourists tried to make sense of the USSR by examining how Soviet Jews’ homes stood in relationship to the society outside. Their writings portray Soviet Jewish domestic space both as an antithesis to Soviet space, a warm and hospitable haven in the midst of a cold and hostile land, and as a Soviet space in its own right, a socialist creation penetrated by a police state. Policymakers may have hoped that tourism would foster popular support for detente, but as this analysis of unique travel reports shows, human rights travel had the opposite effect, re-energising negative Western images of the Soviet Union.
