ABSTRACT
In 1930, Vladimir Antonov-Saratovskii (1884-1965), an old Bolshevik, lawyer, and high functionary in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR),1 wrote a primer on “Soviet proletarian tourism.” Antonov-Saratovskii set out to dene Soviet tourism in a manner that dissociated it from its equivalent in the capitalist world:
While the middle-class or petty bourgeois tourists in the West were allegedly seeking apolitical distraction, Antonov-Saratovskii emphasized the political signicance of tourism in a society building socialism. He argued that tourism:
Antonov-Saratovskii suggested a multitude of useful tasks to be fullled by tourism, ranging from the collection of ethno-and geographic knowledge, to the search for useful mineral resources, to the unveiling of foreign agents. Recreation did not seem to rank prominently among the priorities.
