The concept of revolutionary remembrance (or other kind of military commemoration) as a tourist attraction presents a paradox. Tourism connotes fun and frivolity, an escape from affairs of work or of state. Revolutions and wars, by contrast, are serious and solemn conflicts, they create victims and sacrifice whose remembrance helps to sanctify the losses seen to be the necessary price to pay for social progress or national defense. Yet historical (“heritage”) tourism has a rich history in modern practice. Sites of commemoration have long attracted tourists who wish to see with their own eyes the places of important national memories (the battlefields of Gettysburg from the U.S. civil war, or the Somme from World War I, the fortress at Masada in Israel) or national origins (the colonial Williamsburg historical park in Virginia, the Fortress of Louisbourg on Canada's Cape Breton Island, or the Port Arthur prison historic site in Australian Tasmania).Footnote ¹

In fact, memory and tourism have much in common. Memory functions to incorporate, to provide a link between experienced values and their public commemoration. Memory, or historical remembrance, brings members of a community, society, or nation together. As Alon Confino writes, memory “has come to denote the representation of the past and the making of it into a shared cultural knowledge by successive generations.”Footnote ² Tourism acquires its specificity from the experience of displacement, of “being elsewhere,” away from home, away from the familiar. But in this very displacement, writes Dean MacCannell, tourists seek to overcome differentiation and alienation, to incorporate the fragments of modernity “into unified experience”; the tourist class “scavenges the earth for new experiences to be woven into a collective, touristic version of other peoples and other places.”Footnote ³ By encountering “other places,” the tourist becomes more conscious of the scope of the society to which he or she belongs, of the common ties shared with fellow tourists to shared other places. Pierre Nora notes in passing that lieux de mémoire “include tourist sites generally.”Footnote ⁴ Specific physical sites—tourist attractions—can be organized to provide vivid kernels of public memory.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European nationalists promoted tourism as a method for the symbolic transformation of “elsewhere” into “home.” German-speaking Austrians employed tourism as a way to anchor German identity in particular landscapes.Footnote ⁵ Hungarian nationalists used tourism to the Tatra mountains to support their nationalist project, to reinscribe the Tatras as a Hungarian landscape.Footnote ⁶ In the twentieth century, states themselves became actively involved in shaping tourist agendas. In the United States, national parks attracted tourists not only with dramatic scenery, but through inscribing this landscape with historical, geological, and biological meaning.Footnote ⁷ The “Strength through Joy” movement of Nazi Germany and the dopolavoro in Mussolini's Italy employed mass tourism as a means to incorporate individuals into the nation, combining natural landscapes and patriotic narratives.Footnote ⁸ The Soviet Union also promoted tourism as a weapon in its state-building arsenal, but it employed more abstract uses of “space” and “memory” in adding revolutionary commemoration to the roster of tourist trails.

Soviet tourism explicitly combined fun and instruction, offering active and purposeful rest: tourism provided lessons in “economic geography, botany, zoology, history . . .”Footnote ⁹ One but only one of these goals was to acquaint the tourist with the history of revolution, with the founding myths of the state. This paper explores the phenomenon of tourism to revolutionary sites as one of the functions of Soviet tourism, focusing on how trips and excursions to sites of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions were organized over time and how they were represented in the succession of guidebooks and tourist aids published in the USSR. There is no question that the production of a coherent and consistent memory of the revolutionary experience was an important goal of the regime, yet when the revolution became part of the tourist's itinerary, coherence and consistency had to compete with the messier and more multiple goals of tourists' desires. The appeal of tourism was its very diversity. The tourist's “collective incorporation” into the society through revolutionary memorial sites would enter the tourist itinerary indirectly, as part of a whole package of sites, attractions, sensations, and experiences that enticed Soviet tourists to spend their annual vacations “elsewhere.”

The instrument for this act of collective incorporation is the attraction, a site whose meaning and authenticity are ratified by the gathering of tourists around it as well as by its distance from one's everyday. A tourist attraction, writes MacCannell, is an “empirical relationship between a tourist, a sight, and a marker (a piece of information about a sight.)”Footnote ¹⁰ As Christopher Ely recounts, for example, the Volga river was not inherently a tourist attraction in the nineteenth century, but it became one through the preparation of guidebooks (the marker) celebrating its uniquely Russian character and beauty, and, importantly, by the decision of tourists to travel the Volga in order to appreciate this beauty.Footnote ¹¹ Markers (guidebooks, postcards, memorial plaques) invite the tourist to share in the appreciation of an attraction and thereby signify the sight as an attraction. The attraction also derives its significance from difference, both substantive and spatial. The contemplation of a tourist attraction (that which John Urry labels the “tourist gaze”) represents an activity other than regular and ordinary work, and it takes place as the result of a journey away from home.Footnote ¹²

Military conflict—war—represents one key component of a nation's collective memory. The phenomenon of battlefield tourism has provided historians of memory and of tourism with a rich field through which to examine dichotomies between tradition and modernity, between sacred and secular, between tourist and pilgrim.Footnote ¹³ Susan Layton describes the early emergence of Crimean War battle sites as attractions for Russian aristocrats and middle-class travelers alike.Footnote ¹⁴ Likewise, the fields of Waterloo attracted English tourists to Belgium in the mid-nineteenth century, and the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania drew thousands of visitors prior to 1914.Footnote ¹⁵ But it was the Great War of 1914–18, coinciding with the rising affluence of a touring middle class, that raised the phenomenon of battlefield tourism to a commercial scale, complete with guidebooks and package tours.Footnote ¹⁶ As memory of the war receded, battlefield tourism became a mechanism to teach new generations of the lessons and tragedies of the war, a symbol of the way in which tourism could combine pleasure, awe, and civic collectivism.

“Revolution” as a tourist attraction bears some similarity to war: both evoke social rupture, sacrifice and loss, heroism and national pride. But revolution as “event” is more plastic than a war. The Russian Revolution's chronological and spatial limits can be collapsed to “Petrograd, October 1917,” or extended backward to the Decembrists, Radishchev, and beyond. All history after October 1917 could be considered as part of the “Russian Revolution,” since all economic achievements, all cultural productions, and breakthroughs in science could be labeled a product of the revolution. Spatially, every city on Soviet territory could claim a piece of the revolutionary heritage, and vast swaths of the country could provide sites at which to remember military actions during the civil war.

Constructing revolutionary tourist attractions was not even the main vehicle for inscribing the revolution in social memory. The renaming of streets and squares provided early markers of revolutionary sights. Festivals commemorating revolutionary anniversaries from 1918 to 1927 constituted active interventions in the production of revolutionary memory.Footnote ¹⁷ The assembly of archives and the organization of written revolutionary reminiscences by participants, as Frederick Corney has described, produced a homogeneous template to contain potentially disparate interpretations of the great event.Footnote ¹⁸ Organized tourism to revolutionary places, specified by itineraries and structured by standardized guidebooks, might help also to contain the multiple meanings of revolutionary events; but the many claims and appeals of organized tourism—as healthful and fun as well as educational and patriotic—might tend to diminish the moral impact of revolutionary attractions.

In this essay, I will focus primarily on the construction of events of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions as tourist attractions. I will suggest that the regime did not begin to produce a standard commemorative agenda for revolutionary tourism until the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1920s, tourists (and tourism organizations) were left to their own devices, and tourist attractions tended to be the traditional products of Russian culture. With the rise of organized proletarian tourism in the late 1920s and during the first five-year plan, “revolution” was identified with the achievements, present and future, of the socialist state, not its origins. The revolutionary past received more explicit incorporation into tourist itineraries in the mid- to late-1930s, with special emphasis on the civil war and military confrontations. Only forty years after the revolutionary events of 1917 did tourism officials begin to pay more active attention to the revolution as a tourist attraction, with even more emphasis in the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary in 1967. But the revolution even now remained one destination of many possible tourist excursions, its memory one building block of many that made up the basis of Soviet citizenship.

Certainly the early post-1917 years saw little effort on the part of tourism organizations to celebrate the revolution just won. The journal Ekskursionnoe delo’s list of Petrograd's most frequented excursions from 1918 to 1921 emphasized cultural continuity rather than revolutionary rupture: revolution meant all citizens could visit the imperial palace at Pavlovsk and the Winter Palace.Footnote ¹⁹ Recommended sights in a 1923 Guide to New Moscow also consisted of palaces of the tsars as well as an extensive list of museums, including those dedicated to art, literature, and public health.Footnote ²⁰ Such guidebooks conveyed no sense of urgency about the need to promote Soviet patriotism by mythologizing the revolution. This might have been due to the predominance of socialist moderates in the tourist bureaus operated by the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Their view of cultural revolution was to create possibilities and intellectual mobility, rather than to prescribe dogma. It may also be due to the relatively fluid political climate of the early to mid-1920s.

Even after the tenth anniversary celebrations in 1927 signaled a more activist agenda for defining the meaning of the 1917 revolution, Moscow's excursion bureau in 1928 continued to offer the visiting tourist choices rather than a party line.Footnote ²¹ All excursionists would visit the Lenin mausoleum, the site of the embodied revolution but lacking any historical narrative. Otherwise, they could choose from various excursion “cycles.” History teachers would visit the Museum of Revolution for a themed excursion on “10 years of revolution”; repeat visitors could opt for the “life and teaching of Karl Marx,” or the Museum of the Red Army. Such attractions highlighted the results of revolution, not its temporal events. Ten years after the revolution, its history finally began to appear on the menu of the capital's tourist attractions for educators, but not the masses. Walking tours on “October in Moscow” and “1905 in Red Presnia” were recommended for secondary school social studies teachers, agitprop workers, club activists, and museum staff. Footnote ²²

Guidebooks published during the first five-year plan emphasized the construction of socialism and the present and the future of the Soviet Union, not its past. Industrial and construction sites figured prominently as tourist destinations.Footnote ²³ A 1929 guide simply listed all the available attractions (including several dozen industrial enterprises), with access information.Footnote ²⁴ The tourist group was free to select its own itinerary. The state tourist agency insisted that tourism should be purposeful, but did not dictate the choice of purposes. Nor did the activist Society of Proletarian Tourists privilege revolutionary heritage any more than did the official state agency: Proletarian Tourist's 1930 guide to Moscow emphasized political and industrial walking tours, placing 1905 and 1917 twelfth and thirteenth in its list of recommended walks (“old Moscow” was fourteenth and last).Footnote ²⁵ The revolution was even less central in Leningrad, which was promoted in a 1930 guide as “one of the chief industrial regions of the USSR” and home to important cultural institutions as well.Footnote ²⁶

Civil War tourism received somewhat greater publicity toward the end of the 1930s. This corresponded to the revived emphasis on Russia's national past military glory, and on the need to militarize in anticipation of a coming confrontation with capitalism, fascism, or both. The tourist monthly Na sushe i na more called for the expansion of tourist routes to the “heroic places” of the civil war: in Perekop, the Urals, Ukraine, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus.Footnote ²⁷ But the linkage of pleasure and patriotism conveys the holistic appeal of the Soviet tourist vacation. A hiking trip through the Crimean nature reserve added stories of civil war to the canonical observations of flora and fauna: tourists were invited to imagine the campfires of civil war partisans among the wild strawberries.Footnote ²⁸ Trip accounts instructed tourists to seek out participants and eyewitnesses and to write down their memories and recollections for preservation. The Soviet tourist, as always, did not just observe sights, but employed tourism to make an active contribution to the national welfare.Footnote ²⁹

The Civil War memory projects of the late 1930s were also notable for their increasing emphasis on personalities over class, on heroes rather than on collectives. Civil War tourism in the Urals followed the “trail of Chapaev,” tracking down veterans of the celebrated leader's unit and meeting with the wife and son of Chapaev's famous sidekick, Pet΄ka.Footnote ³⁰ If the Caucasus landscape beckoned, tourists could follow the life of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, visiting the Abkhazian towns where he began his revolutionary career in 1905.Footnote ³¹ Memory was all around: in the landscape, in buildings, in local museums, and in the tales of eyewitnesses who had actually known the famous revolutionary leaders. Otherwise, the guidebooks of the later 1930s continued to include revolutionary and civil war sites as options along side other historical and cultural destinations. Footnote ³² The past continued to have to compete with present and future.

Tourism returned to the Soviet agenda as soon as peace had been won in 1945. As Anne Gorsuch argues, the state aimed to promote travel and tourism as a means to unify the country and promote Soviet patriotism in the last years of Stalin's rule. Turning inward, the regime focused on developing the domestic itinerary as a source of patriotism, with Moscow, “capital of the USSR,” at the country's very center.Footnote ³³ Yet multiplicity still characterized the ideal tourist itinerary.Footnote ³⁴ Moscow's revolutionary attractions shared preeminence with Moscow's national significance, its 800-year history, its scientific and cultural institutions, even its sports.Footnote ³⁵ In 1956, tourists would first read what Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Sergei Aksakov had written about the capital before encountering the “deathless revolutionary exploit of workers of Red Presnia and other participants of the December armed uprising of workers in Moscow” and similar feats in October 1917.Footnote ³⁶

If the death of Stalin in 1953 and Khrushchev's 1956 speech produced dramatic transformations in other realms of Soviet society, the tourist journey offered more continuity than change. Data on tourist excursions in 1959 confirms the small place occupied by the Russian revolutionary past in the contemporary tourist itinerary. In this year, 17,000 tourists in Moscow took the bus tour of the “capital of the Rodina,” and 16,000 visited memorable Lenin places by bus, but only 300 took the bus tour “October in Moscow,” and 120 the tour dedicated to the December 1905 armed uprising. Over 15,000 took the tour of the Moscow metro. Personality (Lenin) trumped process. The Museum of Revolution, with over 10,000 visitors in 1959, might have been sufficient to satisfy the tourist's desire to remember the revolution, but this was the least frequented museum on the tourist itinerary.Footnote ³⁷ And as it had in 1930, the museum served a double purpose: an exemplar of eighteenth-century architecture on the walking tour of Gor'kii Street as well as the repository for “relics of the Great October socialist revolution.”Footnote ³⁸

The celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the October revolution in 1957 brought some renewed attention to revolutionary tourist attractions. Dedicated guidebooks to “revolutionary sights” in Moscow and Petrograd appeared in 1957, but general tourist guides to Moscow offered the usual list of monuments old and new, key museums, and recommended walking tours of the city.Footnote ³⁹ The thickest of these guides, published in 1964, provided an expanded narrative for these walks, for the first time adding revolutionary content to the standard tour of the “central squares” for example. But even now, the book stressed the beneficial multiplicity of tourist attractions, the variety of purposes the tourist could fulfill: “In designing these itineraries, we were concerned to provide substance to each walk, and that they would proceed along streets that combined attractions from new and old Moscow.”Footnote ⁴⁰ A 1966 guide aimed at youth (including for the first time information on dance spots in Moscow), dared to prioritize tourist itineraries. If you had but one day, the guide recommended a general city tour in the morning, and the Tret΄iakov gallery in the afternoon. No Lenin, no revolution. But also no choices. Unlike in 1930, one itinerary would serve all tourists. The three-day visitor should take in the mausoleum and the Lenin museum, as well as the Borodino panorama. Only the twelve-day visitor would find the Museum of Revolution on the list. Other revolutionary sites, it would appear, could be consumed in passing along streets that combined old and new Moscow.Footnote ⁴¹

The content of revolutionary tourist attractions remained remarkably constant during the fifty-year period investigated in this paper. Museums and the personality of V. I. Lenin provided the core elements of revolutionary tourist attractions. Yet in many ways, the memory of revolution saturated the public lives of Soviet citizens. The whole nation was a product of the revolution, and therefore so were all of its parts: even tourism and vacations had become available to the mass of citizens as a result of the revolution. Earlier we could not have dreamed of such a vacation, wrote workers to their factory newspapers; “Soviet power gave the people everything they had dreamed about and fought for.”Footnote ⁴² One did not need to stop in front of a plaque commemorating the Red Presnia uprising to remember the revolution: the very act of stepping on a train, leaving home, or receiving benefits could remind citizens of the struggles and sacrifices that had produced this new well-being.

Memories of revolution could therefore be triggered as easily by visits to symbolic and institutional spaces such as museums or the Lenin mausoleum as to physical sites of sacrifice, loss, or heroic victory. Those physical sites—the Winter Palace, the Kremlin, Sevastopol΄, Smolnyi—possessed such an abundance of national meaning that specific memories of 1905 or 1917 might easily be submerged in the larger symbolism of socialist state-building and Soviet (and imperial) history. Tourism planners—officials and the authors of guidebooks—need not worry, then, about making revolutionary commemoration central to their projects, as long as they were included on the list of tourist possibilities. Revolutionary memory represented the sum of all of the parts.

The revolution as tourist attraction, in other words, did not celebrate 1917 as a rupture, but rather a point of entry, the moment from which the many and not the few could share in a culture of sublime architecture, visual arts, music, literature . . . and mobility. Tourist attractions provided the necessary content for these experiences and encounters; the more varied the attractions—solemn, sublime, and pleasurable—the more complete the tourist experience. It was the purposeful movement (evoking memory, pride, patriotism, and collectivism) of the citizen through unfamiliar space that gave Soviet tourists their “unforgettable memories” and Soviet tourism its role in forging a shared national culture. They did not have to “visit” the revolution in order for its impact to be felt every day.