Guest Editor’s Introduction: International Tourism in the USSR: The Half-Open Door Policy

Abstract

Research on the history of international tourism in the USSR, which consisted of inbound (from foreign countries) and outbound (to foreign countries) tourism, is not one of the major areas of Russian historiography, yet the interest in this subject is obvious. The Soviet Union’s tourist ties with other countries are regarded by Russian and foreign scholars as part of cultural or public diplomacy, which on the one hand depended on the political realities of the times and, on the other, exerted a certain influence on them itself. Soviet historians mostly focused attention on the overall trends in the development of outbound tourism and on the legal issues of incoming tourism. Concrete historical studies for the most part concentrated on trips by Soviet tourists through trade unions and to a lesser extent on foreigners’ visits to the USSR. It was commonplace in all of the historical studies for the authors to pay close attention to ideological objectives and methods of working both with Soviet and with foreign tourists. Perestroika and the ensuing breakup of the USSR, the abandonment of the “only correct” ideology, and the “archival revolution” of the 1990s marked the start of a new stage in the historiography of this problem. The access to declassified documents significantly expanded the source base for research. The absence of censorship and the newly acquired opportunity to read the principal works of foreign colleagues (in particular, the monographs and articles of Prof. Michael David-Fox, the sociologist Paul Hollander, Prof. Ann E. Gorsuch, and others) have facilitated the formulation of new questions, including methodological ones. Similar processes have developed in some former Union republics that became independent countries. There is no debate among historians about the Soviet state’s regulatory role in prewar and postwar international tourism. In addition, most researchers do not confine themselves to studying the ideological and