Club Red

A sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika.

Diane P. Koenker is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 and coeditor of Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, both from Cornell.

Club Red already provides readers with so much. It does an excellent job describing and analyzing the changing institutional leadership of and cultural and social meanings associated with spa and rest home vacations.... It provides important insights into the contradictions and tensions in the Soviet vacation system. It effectively situates vacations in the "socialist" consumer culture that began to emerge in the 1930s and burgeoned in the 1960s, as well as in the broader Soviet experiment. This extremely well-researched and fascinating book will be of value to many scholars, particularly those interested in consumer culture, vacations and tourism, and the Soviet Union.

Koenker's extremely well researched and well-written book traces the two kinds of vacations (health resorts and tourism) through time and demonstrates how the Soviet state sought to construct a unique socialist leisure regime to benefit the proletariat.... This book will be of great interest to specialists in Soviet history and in the history of travel and tourism.

[Readers] will be rewarded by seeing Soviet society from a unique and valuable vantage point. Koenker is to be commended for bringing this story to light and to life.

Olga Mesropova and Thomas Waldemer:

Prodigiously researched and expertly written by a pioneering scholar of Soviet tourism, Club Red expands the analytical frameworks of Koenker’s earlier work, particularly her 2006 volume co-edited with Anne E. Gorsuch, Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism.

Polly Jones:

While adding a fresh perspective to the already rather extensive literature on Stalinist consumption, Koenker's work breaks substantial new ground in this account of late socialism and its reforms of consumption and consumerism, on which only a tiny number of archive-based studies yet exist. It also lays a foundation for scholars to investigate this important aspect of the Soviet experience from other perspectives and using other methodologies, including oral history... this ambitious, wide-ranging but still remarkably rigorous study will be of relevance and value to scholars of every period of Soviet history.

Jeffery Brookes:

This solidly researched history of tourism concerns rest and recreation for the masses as well as outings by more privileged groups.... The book should interest historians and social scientists of the Soviet Unionas well as specialists of tourism elsewhere since she compares Soviet programs with Western tourism.

Robert Legvold:

In the early years of the Soviet era, vigorous outdoor activity held sway as a restorative and as a repudiation of the pleasure-filled, hotel-bound vacations favored in the West. Gradually, the regime made room for health sanatoriums and vacation travel, although still guided by 'scientifically planned and purposeful activities.' Ironically, these changes began in 1927, on the eve of Stalin's brutal collectivization of agriculture and first five-year plans. Koenker, with discriminating thoroughness, traces the evolution of Soviet vacationing from that point through the mid-1980s.... This is well-told history, a portrait of life in the Soviet Union that will be recognizable to those who lived it.

Julie Hessler:

Club Red, Diane Koenker's excellent new book on Soviet vacation travel, adds to a countercurrent that has gathered force in the past few years. Viewed from the perspective of vacations—or, in other recent works, of automobiles, moviegoing, television, or circuses—the divisions between the NEP, Stalin, and especially Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev periods often seem less sharp than we had previously imagined. Without ignoring repression, works in this vein elucidate aspects of normal Soviet life that previous scholarship had tended to obscure.

Catriona Kelly, University of Oxford, author of Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991:

This impeccably researched, percipient, and engaging book is an excellent new addition to Cornell University Press's outstanding Russian and Soviet history list. Following Soviet tourists from sumptuous neoclassical 'rest homes' on the Black Sea to mule trains, from ocean liners to hitchhiking, Diane P. Koenker's Club Red explores the paradoxes of leisure time spent to 'the rule of the bell,' and, conversely, the contradictions of activities in which therapeutic and socializing regimes were offset by the quest for fun and romance. Representing Soviet institutions and 'Soviet identity' from a novel angle, the book shows how turizm took people to locations outside ordinary space and time; it makes an important contribution to the new spatial history as well as to the history of everyday life and social relations.

Donald J. Raleigh, Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:

Skillfully crafted, smartly written, meticulously researched, and historiographically new and important, Club Red is vintage Koenker. The author deftly dissects the paradox of how and why an authoritarian state preaching collectivist principles promoted the individual autonomy and selfhood of its citizens through vacation travel, how they lived their lives under socialism, and what this all means.

Stephen Lovell, King’s College London, author of Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000:

From the recuperative rest homes of the 1920s to the 'wild' tourism of the 1970s, vacationing in the Soviet Union was meaningful business. In this exemplary piece of research, Diane P. Koenker shows how much the nonproductive side of life has to tell us about all aspects of the Soviet experience.

Tricia Starks:

Diane Koenker presents a fascinating picture of the off-hours of workers in the proletarian state.... Koenker combines institutional, social, cultural, identity, and gender history in a superb tale of tourism in the Soviet Union that will be useful to scholars in any of those fields. Additionally, Club Red seems especially well suited to classes on the postwar Soviet experience or comparative courses on the post-1945 world, and chapters would productive and enjoyable discussion material in undergraduate classes.

Shelley Baranowski, Distinguished Professor of HistoryThe University of Akron, author of Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich:

Club Red's scope is impressive; Diane P. Koenker covers tourism and vacations from the Soviet Union's beginnings to its dissolution. In so doing, she describes how tourism and vacations both reflected and contributed to the transformation of Soviet society from a spartan and productivist proletarianism to the Soviet version of the 'good life.' Because Koenker situations Soviet vacations and tourism within the broader history of the role of consumerism and tourism in modern societies, Club Red's appeal will extend well beyond scholars and students of Soviet history.