International Tourism and East–West Commodity Exchanges on the Romanian Black Sea Coast Between the 1960s and the 1980s

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Romanian socialist state became interested in developing international tourism. Whereas in 1960, only 200,000 foreign tourists visited Romania, their numbers climbed to approximately 4 million tourists in the early 1970. Although tourists from socialist countries prevailed, the Romanian state aimed at mostly welcoming Western tourists. More than fifty percent of the tourists headed to the Black Sea. For socialist officials the arrival of foreign/Western tourists enforced the message of peace, brought in hard currencies and portrayed socialism as a viable and modern political regime.

Yet the ones who benefited mostly from the arrival of foreign tourists were ordinary people. Foreign tourists used their visits to Romania to increase their pocket money by selling goods that were in shortage in socialist shops. For Romanian citizens, the presence of tourists from both capitalist and socialist states and of the goods they brought along fueled a “conspicuous” consumption that at times went against the ideology of the Romanian socialist regime. At the same time foreign tourists bought souvenirs and music from the tourist shops but also from regular stores. These transactions facilitated a transnational exchange of ‘things’ both within the socialist Bloc and between the socialist east and capitalist west.

This paper will examine both the Romanian state’s reaction to these exchanges as well as the meaning that tourists ascribed to these things. I am interested to answer the following questions: to what extent contacts with foreign tourists altered tourist workers’ consumption patterns on the Black Sea Coast? How did the established networks help specific “socialist” things, sounds, and images travel to capitalist countries? To what extent did these connections turned into long-lasting networks and what sort of meanings tourists on both sides of the Iron Curtain ascribed to the acquired capitalist or socialist ‘things’?