The Ship as a Message: International Maritime Tourism in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda

The first experiments in the field of Soviet outbound tourism date back to 1930 and 1931, when Soviet shock workers traveled around Europe on the ships Abkhaziya and Ukraina. Outbound tourism resumed a quarter of a century later as part of a 1956 Soviet European cruise on the Pobeda liner. During the four Pobeda tours, up to 1,600 people visited Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Travel was so heavily covered by one media that sea travelogues became a separate genre of Soviet public discourse. By the end of 1956, the poets Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky even wrote a parody of this type of travel writing. The enormous number of publications shows the importance of journeys in 1930, 1931, and 1956 for propaganda.

The presentation analyzes the reasons why traveling on cruise liners has become an iconic form of Soviet tourism. The research is based on travelogues, publications in media, minutes of public speeches, private notes and letters, book manuscripts with the author's editing, and even a script for a ship's radio station.

Ideological reasons were the core of the choice of that particular form of tourism. The sea cruises were designed to show the successful life of a Soviet person to the foreign audience, and they demonstrated the technological achievements of Soviet shipbuilding. They also made it possible to protect Soviet tourists from close interactions with foreigners, made it possible to organize indoctrination right on the ship, and hid the limited amount of foreign currency available to Soviet travelers.

The propaganda system included different narratives for foreigners, for the travelers themselves, and for Soviet armchair tourists.