The Russian Revolution As a Tourist Attraction

Looking at Soviet guidebooks from the 1920s to the 1960s, this essay argues that 1905 and 1917 revolutionary places as "tourist attractions" were mostly tangential to the tourist experience, although one could argue that the entire USSR was a monument to the "revolution." The revolution remained one destination of many possible tourist excursions, its memory one building block of many that made up the basis of Soviet citizenship. The revolution as tourist attraction 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 world importance.