Features of Scientific Tourism in the USSR (Problem Statement)

Abstract

The article analyzes the phenomenon of scientific tourism in the USSR, both from the perspective of tourism issues and within the framework of the social history of science. However, modern research on scientific tourism has actually fallen out of the field of view of both scientific directions. For tourism issues, research design is limited, first of all, by different approaches to defining the sphere of scientific tourism in Soviet and post-Soviet historiography. Whereas within the social history of science framework, broad research prospects are opening up. The macro-analytical strategy makes it possible to identify the relationship of the “Intourist” with the party and state institutions toward scientific tourism, and the micro-analytical approach shows how interaction within tourist groups influenced non-political (including scientific) activity. Scientific tourism is considered as an external social factor influencing science, and at the same time as a form of scientific activity. Based on archival materials and documents of personal origin, the author concludes that the early history of scientific tourism fell in the second half of the 1920s and the completion of its formation in the 1960s. At the same time, the historical reconstruction allows us to see how certain areas of scientific tourism were formed – congress, industrial, expedition, exhibition, and specialized. The author explains the unstable dynamics of the development of Soviet scientific tourism, in addition to bureaucratic red tape and interdepartmental inconsistencies, primarily by attempts to combine two mutually exclusive attitudes – the expansion of scientific and technical cooperation and the achievement of ideological and political effect from trips.