Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret'iakov at the Communist Lighthouse

Abstract

Crash industrialization and forced collectivization the twin and ultimately catastrophic economic policies of the Five-Year Plans of the late 1920s and '30s opened myriad new travel destinations for the intrepid cultural worker in the Soviet Union: mammoth industrial sites, monumental hydroelectric stations, extravagant canal construction projects, gigantic collective farms. Tours to such destinations were typically authorized, organized, and funded by a network of state agencies, whose purpose was not so much to gather information about these far-flung sites the secret police (OGPU [Unified State Political Administration]) stationed throughout the Soviet Union could much more efficiently assist with that but rather to secure much-needed affirmative representations of the successful implementation of Plan policies. Soviet and foreign intellectuals, writers, artists, and photographers visited these sites of economic and social engineering in droves; perhaps the most paradigmatic of all was the once sympathetic communiste de coeur Andre Gide, whose 1936 tour resulted, unexpectedly, in a stingingly negative critique, Retour de I'URSS. The present essay unpacks a major episode in the crowded itinerary of one such radical tourist, Sergei Tret'iakov. Beginning in July 1928 and continuing through the summer of 1930, Tret'iakov made four extended visits, totaling some five months in all, to a remote collective farm [kolkhoz], the so-called Communist Lighthouse [Kommunisticheskii Maiak, or Kommaiak] in the Georgievskii district of the northern Caucasus 's Stavropolskii region.1 These trips were authorized out of Moscow by the primary state agency in charge of the collective-farm system,