Description:
A sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika.
Brief description: Diane P. Koenker is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Editor of Slavic Review. She is the author of several books including Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, coauthor of Strikes in Revolution, Russia 1917, and coeditor and translator of Notes of a Red Guard. From Cornell, she authored Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918-1930, and coedited Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism with Anne E. Gorsuch.
Review Quotes:
Club Red, Diane Koenker's excellent new book on Soviet vacation travel, adds to a countercurrent that has gathered force in the past few years. Viewed from the perspective of vacations--or, in other recent works, of automobiles, moviegoing, television, or circuses--the divisions between the NEP, Stalin, and especially Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev periods often seem less sharp than we had previously imagined. Without ignoring repression, works in this vein elucidate aspects of normal Soviet life that previous scholarship had tended to obscure.
--Julie Hessler "The Journal of Modern History"