One thing I am very thankful to my mom for is that since I was ten, she took me on long tourist trips, which would last for three weeks or even more. I tried to start writing about these tours several times, and each time I thought that I needed to find the photos form these trips, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to write about them.
But realistically thinking, I won’t have time to search for these pictures for a while, let alone to scan them, so I finally decided to start writing about the trips and add the photos later, whenever I have time to find and process them (most likely, after I retire, but who knows!)
Before I start, I want to say a couple of words about vacation-taking in the Soviet Union.
I know that it was different in the beginning of the Soviet state, but by my time, most people had at least one month of vacation (and some had even more!) Vacation time was strictly about “calendar days,” not “workdays,” so if some public holidays were in the middle of your vacation, they were “lost.”
Since vacations were so long and were taken strictly once a year (in most cases, you couldn’t split it into parts), everyone tried to take them in summer. The parents needed this summer vacation to take their kids “to dacha” (as I already mentioned a couple of times), and others just wanted to have time off work. Since it was not sustainable for everyone in a company to take a month’s vacation in summer, there was a perennial nightmare of scheduling vacations in the beginning of the year and hard limits on how often each person could take a vacation in summer.
What would people do with their vacation month? In most cases, they wanted to get away from the city, and it could be just going to the countryside to visit their relatives or going to a dacha. In many cases, people could use a “trade-union voucher” to go on a tour or to some resort. A local trade union bureau would approve the distribution of the vouchers, selecting “the best workers” and/or “those who needed it most,” and the lucky ones would end up paying 10-20% of the full price.
Unlike most people, my mom usually bought the tours without trade union vouchers, paying the full price because most tours she wanted to go to were not available through the trade union vouchers. She would save money during the whole year to go to new places. For seven summers, from 1973 to 1979, we went on these tours together.
The first one was in the summer of 1973, and it was a relatively short one. We were going to take a “Volgobalt course,” departing from Leningrad and then getting to the Volga River through the system of locks, visiting Yaroslavl – an old city on the Volga River, and then returning back to Leningrad. There were several complications with this trip. First, it started on May 20, which meant my mom had to ask for permission to take me out of school on my summer break ten days earlier (that was not a problem; I was a good student). Second, I was only ten, and and a child had to be eleven to be admitted to the cruise (do not ask, I have no idea why), so my mom had to get permission from the captain of the ship. And the last problem was a force of nature: it was very early in the navigation season, and Lake Ladoga was still covered with ice, so the ship couldn’t get to Leningrad. A couple of days before the departure date, all passengers were given railway tickets to Cheboksary, where our ship was waiting for us.
As far as I remember, there were no organized tours at the stops. We had a full day in Yaroslavl. We disembarked, and my mom and I went to the city and tried to visit as many museums and churches as time permitted. We loved a fairy tale -looking city, and only wished we could stay longer.
I know that I have pictures from this cruise somewhere, and I hope to eventually scan them.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
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