Everyone’s Russ-ian to Visit: Exploring Ideas of Russian Tourism
UNESCO’s World Heritage program encourages world heritage of 1,073 sites of outstanding universal value, and that notion has fed into the heritage tourism industry. With every new inscription comes a boom in tourism. However, the way countries conceptualize and utilize tourism is very different. Examining heritage tourism through the perspective of post-socialist Russia and its tourism planning and marketing shows an interesting perspective. The use of world heritage in Russia can guide our understanding of how inscriptions and ideology of our global culture, and an understanding of tourism compared to Western-based ideas.
Thoughts on Russian Tourism:
Soviet Russia: The Beginning of Tourism Ideology
In the past twenty years, commodified Russian tourism (turizm) has grown exponentially, but this was not always the case (Nyíri 2007). The Soviet Union lacked tourism in both a commercial sense until the U.S.S.R became the Russian Commonwealth, and the original Soviet tourism resisted ideals of consumption. The sociological understanding of tourism during the Soviet Union relied on the notion of “amateur” (samodeyatel’nyi) tourism, where the romantic gaze on wildlife encouraged sight-seeing, hiking, and mountain climbing, and this leisure time was perceived as both recreational and intellectual (Nyíri 2007). Soviet Union tourists were encouraged to perform socially useful work, where active leisure time would teach them a love of nature, discipline, and collectivism (Nyíri 2007).
Russian Tourism Today: The Golden Mountains of Altai
After the restructuring of perestroika, and the need for economic structure, Russian tourism still reacts against the capitalistic ideals of heritage tourism found in Western countries. The most visited sites of Russia are Moscow and St. Petersburg, with the Kremlin and Historic St. Petersburg being the most iconic World Heritage Sites, but another large section of tourism focuses on nature tourism (Burns 1998). This is best seen in the Golden Mountains of Altai, which was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1998 for one criteria alone, that the site is an original center of rare biodiversity (UNESCO 2018).
This focus on the natural, rather than the cultural, is a key note to understanding Russia’s view of both tourism and heritage. Vassily Manyshev, deputy head of the Altai Republic Branch of the federal Administration of Natural Resource and Environmental Projection stated that, “… Nature is the most important thing [they] have, economics is only secondary” (Nyíri 2008). The Golden Mountains is a popular tourist destination even during the Soviet Union and has continued to grow today. The Altai Mountains, standing at an impressive 4,506 meters, have been an important cultural landscape for Russia for centuries. Featuring lakes and peaks, the mountain ranges shed light on nomadic people that lived in Russia during the first millennium, are home to legends of mythical heroes such as Sartaksakpay, and have thousands of petroglyphs from ancient civilizations that date back 5,000 years (Stewart, 2014.)
The native Altai peoples are not used as a commercial cultural attraction, and following local worship or culture is highly discouraged. Instead, the Altai mountains are meant as a nature excursion instead of a cultural show (Nyíri 2007). Russian tourists are more interested in what experiences they can have in nature, and this nature comes without commentary or infrastructure. This thought of nature as pristine, untouched, and having spiritual connections.
Conclusion:
These thoughts of Russian tourism step away from thoughts of global World Heritage and focus more on the local native landscapes. Instead of appealing to domestic tourists through cultural interaction with native peoples, the narrative that is created is that of an adventurer pursuing a simple and spiritual connection with nature. Rather than a creation of global culture in this current time of transnationalism, Russian heritage tourism focuses on the individual experience and the ideologies of their socialist past.
References:
Burns, Peter. “Tourism in Russia: Background and Structure.” Tourism Management 19, no. 6 (1998): 555–65. doi:10.1016/s0261–5177(98)00060–0.
Centre, UNESCO World Heritage. “Golden Mountains of Altai.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Accessed April 04, 2018. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/768.
Light, Duncan. “Gazing on Communism: Heritage Tourism and Post-communist Identities in Germany, Hungary and Romania.” Tourism Geographies 2, no. 2 (2000): 157–76. doi:10.1080/14616680050027879.
Nyíri, Pál, and Joana Breidenbach. “”Our Common Heritage” New Tourist Nations, Post-“Socialist” Pedagogy, and the Globalization of Nature.” Current Anthropology 38, no. 2 (2007): 322–330.
Nyíri, Pál, and Joana Breidenbach. “The Altai Road: Visions of Development across the Russian–Chinese Border.” Development and Change 39, no. 1 (2008): 123–45. doi:10.1111/j.1467–7660.2008.00471.x.
Shtyurmer, Yu. A. 1985. Kratkii Spravochnik turista (Concise Handbook for The Tourist). 3d edition. Moscow: Profizdat.
Stewart, Will. “Archaeologists Encounter Extraordinary Alfresco Gallery of Prehistoric Art in the Stunning Altai Mountains, One of the Great Undiscovered Tourist Destinations of Siberia.” Daily Mail Online. November 02, 2014.
Thompson, Karen. “Post-colonial Politics and Resurgent Heritage: The Development of Kyrgyzstans Heritage Tourism Product.” Current Issues in Tourism 7, no. 4–5 (2004): 370–82. doi:10.1080/13683500408667991.
