“soviet rivera”: recreation tourism of foreign citizens on the black sea coast of the USSR in the 1960-1980-ies

The article is devoted to defining the role of the largest soviet resorts of the Black sea - Sochi and Yalta in the development of international tourism in the USSR during the post-war period. These tourism centers occupied leading positions in receiving foreign tourists, yielding only to Moscow and Leningrad. The author analyzes the main types of tourism that were typical for Sochi and Yalta, dynamics and structure of tourist flows, the state of the tourist infrastructure, the specifics of the ideological work with voyagers from abroad. The guide-translator of «In- tourist» was the main figure, who directly carried out ideological work with foreign tourists. The vividly expressed seasonality of international tourism was an important problem of its development in the region. In the mid-1950s and the first half of the 1970s the development of services for foreign cruise ships had huge value for the structural subdivisions of «Intourist» in Sochi and Yalta. After inputting in exploitation large hotel complexes of «Intourist» in the 1970s on the black sea coast the share of cruise tourism began to decline, but remained significant until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, the expansion and modernization of tourist infrastructure of Sochi and Yalta in the 1970s allowed more actively to promote recreation tours not only on a summer period, but also in cold seasons. Tourists from Western and Eastern Germany, Fin- land, Czechoslovakia were their main customers. At the same time, the development of spe- cialized medical tourism for foreign citizens on the coast of the Caucasus and Crimea, which at that time was called the «all-Union health resorts», did not receive wide distribution. The publication was prepared within the framework of a research project № 16-41-93578 sup- ported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities. References