Diane P. Koenker is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918-1930 and Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream, and is the coeditor of Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, all from Cornell.
"""We still lack a clear understanding of what motivates the Eastern European tourist, what they are escaping, and what experiences they seek. This excellent, necessary book begins to fill those gaps. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker have assembled fourteen essays of consistently high quality.""-Timothy Phillips, Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2007 ""Like the ideal tourist excursion, this collection offers a richly rewarding experience that is both intellectually stimulating and fun. One learns a great deal about tourists and tourism in Russia and Eastern Europe and thereby gains new insight into the spatial dimensions of nation-building, the curious blend of military voyeurism and emotion-charged patriotism among battlefield visitors, the precursors of 'fraternal' relations among Communist-bloc countries, the difference between proper (proletarian) excursions and wandering, the importance of travel writing and other 'cultural mediators' in the shaping of popular attitudes, and myriad other fascinating and even touching subjects. The essays contain numerous cross-references and comparisons, and are studded with evocative (and instructive!) illustrations. The editors are to be congratulated for having done such a splendid job in producing a collection that is of such a consistently high quality.""-Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University ""Turizm permits a close examination of continuities and discontinuities between capitalism and socialism using the lens of tourism, specifically the tensions between noncommercial versus commercial and purposeful versus leisure travel. Because it focuses on the Russian empire and Soviet internationalism, it is on the cutting edge of discussions about the contributions of tourism to the construction and maintenance of empire.""-Shelley Baranowski, The University of Akron ""Turizm contains numerous very new, well-argued, and interesting accounts of hitherto-unknown aspects of tourism and leisure in Eastern Europe. I am delighted that this book bridges at least two important watersheds-1917 and the Russia-Eastern Europe divide. This is rarely done and is to be applauded.""-Theodore R. Weeks, Southern Illinois University"