Intourist
Intourist (April 12, 1929 - Present) was the official tourism agency in the Soviet Union and was responsible for welcoming all foreign tourists to the U.S.S.R. and providing them with guides. Intourist was founded by the People's Commissariat of Commerce, the People's Commissariat of Railways, and the Sovtorgflot merchant fleet, and its name is a contraction of inostrannyj turist (foreign tourists). Its first foreign office opened in London about 1930, and locations in Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York soon followed. Intourist 'owned' hotels and other important tourism related businesses throughout the Soviet Union, but, since they were owned by the Soviet government, Intourist itself never truly owned anything. Privatized in 1992, a majority share (50.1%) was owned by the British Thomas Cook Group from 2011 until the group collapsed in September 2019. It was then acquired by Anex Tours, a company based in Turkey, in November of that year.
English language 1930s tourist map of the Caucasus that begs the question - why?
Pictorial Map of the Caucasus.
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This is a beautiful c. 1930 Intourist U.S.S.R. Travel Company pictorial map of the Caucasus. The map is most intriguing as while clearly a tourist-focused piece, the English-speaking audiences for whom it was intended are mysteriously absent. The English only established normalized relation with the USSR a year before, and the Americans had not. Moreover, this map appeared at the height of the Great Depression, when global travel dropped to a trickle. (more details)
Touring Moscow at the Height of the Cold War.
This is a c. 1962 pictorial tourist map of Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union and center of international Communism. It was issued while the city was undergoing a widespread modernization effort and at the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. and U.S.S.R. nearly fought a nuclear war due to the Cuban Missile Crisis. (more details)