Journal of Tourism & Hospitality
Open Access

Abstract

The Soviet Heritage: Conceptualization of Ambiguous

Virginija Jureniene* and Martynas Radzevicius

Tourism is one of the most popular businesses developed all over the world. In today’s society, a new approach to tourism has emerged due to the rapidly changing environment, increasing expectations, improving life quality, and increasing cultural integration. Modern tourism development is inevitably related to not only its impact on the country’s economy, cultural and political environment, but also tourists’ emotions, psychological state, perception, and improvement. The consequence of these changes is the formed demand for niche tourism based on the search for exclusive experiences. Creators of the tourism experience are looking for new resources of cultural heritage in order to satisfy the growing demand.

One of them is the heritage of the former Soviet bloc countries whose potential has not been used fully yet. However, many post-Soviet countries face one of the most difficult tourism development problems, i.e., to ensure giving acceptable sense of the Soviet heritage to the society without limiting its exploitation in the tourism industry. Most of the former bloc countries currently identify with the Soviet heritage and acknowledge the importance of such heritage for the national cultural development. Despite this, unclear conceptualization of this heritage as well as ambiguous ratio of the Soviet heritage to the cultural tourism industry still exists. Therefore, this review article aims at conceptualizing the phenomena of the Soviet heritage in more detail giving emphasis to the distinctive features of the Soviet heritage, clearly defining the situation of the Soviet heritage in the context of the tourism industry, and evaluating the Soviet heritage as a tourism resource.

Published Date: 2022-12-16; Received Date: 2022-11-16