Lilija Wedel

Lilija Wedel studied History and Political Science at Leibniz University Hannover. In 2013, she moved to the University of Göttingen, where she completed her doctorate in East European His-tory with a dissertation on the social, mental, and cultural worlds of the Russian nobility between 1762 and 1861. Alongside her doctoral studies, she worked on several occasions as an archivist at the Regional Church Archive in Hanover and returned to the position from 2018 to 2020. She also taught at the Department of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Göttingen. From May 2020 to March 2023, she was a research associate in East European History at the Faculty of History, Philosophy, and Theology at Bielefeld University, where she worked on the BKM-funded research project “German Advertising in the Russian Empire, 1870–1914.” Since the summer semester of 2023, she has taught as a lecturer at Bielefeld University and, since the winter semester of 2024, at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. She is currently prepar-ing a new research project.

Intourist-Werbung für den US-Markt: „16 Days Cruising the Volga and Visiting Great Cities in the Soviet Union”, ca. 1932. Die Werbung wurde sowohl als Plakat als auch in Form von Broschüren/Prospekten gedruckt

Background Article

Marketing in Soviet Foreign Tourism

Between Propaganda, Foreign Currency, and Cultural Performance

From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, the tourism industry relied heavily on marketing. But how did an ideologically driven state like the Soviet Union present itself abroad as an attractive travel destination?