Restoring Vacations after the War 129unions received orders to make all efforts to rebuild and restore the damaged
and destroyed leisure facilities so that Soviet war invalids and workers could
begin to repair their weary organisms and recover the strength expended in
the defense of their homeland.
The postwar years offered new opportunities to expand and reshape not
only Soviet vacation opportunities but the entire direction of the Soviet proj-
ect. For many citizens, the end of the war kindled an optimism that the peo-
ple would now be rewarded for their sacrifi ce not only in war but also in the
intensive industrialization effort that had preceded it and made victory pos-
sible.^3 The party-minded writer Vsevolod Vyshnevskii had offered a glimpse
of this new world in a 1944 speech:- Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–
1957 , trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY, 1998), 16.
Souvenir photograph of a couple at a central NKVD rest home in Tsikhis-Dziri, Georgia, 27
May 1941.