Club Red. Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream - Diane P. Koenker

130 Chapter 4

When the war is over, life will become very pleasant. A great literature will

be produced as a result of our experiences. There will be much coming and

going, and a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read

whatever he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel for

Soviet citizens will be made easy.^4

The wartime destruction offered opportunities to rethink the direction

and organization of the socialist vacation.^5 But the victory over fascism could

also serve to validate the Soviet system as it had developed by the end of the

1930s. The right to rest remained hallowed in postwar propaganda, but how

would that rest be organized in the years of reconstruction, carried out amid

continuing economic challenges and the emerging Cold War? Was the prewar

structure to be re-created, with heavy emphasis on the aristocratic standard

of monumental and medically lavish facilities in the south? Could sporting

tourism gain the upper hand (and support of the trade unions) over pajama

touring, especially given the continuing confrontation with hostile powers?

Or was there room for a middle ground of comfortable, nonmedicalized va-

cation? This last was already becoming the norm by the end of the 1930s,

expressed in the demand for putevki and vacation time in the summer, in the

south, and on the shore.

Initially, recovery dominated policy decisions. Both the tourism and the

health resort agencies struggled to rebuild their facilities and clienteles in the

postwar years, and it was not until 1950 that some semblance of normality

returned to opportunities for annual vacations at rest or in motion. But the

trade union organizations gave priority to restoring the expensive infra-

structure of rest homes and health spas, consigning tourism to a second-class

status that ignored the possibilities it offered to develop more economical

leisure travel. Both tourism and health spas remained embedded in the trade

union structure, and access to vacations continued to be linked to the work-

place. In these protean postwar years the government would decree the

expansion of these facilities and would boast of the millions of rubles to be

spent on the vacations of laboring people, but the structure of the expansion

would be dictated and constrained by the costly patterns already set in the

prewar years.

Yet within this restoration of the 1930s vacation edifi ce, subtle changes oc-

curred in the early 1950s that presaged the more dramatic social developments

4. Quoted in Alexander Werth, Russia: The Post-war Years (New York, 1971), 99.


5. Recent work on this period includes Juliane Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society
   between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of
   War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2001);
   Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Postwar Youth and the Emergence of Mature
   Socialism (Oxford, 2010); Juliane Fürst, Polly Jones, and Susan Morrissey, “The Relaunch
   of the Soviet Project, 1945–64: Introduction,” Slavonic and East European Review 86, no.
   2 (2008): 201–207; Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR 1941 to the
   Present (Chichester, UK, 2010).