Restoring Vacations after the War 131usually associated with the years of “de-Stalinization” after 1953. Consumer
comfort gained new prominence, and professional expertise acquired new
authority. The medical profession asserted primacy in the postwar adminis-
tration of vacations, and professionalism in vacation services, such as food
preparation, gained unprecedented status in planning and execution. We can
also see in this period the rise of a new social stratum, the intelligentsia, who
not only furnished the expertise but simultaneously became the most skilled
consumers of the annual vacation, whether in health resorts or on tourist
trails. During the course of the 1930s and late 1940s, members of this new
leading class had come to dominate Soviet society and to expect rewards for
their service to the state.^6 Some had risen from lowly social roots through the
process of Soviet industrialization and urbanization.^7 Others had been the
offspring of a prerevolutionary elite who managed to use their cultural capi-
tal to reproduce a position of privilege in the new order.^8 By the beginning of
the 1950s, they had begun to utilize the opportunity to secure leisure travel
as one of the signifi ers of their prestige and social position.
War and Recovery
The decreed reinstitution of the regular vacation on 1 July 1945 celebrated
the return to normalcy in the aftermath of war with its suffering and sacri-
fi ces. Trade union health and tourist authorities scrambled to organize bases
and itineraries for the fi rst batches of vacationers. The central trade union
newspaper Trud announced that 750,000 working people would enjoy a
much-deserved vacation by year’s end, and they called attention in August to
the departure of thirty tourist groups bound for destinations in the Caucasus.^9
Recognizing that not all deserving workers could immediately regain their
right to rest, Soviet authorities stipulated that among the spa and rest home
vacationers planned for 1945, priority should be given to invalids from the
war, pregnant women and nursing mothers, workers in hazardous branch-
es of work, and “others.” Mothers and injured veterans constituted newly
privileged categories of entitlement, outranking even shock workers, an ac-
knowledgment of the human costs of the war. Soon, however, the familiar
“very best production workers” rejoined the A-list, along with demobilized
soldiers.^10 Prewar experience had already shown how diffi cult it was to- Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge,
1976), analyzes the “big deal” between the regime and the managerial middle class that
traded political loyalty for material perquisites. - Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934
(Cambridge, 1979). - Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1995);
Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA,
2009); on the intelligentsia as a social group, see also Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of
Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, NY, 2008). - Trud , 7 July 1945; 7 August 1945; 22 September 1945.
- Trud , 16 August 1945; 25 January 1946.