132 Chapter 4
enforce hierarchies of entitlement; priority was easily granted, real access more
elusive. Expanding the privileged categories at this moment recognized the
war contributions of the mass of the Soviet population without actually pro-
viding the promised access: this was, in modern terminology, an “unfunded
mandate.”
Tourist authorities began cautiously, limiting their initial efforts to recon-
structing the handful of the most popular destinations from the prewar pe-
riod: Moscow, Leningrad, Crimea, the Caucasus Black Sea coast, the northern
Caucasus, and Transcaucasia.^11 Although the central tourist authority pledged
to provide tours of Moscow to demobilized soldiers, offi cials reported that
most of the initial tourists on long-distance routes consisted of teachers, stu-
dents, engineers, and scientifi c workers.^12 As before the war, the right to rest
remained a commodity to be rationed to a few for the good of the whole, but
in fact it went only to those few—urban intellectuals—who possessed the
social capital to take advantage of these opportunities.
Planning for the return of the vacation had begun well before the fi nal
defeat of the German armies in early May 1945. The Tourism-Excursion Au-
thority of the Central Trade Union Council received orders on 24 April 1945
to mobilize six of the biggest regional administrations for the revival of tour-
ism that very summer. The assignment included developing itineraries that
would expose tourists to the history of the war as well as the familiar sites of
socialist construction, natural reserves, and cultural monuments. The trade
union center approved new spending to train excursion guides, rebuild tour-
ist infrastructure destroyed in the war, and reopen the Tourist Equipment
Factory, which would put tents, rucksacks, and other supplies in the hands
of the expected new fl ow of tourists. Central health spa authorities, despite
the pledge to send 750,000 citizens to rest homes and sanatoria in 1946, con-
tinued to rely on local initiative to provide these opportunities, exhorting lo-
cal trade union committees and even individual enterprises to rebuild dam-
aged structures and in particular to expand the subsidiary farms that could
provide health institutions with local food for their patients and vacation-
ers.^13 This decentralized approach might have constituted a new model for
the management of the Soviet economy. Nikita Khrushchev would attempt
something similar late in the 1950s, but in the immediate postwar years the
attempt foundered.^14
By 1948, the health authorities’ bootstrap approach—urging individuals
to solve their own vacation facility problems—had reverted to a more
familiar pattern of central control and supply. Unable to comply with central- Trud, 7 July 1945; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 24 (materials on tourist camps, 1945), l. 44.
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 24, l. 24; Trud , 7 August 1945. On veterans as an entitlement
group, see Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an
Authoritarian Society 1941–1991 (Oxford, 2008). - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 44, 115; Trud , 28 September 1945.
- On reform efforts in this period, see Julie Hessler, “A Postwar Perestroika? Toward a
History of Private Enterprise in the USSR,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (1998): 516–542.