134 Chapter 4
directives on their own, individual units appealed to the center for direction
and above all for the funds with which to implement central decrees. Local
offi cials now appeared plaintively at central conferences, asking for a hand-
out to fulfi ll their responsibilities. This pattern would be replicated through-
out the coming decades. Economic shortages, which deteriorated into actual
famine conditions by 1946–47, provided many reasons for the failure to act
locally. Shortages of capable managers in the aftermath of the devastating
war also contributed to the stalled recovery of the vacation economy.
The challenges were enormous. Many of the structures of sanatoria and
rest homes had been damaged during the wartime occupation, some beyond
repair. Surviving structures were often commandeered by other agencies
with more clout, and tourist and health authorities struggled to reclaim them.
Of sixty-two prewar sanatoria in Crimea, only ten were still functioning after
the peninsula’s liberation, and these were vulnerable to requisition by agen-
cies more privileged than the trade union health administration. As late as
1946, electricity had still not been restored in Yalta, and not a single beach
functioned. Odessa’s once-thriving kurort network with eighty sanatoria also
suffered greatly during the war.^15
The overwhelming response of local institutions to these conditions of
scarcity was to petition the center to solve their problems and to rail against it
when it did not respond or responded inappropriately. At a May 1947 confer-
ence of heads of health resorts, director after director reported on their miser-
able situations. Some had been cut off by the central kurort supply agency,
and they begged to be included in the central allotments. Others complained
that the ministries to which they belonged did not allocate the funds they
needed to rebuild. A conference of directors in Sochi produced even more
pointed complaints: the Textile Workers’ Sanatorium had attempted to es-
tablish its own farm to feed patients, but the central kurort administration
failed to supply seed until the growing season was already over. But oth-
ers complained about excessive oversight that inhibited their ability to solve
their own problems. They petitioned the director of the trade union kurort
administration to “show more confi dence in us, give us more freedom, don’t
tutor us on every trifl e.”^16 For enterprising managers, the state was too rigid;
for the weak, it was too poor.
The central authorities blamed the problems on certain ineffective man-
agers in their periodic editorials in the newspaper Trud , and they always
praised by name the handful of sanatoria and rest homes that worked well.^17
The newspaper also regularly provided surveys of readers’ letters—“signals
from below”—about the shortcomings in the right to rest. Some Soviet- GARF, f. 9493, op. 3. d. 21(Sochi sanatorium directors’ conference, 24 October 1947),
l. 18ob.; d. 177 (materials on Crimean health institutions, 1946), ll. 11, 1; d. 78 (national trade
union conference of resort and rest home managers, December 1949), l. 165. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 20, ll. 97 ob., 16; d. 21, ll. 10, 4 (quote).
- Examples in Trud , 14 May 1946; 26 July 1946; 16 November 1946; 11 June 1947; 15
May 1948.