136 Chapter 4
The ideal was for the rest of the day to be spent in relaxation and recre-
ation, but there were no games or sports facilities, and the grounds were so
ragged, unkempt, and fi lled with trash that it was hazardous to walk outside.
There were no walkways, no benches, certainly no fl owerbeds or decorative
shrubs. A river might run by, but the beach was overgrown and the stairs
down the bank beyond repair. The staff members were more interested in
their own survival and saw their jobs as opportunities to secure access to food
at the vacationers’ expense. Some were kind and caring, but many more were
rude and indifferent to the needs of the vacationers. The evenings dragged
on with nothing to do: the fi lm projector might be broken or show only old
fi lms, the radio did not work, and there was no one to organize amateur
concerts, lectures, or games. If there was a library, it lacked an assortment of
books, and there was no comfortable place to sit and read. And if a vacationer
wanted to register a complaint, the mandatory complaint book was missing
or locked away. Many tried to leave early, preferring spartan dormitories to a
Soviet rest home, but even this was diffi cult because train tickets could not
be secured in advance.^20
Vacationers registered their dissatisfaction loudly and in public in letters
to the authorities and the press. Their complaints testifi ed to the kind of
vacation stay that Soviet citizens expected and the kind that had been the
publicized norm before the war. But now they had become bolder in their
insistence on comfort and care. Their ideal vacation experience made the
rester the focus of care, the object of medical, cultural, and culinary attention.
The combination of new landscapes, the picturesque seaside or mountain
views, and the unusual abundance of comfort and medical care were meant
not merely to provide a respite from the routine of work but to transform the
Soviet vacation spot into a magical therapeutic wonderland.
Quite clearly, the full-service vacation was more accessible for some So-
viet citizens than for others. In Sochi, although offi cials denied it, a class
system prevailed in the allocation of food supplies. “As a rule, there is a
division of sanatoria by Kurorttorg [the central food supplier] into sanatoria
of special designation, sanatoria of a higher type, and sanatoria of the Cen-
tral Trade Union Council,” insisted one head doctor at a 1947 conference on
Sochi health resorts. The head of the food supply authority, Serebrovskii,
acknowledged that he had received a list of eighteen sanatoria that were to be
supplied differently from the others and allotted the best selection of prod-
ucts. Even if Sochi had emerged as the exemplary center of Soviet vacation
health benefi ts, and although Serebrovskii insisted that “every patient gets- This description is based on comments from the following sources: GARF, f. 9493,
op. 3, d. 20; d. 77; Trud , 1 September 1945; 9 December 1945; 16 July 1946; 26 July 1946; 22
May 1947; 16 July 1947; 19 September 1947; 2 August 1949; 7 September 1949. (One sign
of the leanness of these years was the paucity of any kind of reporting about vacations or
tourism in Trud in 1948.)