Restoring Vacations after the War 139Decentralization and lack of administrative control make it diffi cult to es-
timate the scale of the postwar health vacation enterprise. For 1945, Trud
reported that 400,000 Soviet citizens had received sanatorium vacations, and
1.1 million had gone to rest homes. These fi gures appear to be exaggerated.
By 1952, health places fell under several jurisdictions: the Ministry of Health
accounted for 114,000 beds in 1948, and the trade unions controlled 120,000.
In that same year, trade union offi cials planned to distribute vacation putevki
to between 1.5 million and 1.87 million Soviet working people, which would
have meant 12 vacationers for every trade union bed; thus to accommodate
everyone they would have had to operate at full capacity year-round.^28 In re-
ality, few locations could accommodate vacationers in all seasons, and local
reports suggested that both rest homes and sanatoria fi lled (and overfi lled)
their capacity only in the summer months of July and August. By 1950, the
bed stock in sanatoria and rest homes had grown to 383,000, and the plan for
1950 called for 2 million vacationers, a more modest ratio of 5 for every bed.
For 1952, trade union authorities announced they would provide 2.8 million
putevki to sanatoria and rest homes. Trud contended that the trip to a vaca-
tion spot was now an “ordinary occurrence” for Soviet people, but the popu-
lation in 1951 was 181.6 million: therefore, only 1.5 percent could receive
offi cial vouchers.^29 Vacations in fact were far from ordinary, and in general,
reporting stuck to examples rather than aggregates: Soviet readers could learn
that “last year 1,380 workers, engineers, and staff from our factory received
putevki to rest homes and sanatoria.” They even learned the names of a select
few but would not know how representative these were.^30 Publicity about va-
cations reminded people that the opportunity existed “for all,” but it did not
reveal the sober extent of scarcity. In this respect, the provision of vacations
continued the practice of the 1930s: for most Soviet citizens, the idea of an
annual vacation was more promissory than real.
Tourism: Mountain Roads or Seaside Rest?
Under such conditions of scarcity, the low-cost tourist vacation might have
offered better opportunities for a quick relaunch of Soviet “vacations for all.”
In August 1945, the head of the trade union’s central tourist authority, N. M.
Rogovskii, gave a confi dent interview to Trud about the revival of tourism
activities, pledging the restoration of damaged hotels and tourist bases and
reopening of the popular long-distance package tours to Crimea and along the- Trud , 19 January 1946; 7 February 1948; 26 February 1948; 5 March 1948; 15 May
- Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1956 godu. Statisticheskii ezhegodnik (Moscow, 1957),
275; Trud , 20 April 1950; 13 April 1952; Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1973 godu. Statis-
ticheskii ezhegodnik (Moscow, 1974), 642, 644. - Example from Martenovka , 17 May 1952.