Restoring Vacations after the War 147receive one. Offi cially, as has been noted, war invalids, pregnant women,
and leading production workers were to receive priority for subsidized pute-
vki, and as in the 1930s, health spa administrators kept careful records of
these categories. Offi cial targets, such as 60 percent or 80 percent workers,
had been dropped, but these data and a growing tide of alarming anecdotal
evidence told administrators that in the land of the Soviets, citizens with
knowledge of the system and the ability to manipulate it continued to put
themselves and their friends and family in the best vacation spots. In this
respect, the gap between the ideal of communist abundance and equality and
the reality of socialist distinction remained unchanged after the war. But in
the postwar years, the newly prominent intelligentsia came to be seen as the
rightful recipients of the scarce vacation opportunities.
The procedure for acquiring a spa, rest home, or tourist putevka had not
changed since the war: the path to a vacation ran through one’s place of em-
ployment. Anyone who wished to spend his or her annual leave at a sanato-
rium or rest home needed fi rst to visit the doctor, then to appear before the
enterprise insurance commission, and fi nally with its approval, to approach
the factory committee, which controlled the putevki distributed by its trade
union.^45 Medical necessity continued to be the fi rst requirement for the allo-
cation of a vacation away from home. Assigning access to leisure travel at the
workplace helped to cement the close relationship between production and
recreation, linking the right to rest to economic and social effort, a contribu-
tion best evaluated at the point of production.
Medical need and workplace honor, however, yielded to infl uence and
connections, continuing the pattern of corruption that had been so prevalent
before 1941. Central authorities acknowledged that local boards either did
not care or did not know how to select the most appropriate recipients of
health spa putevki. Kurort doctors threw up their hands at the fl ow of pa-
tients; as many as half of the total arrived with the wrong medical conditions,
“especially in summer.” Or they arrived in August with a putevka designated
for October. Instead of the “most worthy and honored” veterans, invalids,
and production workers, too many enterprise committees were giving pute-
vki to “employees and dependents,” despite an explicit decree from the Cen-
tral Trade Union Council forbidding this practice. The pattern carried over
into the distribution of tourist trip vouchers, whereby factory committees
knowingly issued them to individuals who planned all along to remain on
the beach. Meanwhile, young and healthy “miners, transport workers, metal
workers, textile workers and chemical workers voiced many reprimands be-
cause tourist putevki were practically inaccessible to them.” Organizers at
the Moscow oblast tourist base in Borodino lamented the arrival of too many
elderly people and even invalids for their hiking trips, all because unions
- Trud , 25 January 1946; 14 November 1946.