148 Chapter 4
“distribute putevki mechanically, without thought, and often incorrectly in-
forming the recipient that the tourist base is a rest home.”^46
The social reality of the Soviet vacation is captured in the fragmentary col-
lections of reports about resters and tourists. Every institution was required
to record information about sex, occupation, and age for each of its resters
and to provide compilations in their annual reports.^47 We have some useful
snapshots of the vacationers at Moscow oblast rest homes from 1947 to 1952:
the percentage of workers here fl uctuated from 39 percent to 50 percent in1952.^48 In Sochi the prewar patterns prevailed, in which the percentage of
workers in sanatoria was highest in the winter months and lowest in the peak
vacation months of July, August, September, and October. Trade unions and
factories frequently could not even dispose of all their winter-month pute-
vki.^49 The disproportion of workers receiving vacations in the unfashionable
winter season suggests the second-class status accorded to them.
Workers were even scarcer among postwar tourists than among rest home
vacationers, and the designation “proletarian tourism” had long since disap-
peared from the tourism movement’s vocabulary. Again data are only frag-
mentary, but the composition of one group of tourists in 1951 is representa-
tive. Students, engineers, teachers, and scientists comprised 67 percent of the
total and workers only 13 percent. By 1954 the category “intelligentsia” had
begun to appear in these reports for both tourism and health spa vacations,
and most of the postwar tourists were now members of this group, followed
by white-collar employees. The all-union Kurort Administration reported in
that year that of the many members of the intelligentsia at the resorts, most
were healthy people who were accustomed to going there for pleasure, not
treatment.^50
Other distinctions among vacationers, both at spas and on tourist trips,
appear in the record but with much less commentary by offi cials. Men and
women appear to have been sent to health spas and rest homes in roughly
the same proportion as they were represented in the population as a whole.
46. GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 20, l. 19; d. 21, ll. 15–16, 23; d. 1660 (sanatorium directors’
conferences, 1949), l. 29; d. 78, l. 79; f. 9520, op. 1, d. 217, ll. 71ob., 72, 109–110; TsAGM, f.
28, op. 2, d. 101 (Moscow TEU reports, 1953), ll. 49–50.
47. Such compilations remain in archived folders, never systematically aggregated, per-
haps because the results demonstrated how little the center’s policies were followed. GARF,
f. 9493, op. 3, d. 21, l. 23.
48. TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 329 (medical reports of sanatoria and rest homes, 1947);
GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 385 (rest home medical report, 1948); TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 443
(rest home medical report, 1948); GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 768; TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d.
679 (rest home medical report, 1950); d. 802 (rest home medical report, 1951); d. 920 (rest
home medical report, 1952).
49. GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 55; GAGS, f. 178, op. 1, d. 26 (sanatorium medical report,
1952); f. 214, op. 1, d. 72 (sanatorium medical report, 1953); GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 21, l.
16ob; d. 78, ll. 43, 82.
50. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 193; TsAGM, f. 28, op. 2, d. 117 (Moscow TEU reports, 1954);
GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 916 (kurort directors’ conference, 24–28 March 1955).