150 Chapter 4
caring and attentive group leaders who welcomed and guided “tourists from
different corners of the native land, many speaking different languages.” By
1954 the Moscow tourist base welcomed 4,247 tourists from as far away as
Kamchatka, Sakhalin, Iakutiia, and China. Administrators of Moscow oblast
rest homes also added excursions to the sights of Moscow such as Red Square
and the Tret'iakov Gallery for their out-of-town vacationers.^54 The allure of
urban tourism represents a different kind of appeal from that of languid va-
cations in the south, and we can begin to see in these city tours another
example of convergence between rest and tourism. Cultured and purposeful
sightseeing was gradually coming to be an expected component of leisure
travel, even if its primary purpose was rest or physical exercise.Planning Vacations for Socialist Prosperity
Until 1950, recovering and rebuilding lost capacity constituted the main
story of vacation and travel work and investment. Now having restored the
infrastructure and material prerequisites, offi cials turned their attention to
the content of the Soviet vacation. What should a proper vacation be? The
purposeful nature of the right to rest retained pride of place in discussions
and plans, beginning as always with medicine. In discussions about the
“wrong people” receiving putevki, sanatorium and rest home managers ex-
pressed concerns about fairness and corruption, but always in the language
of medical utility. A spa vacation was meant above all to restore the health
of the vacationer, and healthy people at sanatoria took these valuable places
away from the truly medically needy.^55 But now in the 1950s needy vacation-
ers would receive medical care and cultural services at the highest profes-
sional level.
The very administrative structure of health spas emphasized their medi-
cal basis and signaled the expanded authority of medical professionals. At
the summit of each institution stood the head doctor, the supreme manager
who assumed responsibility for all aspects of the vacation experience. The
head doctor of a Leningrad sanatorium, Plastinina, with twenty-fi ve years’
experience in the trade union health spa system, reminded fellow doctors
of this point at a 1949 conference. We deal with treatment, she said, which
in a narrow sense referred to medical procedures: baths, dosed walking,
X-ray treatments, drinking mineral water, and massages. But in their sana-
torium, treatment began from the minute the patient arrived and did not
depend on the number of procedures performed. “In our sanatoria and rest
homes, every moment is medical.” “The health of the individual,” said- TsAGM, f. 28, op. 2, d. 34; d. 117, l. 8; TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 1089 (reports on
cultural work at rest homes, 1954), l. 2. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 77, ll. 20–23; d. 141, ll. 82, 112; Trud , 18 November 1949;
GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 78, ll. 79–83, 138.