154 Chapter 4
the tango and foxtrot were removed from the realm of the permissible, polic-
ing cultural tastes proved impossible. As Juliane Fürst has written, “Post-
war youth danced. At any occasion and in any place, young people set up
makeshift dance fl oors and spent their time revolving to the tune of waltzes,
foxtrots, and tangos.”^65
As before the war, fi lms constituted a major form of health spa and rest
home entertainment, but viewers had become more discriminating. Vacation-
ers in Sochi in 1948 expected to watch fi rst-run fi lms both in town cinemas
and in their own sanatoria. These entertainments and cultural activities were
not always included in the putevka: typically vacationers had to buy tickets
for the cinema and concerts, and some sanatoria charged their patients for
their games of billiards. The existence of a market for leisure activities sug-
gests something about patient demand. By 1954 they insisted on being enter-
tained: you cannot rest well “when the leisure hours are not fi lled with in-
teresting amusement,” wrote the Sochi newspaper Krasnoe znamia in 1954,
“where people are simply bored.”^66- TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 679, l. 3; GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 355, ll. 7ob., 47; Fürst,
Stalin’s Last Generation , 201. - GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 355, l. 23; GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 1669 (cultural work reports,
1949), ll. 28–29; TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 706, l. 74; GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 498, l. 99 (quote).
Dancing on the veranda at a rest home, near the city of Ples, Ivanovo oblast, early 1950s.
RGAKFD g. Krasnogorsk, no. 1–28116. Used with permission of the archive.