Restoring Vacations after the War 159As the managers planned the restoration of vacations after the war, they
had an opportunity to rethink the way in which this leisure enterprise was
organized. The path of least resistance was to continue with central plans
and allocations, with notional prices and no bottom line, a “soft budget con-
straint” that discouraged efforts to make rational and effi cient use of scarce
resources. But there also arose in this period isolated voices speaking in favor
of a more market-oriented organization of the leisure industry, early harbin-
gers of the reforms that economic experts would start to implement in the
1960s.
In the postwar USSR, the Ministry of Health and the trade unions contin-
ued to assume responsibility for the organization of what elsewhere would
have been labeled a vacation industry. Socialist Yugoslavia, for example, ap-
propriated a bourgeois vacation infrastructure in the late 1940s and assigned
it to an economic ministry, treating tourism and vacations as another unit of
the economy, like a business.^78 The administrative peculiarity of Soviet vaca-
tions, located outside economic structures, led in turn to a series of contra-
dictions that only became more noticeable as the professional level of manag-
ers and vacationers became more sophisticated after the war.
Were vacation institutions subject to the rules of supply and demand or
not? Tourism enthusiasts continued to criticize the central Tourism-Excur-
sion Authority for being concerned only with market demand, maximizing
revenue, and profi ts. The fact that most people wanted to visit Crimea and
the Caucasus was no reason to allow them to do so. Central authorities knew
best, argued the advocates of central planning, and they should decide how
to invest in vacations and tourism. It was the responsibility of local organiza-
tions to appeal to the center for funds, a business model based on the dole,
and to blame local problems on someone else. As one tourism enthusiast as-
serted in a 1948 meeting, “Of course, fi nances are an issue, but they shouldn’t
determine everything.”^79
This quasi-accountable, quasi-welfare structure led to further peculiarities
in the business of Soviet vacations. Medical doctors bore the responsibility
for the fi nancial administration of their units, a task that they often resented
and that many managed poorly. Purely economic solutions to questions of
incentives and allocation of resources were met with skepticism. Faced with
the problem of variable demand for rest home places in winter and summer,
offi cials resisted the suggestion of differential pricing, “as exists the world
over,” preferring instead to improve conditions in winterized rest homes to
make them more attractive.^80
Because tourism and health vacations were considered an entitlement
and not a business, they continued to cede priority to productive econom-
ic activities. When the Moscow TEU revived its summertime Volga cruise
itineraries in 1952, for example, it rented spaces on freight-hauling boats, and
- Duda, “Workers into Tourists.”
- GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 69, ll. 8ob., 9ob., 12, 20.
- GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 21, ll. 3, 16ob.