160 Chapter 4
the interests of tourists were subordinated to the requirements of the trans-
port of goods. First, the passenger areas of the boats were small and uncom-
fortable, and second, the schedules were determined by the freight company,
which limited the range of shore excursions that could be provided.^81
The basic currency of Soviet vacations, the putevka, encapsulated all
these contradictions between economic rationality and socialist desire. Pute-
vki possessed a nominal monetary value, representing the cost of the services
provided. Rest homes, tourist bases, and sanatoria received compensation for
their services based on these costs. For example, in 1955, a summer putevka
at a Sochi sanatorium was valued at about 46 rubles a day: 16.77 rubles from
each putevka was designated for food, 6.51 for wages, 5.23 for medicine, and
88 kopecks for cultural activities. The largest share of the daily cost, however,
23 rubles, went to the expenses of Sochi as a whole (overhead, in academic
research parlance), an invitingly large black hole. Putevki were meant to be
distributed, not bought and sold, and their issuers—the factory and enter-
prise committees—bore no fi nancial responsibility for their full utilization.
Nor did the costs correspond to value because of the subsidies that came from
social insurance. A tourist trip was actually less expensive than a rest home
vacation because its facilities were more modest and the tourist provided his
own recreation and locomotion. But tourist putevki were not eligible for a 30
percent insurance discount, and they cost the factory committees or the tour-
ists real money to purchase. When they were issued for free or at discounts,
their recipients had little incentive to use them: in 1952, one-third of tourist
putevki went unutilized.^82
In short, there was no offi cial market in putevki, despite the existence of
known supply and demonstrated demand. Cautious voices emerged in the
1950s to propose a more market-oriented way to balance the needs of con-
sumers with the scarcities of vacation facilities. Why not sell unused putevki
for cash, without red tape, suggested the head of the Georgian Kurort Admin-
istration in 1952. On the other hand, selling unused putevki for personal gain
was an acknowledged form of trade union corruption: better to maintain red
tape and eschew the market. The Moscow Tourism-Excursion Authority, one
of the more active packagers of tourist travel in the early 1950s, combined
both allocation and market. Of its planned sixteen thousand tourist putevki
in 1953, it issued nine thousand in advance to trade union organizations who
had applied for them. Most of the remainder were sold through the central
Moscow offi ce to individual consumers. As the result of an extensive pub-
licity campaign (which could not be labeled “advertising”), the demand to
purchase putevki was so great that the offi ce had to hire extra staff in the fi rst
days of the sale.^83- TsAGM, f. 28, op. 2, d. 101, ll. 52–55.
- GAGS, f. R-24, op. 1, d. 546 (correspondence with editors of Krasnoe znamia, 1955),
l. 2; GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 69, l. 7; f. 7576, op. 14, d. 63, l. 99. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 141, ll. 160, 82; TsAGM, f. 28, op. 2, d. 101, ll. 82–84.