Restoring Vacations after the War 161
As Elena Zubkova has written, the rigors and success of the war effort
had led many Soviet citizens to expect a softer regime, in which the comfort
and pleasure of citizens, a “spirit of freedom,” would receive priority. Trade
union offi cials, who represented the interests of Soviet citizens on the job
and off, also signaled the possibility of new models of domestic vacations
for the new age. They expected that more people would wish to travel; they
acknowledged that Soviet citizens deserved a greater variety of vacation op-
tions, choices that fell between the twenty-six-day cure and the ten-day forced
march of the training hike. Offi cials in Sochi in 1947 proposed the expansion
of vacation opportunities outside the limits of the sanatorium putevka, argu-
ing that an improving standard of living would result in more people wanting
to spend their vacation on the move, not confi ned to one highly medicalized
place. They wanted to “forget the doctor’s instructions” and stay on the beach
for two or three hours if they wished, not for the prescribed twenty minutes
monitored by a uniformed nurse. The trade union chief Shvernik had pro-
posed to transfer many rest homes to the tourism authority in order to shift
the balance of vacationing away from medicine and toward leisure travel.
Hotels should be built to accommodate the new demand for travel in luxury
and style but without the medical overhead of the health resort system. “It
will be diffi cult to imagine tourism without these fi rst-class hotels, which are
worthy of our state, which will be respectable and radiant, so that entering
them people will sense the expanse and the amplitude of our native land,”
concluded another trade union offi cial at a 1948 conference on tourism.^84
Voices spoke tentatively of new models of vacation experiences, not the
solitary medicalized reward for hard work or respite for job-stressed nerves
but an opportunity for families to rest and travel together. Hotels and rest
homes should be built with smaller rooms suitable for families, said some.
Automobile tourism was especially inviting for family travel. In short, while
the pull of traditional forms was strong, postwar discussions on vacations
and tourism began to imagine a new hybrid kind of vacation in which plea-
sure and choice supplanted medical purpose.^85
Two guides to Soviet health spas illustrate the changes that had taken
place from the 1930s to the postwar period and also show the ambivalence
about the direction that vacations should take. The 1936 guide to health re-
sorts was a thick tome of 522 pages whose text emphasized the medical and
meteorological properties of each of the listed resort destinations. Its illus-
trations emphasized the majestic but stern architecture of the repair shops
for working people. But it opened its descriptions of the individual resorts
with the three most traditional vacation destinations, and fully half of its
- Zubkova, Russia after the War, 16; GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 21, ll. 16ob, 23ob.; d. 1861,
l. 71; f. 9520, op. 1, d. 69, ll. 23, 28 (quote); Trud , 13 July 1949.
- GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 1861, l. 75; Trud , 13 July 1949; 30 April 1953. Timothy
Dunmore, Soviet Politics, 1945–53 (London, 1984), 42–59, discusses the confl ict between
familiar forms and ideas for change in industrial planning in this period.
