Restoring Vacations after the War 163motorboats, playing chess, or hiking a forest path. More destinations re-
ceived photographic coverage; the “big three” commanded only one-third
of the photographs in 1951, not one-half. More signifi cant was the decrease
in the illustrated prominence of what Alexander Werth called in 1946 the
“huge health factory,” the Caucasus Mineral Waters. The whole Black Sea
coast from Anapa to Batumi now received much more attention, as did
Crimea, refl ecting the decline all over the world of the nineteenth-century
aristocratic mineral spa-based vacation in favor of the seaside and the
pleasures it offered for mass consumption.^87 The continuities between the
1930s and 1951 remained powerful: vacations were medical, but they were
also vacations, and guidebooks would help citizens explore the most popu-
lar and pleasurable destinations. New in 1951, instead of the impersonal
structure of the built-vacation institutions, was the visual confi rmation that
the Soviet people could be active agents and architects of their vacation
experience.
The interruption of the war years had made changes imaginable, but as the
vacation and tourism structure revived by the early 1950s, it looked in many
ways similar to what had been in place by the end of the 1930s. The relaunch
of the Soviet project proceeded along the trajectory already plotted during
the 1930s. There was no utopian moment in the postwar Soviet vacation,
no dramatic shift away from the emphasis on monumental health palaces,
and little diversifi cation of their geographic distribution or of the practices of
vacationers. This continuity may have refl ected the straitened economic con-
ditions after the war or the lack of imaginative leadership within the sphere
of leisure travel. But the persistence of the prewar model for vacations might
also have indicated a confi dence in the original choices: the socialist good
life included mobility, health, luxury, and sun. This was true in the 1920s,
and it remained just as valid in 1950.
Soviet vacations in the postwar era continued to emphasize a distinctive
combination of purpose and pleasure. Medicine remained all-important. Take
away the therapeutic chemical properties of Matsesta water, said administra-
tors in 1950, and you have no Sochi.^88 The vacations that addressed the thera-
peutic needs of citizens also included intellectual and cultural programs of
self-improvement. Vacations should be a time to read useful books and gain
new insight into the international situation through lectures and fi lms. Tour-
ist travel taught important survival skills as well as patriotic knowledge: the
- Kurorty SSSR , ed. S. V. Kurashov, N. E. Khrisanfov, and L. G. Gol'dfail' (Moscow,
1951); Werth, Russia: The Post-war Years , 157; see Jean-Didier Urbain, Sur la plage: Moeurs
et coutumes balnéaires (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Paris, 1994); Mackaman, Leisure Settings ; Ellen
Furlough, “Packaging Pleasures: Club Méditerranée and French Consumer Culture, 1950–
1968,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (1993): 65–81; Löfgren, On Holiday , chap. 5, “The
Mediterranean in the Age of the Package Tour.” - GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 644 (kurort directors’ conferences, 1950), l. 97.