Restoring Vacations after the War 165
a high level of service that acknowledged their dignity as Soviet people. The
people themselves were now actors in the pages of the guide to health re-
sorts, and the extensive discussions at all levels of the health spa and tourism
administrations confi rmed that their desires and preferences needed to be
accommodated.
The rise of the skilled leisure consumer was matched by the growing im-
portance in this period of professionalism and experts. Doctors administered
their health workshops not as bureaucrats but as skilled professionals. The
postwar acknowledgment of the importance of coziness and hospitality was
now dressed up in the scientifi c garb of Pavlov’s principles: under social-
ism, science and expertise were mobilized in service of the people’s welfare.
Skilled chefs acquired new authority as specialists in nutrition, as psycholo-
gists in cosseting vacationers, and in support of the cultural workers who
served to expand the horizons of their customers. This period also saw the
emergence of the professional mass organizer, the massovik, although invest-
ment in cultural expertise still lagged behind that in facilities, medicine, and
food.
The period between the end of the war and the death of Stalin in March
1953 is often labeled “high Stalinism,” its contours dominated by the xeno-
phobia refl ected in Andrei Zhdanov’s assault on cultural nonconformity in
the late 1940s and the ominous Doctors’ Plot of 1953 that portended a new
wave of repression and anti-Semitic political violence. The year 1953 consti-
tutes the great break in this chronology. The story of vacations and tourism
in the fi rst postwar years, however, owes little to continuities with Stalinism.
Leisure travel struggled to reestablish its facilities and priorities in the fi rst
years after the war, largely as a result of overwhelming economic shortages.
The great turning point after the war in the realm of the provision and con-
sumption of leisure turned out to be 1950. That year’s all-union review sym-
bolized a fresh commitment to expand and develop leisure facilities along
principles of medical expertise and caring hospitality. Improving economic
conditions made greater investments possible, but transformed attitudes on
the part of administrators and specialists—a newly confi dent and empow-
ered postwar generation—also shaped the postwar dynamism. Some of these
innovative vacation authorities were able to imagine and suggest changes in
the economic organization of their work and invite the application of mar-
ket-like mechanisms to help improve the provision of leisure travel. Mark
B. Smith has noted a similar phenomenon in his study of postwar property
relations and housing: the proponents of reform and consumption mobilized
their arguments and ideas in the fi rst years after the war and began to imple-
ment them after 1950. The system began to change in 1950, well before the
death of Stalin.^89
- Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to
Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 62–64.
