From Treatment to Vacation 169terminal echoed the style of Moscow’s Northern River Port, with elaborate
marble inlays and sculptures of Black Sea fauna, topped by a spire that could
be seen for miles out to sea. Both structures included exotic Caucasian motifs
whose Oriental fl avor enticed arriving passengers. Hundreds of thousands
of Soviet citizens came to “sun city, city of fl owers, the pearl of the south”
to receive medical care from the “most miraculous doctors” in the world. In
1965 the city won the honor of “best resort of the Soviet Union.”^4
Sochi epitomized the Soviet vacation as an object of consumer desire,
a destination out of this world, a place of wonderment and fantasy. The
rituals of the spa regime—mornings for medicine and healing, afternoons
for uplifting culture and active sports, evenings for dalliance and fun—set
the kurort decisively apart from the daily lives of ordinary and even ex-
traordinary Soviet vacationers. Sochi offered both real and vicarious visi-
tors a kind of secularized pilgrimage to a socialist sacred space. Writing
about Tibet, Peter Bishop defi nes a sacred place “in terms of its separation
from the profane world, by the limited access accorded to it, by a sense of
dread or fascination, by intimations of order and power, combined with
ambiguity and paradox. Sacred places also seem to be located at the pe-
riphery of the social world.... Rituals accompany the crossing of the
threshold, guardians protect the passageway.”^5 Access to this sacral Sochi
came fi rst of all by the tightly rationed putevka and then by the long train
journey; many letter writers affi rmed the miraculous healing power of the
waters and therapies; the majestic architecture and sublime mountains
inspired awe as well as pleasure; the authority of the medical staff re-
minded visitors of the power of ideas and the state, sacralized by the pre-
sentation of the kurort booklet, the ticket to good health. The routine in
this magical elsewhere fulfi lled Karl Marx’s humanistic utopia, in which
a person would hunt in the morning, fi sh in the afternoon, rear cattle in
the evening, and criticize after dinner.^6 But far from a mythical no-place,
this place existed in concrete and marble reality, to which some lucky
million Soviet citizens could gain access every year. They believed in the
adage expressed by the heroine of the popular 1980 fi lm Moscow Does Not
Believe in Tears , which has been much repeated in Soviet and post-Soviet
culture: “Everyone must visit Sochi, if only once in their lives.”^7
- Sergei Tolstoi, Greater Sochi (Moscow, 1968), 43, 49; Trud , 24 May 1959; 15 February
1961; 12 November 1965. - Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation
of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley, 1998), 10. - Karl Marx, The German Ideology , intro. C. J. Arthur (London, 1970), 53.
- Moskva slezam ne verit, dir. Vladimir Men'shov, Mosfi l'm, 1980. The movie quote can
be found in http://www.life-sochi.ru, among other places. A 2009 poll reported that one in three
Russian citizens has been to Sochi “at least once.” All-Russian Center for the Study of Public
Opinion, 15 June 2009, http://www.rzn.info/news-federal/russia/30116.