From Treatment to Vacation 173through the 1980s, when its contours had become frozen in economic stagna-
tion and bureaucratic inertia. The expansion of a Soviet vacation available
to all citizens appropriately complemented Khrushchev’s emphasis on the
consumer economy, the fulfi llment of the prewar promise that had been put
into motion in the immediate postwar period, as discussed in chapter 4. The
consumption of leisure also possessed both use value and symbolic value.
The vacation would continue to be characterized by its functional benefi t,
the recovery of good health as a means to return to productive activity. But
it also increasingly became a means by which Soviet citizens could express
their socialist identity, their aspirations to culture, their aesthetic values, and
their worldly knowledge. As the vacation experience became accessible to
more and more citizens, the possibilities for choice, differentiation, and dis-
tinction also increased. The post-Stalin years thus witnessed the transforma-
tion of a Soviet consumer regime from hierarchy to relative abundance that
permitted personal choice and distinction. But despite this transformation,
the economy’s failure to fulfi ll the promises of the 1960s for greater access to
goods produced deep discontent.
This chapter will show that in the decades that bridged de-Stalinization
and late socialism, vacationers increasingly valued holidays as commodi-
ties to be consumed for pleasure, satisfaction, and self-identifi cation rather
than for physical and mental recuperation. The state responded slowly to
popular demand, however, most notably in its failure to provide adequate
vacation opportunities for married couples and their children. This short-
coming revealed the contradictions between the traditional purpose of the
Soviet vacation to provide medical recuperation for working adults and the
growing demand by sophisticated Soviet consumers for family vacations as
an entitlement of the Soviet good life.
Treatment: Soviet Rest and Recuperation
The creation of the Soviet consumer proceeded haltingly despite the uto-
pian promise of abundance for all, and the continuing development of the
Soviet health resort exemplifi ed the uncertainties of the evolving consumer
society. The fi rst postwar edition of the guide to Soviet health spas in 1951
had already revealed the contradiction between the words that emphasized
the purposeful, rational, and medical nature of kurort vacations and pictures
that invited pleasure, sociability, and relaxation. Words mattered, however,
and the language of medicine pervaded discussions of health resort plan-
ning, both in public and in private. Until 1960, in fact, the Ministry of Public
Health controlled the majority of the beds in health resorts. In 1955 a confer-
ence of health ministry kurort offi cials reaffi rmed the primacy of medical
factors in the allocation of kurort putevki: only those who genuinely needed
medical treatment should receive them, and they came with the obligation
to fulfi ll the course of treatment. “I want to emphasize,” said Eremenko, the
chief of the ministry’s health resort bureau, “that our rules should make clear