From Treatment to Vacation 175that kurorts should serve those who are actually ill, and not random people
who are accustomed to go to the kurort for their amusement.” The medically
needy made their own priorities known in their letters back home to factory
newspapers. Their gratitude for a health vacation invariably included the
traditional medical results such as regaining one’s health and ability to return
to work. “It is no exaggeration to say that some of us came here on crutches
but have left completely healthy,” wrote a worker to her Moscow factory
newspaper.^19
Even with the 1960 transfer of almost all health resorts to the Central Trade
Union Council (to which I will return), the medical function of the Soviet
vacation continued to be emphasized. “No one receives a putevka without
going through the medical commission,” insisted the trade union chief A. I.
Shevchenko in 1961. The rest home, despite its relaxed medical regime, re-
mained a “school of health” with lectures on the evils of smoking and drink-
ing and lessons in nutrition and hygiene. Physicians continued to administer
their sanatoria, and they ardently defended the medical nature of the Soviet
vacation. Reacting in 1962 to a proposal that sanatoria could be managed
better by lay administrators than by doctors, the head doctor at a Kislovodsk
sanatorium insisted, to applause, “In medical institutions the direction must
come precisely from a doctor, and only from a doctor.” Ten years later, the
head doctor of the Kislovodsk polyclinic affi rmed, “Our basic task remains
improving the effectiveness of our kurort treatment, and restoring our pa-
tients’ ability to work as quickly as possible.”^20
To be sure, public health posed real challenges to Soviet society well into
the second half of the twentieth century. Life expectancy had increased from
46.9 years in 1939 to 69.5 years by 1972 but then began to decline.^21 In 1966,
according to the director of one sanatorium complex, as many as 30 percent
of military recruits were unfi t for service. Improved health and longer life
thus remained fundamental purposes of the Soviet vacation into the 1970s.^22
Healthful mineral springs constituted the centerpiece of the kurort re-
gime, continuing a tradition of continental European and North American
- GARF, f. 9228, op. 1. d. 916 (kurort directors’ conference, March 1955), ll. 15, 26–28,
“I want to emphasize,” l. 97; “It is no exaggeration,” Martenovka , 22 May 1958; 10 May 1960;
Znamia trekhgorki , 9 July 1958. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 238 (international socialist conference on health spas, July
1961), ll. 168–169; d. 428 (kurort offi cials’ conference, April 1963), ll. 87–88; d. 326 (kurort
offi cials’ conference, January 1962), l. 254; d. 1669 (kurort offi cials’ conference, April 1972),
l. 128. - Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 70 let. Iubileinyi statisticheskii ezhegodnik (Moscow,
1987), 409. This was the fi rst time life expectancy fi gures had been offi cially reported since
the 1950s. See, e.g., Zdravookhranenie v SSSR. Statisticheskii spravochnik (Moscow, 1957),
- V. N. Avanesov, Anapa: Sud'ba i zhizn' moia (Krasnodar, 2001), 40; Trud , 14 January
1965; Martenovka , 19 May 1970.