180 Chapter 5
The ever-growing demand by Soviet citizens to spend their vacations away
from home in leisure pursuits included new expectations about the quality of
the vacation experience. Vacationers continued to value professional and so-
licitous medical attention, as we have seen. Offi cials also acknowledged that
the increasingly sophisticated leisure consumers expected better service and
a greater variety of activities in which to engage during their nontreatment
hours. If the medical side of the vacation emphasized dependency, the lei-
sure side privileged consumer agency, and health spa offi cials worked hard
to accommodate the new needs and demands. As always, these involved a
fragile balance between didactic cultural uplift and pure fun and release. The
Soviet vacation became not just a reward for work well done but a space of
personal self-development.
The southern shores of the Soviet Union remained the destination of
choice for the emblematic vacation, memorialized in the 1957 fi lm To the
Black Sea , in which one protagonist, an eminent Moscow professor, con-
fessed that his life’s dream was “to drive to the Black Sea in my own car.”
The fi lm proceeds to chart a romantic comedy of errors with the Black Sea
as its destination and backdrop: a caravan of automobiles transits the adven-
turous road to Crimea, and cars driven by two males seeking the love of the
same silly coed careen repeatedly past an apocryphal road sign that reads,
“Crimea—this way; Caucasus—that way.”^32
The dream of one’s own car remained only that for most prospective Soviet
automobilists: the density of automobile ownership in the USSR in 1977 was
26 per 1,000 people, rising only to 45 per 1,000 in 1985. By contrast, the level
in the United States in the 1970s was 426 cars per 1,000 people. For almost
all Soviet vacationers, then, the journey to the south took place by rail, a trip
from Moscow to Simferopol or Sochi that took more than thirty-six hours.
In 1960, 530,000 visitors to Sochi traveled by train, compared with 60,000
by sea and 40,000 by air. Automobiles did not even receive mention.^33 The
train journey from Siberia and the Far East took between twelve and twenty
days in each direction, making the favored southern watering spots virtu-
ally inaccessible for those outside European Russia.^34 The kurort journey also
posed its own peculiar challenges for vacationers. The railway authorities
did not sell round-trip tickets, and even a one-way ticket could not be bought
until the prospective passenger had presented a kurort putevka. Only after
arriving at his or her destination could the traveler purchase a return ticket
by presenting a kurort booklet, and then only ten days before the intended
departure date. The rise of air travel in the 1960s made long-distance travel- K chernomu moriu , dir. Andrei Tutyshkin, Mosfi l'm, 1957.
- Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca,
NY, 2008), 239–240; Literaturnaia gazeta , 18 May 1961 (hereinafter LG ), 2. - V. I. Azar, Otdykh trudiashchikhsia SSSR (Moscow, 1972), 9. Vasilii Shukshin’s 1972
fi lm, Pechki-lavochki ( Happy-Go-Lucky ), Gor'kii Film Studios, traces just one Siberian cou-
ple and the adventures they encounter on their rail journey to the south, via Moscow (all
routes went through Moscow).