From Treatment to Vacation 181more affordable, but access to air tickets required the same kind of red tape
as the trains.^35
The staple nonmedical activities for rest homes and sanatoria had long been
and would remain watching fi lms and dancing to live or recorded music. Many
vacationers, however, had complained about the monotony of this regime, and
kurort offi cials continued to worry that cultural activities focused too much on
amusement and not enough on raising the cultural levels of those who visited
their establishments. The horizons opened by the Twentieth Party Congress
but particularly by the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961 brought new urgency
and energy to the task of using vacation facilities to educate the whole person.^36
Toward the end of the 1950s and continuing throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
Soviet vacationers could expect that their leisure days and hours would bring
cultural uplift and knowledge as well as fun.
The patriotic content of vacation cultural activities reinforced the continu-
ing close connection between the interests of the Soviet state and its leisure
practices. Even before the cult of World War II assumed a leading place in
state policy during Brezhnev’s term of offi ce, a new emphasis on patriotic
and historical appreciation began to appear at the end of the 1950s, particu-
larly around the Moscow region. The cultural activities of Soviet health spas
also refl ected a growing interest among the intellectuals in ethnic Russian
tradition, an interest that would be expressed in literature’s “village prose”
movement.^37 The rest home Communicator in Zvenigorod, an area that had
once relied on its natural beauty (“the Russian Switzerland”), now began to
emphasize its long historical pedigree as well, including monuments of reli-
gious and military signifi cance. A rest home in Kalinin oblast also reported
that its vacationers now took walks to historical places such as monasteries
and bell towers and traveled by bus to see the restored eleventh-century ar-
chitecture of Novgorod. Another rest home reported as “new” for 1959 eve-
ning campfi res in the woods, with veterans sharing stories of the local war
effort. The director of the Blue Lake home boasted in 1961 of even more
- On one experience, see M. V. Rabinovich, Vospominaniia dolgoi zhizni (St. Peters-
burg, 1996), 343; on diffi culties, Trud, 13 May 1962. See also Christian Noack, “Coping with
the Tourist: Planned and ‘Wild’ Mass Tourism on the Soviet Black Sea Coast,” in Gorsuch
and Koenker, Turizm , 299. A 2001 guidebook to the Black Sea coast notes the continuing
problem of return travel: “The hard thing in traveling to Black Sea kurorts is not to get there
but to fl y out on the expected day. Return tickets in peak season are not available.” Cherno-
morskoe poberezh'e Kavkaza ot Tuapse do Adlera. Putevoditel' (Moscow, 2001), 19. I was
able to buy two round-trip tickets from Moscow to Adler in 2006 through Expedia and a
Moscow travel agency, but to be sure, this was in the off-peak part of the year. - TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 1252, ll. 12, 9; GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 498 (correspondence
with Krasnoe znamia editors, 1954), l. 99; GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 326, ll. 229–241. This goal
was enshrined in the program adopted at the Twenty-Second Party Congress: Programma
kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza priniata XXII s’’ezdom KPSS (Moscow, 1962)
(see next chapter). - On the cult of the war, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and
Fall of the Cult of World War II in the USSR (New York, 1994), 134–146. On village prose, see
Kathleen Parthé, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton, NJ, 1992).