184 Chapter 5
For their part, Soviet vacationers continued to expect comfortable living
conditions, attentive service, and tasty food. They also began to pay more at-
tention to commodities that would help them enjoy their vacations. Although
self-service restaurants lowered costs and reduced time spent in dining, vaca-
tioners preferred to be served: “We come to rest here only once a year, so let
them serve us our dinner at the table, we don’t want to carry our plate to the
table ourselves.” They asked for services such as barbers, shoe repair, intercity
telephone exchanges, and laundry, and they also spoke out in favor of oppor-
tunities to rent bicycles, dishes, water toys, musical instruments, televisions,
and radios for the duration of their vacations. They complained when food was
boring, and they increasingly appreciated local variations in menus. The chefs
who had met in 1950 to discuss expanding culinary horizons had done their
work well. An Odessa rest home boasted about the popularity of its house-made
salads and stuffed vegetables; a Tataria rest home held a contest in 1961 for the
best new dishes and subsequently added items like stewed meat with plums and
azu Tatar style (another stew) to its offerings. Vacationers also began to demand
better supplies of “vacation goods”: bathing suits, sunglasses, men’s summer
shirts, and women’s wraparound sarafans.^44 Spending time in the sun and fresh
air and improving one’s health were not enough; the new Soviet consumer now
expected a proper vacation to include the acquisition of material goods as well
as an extra four kilograms of body weight.
The source of these rising expectations included the party’s own promises
about the consumer’s road to communism, which permeated public culture in
the press, television, radio, and fi lm. Khrushchev’s seven-year plan, begun in
1959, explicitly targeted growth in the consumer goods sector. Moreover, the
complaint book had long been a sacrosanct instrument for consumers to commu-
nicate their demands to authorities, and it continued to instruct offi cials about
their successes and failings.^45 Local offi cials compiled complaints and forward-
ed them to central offi cials. “Every complaint must be reviewed, and the guilty
should be punished,” admonished the trade union kurort boss I. I. Kozlov in1976.^46 The trade union newspaper Trud regularly surveyed letters from vaca-
tioners and reported on the information they conveyed about what was good but
mostly what needed to change. Kozlov would often relay the most salient com-
plaints in his annual reports to kurort directors as a way to encourage improve-
ments, and these speeches were regularly reported in the press. So it was no
44. GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 238, l. 180; GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 712, ll. 33, 59; TsGAMO, f.
7223, op. 1, d. 1567, l. 18; GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 957 (central kurort administration meet-
ings, June 1967), l. 14; d. 326, ll. 112, 389; Trud , 19 June 1973; 30 June 1960; 20 September
1974.
45. N. B. Lebina and A. N. Chistikov, Obyvatel' i reformy: Kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni
gorozhan (St. Petersburg, 2003); Reid, “Khrushchev Modern”; Alec Nove, An Economic His-
tory of the U.S.S.R. (Harmondsworth, UK, 1972), 354–356; Marjorie L. Hilton, “The Cus-
tomer Is Always Wrong: Consumer Complaint in Late-NEP Russia,” Russian Review 68, no.
1 (2009): 1–25; and above, chapter 1.
46. GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 2303, l. 65.