190 Chapter 5
pansions, sanatoria, and rest homes for restricted use. In the mid-1960s, a
new form appeared alongside the pansion—the hotel, in which medical va-
cationers could receive food and lodging while taking the cure at a nearby
sanatorium. Generally, those who sought medical treatment without having
a putevka to a sanatorium—the kursovniki —had found lodging with private
landlords in places like Yalta and Sochi. Socialist hotels would put these
private arrangements out of business.^58 At the other end of the luxury spec-
trum, individual factories built their own “rest bases,” with simple facilities
but accessible to workers and employees who were unable to secure a pute-
vka to one of the more elaborate places of vacation. Leningrad’s Skorokhod
shoe factory built such a base eighty-seven miles to the south in Luga, from
which reports regularly appeared in the factory newspaper, Skorokhodovskii
rabochii.Playing the Market
A more controversial solution to the problem of unmet demand for vaca-
tion facilities paralleled the economic innovations under discussion in So-
viet society throughout the 1960s: the application of market-like mechanisms
to channel demand and provide better signals for kurort planning. A new
generation of economists was now studying capitalist economic principles
and advocated using the notion of profi t to provide better information to So-
viet planners and to improve incentives for managers. In 1965 the Khar'kov
economist Evsei Liberman had attracted international attention when the
Party leadership adopted some of his reforms.^59 Assessing the economic costs
of the putevka had always been complicated, with so many factors going into
the value of a vacation. Reformers now suggested that variable pricing, or
discounts, be adopted to encourage vacationers to take up putevki in the less
popular months. Some offi cials, however, resisted this reform, worried more
about the notional “surplus” eroded by the discounted putevka than the op-
portunity to fi ll all their spaces in the off-season.^60
Proposals to put the distribution of putevki on a more commercial basis
accompanied the transfer of the Health Resort Administration to the trade
unions. The central trade unions distributed putevki to individual unions
and then to enterprise committees. Giving away 20 percent of their putevki to
deserving workers at no charge, local committees sold the rest to workers at
30 percent of their stated value. Social insurance funds that were part of ev-
ery enterprise’s operating budget paid the difference. At the start of the 1960s,
the insurance fund subsidized between 85 and 90 percent of all putevki,- Trud , 9 February 1963. Expansion was denounced in this article for its lack of plan-
ning and aesthetics. See also Trud , 12 November 1965; GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 326, ll. 66–70;
d. 428, l. 22. - Lewin, Political Undercurrents , chap. 6. Liberman’s face appeared on the cover of
Time Magazine , 12 February 1965. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 227, ll. 35–37; d. 1669, l. 108; d. 326, ll. 255, 317; d. 238, l.
144; Azar, Ekonomika , 130.