192 Chapter 5
Komsomol respondents who preferred tourist vacations, 76 percent of Trud’ s
participants said they wanted to spend their vacation in a pansion or a rest
home.^65 This result reaffi rmed trade union authorities’ insistence on expand-
ing traditional health vacation facilities, allowing them to ignore the pref-
erences expressed in the poll of readers of the Komsomol newspaper, who
represented a more educated, urban, and youthful subsection of the Soviet
public.
Individual kurort operators also frequently engaged in market-like activi-
ties, early signs of the “second economy” that would increasingly fi ll in the
gaps left by the failures of central planning. Underfunded rest homes would
rent space for cash, contributing to the general problem of overcrowding but
gaining in this way much-needed operating funds. Another rest home used
its savings to build small fi shing and hunting lodges, using the surplus to
improve services for other vacationers. Local offi cials in Sochi on their own
initiative reorganized their hotels, eliminating the infamous dezhurnye , the
women who controlled the room keys and monitored each fl oor, freeing more
money for services (and liberating guests to come and go as they pleased).
They also opened themed restaurants such as The Old Mill, where the wait
staff dressed as a miller and his daughters, and Caucasian Village, serving
shashlik and Georgian wine. “We shouldn’t fear the word ‘enterprise,’ ” wrote
the head of the Sochi Communist Party branch describing these attractions.
“We should applaud such enterprise, which brings profi t to the state and joy
to its citizens.”^66
Ultimately such primitive socialist accumulation could not generate the
massive amounts of capital needed to meet the ever-growing demand for va-
cations in summer and in the south. Trade union offi cials continued to ex-
pect the central state to allocate the resources for every need from large to
small. Directors of provincial health resort administrations traveled to Mos-
cow every year for their annual meetings with their begging bowls in hand
to seek subsidies from the center. In response to advice that the Latvian re-
public should use its own funds to expand resort facilities on the Baltic Sea,
its kurort administrator replied that since most of its vacationers came from
other republics, the country as a whole, not just his republic, should pay for
its expansion. The director of the Far East Kurort Administration received
prolonged applause for insisting that funds for expansion should go fi rst of
all to local kurorts like his, not to the well-established centers like Sochi,
Kislovodsk, and Piatigorsk. “They can do very well at their own expense,”
he proclaimed. But the head doctor at one Kislovodsk sanatorium replied the- Ibid.; Trud , 21 June 1967. The survey questions were published 10 July 1966. Other
surveys were carried out by the Plekhanov Economics Institute and the State Committee on
Prices; Azar’s Ekonomika , 4–5, and Otdykh , 4, relied on these sources. - TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 1252, l. 92; GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 428, ll. 30–32; “We
shouldn’t fear,” S. F. Medunov, “Gorod, kotoryi prinadlezhit vsem,” Ogonek , no. 6 (February
1967): 16–18.