From Treatment to Vacation 193following year that his institution was just as needy as everyone else. And
every year the needs continued to mount: more money for staff, equipment,
repair, expansion, food, a swimming pool, an airport.^67
When the Central Trade Union Council took over the administration of
health places in 1960, its leaders placed high hopes in the opportunities
this transfer would provide for accumulation of investment capital from in-
dividual enterprises cooperating with regional kurort administrations. But
local administrators expressed their opposition to these plans almost imme-
diately, and even while the Liberman reforms were getting under way, the
kurort administrators spoke out fi rmly and consistently for the command-
administration system as the solution to their problems of mounting consum-
er demand. When specialists advocated the creation of an “industry of rest,”
they envisioned rearranging the organizational chart of the central planning
system, not introducing market mechanisms like prices and credit. A Min-
istry of Rest, like the Ministry of Heavy Industry, would command its own
food supply chain, taxi fl eets, ships, gas stations, and railway cars instead of
having to interact with other agencies for these services.^68
In 1972, the head of the trade union kurort administration, I. I. Kozlov,
pronounced confi dently that with expansion plans now under way, the de-
mand of Soviet citizens for their annual rest, whether in the central all-union
kurorts or in republican or provincial kurorts, would be satisfi ed by 1990.
But he also noted signs of growing new troubles that would only intensify
in the coming years: much of the investment in new facilities never bore
fruit because of the slow construction of new vacation complexes. In 1976 he
noted that some projects had been under construction for eight or ten years
and still were not fi nished; these half-built concrete hulks like the planned
Svetlana pansion in Sochi, in its fi fteenth year of construction in 1980, were
now beginning to decay from exposure to the weather.^69 The column “Build
Health Places More Quickly” became a staple feature of the newspaper Trud
in the 1970s and 1980s. Who was to blame? The problem of so-called dol-
gostroiki , or unfi nished projects, was endemic in the Soviet economy; the
vacation industry was not unique.^70 Trade union offi cials blamed local kurort
councils that failed to hold their construction fi rms accountable or the archi-
tectural offi ces that failed to provide building plans in a timely manner. In
their fi nger-pointing, offi cials ignored the larger context of an entire economy
- GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 326, ll. 104, 90, 248; d. 227, l. 111; d. 957, ll. 30–32; d. 2303,
ll. 79, 175. - N. Shelomov, “Industriia otdykha,” KP , 27 September 1966. Shelomov, an architect,
worked for the planning institute that commissioned the consumer survey. See also Azar,
Ekonomika , 170–173. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 1669, l. 199; d. 2303, l. 45; Trud , 23 February 1979; 24 Janu-
ary 1980. - Almost every report by the kurort head Kozlov included laments about construction
delays: Trud , 27 April 1973; 27 December 1974; 14 April 1976; 13 April 1977; 22 February
1978; 29 December 1978; 23 February 1979; 10 April 1981; 2 February 1982; Hewett, Reform-
ing the Soviet Economy , 89.