194 Chapter 5
running out of gas, relying on an obsolete system that was unable to allocate
effi ciently the resources at its command.Unplanned, Unorganized, and Overwhelming
And still Soviet people wanted to spend their vacations in the sun and
by the sea. The growing gap between this consumer demand and the trade
unions’ ability to accommodate it led to the explosion of “unorganized” va-
cationing. Even as organized facilities expanded, the number of unorganized
vacationers came to be three and four times as large. In other countries such
vacation travelers would be labeled “tourists,” but in the Soviet Union the
division persisted between “rest” and “tourism.” Health resort areas had long
served surplus vacationers through their system of ambulatory treatment:
people who desired a course of treatment but did not have a putevka could
travel on their own, fi nd private lodgings through the local kurort bureau, and
register with a polyclinic, which would assign the patient to a sanatorium
dining room for meals and arrange a course of medical treatment, including
mineral baths. In Sochi in 1954, the kurort bureau had arranged for almost
three thousand beds for ambulatory patients but three times that number for
vacationers expected to arrive without putevki or any plans to take a cure.^71
The actual size of this vacationing sector defi ed exact estimation, precisely
because it was unorganized. By 1960, Crimea kurort offi cials estimated that
of 1.4 million vacationers that year, only 560,000 had come with putevki;
Sochi in that year served 225,000 organized vacationers, but another 400,000
or more traveled without putevki, outside the system. By 1971, only one in
fi ve Sochi vacationers enjoyed the perquisites of a putevka. Economists con-
sidered passport registrations or the consumption of bread to assess the true
volume of these so-called wild vacationers, and they used their estimates to
justify the expansion by trade union organizations of pansions and kurort-
cities to serve this burgeoning demand. One economist estimated in 1979
that nine of every ten vacationers in the south were unorganized.^72
The massive fl ow of unorganized vacationers created havoc with attempts
to plan the expansion of vacation facilities in an orderly way. The Black Sea
town of Anapa, home to hundreds of thousands of Young Pioneers every
summer, had expanded in the 1960s into a major destination for unorga-
nized tourists.^73 These vacationers competed with “legitimate” vacationers
for transportation (although an increasing number of them traveled in their
own automobiles), they required housing and entertainment, and above all,
they needed to be fed from the same sources of supply that served the orga-
nized visitors to sanatoria and rest homes. To regulate the housing demands- Azar, Otdykh , 13–20; GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 460 (correspondence with Krasnoe znam-
ia editors, 1953), ll. 30, 37; d. 498, l. 62. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 227, ll. 23, 91–92; d. 1669, l. 110; Azar, Otdykh , Ekonomika ;
Trud , 10 April 1979. - Noack, “Coping.” See also Avanesov, Anapa.