196 Chapter 5
experience itself. Finally acknowledging in 1976 the fact of this unplanned
response to the huge demand for seaside vacations, Kozlov admonished the
local administrations of Ukraine and Georgia, who preferred to devote their
attention to their traditional, organized customer base, “The right to a health-
ful vacation belongs also to those Soviet people who have not managed to
obtain a putevka. And they are in fact the majority. To provide for them a
normal vacation—this is a task of the entire government, a task of Soviet
trade unions.”^77 Attempts to redirect these wild vacationers to other parts of
the country fell short: the south remained their dream. The new twelve- and
fi fteen-story pansion complexes in Adler and other expansion areas along the
Black Sea coastline that were started but never fi nished had been designed to
accommodate the unorganized.Whose Right to Rest?
As we have seen, the Soviet economy had been unable to fulfi ll the con-
stitutional guarantee of a right to rest for everyone, and therefore access to
spa and rest home vacations had been rationed through the putevka system.
Highest priority went offi cially to medically needy workers, then to other
medically needy citizens, and then to healthy workers. The symbolic en-
titlement of production workers continued well into the post-Stalin era: in
1961, the presidium of the Central Trade Union Council had affi rmed that 75
percent of putevki should be allocated to production workers, and offi cials
continued to monitor the social composition of the citizens who enjoyed
the medical vacation facilities.^78 As the Soviet Union evolved in the postwar
years from a producer to a consumer society, however, the consumption of
vacations represented not only medical necessity but social distinction and
status. Offi cials allocated vacations to enhance the status of favored groups—
hence production workers offi cially merited superior respect and privileges.
Consumers exercised their right to rest in particular ways that signaled to
themselves and others their position in society. The practice of vacationing,
then, became a factor in evaluating the development of Soviet society.
The low level of economic development in the Soviet Union exacerbated
the problem of inequality in a socialist society. Stalin had famously rein-
troduced wage inequalities in 1931 to provide incentives for the growth of
production; offi cially society consisted of social groups that varied in func-
tion and economic position but were “nonantagonistic.” The leadership that
replaced Stalin in 1953 rejected the inequalities of the 1930s and pledged to
restore the social and economic leveling of the earliest revolutionary Soviet
years: as the economy developed, it would support a “state of the whole- Azar, Ekonomika , 99, 101, 22; GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 227, ll. 215–220; d. 2303, l. 53
(quote). - GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 238, l. 168. See below for a discussion of the statistical efforts
to record social composition.