198 Chapter 5
“Often healthy people are assigned places in our kurorts, we can call them
‘permanent vacationers.’ Our health resorts should receive only laboring peo-
ple [ trudiashchimsia ]: workers, collective farmers, and intelligentsia.” Once
again in 1964, Trud insisted that kurort places should be reserved for leading
“producers” (workers and engineering-technical personnel) and the medically
needy.^81 Such wording, even while including intellectuals, excluded the less
“leading” sectors of the economy, such as service workers and workers in the
less prestigious industries, which included the consumer goods industry itself.
Although the consumption of consumer goods and services might become a
marker of status, their provision brought no special distinction.
The continual appeal for the priority of workers and the medically needy
for subsidized vacations acknowledged the contrary reality that revealed it-
self in anecdotes and statistics. Those with the most social, political, and
cultural capital—intellectuals and offi cials—vacationed every year and in
the summer. Those with less—production workers—vacationed occasionally
and mostly in the winter.^82 And those with least—collective farm workers—
vacationed hardly at all. Moscow oblast rest homes reported for 1959 that
workers comprised 56.5 percent of their visitors, well below offi cial target fi g-
ures, and that white-collar workers furnished 34.2 percent. Collective farmers
might have been counted under the category “other,” if at all, which amount-
ed to 1 percent of the total. By 1968, collective farm vacationers received their
own category in Moscow rest home reports, accounting for just 2.1 percent of
vacationers. Workers provided 43.1 percent of Moscow’s vacationers, white-
collar employees 24.9 percent, and engineering-technical personnel 12.2 per-
cent. To assess just how underrepresented were the former ruling classes of
workers and peasants, we can cite their share of the total population. In 1970,
according to offi cial census categories, workers comprised 56.8 percent of the
Soviet population and farm workers 20.5 percent. Collective farmers enjoyed
the formal right to a vacation, but their limited cultural capital meant that
they did not know they had these rights and would not know how to take
advantage of them if they did.^83 Cinema refl ected the oddity of the collective
farm vacationer. Vasilii Shukshin’s 1972 fi lm, Happy-Go-Lucky, follows one
such couple, only one of whom received a medical putevka, sympathetically
recording their simplicity and lack of city guile. As late as 1984, the fi lm Love
and Pigeons , directed by Vladimir Men'shov, repeats the theme of the simple
farm vacationer plunged into the exotic sophistication of a Black Sea resort.^84- GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 916, “of leading professions,” l. 17, “not only to second-rank,”
l. 26; f. 9493, op. 8, d. 227, l. 12; “Often healthy people,” Trud , 4 May 1963, 2 July 1964. - The preponderance of workers in winter is noted for 1953 in the Sochi sanatorium
of the coal industry. GAGS, f. 214, op. 1, d. 72, l. 17. In 1959, Trud reported that Perm work-
ers received 60 percent of winter putevki and only 31 percent of summer putevki. 11 April - In some Crimean sanatoria in summer 1961, workers accounted for between 2.8 and 24
percent. GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 227, ll. 12, 67. - TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 1567, ll. 7, 10; d. 1603, l. 201; Narodnoe khoziaistvo v
1973 , 43; GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 916, l. 17. - Pechki-lavochki ; Liubov' i golubi , dir. Vladimir Men'shov, Mosfi l'm, 1984.