From Treatment to Vacation 201vacation institutions might refl ect their own choices; a worker might prefer to
vacation in a rest home rather than undergo the strict medical regimen of the
sanatorium, but we lack evidence concerning such preferences. The market
research surveys of the 1960s paid more attention to stratifi cation by age and
regional difference than by social stratum, at least in their published results.
The poll conducted by the newspaper Trud revealed certain differences in
preferred activities by social group: workers wanted to hunt, fi sh, and row
while on vacation, activities not generally offered at sanatoria. White-collar
workers, by contrast, would rather read, stroll, or play chess or skittles, all ac-
tivities encouraged by sanatorium libraries and cozy clubs. Did workers and
intellectuals prefer to vacation with others of their own social milieu? The
evidence is not helpful here. A comment on a 1969 survey indicated that all
social types engaged mainly in unorganized tourism: workers and intellectu-
als, married people and singles.^88 Again, this lack of preference refl ects mate-
rial reality as much as consumer preference, since unorganized vacationers
numbered so many more than those with putevki.
The Right to a Family Vacation
Soviet consumers expressed one vacation preference more unanimously
and loudly than any other. The putevka system of distribution was geared al-
most exclusively toward adults vacationing alone, but throughout the Soviet
period, and increasingly in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens wished to spend
their vacations with their families. Kurort offi cials proved surprisingly re-
sistant to accommodating these demands, both from their own beliefs that
adults should vacation apart from their children and because accommodat-
ing families meant rethinking the entire structure of the trade union vacation
system.
The medical and production origin of vacations contributed to the offi cial
indifference toward family vacations. Since the state was unable to provide
healthful vacations for all its citizens, priority went to the most medically
needy and the most deserving of this state benefi t: production workers. “In
the summer months when there is a critical shortage of vouchers, we have at
our resorts too many nonworking family members and housewives. Health
resorts ought to provide treatment and rest to the producers of our material
wealth—workers and collective farm workers,” argued the central directorate
for trade union health facilities in 1955. The vacation served the good of the
producer, not the producer’s spouse or children. Moreover, children threat-
ened to violate the peace and calm required for effective treatment, and they
introduced further medical risk. A small number of health facilities had been
established for mothers to rest with their children and for pregnant women,
but in these cases too, the goal was to promote the health and well-being of
- Trud , 21 June 1967; L. Pavlov, “Otdykh v ‘razreze,’ ” LG , 3 December 1969, 11.