202 Chapter 5
the women, not to satisfy their affective needs. With no way to care for their
children, mothers whose health required medical vacations refused to take
them unless they could bring their children along. Rest homes for mothers-
to-be served as schools for motherhood, not for fun.^89
Moreover, some adults actively sought the opportunity to escape from the
drudgery and routine of their family circumstances. “It is a fi ction that a moth-
er wants to spend a month with her child,” insisted the head of the Yalta spa
district in 1965. “There is absolutely no basis in this.” Children interfered with
certain types of behaviors peculiar to the health spa environment: “a person
on vacation does not behave as he does at work.” Since the 1920s, as we saw
in chapter 1, the health spa had been a symbol of the casual extramarital affair.
Propaganda fi lms reinforced the image of romance, with their lingering shots
of young couples on verandas, overlooking vistas, and above all in the sunset.^90
Offi cially, the kurort regime tried to discourage romance, most famously by
its 11:00 p.m. curfew; violating the curfew might result in expulsion from the
kurort and a reprimand sent to one’s place of work. And in a letter to the Sochi
newspaper, a group of patients expressed their dismay at the prevailing culture
of partnering: at their sanatorium, the “majority of patients were housewives,
who sought out for themselves a convenient man,” and the “men are looking
above all for a woman.” (In response, the sanatorium’s director said he was not
responsible for the behavior of his patients outside its grounds.)^91 By 1973, as
shown in the fi lm Old Walls , the resort affair had become a normal, if covert,
part of the vacation, conveyed by a scene in which multiple women slip into
their sanatorium rooms at dawn, evading the curfew after a night spent some-
place else. A short story by Vasilii Aksenov, “The Local Hooligan Abramashvi-
li,” recounts how the eighteen-year-old Georgian hero climbs to a second-story
balcony to experience his sexual initiation with a vacationing older married
Russian woman. In Love and Pigeons , a rural man unhappy in his marriage
is swept away by an affair with a state offi cial he meets while taking a cure.^92
A long-standing Soviet taboo on discussing any sexual matters in pub-
lic has made evidence of such resort affairs hard to come by. Commentators
disagree on the reasons for the Soviet reluctance to discuss sex in public,
suggesting ideological imperatives to deindividualize the person, peasant at-
titudes that treated the sex act as unclean, lack of knowledge, and the absence- GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 916, ll. 26, 34; GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 1955, l. 75; GARF, f.
5528, op. 4, d. 132 (conference on worker rest, May 1932), l. 88; GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 498,
l. 120 (letter to Krasnoe znamia , 16 May 1954); TsGAMO, f. 7223, op. 1, d. 1252, ll. 41–43. - Letter from A. Antonenkova, Znamia trekhgorki , 20 June 1964: “I was especially glad
to rest away from all my domestic troubles”; GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 698, ll. 109 (quote), 116;
Zdorov'e naroda , silent fi lm, 1940, RGAKFD, no. 4074; My edem v Sochi , color sound fi lm,
1959, RGAKFD, no. 15475. - Leonid Likhodeev, “Moral'nyi oblik otdykhaiushchego,” LG , 21 August 1968, 13;
GAGS, f. 24, op. 1, d. 368 (correspondence with Krasnoe znamia editors, 1951), ll. 200–
200ob. - Starye steny , dir. Viktor Tregubovich, Lenfi l'm, 1973; Vasilii Aksenov, “Mestnyi khu-
ligan Abramashvili,” Na polputi k lune (Moscow, 1966), 43–61; Liubov' i golubi.