204 Chapter 5
Soviet health facilities had always been constructed on the principle of
sex and age segregation. In the 1950s most establishments, whether sanato-
ria or rest homes, lodged their guests in large rooms or tents holding six to
twelve people; even a husband and wife had to lodge apart from each other.
In more modern facilities in which two-person rooms could accommodate
a mother and father, there was no room for children, and the beds were al-
ways single and narrow. The entire regime of the Soviet vacation establish-
ment had been organized around the interests and needs of adults. Children
needed their own level of cultural activities, different nutritional norms, and
more supervision, insisted health offi cials. Other people’s children impeded
the normal rest of Soviet adults. Nude sunbathing could be allowed for adults
but not in the presence of teenagers, and a Yalta resort director reported many
complaints on this score. Children and young people were better off with
their own age cohorts in pioneer camps and Komsomol outings, not mixing
with adults who had their own particular needs.^96
For some observers, the family vacation seemed ideologically inappropri-
ate for a socialist society, in which the collective was more important than the
family and in which bourgeois consumerism should give way to asceticism
and work. The system of separate vacation facilities for adults and children
in part refl ected utopian dreams of the withering away of the family—which
for some theorists meant a withering away of sex altogether—and the offi cial
restoration of Soviet family values in the 1930s did not necessarily promote
the family as an affective unit. An offi cial ideology that could not admit in
public to the reality of sexual relations could fi nd no justifi cation for facili-
tating romantic getaways for lawfully married couples: the resort affair was
one consequence of this ideological ambivalence toward the idea of healthy
marital sex.^97 Furthermore, conjugal units might threaten to undermine more
socially important work-based collectives. Soviet rest home vacations in the
1950s and 1960s brought together individual adults in new collectives, rein-
forcing work-based identities, teaching habits of cooperation and solidarity,
and developing friendships that transcended local or family loyalties.^98
Finally, a Soviet family vacation (husbands and wives together, or parents
with children) may have refl ected bourgeois excess inappropriate for a so-
cialist society. Most families could not afford to purchase vouchers for a va-
cation together, provoking envy and resentment toward those who could: to- GARF, f. 9493, op. 8, d. 428, ll. 111, 79; d. 698, ll. 108–109; GAGS, f. R-24, op. 1, d.
498, ll. 119–120 (16 May 1954 letter to Krasnoe znamia ). - See Kon, Sexual Revolution , and Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Mo-
rality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007), chap. 4; Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dicta-
torship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb, IL, 2007), 191. As Field has
shown, private sexual life was open to state scrutiny and state policy, and even if people
disagreed on moral norms, they tended to accept the state’s right to intervene. - Martenovka , 11 May 1954; Znamia trekhgorki , 16 August 1960; TsAGM, f. 28, op. 2,
d. 151 (river cruise comment books, 1956), l. 62.