From Treatment to Vacation 207The ability of the Soviet vacation system to accommodate the demand for
any kind of family vacation remained extremely limited even into the 1980s.
In 1982, twenty-two years after the trade union head had called for more
facilities for family vacationers, the kurort chief Kozlov announced a new
approach. “Although this phenomenon has arisen recently,” he insisted, “it
has become very popular.” His agency would begin to issue a single putevka
for whole families, for rooms accommodating two, three, or four people, irre-
spective of where the two adults were employed. Families had already fueled
the explosion of unorganized vacationing along the Black Sea coast. A survey
cited in 1969 indicated that in Anapa, the most family-friendly destination,
there were 103 children for every 100 adults; in nearby Tuapse, the ratio was
96 children for 100 adults; and even in Essentuki, in the more sedate Mineral
Waters spa region, 3 out of every 4 vacationers were unorganized, and there
were 43 children for every 100 unorganized adults. Moreover, the study re-
vealed that these vacationers preferred to live in one- and two-story cottages
or cabins, even in tents, rather than the high-rise pansions in which the trade
unions were investing so much of their capital.^106 The Soviet people had
expressed their consumer choices, and offi cials made an effort to listen. But
they continued to plan for expansion along the same limited parameters as
in the 1930s, more beds each year, but distributed always in the same ways
as before.The socialist consumer regime that developed in the post-Stalin years
moved sharply away from the hierarchical model of the 1930s, even if offi cial
policy continued to emphasize that vacation putevki should be allocated fi rst
to the deserving and then to the medically needy. Instead, with rising stan-
dards of living and more disposable income, increasing numbers of urban
Soviet citizens had acquired the ability to exercise choice in how to consume
leisure time, particularly the annual vacation to which they were entitled. As
a journalist wrote in 1967 in the Writers’ Union weekly, Literaturnaia gazeta ,
“ ‘Surplus’ money has emerged on the scene, and so too has the habit of going
to a kurort, as earlier emerged the habit to acquire a motorcycle, a television,
or a three-piece suit.” Under the constraints of the shortage economy, Soviet
consumers chose vacations that brought medical benefi t through therapies
ranging from sun and air to dental to psychiatric. They chose to vacation in
summer, when they could most benefi t from the full array of natural therapeu-
tic factors, but also because summer time was the most “fashionable.”^107 They
chose to select their vacation destination themselves, as much as possible,
preferring the crowded beaches of Anapa to the forested isolation of north-
ern rivers and lakes. And they chose to consume this treasured restorative
time with their close family members, building memories and taking direct
management of the healthful and recreational opportunities that vacations
- Trud , 2 February 1982; L. Pavlov, “Otdykh v ‘razreze,’ ” LG , 3 December 1969, 11.
- L. Zhukhovitskii, “Feshenebel'nost' stuchitsia v dver',” LG , 20 September 1967, 13.