208 Chapter 5
could provide. The choices recapitulated many of the features of the prewar
vacation experience, but the availability of discretionary income gave Soviet
consumers new authority to make these choices, and the regime recognized
its obligation to respond to their preferences.
Consuming a Soviet vacation retained its utilitarian signifi cance. Whether
medical or not, a vacation remained a repair shop for laboring people, restor-
ing their psychological zest and their physical capabilities for work. Even the
nonmedical elements of the vacation experience involved education, cul-
tural uplift, and the rational use of free time. In the highest-priced sanato-
rium vacations, these qualities came bundled with the best food, the largest
service staffs, and the most attractive physical landscapes. The preference of
intellectuals and white-collar workers for medicalized vacations and their
success in obtaining them invested these vacations with the sign value of
privilege and prestige. An August vacation in a Yalta or Sochi sanatorium
both provided medical and cultural utility and marked the consumer as
someone whose status entitled him or her to this highest level of vacation
leisure.
The language that described the Soviet vacation enterprise signifi ed the
post-Stalin socialist consumer regime to be democratic and mass. Offi cials
promised year after year to expand capacity to meet demand, and they
sought to accomplish this through Fordist measures of reducing unit costs,
through scientifi c studies of demand, and through providing greater variety
in vacation options. Even if the basic service component of a spa vacation—
doctors, cooks, nurses, and cultural organizers—could not produce econo-
mies of scale, offi cials continued to promise new industrial methods of food
supply (semiprepared foods, for example), and they employed standardized
architectural designs to speed the process of constructing new facilities. One
can observe a notable sameness in the architecture of pansions and hotels
constructed in the 1970s, a Soviet brand analogous perhaps to the orange
roofs of Howard Johnson motor lodges of the period.^108 But unlike consumer
access in capitalist societies, which was guided by the invisible hand of the
market, Soviet consumption was overtly and purposefully directed by pro-
fessionals: physicians, architects, and sociologists. The Soviet vacation as
it had evolved by the 1970s refl ected an ambiguous balance of dependency
on experts and freedom to exercise consumer choice, of utilitarian purpose
for the good of the state and of pleasurable indulgence of physical, cultural
and social appetites. Socialism would succeed economically by eliminating
waste and irrationality in both production and consumption. The new Soviet
consumer regime starting in the 1960s could fl ourish not only because of
the expansion of the national income but also because of the triumph of the
educational system that had fi nally produced a nation of expert planners and
trained consumers.- Based on a review of photographs in Turist, 1966–1980, and Trud , 1965–1982.