From Treatment to Vacation 209In Western capitalist economies by the 1960s, the sedentary type of vaca-
tion, known in French as villégiature , had merged with travel for sightseeing
under the single rubric of tourism. In the Soviet Union, these two kinds of
leisure travel remained conceptually and administratively separate, and rest
remained the gold standard, Sochi its mecca. Some people, particularly the
most privileged, consumed both. Travel had become a badge of consumer
distinction just as noticeable and important as blue jeans, transistor radios,
and automobiles. The well-dressed vacationers in the fi lm From the Lives of
Vacationers came from the Soviet intellectual classes: a mathematician, a
diplomat, an elderly woman of aristocratic mien who had known the 1920s
poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin in her youth, and a guitar-
playing professor. The ennui that surrounded this October vacation derived
in part from its familiarity and regularity. “Last year I was in Sochi,” recalled
the professor, “twenty-four days, but not one treatment, not one dose of med-
icine.” Two of the vacationers compared notes on their tourist trips to Italy,
recalling the “Pentagon—oh, no, I meant ‘Pantheon,’ ” and listing the cities
they had seen. As modern tourism after 1955 became more accessible and
popular, the two forms of vacation would intersect and converge, as the next
chapters will show, but the primacy and fashionableness of the spa vacation
would never completely disappear: “Everyone must visit Sochi, if only once
in their lives.”