chapter one
Mending the Human Motor
M
aterialist and Marxist, the Soviet Union subscribed to the labor
theory of value, privileging work as the foundation of personal
worth and as the path toward a society of abundance for all. Work—physical
or mental—was the obligation of all citizens. Work ennobled; it was man-
kind’s highest calling. But work took its toll on the human organism, and
along with creating the necessary conditions for productive labor, a social-
ist system would also include productive rest as an integral element of its
economy. The eight-hour workday, a weekly day off from work, and an an-
nual vacation constituted the trinity of restorative and healthful rest in the
emerging Soviet system.
Of these three, the annual vacation was the most original contribution of
Soviet socialism to promoting the welfare of its workforce. Its labor code of
1922, the fi rst in the world to do so, stipulated that all workers with at least
fi ve and a half months of work tenure were entitled to an annual two-week
vacation. And as early as 1919, Soviet leaders had begun to create a network
of vacation institutions that would maximize the benefi t of workers’ annu-
al breaks from production and labor.^1 Rest homes and health resorts would
become “workshops for the repair of toilers,” offering structured rest and
medical therapies that would allow workers to recover their strength and en-
ergy for the work year to come. French workers, wrote the health commissar
Nikolai Semashko, had only one rest home, the cemetery.^2 Soviet workers, by
contrast, enjoyed an absolute right to rest, one that would later be enshrined
in the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union.
This chapter explores the practice of Soviet vacationing in rest homes and
health spas ( kurorty , or cure places) in the 1920s and the 1930s and the evo-
lution of specifi c doctrines of socialist rest. The question of whether vaca-
tion was a recuperative necessity or a socialist entitlement shaped planners’
- A decree of April 1919 nationalized all existing spas and other institutions of healing.
L. G. Gol'dfail' and I. D. Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii, i doma otdykha SSSR (Moscow, 1928),
- N. A. Semashko, “Trud i otdykh,” in Doma otdykha. Sbornik statei i materialov (1920–
1923 gg.) (Moscow, 1923) (hereinafter Doma otdykha 1920–1923 ), 8.