14 Chapter 1
rendered in English as “rest,” its meaning for Soviet culture is a much more
active one. Under socialism, wrote one authority on socialist leisure, we
challenge the conception that otdykh means “peace [ pokoi ], inactivity, idle-
ness... A system of correctly organized rest ought to activate the worker or
collective farmer, strengthen their will to labor and properly combine amuse-
ments, games, and fascinating activities with expanding their political, pro-
ductive, technical, and general cultural horizons.”^7 The annual leave was an
empty vessel to be fi lled with socially, culturally, and economically mean-
ingful activity: otdykh. Another term that often replaced otdykh in practical
discussions— ozdorovlenie , or making healthy—reinforced the physiological
value of vacation.^8 In the Soviet Union, the annual vacation was purposeful,
a joint investment by the state and the individual to restore socially useful
labor power and to improve the self.
A few experts believed that the need for vacations would wither away in
a socialist state. “Normal” socialist labor would not overtire a worker, and
life itself would provide suffi ciently varied experiences and impressions.
“The need for an annual vacation will disappear,” said one social insurance
expert. Others argued that since work was a matter of “honor, courage, and
valor,” the idea of a vacation devalued the very notion of socialist labor. It
was a Menshevik point of view, argued health experts in 1932, to say that
labor itself was “harmful.”^9
Most Soviet experts embraced the ideal of a socialist system of rest that
would employ the discipline of science to determine the optimal organiza-
tion of vacation time. In this regard, the Soviet Union situated itself squarely
in a European Enlightenment tradition that had already fostered a scientifi c
approach to issues of health and the human organism. Nineteenth-century
French spa culture had begun to apply science and reason to its therapeutic
regimen as early as the 1830s, including a strict use of time marked by the
same bells that had begun to rule the capitalist factory. The Russian elite, like
Leo Tolstoy’s Alexei Karenin, had a long tradition of seeking their cures in
establishments in France, Germany, and Switzerland, and they were well fa-
miliar with these practices: “As in previous years, with the coming of spring
he went to a spa abroad to restore his health, upset each year by his strenu-
ous winter labours. Returning in July, as usual, he at once sat down with- Danishevskii, “Problema massovogo rabochego otdykha,” 69.
- GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 132, l. 110. Ozdorovlenie , literally “healthifi cation,” was a
fundamental principle of Soviet public health, but as Daniel Beer argues, it originated as a
response to a crisis of “degeneration” in the late imperial period. He translates the term as
“renovation.” Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal
Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2008). See also John F. Hutchinson, Politics and Public
Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1918 (Baltimore, 1990). - GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 132, ll. 11, 81–82, 93–95, 151: the insurance expert attributed
this point of view, with which he disagreed, to economic planners in Gosplan, who believed
the “rest home should be liquidated as a class” (l. 95).