Mending the Human Motor 15increased energy to his customary work.”^10 By the end of the imperial regime,
the rise of professions and a growing demand by a middle class for the con-
sumption of good health had produced an explosion of medical remedies,
including health spas, that would bring the benefi ts of modern science to
the everyday consumer.^11 Soviet medicine built on these traditions, but it
added three particularly socialist principles: centralized unity of health care
providers, free medical care, and an emphasis on prevention, hygiene, and
public health.^12
Soviet public health offi cials who gathered to consider “worker leisure” in
1933 fl uently spoke this language of modern science, and medicine constituted
the central axis of Soviet vacation practices.^13 Climate therapy (sun, sea,
and fresh air), physical culture therapy (morning exercises, volleyball, and
bracing hikes), and nutritional therapy guaranteed that all Soviet vacationers
would spend their annual leaves in scientifi cally planned and purposeful
activities. One’s own physical constitution, as certifi ed by a medical special-
ist, would determine the best form of rest: whether a six-week recuperation
in a tuberculosis sanatorium, a month-long stay at a “climate” rest home, or
a long-distance backpacking trip for the physically healthy but emotionally
drained urban dweller. Doctors signed the certifi cates that entitled vacation-
ers to receive a pass to a resort or rest home; they checked the patients in
when they arrived, and they sent them home again with a detailed bill of
health. The line between treatment and ordinary rest was blurred: indeed,
the terms for “patients” ( bol'nye —from the word for illness) and “resters”
( otdykhaiushchie ) were generally interchangeable. In the early years of the
Soviet regime, scarce places in health resorts and rest homes were meant
to be used by the most medically needy—particularly those suffering from
tuberculosis but also those affl icted with neurasthenia. Very soon, however,
such restrictions were swamped by the broader social need to provide all
working people with the opportunity to recover their strength. Newly nation-
alized health resorts proved too attractive to be reserved only for the very ill.
Vacations at one of the “health places” ( zdravnitsy ) came to be considered
attractive incentives for exemplary work performance. In time, medical ra-
tioning of scarce vacation places became supplemented by rationing based
on social status, as we shall see.
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina , trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New
York, 2000), 200. - Mackaman, Leisure Settings , 96–98; Susan K. Morrissey, “The Economy of Nerves:
Health, Commercial Culture, and the Self in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 69, no. 3
(2010): 645–675. See also Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for
Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca, NY, 1993); and Beer, Renovating Russia. - Neil B. Weissman, “Origins of Soviet Health Administration: Narkomzdrav 1918–
1928,” in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia , ed. Susan Gross Solomon and John
F. Hutchinson (Bloomington, IN,1990), 97; see also Susan Gross Solomon, “Social Hygiene
and Soviet Public Health, 1921–1930,” in Solomon and Hutchinson, Health and Society in
Revolutionary Russia , 175–199. - Danishevskii, “Problema massovogo rabochego otdykha,” 77.