16 Chapter 1
Sites of Leisure and Restoration: Kurort and Rest Home
Serious socialist vacationing in the Soviet Union built on the nineteenth-
and twentieth-century culture of science, and it depended on expert profe-
ssionals for its implementation. Soviet vacations also relied upon a built
environment inherited by the revolution. Before the regime began to construct
its own health facilities, it fi rst utilized the nationalized properties of the
aristocracy and merchant princes, including the sanatoria and pansions of
the prerevolutionary health spas and villas and country estates that would be
converted into rest homes.
Russia’s spa culture had fi rst emerged in the service of empire. Mineral
spring towns in the Caucasus welcomed recuperating military offi cers in the
early nineteenth century, followed by royal family members who established
estates in the area, who in turn attracted a growing population of middle-class
consumers of vacations and leisure. Crimea began to host imperial visitors
in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the end of the century a
bustling resort culture had developed not only in imperial Yalta but along the
Black Sea coast and in the North Caucasus. Medical and commercial interests
worked together to attract visitors in search of therapeutic leisure, part of a
larger commerce in health remedies that would counter the mounting stresses
of urban life.^14 The history of the spas of the Black Sea shore in Abkhaziia il-
lustrates this pattern of commercial development. Medical professionals had
determined at an international congress in 1898 that the Abkhazian coastal
town of Sukhum (population three thousand) possessed ideal climate condi-
tions for the treatment of lung diseases, particularly tuberculosis. Naturalists
had already discovered the remarkable botanical variety of the region, and in
1895 a factory owner-philanthropist, Smetskoi, purchased land on which to
develop a botanical garden. Shortly after the turn of the century, he added
several sanatorium buildings for the treatment of patients on his property,
modeling them after the German spas he knew. Growing demand by family
members accompanying the patients and by completely healthy individuals
led to the further construction of hotels and pansions to accommodate the
visitors, served by the farm and vineyards that Smetskoi had also established
on his property. Further up the coast, in the small town of Sochi, the Moscow
businessman Tarnopol'skii built an expansive spa, soon to be incorporated as
the Caucasian Riviera.^15
The Black Sea coast remained less popular before the revolution than
the four towns clustered in the North Caucasus mineral springs area:- Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era
(Ithaca, NY, 2003), 171–177; Kurorty SSSR: Spravochnik , ed. M. I. Ganshtak (Moscow, 1936),
6–8; Morrissey, “Economy of Nerves.” - Kurorty Abkhazii. Putevoditel' s prilozheniem kratkogo ocherka osenne-zimnikh
kurortov SSSR (Sukhum-Gagry) , ed. L. B. Korets (Moscow, 1925), 59–62; Sochi (Moscow,
1959), 9.