Mending the Human Motor 17Essentuki, Piatigorsk, Kislovodsk, and Zheleznovodsk. It was here that
Russian military offi cers, including the poet Mikhail Lermontov, had
sought respite and cures in the nineteenth century. The opening of a rail-
way link from Rostov to the Mineral Waters station in 1875 assured a per-
manent fl ow of patients and vacationers. In addition to bath works, sipping
stations, and medical facilities, the towns’ commercial developers con-
structed parks, theaters, and music halls, drawing patrons from Russia’s
aristocratic, moneyed, and professional strata.^16 Yet by and large, Russians
preferred to take their cures abroad. In 1912, German spas counted more
than a million visitors; Russian spas attracted only 110,000 cure seekers.
The most visited Russian spa, Essentuki, attracted only 13,000 visitors in
1912, while Bohemia’s Karlsbad drew 70,000, including 20,000 Russians.
Local publicity emphasized that the features of Russian spas compared
well with European watering places, but they lacked the cachet of the more
famous destinations in the West.^17
The world war that began in 1914 cut Russians off from European cures.
Medical specialists left the spas for duty in the Russian armed forces, and
many resort properties were turned over to the Red Cross and other public
organizations for use as hospitals for wounded soldiers.^18 The health spas of
the south fell upon hard times after the revolution, as Crimea and other cura-
tive playgrounds served as staging grounds and bases of operations for civil
war armies and foreign interventionists. By 1918, the fl edgling Soviet govern-
ment possessed only three working spas, all located in central provinces of
the Russian Federation.^19 Elsewhere, the spa industry collapsed as customers
and proprietors fl ed for safe havens abroad. With the end of the civil war in
late 1920, the Soviet government turned its offi cial attention to economic and
demographic reconstruction. Properly rebuilt, the former aristocratic plea-
sure zones would now serve as centers of recuperation for civil war veterans,
government offi cials, and in theory, the new benefi ciaries of soviet power,
workers and peasants.
In December 1920 (a time of growing turmoil and opposition even within
Bolshevik ranks), the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree de-
claring that Crimean properties “formerly owned by big landowners and
capitalists, and palaces of the former tsar and grand princes ought to be used
- Gol'dfail' and Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii i doma otdykha , 54–58. In 1907, a typical
year, over 40 percent of visitors to Mineral Waters consisted of large landholders and mer-
chants; middling property owners counted for 24 percent, and offi cers, offi cials, and profes-
sionals like teachers and doctors each constituted about 10 percent of spa patients. Kurorty
SSSR (1936), 8. - Gol'dfail' and Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii i doma otdykha , 10.
- Ibid., 58.
- These were Staraia Russa, in Novgorod province (founded in 1828); Lipetsk, in the
Don River province of the same name (founded in 1803); and Sergeevskii Mineral Springs
in the Urals steppe (founded 1833). Kurorty SSSR. Spravochnik (Moscow, 1923), 9; Kurorty.
Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (Moscow, 1983), 326, 221, 306.