18 Chapter 1
as sanatoria and health institutions for workers and peasants.” The Com-
missariat of Public Health received orders to prepare twenty-fi ve thousand
beds for the treatment of the victors of the revolution.^20 Economic recovery
lagged behind the issuance of decrees, but gradually and haphazardly, a new
socialist health spa network began to take shape in the key areas of Crimea
and the Caucasian Mineral Waters. Offi cially, industrial workers received
the highest priority in assignments to health resorts, but senior party and
state offi cials regularly sought rest and treatment on southern shores, adding
their communist imprimatur to the model begun by the imperial family and
its troops. In July 1923, the Kremlin ordered the Karl Marx resort to be made
habitable in Suuk-Su, Crimea, within two weeks, just in time for the arrival
of weary Central Executive Committee members. (The crash effort was suc-
cessful: Rozalia Zemliachka wrote in the resort’s comment book that she
had enjoyed the food and the living conditions.) In December 1923, Leon
Trotsky was sent by his physicians for a two-month climate therapy cure in
Sukhumi, which famously kept him away from Moscow at the moment of
Lenin’s death and disadvantaged him in the intense struggle over Lenin’s
successor.^21
The enormity of the destruction wrought by years of war and by revolu-
tionary upheavals slowed the availability of funds for the reconstruction of
the newly socialized health spas. Local jurisdictions frequently took matters
into their own hands, appropriating private hospitals and spas for public use.
The Russian Federation’s Commissariat of Public Health took over the lion’s
share of health facilities, but it could not fi nance them all adequately. Even-
tually a hierarchical system developed that would remain the model for the
duration of Soviet rule. The best facilities became designated as national ( ob-
shchegosudarstvennye ) spas, and while they were expected to fi nance the
bulk of their operations with revenue from patients or state insurance pay-
ments, they also received national subsidies for scientifi c work and new con-
struction. Regional and local spas had to operate under the budgets of their
local governments.^22 In addition, individual agencies, such as the Central
Trade Union Council, the Communist Party, the Red Army, and various gov-
ernment and economic bodies fi nanced and managed an increasing number of
health resorts. Such proprietary institutions could bypass state rules for fund-
ing and for the allocation of patients, and by the 1930s they were regarded
as the cream of the Soviet vacation system. Proprietary sanatoria paid their
staff higher wages than the rest, and they commandeered the best beaches.^23- Decree of 21 December 1920, quoted from Gol'dfail' and Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii
i doma otdykha , 202. - GARF, f. 3263 (kurort reports, 1923–24), op. 1, d. 5, ll. 1–1ob.; d. 9, l. 2; Leon Trotsky,
My Life (New York, 1970), 508–509. - Gol'dfail' and Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii i doma otdykha , 11.
- GARF, f. 9493, op. 1, d. 8 (report on Caucasus Mineral Waters resorts), ll. 50–51,
117–118, 190.