Club Red. Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream - Diane P. Koenker

Mending the Human Motor 19

This pattern too would persist: the central command economy was riddled
with independent institutional entrepreneurs.
Real expansion of imperial-era health resorts and the development of new
centers took off only in the mid-1930s, beginning with the second fi ve-year
plan in 1933. During the 1920s, the health commissariat placed highest pri-
ority on restoring resort areas’ infrastructure and reviving the capacities of
existing sanatoria to receive patients. The number of available beds at So-
viet sanatoria remained constant in the mid-1920s, although the number of
patients served began to rise in the second half of the 1920s, as table 1.1
demonstrates, suggesting a more intensive utilization of available places. The
increase in the number of so-called ambulatory patients, accounting for half
of all health spa patients by 1927, indicates the resurgent desirability of the
spa as a vacation destination. Rather than receiving full room and board in a
particular sanatorium, these outpatients rented rooms in hotels, pansions, or
private homes and received medical treatments (including sun bathing and
swimming) either as day patients of sanatoria or through central polyclinics.
The fi rst fi ve-year plan (1928–1932) saw modest growth in the sanatorium
network, which reported a 66,400-bed capacity by 1932. During the second
fi ve-year plan (1933–1937), capacity nearly doubled, reaching 113,000 beds
by 1937.^24
By the late 1930s, major new investments had resulted in the construc-
tion of lavish new facilities that became showplaces of the Soviet health

24. M. Ia. Rusakov, “Voprosy tret'ego piatiletnogo plana. K voprosu o rekonstruktsii ku-
    rortov SSSR v tret'em piatiletke,” Voprosy kurortologii , no. 4 (1937): 84; GARF, f. 9228, op. 1,
    d. 24 (kurort managers’ conference, March 1938), l. 44.

Table 1.1 Beds and resident patients in Soviet sanatoria, 1920–1927

Year

Number

of beds

Number of

resident patients

Number of

outpatients

Total

patients

1918 — 8,200

1919 — 4,992

1920 — 38,883 6,569 45,402

1921 29,096 57,687 17,838 75,525

1922 13,721 32,731 9,002 41,733

1923 22,714 56,252 37,762 94,104

1924 23,045 72,446 59,374 131,820

1925 26,460 91,338 70,481 161,819

1926 28,809 93,341 79,832 173,173

1927 23,370 93,600 96,019 189,619

Source: Gol'dfail' and Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii i doma otdykha, 14.