22 Chapter 1
occupations of philandering and drinking. No wonder they cut their stays
short, wrote a worker correspondent. Married women workers made little
use of the rest homes for their annual vacations because they had no place to
leave their children while they were away.^29
By the beginning of the 1930s, health offi cials worried that the rest home
system was failing. Almost 15 percent of the available places went unfi lled.
The requisitioned buildings in which they had been located now urgently
required capital repairs, and the country’s food crisis undermined the nutri-
tional value of rest home vacations. The unwillingness of factory workers to
spend their vacations in these homes led to some proposals to eliminate the
system entirely. Others argued, however, that for “healthy but tired” work-
ers, the rest home was often a more appropriate vacation destination than
a health spa; they should be expanded and diversifi ed, not cut back. Many
experts believed that rest homes that catered to single branches of industry or
even individual enterprises were more attractive than general-purpose bases:
vacationers with common experiences and cultural requirements would be
easier to serve, and their regimens could be specifi cally targeted to the needsSleeping room at the Mal'binsk rest home of the Irkutsk district insurance fund, 1924.
RGAKFD g. Krasnogorsk, no. 421898. Used with permission of the archive.- Pechatnik , 12 July 1928, 24; also Pechatnik , 1 September 1928, 40; GARF, f. 5528,
op. 4, d. 132, ll. 88, 239.