24 Chapter 1
Pleasure and purpose combined even more closely in a new form of rest
home that took its place in the roster of health-improving vacations in the
1930s. Floating rest homes, aboard riverboats and barges, offered the same
healthful regimen as stationary rest homes but added the therapeutic ben-
efi ts of changing scenery. River travel calmed the nervous system, improved
the appetite, and contributed to healthful sleep, wrote a public health ex-
pert. Floating resters could receive attentive service, with ample food, a li-
brary, games, sun bathing, and evening entertainments, just as on land. But
they could also familiarize themselves with the life of the country and the
achievements of socialist construction. In 1938, fi fteen fl oating rest homes
plied the Volga and Kama Rivers, with sailings from Gor'kii to Perm, Saratov,
and Astrakhan (and back); 13,500 passengers could be accommodated in a
season. Such cruises enjoyed a huge demand, an early harbinger of a Soviet
vacation that combined touring and rest. “River tourism has become one of
the most popular forms of rest,” wrote the popular daily Vecherniaia Moskva
(Evening Moscow) in 1937; in Gor'kii these cruises always fi lled up all their
spaces.^33Destinations
The unboundedness of the Soviet Union’s vast expanse occupied a spe-
cial place in the country’s emerging ideology.^34 Huge swaths of the country
offered suitable conditions for healthful rest in the embrace of nature, with
its forests, lakes, rivers, mineral springs, and clean air. Planners argued for
the development of kurorts and rest homes in all parts of the country, proxi-
mate to wherever industrial and urban construction took place. But invest-
ment centered on the three regions where Soviet vacationers most wanted
to spend their summer holidays: Crimea and the Caucasian Mineral Waters
area, both of which had long histories as Russian spas, and the emerging
Caucasus coastline of the Black Sea. By 1936, these three areas accounted for
sixty thousand beds, roughly two-thirds of the nation’s total capacity.^35
The Caucasus Mineral Waters, the oldest resort area in Russia, dated its
imperial patronage to 1803, but by the twentieth century the Crimean penin-
sula had emerged as the pearl of Russian and Soviet therapeutic destinations,
the “all-union health resort.” In the eighteenth century Empress Catherine II
had designated Crimea a garden incorporating the vast diversity of her newly
expanded empire, and well into the 1930s Crimea boosters continued to laud- GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 131, l. 53; N. E. Khrisandrov, “Plovuchie doma otdykha i
sanatorii,” Voprosy kurortologii , nos. 1–2 (1938): 82–85; Vecherniaia Moskva , 19 August
1937; GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 131, l. 53. - See, for example, Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolu-
tion to the Second World War (New Haven, CT, 2003). - GARF, f. 5528, op. 6, d. 108 (materials on social composition of kurort patients,
1930), l. 8; GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 132, ll. 179–182; calculation from Kurorty SSSR (1936),
and GARF, f. 9228, op. 1, d. 24 (1938).