40 Chapter 1
submit absolutely to all of the doctors’ orders .”^74 The chief administrative of-
fi cer of each sanatorium and rest home was the head doctor, who supervised
not only all medical services but also the institution’s cultural and political
program and all housekeeping tasks. Rest homes followed a less rigorous
medical regime on the assumption that their residents suffered only from
fatigue, not serious illness. The rest home served instead as a “school of sani-
tary education.”
Rational rest and treatment required strict discipline in their administra-
tion. Like factories and spas in nineteenth-century France, Soviet rest homes
and sanatoria operated by the rule of the bell. The schedule itself constituted
one of the most important therapeutic aspects of the health institution. Ku-
rort guidebooks outlined the prescribed regime; these rules would undergo
revisions in the years to come, but the basic structure of the medical rest
remained the same. Patients would rise with the bell, make their beds, and
clean their rooms. Temperatures were monitored twice daily, and meals were
served precisely four times a day. Patients could not receive visitors or even
congregate in their sleeping rooms during the day, nor could they consume
food there. Every institution insisted on two hours of scrupulously enforced
afternoon rest, the “dead hours.” Card games, consumption of alcoholic bev-
erages, and excessive noise were all prohibited. Dancing was possible only
with a doctor’s permission. “The sanatorium is not a house for amusement,
but a repair shop for toilers.”^75
The rigid kurort regime sought to preserve the optimal healing effects of
the spa vacation, but it also served to discipline and tame what was seen
as the unruly residue of working-class culture. Pleading for more power to
punish violators of the kurort regime, the head of the Crimean group of sana-
toria, Ivanov, insisted that “even workers” now demanded that all resters
conform to the kurort regime, “so that during the dead hours people don’t
walk around drunk, yelling, singing, carrying on, that they don’t walk around
half-dressed, as is common now, only in shorts or women in their halter
tops, because this does not only have a certain moral signifi cance, but on the
southern shore of Crimea it is even harmful to one’s health, because excess
exposure to sunlight here causes insomnia.” Too much sunlight led to in-
somnia, and insomnia led to seeking out music in restaurants or to people’s
returning late from the cinema singing loudly and crudely.^76
As an alternative to the factory model with its bells and discipline, some
health experts had proposed a different approach for the kurort regime: not
a workshop but an antiworkshop. The change of scenery provided by a pute-
vka to a health resort should require a complete change of environment.- Lifshits, “Mediko-sanitarnoe obsluzhivanie,” 31–32; GARF, f. 9493, op. 1, d. 8, l. 149;
Gol'dfail' and Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii i doma otdykha , 458 (quote; emphasis in original);
GARF, f. 9493, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 11–12; d. 8, ll. 39–41. - Kurorty Abkhazii , 80–87 (quote, 80); Gol'dfail' and Iakhnin, Kurorty, sanatorii, i
doma otdykha , 471–472. - GARF, f. 9493, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 69–70.