Mending the Human Motor 41Substituting mountain and sea views for smokestacks and grimy cityscapes
produced signifi cant benefi ts, but the health spa regime also prohibited any
activity that would lead to additional stress, including politics as well as
drinking, cards, and inappropriate music. Public life beyond the walls of
sanatoria should also be regulated to minimize noise and distraction. Medi-
cal studies dating from the early 1930s had proven conclusively the harmful
effect of noise on the nervous system: offi cials proposed playing music on
public loudspeakers only during specifi ed times of day and rerouting traffi c
away from kurort centers. How could patients rest during the quiet hours
when all around them they could hear steamship whistles, trucks, and bark-
ing dogs from 4:00 a.m. until late at night? The excessive regimentation of the
kurort regime, argued some offi cials, undermined the therapeutic effects of
the change of scenery and quiet repose. Compulsion should play no role in a
healing vacation. We need to end bells, said the director of a Moscow oblast
sanatorium; it was insulting for patients who had fi nished their meals to wait
until the head doctor gave everyone permission to leave the dining room.
By the late 1930s, the bell system had been discontinued in many kurorts,
and patients were no longer denied a meal if they arrived late to the dining
room.^77
This more relaxed regime had already become a staple at rest homes. At fi rst,
rest home patients followed a regime quite similar to those of kurort patients:
sleeping rooms could be occupied only during sleeping times, and a patient
who came late to the dining room forfeited that meal. “From dinner until eve-
ning tea all resters must lie down: neither games nor reading books or newspa-
pers nor conversations during this time are permitted.” Experts reasoned that
workers who spent their factory time in independent activity and in lively po-
litical life needed the opposite conditions in the rest home. “A worker landing
in a rest home becomes a machine needing repair, and he should not engage in
any kind of activism that could increase the loss of his vital forces.”^78 But of-
fi cials assessing the function of rest homes in 1932 estimated that only 25 per-
cent of those who came to rest homes needed the enforced quiet of the kurort
regime. For the others, the regime quickly became boring—one foreign visitor
even compared the rest home to a prison—and many abandoned their paid
vacations early rather than to submit to the obligatory quiet hours. As a rule,
the rest home regime offered more free time and more varied activities to its
vacationers. It was intended to encourage a kind of socialist “individualism”:
“not that [bourgeois] individualism [ individualizm ] that we unanimously con-
demn, but an individuality [ individual'nost' ] that produces the most harmoni-
ous development of the human personality in the communist system.” This
- Kurorty SSSR (1923), 50–51; GARF, f. 9493, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 166, 37, 207; D. I. Mikheles,
“Shum na kurortakh i bor'ba s nim,” Voprosy kurortologii , no. 4 (1939): 41–43; Danishevskii,
“Problema massovogo rabochego otdykha,” 77; GARF, f. A-483, op. 2, d. 41, ll. 226–227. - “From dinner until evening tea,” Doma otdykha 1924–1925 , 64–65; “worker landing
in a rest home,” GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 132, l. 78 (the theory about activism’s effect on vital
forces was attributed to “bourgeois” Ukrainian physiologists).