46 Chapter 1
of these plans diffi cult. One patient wrote in 1927 from Kislovodsk that the
sanatorium reading room lacked newspapers and he couldn’t afford to pay
the fee to enroll in the city’s library. With one amateur evening a week, “time
passed very slowly.”^88
Attempts to develop cultural activities that were integral to the life of the
kurorts continued to falter into the 1930s, largely because of the huge dif-
fi culty in fi nding qualifi ed cultural organizers. Low salaries failed to attract
educated and trained staff to the main resort areas; abysmal living conditions
made it diffi cult to keep them once they had arrived. Many cultural workers
sought these positions as a way to win a paid vacation in the south; having
received their own cure, they resigned and returned to their regular jobs.- Doma otdykha 1924–1925 , 69–70, 115; GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 1478; d. 1495 (trade
union conference on rest homes and sanatoria, February 1941), l. 48; f. 5228, op. 3, d. 131;
op. 6, d. 164 (correspondence on kurort treatment), ll. 109ob–110 (quote); Tsentral'nyi gosu-
darstvennyi arkhiv moskovskoi oblasti (TsGAMO), f. 4179, op. 1, d. 436 (correspondence on
worker rest), ll. 13–16. Resters at Hammer and Sickle’s rest home also complained about the
lack of activities: Martenovka , 28 May 1935; 10 July 1935; 15 July 1938.
Outdoor education: a group of workers from the Red October factory listening—or not
listening—to a speaker in the “bosom of nature,” on the lower Volga River, 1932. RGAKFD g.
Krasnogorsk, no. 244848. Used with permission of the archive.