Mending the Human Motor 49world digging out from a severe depression and contemplating a socialist
alternative to capitalist modernity. For an English-speaking audience, a
fi lm emphasized social equality: patients came to Soviet health resorts
“from all walks of life”: an aviation worker, a Donbass miner, a collective
farm worker, and a military lieutenant sat together at chess; dominoes play-
ers included a surgeon, railway engineer, plant director, and shop foreman.
The French language fi lm included footage of nude sunbathing. But in
addition, these fi lms and those directed to the Russian-speaking audience
emphasized the unique Soviet combination of medicine, luxury, contempo-
raneity, and fun. Images of medical treatments taken in up-to-date facilities,
provided by caring nurses and physicians in the cleanest whites, alternat-
ed with beach scenes of happy bathers plunging into the surf. Everywhere
young couples—even at the Red Army sanatorium in Sochi—strolled on the
pathways, danced elegantly on handsome outdoor terraces, or paddled their
kayaks on the waves. Automobiles, smooth new highways, and glistening
white constructivist sanatorium buildings conveyed the sense of the new.
The therapeutic value of a spa vacation received its affi rmation in images
of nurses monitoring their patients’ vital signs, the consumption of nutri-
tious fruit and mineral water, electric sunlamps, and healing mineral water
Souvenir photograph from a Yalta vacation, 24 September 1938.