Mending the Human Motor 51under the Khrushchev regime of the 1950s and 1960s. The fi lm A Girl Hurries
to a Rendezvous illustrated the new disdain for medical purpose. One of the
protagonists, the henpecked manager, has lost his documents and his money,
and in order to fi nance his vacation without a putevka, he sells his services
to legitimate spa patients who are about to be thrown out of the sanatorium
because they have neglected their prescribed treatments. For fi ve rubles each,
he will take the treatments in their stead. We see the portly offi cial being
blasted by a power hose, operating a rowing machine, and riding a stationary
bicycle. The completed treatments are then duly noted in the medical book-
lets that he returns to their rightful owners in exchange for cash, enabling
him to buy provisions for a seductive rendezvous in his tiny rented room.
The prized Soviet health vacation had become an object of desire but not for
its medical component.
The provision of luxury accommodations—sculpture, fi ne carpets, and
second helpings in the dining room—had led to a reduction in the number
of available beds in Soviet health resorts, and the putevka became increas-
ingly diffi cult to obtain, even for those with connections. But while offi cial
health institutions faced cutbacks and received fewer patients with putevki,
the number of vacationers without putevki exploded. North of Sochi, the
local resorts on the Black Sea shore took in increasing numbers of so-called
unorganized patients, even whole families. The beach town of Anapa served
63,000 of these vacationers in 1938, including 17,500 children. Only 10 to 25
percent of visitors even sought to take a course of treatment as outpatients.
And as at the Teberda mountain resort high in the Caucasus, even ambula-
tory patients remained outside the health agencies’ watchful gaze: they might
purchase a putevka for outpatient treatment, but they lived in hotels or pri-
vate homes, making monitoring of medical services diffi cult. In 1939 scenic
Teberda received almost as many tourists as medical patients, its function
as a health spa diluted almost beyond recognition.^95 This overfl ow and the
entire phenomenon of “unorganized” vacationers suggest a surprising degree
of mobility for Soviet citizens in the 1930s.
The Soviet health spa vacation had been created to produce medical results.
Vacation travel to spas and rest homes served the state’s interest in promot-
ing a healthy population and reinforced the regime’s commitment to public
health and to prophylactic medicine. For the individuals who received this
medicalized leisure travel, the appeal of the vacation transcended medicine
and good health: it produced as much pleasure as healing, and the medical
foundation of the spa vacation became subordinated to entertainment and
fun, in visual propaganda as well as in reality. By the mid-1930s, the spa
vacation had become a prized commodity, valued perhaps for its medical
properties but just as much for its opportunity to travel elsewhere and for
the distinction that this travel conferred on the individual. Like many other
- GARF, f. A-483, op. 2, d. 41, ll. 232, 251, 163–174.