In the Soviet Union citizens were granted not only the “right to work,” but also the “right to rest.” In 1922, the labor code specified workers' right to an annual two-week paid vacation, and in 1936, the new Soviet constitution codified citizens' “right to rest and leisure.” Moreover, a considerable amount of state resources was directed towards this end. In this impressive book, Diane Koenker explores Soviet ideas and debates about vacations, including tourism, as well as official policies and practices, from the early 1920s to the 1980s.

In its early years, the Soviet regime did not promise vacationers happiness or fun, as did the sponsors in the 1950s of the all-inclusive holidays at Club Med. Instead, Koenker demonstrates, Soviet leaders promoted purposeful, rational leisure. Soviet health resorts and rest homes were supposed to provide “medically restorative” vacations that would repair citizens' bodies and reinvigorate them for productive labor (p. 20). Soviet tourism—whether physically active trips or less rigorous package tours—was meant to offer recuperation from work and daily life as well as new and enlightening encounters with the diversity of Soviet lands, flora, fauna, and peoples. In the decades that followed, the recuperative goal of vacations remained, but their educational purposes were intensified. Medicalized vacations at resorts and rest homes increasingly offered citizens “intellectual and cultural programs for self-improvement,” such as lectures on artists, concerts, and short expeditions to historical places (p. 163). Soviet tourism was also designed to edify—via special geological tours, politically themed itineraries, cultural excursions to museums and galleries, exposure to different Soviet republics and cultures as well as foreign lands and peoples, and other activities. Koenker argues that authorities sought to mobilize vacationing as a vehicle for transforming society and making the new Soviet person.

Soviet vacation officials did not promote pleasure for its own sake, but supported it as a by-product of the purposeful vacation. Nonetheless, as the new Soviet elite and growing middle class in the mid-1930s began to expect more personal comfort and fun while vacationing, vacation officials and personnel sought to respond to these expectations. Koenker argues that in the postwar and later Soviet years, political and economic transformations—particularly the development of a socialist consumer society and the vast expansion of the middle class—gave rise to a much greater number of vacationers, who also demanded more pleasure-oriented experiences, because they viewed vacations as opportunities not only for physical and mental revitalization but also for “pleasure, satisfaction, and self-identification” (p. 173). As vacation officials negotiated citizens' interests over the decades, they came to recognize leisure travel as a sign of the “good life” and significantly enlarged and improved facilities for recuperative, educational, and pleasurable vacations. It was in this context that we can speak of “Club Red”: vacations away from home that focused increasingly on fun, enjoyment, and entertainment, even as a tension between utility and pleasure persisted. Although not everyone managed to procure a health resort vacation in the Black Sea town of Sochi—the “gold standard in socialist vacationing”—in the late Soviet era hundreds of thousands of citizens managed to vacation there every year. And even if the Soviet state did not guarantee the “right to rest for everyone” in the form of a fully paid or subsidized trip to a sanatorium or a rest home, millions of vacationers utilized such facilities as well as the growing number of tourist bases and hotels—reportedly almost seven million vacationers in 1960 and forty million by 1980 (p. 186). In the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, millions of citizens also pursued other kinds of vacations away from home, including tourist journeys by train or water, package tours abroad, and “unorganized” trips arranged by individuals rather than Soviet institutions.

Even though “socialist” travel vacations became a mass affair, many Soviet citizens were not able to enjoy them. As Koenker shows, “the right to rest” did not guarantee equal access to vacations away from home—whether in the form of medicalized rest or tourism. The putevka (travel voucher) system for health spas and rest homes, which was supposed to prioritize the medically needy, industrial workers, and other select groups such as pregnant women, did not work as intended; trip vouchers, particularly for the best spas, were frequently allocated to nonpriority groups, especially party officials and the middle class, who utilized their connections, social status, and money to obtain them. The tourist voucher system was also problematic. Tourist vouchers, unlike vouchers for spas and rest home vacations, were rarely subsidized, which meant that even when the laboring classes received them, they often could not afford the costs of domestic and foreign travel. Peasants fared the worst, receiving only a “small fraction” of total travel vouchers and lacking the extra resources to obtain them in other ways.

Readers of Business History Review might find Koenker's economic argument about Soviet vacations and tourism particularly interesting. The state significantly increased the infrastructure for travel vacations of various kinds in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, but consumer demand always outstripped supply. Meanwhile, Soviet consumer-travelers during this time began to demand different kinds of vacation experiences, particularly family vacations, but vacation officials were slow to respond. Ultimately, the Soviet regime succeeded in providing a vast network of pleasurable and relaxing vacation experiences away from home, but it catered more to the elite and middle class than to workers and peasants. Moreover, because the vacation system was not commercially organized as in a market economy, it failed consumer-travelers. Constrained by the Soviet economy, the system was too limited and too inflexible to meet the needs of the growing numbers of consumer-travelers.

Koenker often provides a trenchant gender analysis in her scholarly work, so I wish that she could have provided more of it in this book, particularly since she provides some fascinating details about gender, sexuality, and vacations. Koenker points out, for example, that the lodging in health spas and rest homes was segregated by gender. She describes how women tourists, particularly women teachers, chose package tours to a greater extent than men. Koenker provides a short discussion about how health vacations and Soviet tourism offered both men and women sexual opportunities outside their daily lives and existing relationships, including marriage; these sexual liaisons were quite common, and yet (or perhaps because of this) vacation officials and tour guides apparently rarely mentioned them, unless these liaisons were between Soviet citizens and foreigners, especially women and locals. Tell us more! What do the disapproving “reports of trip leaders” about these relationships tell us about Soviet ideas of gender and sexuality? How did popular representations of sexuality and vacations in films and novels, which Koenker discusses briefly, reinforce and/or challenge gender and sexual norms?  Why did the Soviet regime appear to tolerate extramarital affairs within domestic vacations—and perhaps even implicitly sanction them—by allowing their representation in popular literature and films, even as the regime touted the importance of the nuclear family and communist morality (including sexual constraint and fidelity), particularly during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years?  How did women's, health, and tourist newspapers and journals as well as other forms of media and travel literature depict vacationing, gender, and sexuality, and what do these depictions tell us about Soviet society? How did vacations provide nonnormative sexual opportunities, such as same-sex liaisons, and how did officials and vacationers respond to and understand them?

Of course a book cannot discuss everything, and Club Red already provides readers with so much. It does an excellent job describing and analyzing the changing institutional leadership of and cultural and social meanings associated with spa and rest home vacations, and Soviet tourism, as well as the programs and practices connected to these different forms of leisure travel. It provides important insights into the contradictions and tensions in the Soviet vacation system. It effectively situates vacations in the “socialist” consumer culture that began to emerge in the 1930s and burgeoned in the 1960s, as well as in the broader Soviet experiment. This extremely well-researched and fascinating book will be of value to many scholars, particularly those interested in consumer culture, vacations and tourism, and the Soviet Union.