The idea of leisure and vacations in the Soviet Union at first glance suggests a paradox. As a system based on the labor theory of value, the USSR emphasized production as the foundation of wealth, personal worth, and the path to a society of abundance for all. Work—physical or mental—was the obligation of all citizens. But work took its toll on the human organism, and along with creating the necessary incentives and conditions for productive labor a socialist system would also include reproductive rest as an integral element of its economy. The eight-hour work day, a weekly day off from work, and an annual vacation constituted the triad of restorative and healthful rest opportunities in the emerging Soviet system of the 1920s and 1930s.
Of these three, the annual paid vacation was the most revolutionary contribution of Soviet socialism to promoting the welfare of its work force. Well in advance of other industrialized nations, the Soviet Union in its labor code of 1922 stipulated that all workers with at least five and a half months work tenure were entitled to an annual two-week vacation with pay. And as early as 1920, Soviet leaders began to create a series of vacation institutions that would maximize the benefit of workers' annual breaks from production and labor. Rest homes and health resorts would become “workshops for the repair of toilers,” offering structured rest and medical therapies that would allow workers to recover their strength and energy for the work year to come. The Soviet vacation did not provide an escape from the mobilization of citizens toward the common goal; from its beginning it was a continuation of that mobilization using an alternate setting.
The primary purpose of the Soviet vacation was therapeutic, the recovery and restoration of individual working units: the bodies and minds of Soviet laboring people. So the Soviet vacation was meant to be taken alone, without the nuisance or extra expense of family members, whose own individual needs were likely to be different. Scarce resources dictated that only the most medically needy could spend their vacations in the health palaces of the sanatoria system. Children had their own networks of sanatoria and pioneer camps. Working husbands and wives were each entitled to a paid vacation, but they were not entitled to spend that vacation together. If you have ever wondered why there were no double beds in Soviet hotels, read on.
Some individuals preferred this practice of separate vacations, but there is also ample evidence that many, if not most, Soviet citizens wished to spend their rightful vacations with spouses and family. This right to a certain type of rest met with resistance from the Soviet health and tourism authorities, who were extremely slow to respond to popular demand. This article examines the evolution of the Soviet family vacation in the 1950s and 1960s in order to explore three key issues in postwar Soviet history. In the first place, the issue of family vacations underlines fundamental ambivalences about the role of the family and the role of sex in the Soviet Union. Secondly, discussions of family vacations illustrate the continuing tension in postwar Soviet life between production and consumption, between state interests and citizens' interests, between subjecthood and citizenship. The utilitarian and solitary vacation served the productive interests of the state; turning a vacation into a family's shared experience privileged consumers, who demanded that state resources be allocated to promote their personal interests. Finally, although state authorities would eventually acknowledge the validity of its citizens' claims to the right to rest when and with whom they chose, the Soviet economic system inhibited innovative responses to consumer demand. Officials monotonously followed the patterns that had been established in the central plan years of the 1930s, unable or unwilling to imagine either Disneyland or a double bed.
“VACATIONS FOR ALL” IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
In the industrializing countries of Europe and North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the vacation away from home had come to constitute a marker of middle-class status. The grand tour, once the preserve of the aristocratic elite, had become accessible to the middle class through rising standards of living and lower costs. Under the influence of scientific management theorists and demands of the socialist movement after 1918, access to an annual paid summer vacation spread beyond the middle classes, and came increasingly to be seen by workers as their entitlement in a democratic society.Footnote 1 New institutions emerged to cater to the growing demand for vacations: cut-price train tickets in France under the Popular Front, holiday camps in Britain that provided packaged holidays with extensive activities for parents, children, singles, and couples.Footnote 2 In the United States, New Deal programs and changing attitudes of trade unions combined to create a new demand by worker families for the vacation as an integral component of their standard of living.Footnote 3 In Nazi Germany, the Strength through Joy movement planned its own version of the holiday camp, spas that would provide inexpensive week-long holidays for working people and their families, “to become the Eldorado of vacationing families with children.”Footnote 4
Still, vacations for workers and their families did not become truly mass until after 1945, along with rising standards of living, new consumerist expectations, and a growing ‘embourgeoisement’ of postwar industrial societies.Footnote 5 Within this mass movement, however, the family vacation was not the only model. Ellen Furlough notes the segmentation of the vacation market by the 1960s, with different appeals to family holidays (parents and children), “romantic” vacations (couples only), and the “fun holiday” for singles and same-sex groups looking for pleasure and partners. Summer camps for children enjoyed popularity for their pedagogical and social value, and the colonies de vacances remained the norm in France until the 1970s. In Cold War America, “Summer camps became an increasingly common enhancement activity for middle-class children, as well as a welcome break for their parents, who were devoting so much of their time and energy to child-rearing responsibilities.” Meanwhile, the growth of institutions like the Club Mediterranée offered vacation opportunities aimed primarily at adults.Footnote 6
The appeal of the family vacation remained powerful, attractive on the right and the left as a means to strengthen, respectively, the patriarchal family and the nuclear family. In Britain, conservatives endorsed the idea of the family vacation as a “reward for the father to be shared as a gift with his family,” but so did British trade union members who emphasized the same idea in essay contests and pamphlets. Across the channel, the French communist newspaper L'Humanité stressed the way the vacation would let a family who “live under the same roof but as strangers and without having the time to know one another” recuperate the family values undermined by relentless industrial capitalism.Footnote 7 Pete Seeger's 1941 “Talking Union” celebrated the ideal of the family vacation, too: “Vacations with pay,/Take your kids to the seashore.”Footnote 8 By the second half of the twentieth-century, the family vacation had emerged as an unquestioned right and a marker of advanced consumer societies.
The Soviet Union also aspired to become a consumer society of a particular socialist form, and the annual paid vacation can be seen as one element in this endeavor. Despite the emphasis on construction and heavy industry in the First Five Year Plan of 1928–1933, planners also included consumer goods in their ambitious targets. Although undermined by the economic reality of serious shortages and a controlled hierarchical access to consumption, Soviet mythmakers emphasized the rise of “cultured consumption” in the 1930s and promoted its record-breaking workers, the Stakhanovites, as exemplars of a new, modern consumerist sensibility.Footnote 9 Jukka Gronow has described how the production of luxury goods such as champagne, caviar, ice cream, and perfume received official backing as promises of a socialist material culture of abundance and variety.Footnote 10 The Soviet vacation also evolved in the 1930s from a medically necessary antidote to the harsh conditions of industrial labor to a socialist entitlement to pleasure and relaxation. Published guides to health spas reproduced photographic images of landscape and leisure to accompany dry text enumerating the medical specialties of specific locations.Footnote 11 A 1939 advertisement for Soviet domestic tourism evoked new norms of the Soviet “good life.” A drawing depicted a man and a woman, hikers with backpacks, resting on a seaside overlook. Down below, an automobile sped along the corniche, and out on the ocean a cruise ship could be seen in the distance.Footnote 12 Nonetheless, when the Soviet vacation industry revived after the Second World War, consumerism was to compete with public health priorities and utilitarian goals.
THE SOVIET RIGHT TO REST
The 1936 Soviet constitution guaranteed citizens, among many other benefits of the “most democratic country in the world,” the “right to rest.” This mantra found its way into much of the propaganda and education about cultured leisure and the superiority of socialism. It also fueled state spending for vacation facilities, which increased significantly from 1936 to 1941.Footnote 13 Wartime destruction left many sanatoria, rest homes, and tourist bases in ruins, but by 1950, the regime was mounting a major campaign to restore and expand the opportunities for its laboring people to take their rightful rest (vacation) in comfortable, cultured, and curative circumstances.Footnote 14 Over the next two decades, the regime would spend millions of rubles on reconstruction and would extend the range of vacation opportunities available to its laboring people.
Soviet citizens could take their annual vacation in a number of locations. Some stayed home, taking advantage of local cultural and leisure opportunities or just working around the house; some visited relatives in the countryside, both to help out with farming and to enjoy a change of scenery; some repaired to dacha communities near their places of residence.Footnote 15 In what follows, I am most interested in the phenomenon of travel to designated vacation spots, travel for the purpose of being elsewhere, to encounter unfamiliar surroundings and new sets of people.
Vacation travel in the Soviet Union can be divided into two distinct types. Both were administered by the Central Council of Trade Unions (rather than an economic or public health ministry), but each type of leisure travel had its own separate agency within the trade union organization. A person could travel to a particular destination and remain there for the duration of the vacation: this was travel to rest. Or a person could travel along an itinerary for the purpose of seeing sights: this was travel to see and to do, or turizm. Both were deemed to be medically, culturally, and socially beneficial, and they increasingly shared similar characteristics as Soviet vacations became less purposeful and more fun. While camping vacations in capitalist countries appealed to families because of their modest costs, the particular history of Soviet tourism—which emphasized rugged self-locomotion rather than recreational sightseeing—suggests that travel to rest would be the most attractive choice for parents with children.Footnote 16
The first choice in travel to rest was the health spa or resort (kurort), with its constellation of sanatoria, medical facilities, scenery, and services. Although the 1967 guide to trade union health spas would enumerate 183 of them all over the country, the oldest and most prestigious spas were located in the Caucasus Mineral Waters towns, particularly Kislovodsk, on the southern shore of the Crimean peninsula, and along the eastern Black Sea coast of the Caucasus range from the towns of Sochi to Sukhumi.Footnote 17 In theory, spa vacations were reserved for the most medically needy, and a citizen required a doctor's certificate in order to receive a place. A person visiting such a spa (often designated as “patient” [bol'nyi] but also as “vacationer” [otdykhaiushchii]) signed up for a three- to four-week course of treatment and recreation. The “spa regime” involved daily medical procedures, including mineral water baths, sun baths (monitored by a beachside nurse), sea water baths, massages, “dosed walking,” particular diets suited to the patient's medical needs, and the obligatory “dead hour” for naptime. Recreational possibilities included sports (volleyball everywhere, tennis first in the elite spas and later more widespread) and excursions to local attractions, some even involving a modest amount of hiking or climbing. Evenings offered cultured entertainment such as lectures and slide shows, performances of folk music by amateur ensembles, films, concerts and plays performed by visiting artists, and lots and lots of dancing, whether to radio or record player, or to the live accompaniment of an accordion or jazz orchestra.Footnote 18 This spa vacation set the standard, but it was a very expensive standard given the capital and service requirements of its medical infrastructure. Vacationers who could not obtain a scarce place in a sanatorium had several alternatives. They could find lodging in a pension, hotel, or private home in a spa location, and receive a course of medical treatment through a central polyclinic, or they could obtain lodging in a pension without treatment, and take the sun and the waters as they chose.
The rest home (dom otdykha) was a junior version of the health spa, offering shorter stays (ten to twelve days was the norm), less extensive medical treatment, and simpler, smaller facilities. Many rest homes belonged to particular enterprises, institutions, or trade unions and they were located in natural settings along rivers and lakes relatively close to the population centers they served. The regime here was more relaxed than in a sanatorium: morning exercises, sports (especially volleyball, which attracted spectators as well as players), mushroom hunting, leisurely strolls through grounds landscaped with statuary and flowerbeds, sunbathing and swimming, and simple but nutritious food. The most common medical condition for rest home vacationers was “overtiredness,” and success in treatment was measured by how much weight the patient had gained. Chess, checkers, and newspapers could be found in cozily furnished club rooms; evenings offered occasional films and amateur concerts, and by later in the 1950s, television.Footnote 19 Neither spas nor rest homes could accommodate all who wished to spend their vacations there, and toward the end of the 1950s a new hybrid form of vacation destination emerged: the “tourist-health camp,” sometimes called a “rest base” or “sports camp.” These vacation centers were even simpler and more haphazard than the rest home. A Kazan' camp arose when the local party and trade union committees directed a firm to “build a base.” “With what?” “However you like. The Volga is broad and deep, find a spot and build.”Footnote 20 Most camps consisted entirely of tents, providing cots and mattresses, but no dining room. Vacationers brought their own provisions to prepare in a central cooking area. Most offered daily activities such as morning calisthenics, swimming, and sports, and special events such as sightseeing excursions or overnight camping trips—tourism.Footnote 21
Access to any of these vacation destinations required procurement of a trip voucher, or putevka. These were allocated by central trade union authorities to local union organizations that could then distribute them to their members through local enterprise committees. A certain percentage of vouchers were reserved as rewards for meritorious service or exceptional need and handed out for free.Footnote 22 The rest were subsidized by the trade union social insurance fund, so that their recipients paid only 30 percent of the face value of the voucher. (Prices for the standard terms of treatment were listed in the published annual guides to vacation destinations.) Unclaimed vouchers, most common for off-peak times before July and after August and for less desirable locations, could be sold for their full value. It was very difficult for a married couple working in different enterprises to acquire two vouchers for the same location and time, and almost impossible to acquire two identical subsidized trips. To travel as a family was even more difficult, because most rest homes and sanatoria explicitly forbade admission of children. If children needed medical treatment, they could be served in one of the country's specialized children's sanatoria: 1,142 of them in 1963, with 129,000 beds, compared to 2,139 for adults.Footnote 23 For more active rest, children could be sent to summer-long pioneer camps.
Active vacations for adults—tourism—were even less suitable for parents traveling with children. Organized tourism had begun to develop in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s, with the creation of the Society for Proletarian Tourism and Excursions, which arranged group travel to cities or scenic regions of the Soviet south.Footnote 24 In 1936 the trade unions assumed the stewardship of Soviet tourism, administering a series of tourist bases and organizing specified itineraries (marshruty) for tourist travel. A tourist vacation was recommended for healthy adults who wished to expand their horizons and strengthen their physiques in relatively rigorous travel. Many tourist itineraries involved some hiking through the nature reserves of the Caucasus or Crimea before concluding with several days' stay at a seaside tourist base. Completion of specially designated routes earned the tourist the “Tourist of the USSR” merit badge, certifying that they had learned the history of Soviet tourism and had demonstrated competency in tourist skills, such as lighting a campfire with only two matches, setting up a tent, and using a compass to navigate an unmarked trail. Only those seventeen years of age or older were eligible for this award.Footnote 25
Access to these tours also came in the form of a voucher handed out or sold through trade union organizations at the workplace, and many tourists sought these vouchers as a means to a pseudo-spa vacation. They failed to read the fine print that explained that the journey would be accomplished on foot, and that the tourist should bring a knapsack, comfortable clothes, and sturdy shoes with low heels. Sometimes they were assured by their local factory committees anxious to dispose of all of their allocated tourist vouchers that the tourist did not really have to backpack for 180 kilometers and could choose to remain at the base camp for the length of the package stay. Such tourists earned the contemptuous nickname of “pajama people” (pizhamniki), their travels limited to the distance between the tour base and the beach.Footnote 26 Other tourist routes provided less rugged exposure to the natural beauties of the Soviet land: itinerary number 28 in 1956 offered a twenty-day bus trip along the Black Sea coastline from Sukhumi to Sochi, with four-day stays in five different coastal towns. A tourist could also purchase a voucher for a twenty-day tourist experience in a single tourist base, with the opportunity to take day trips to local attractions.Footnote 27 This very popular option most closely replicated the model sanatorium vacation. Like the sanatoria and rest homes, tourist bases provided food, lodging, recreation (volleyball), and evening entertainment (dancing). The accommodations, however, were more primitive: large stationary tents provided the bulk of the sleeping spaces at Soviet tourist bases until late in the 1960s.Footnote 28
Soviet tourism expanded significantly in the 1950s both in capacity and in the variety of travel. Tourism facilities grew from a low of 81 tourist bases with 9,000 beds in 1950 to 611 in 1970 with 160,000 beds.Footnote 29 (The population, meanwhile, had increased from 181.6 million people in 1951 to 241.7 million in 1970.Footnote 30) Travel by riverboat proved to be another popular vacation activity, with ten to twenty-day vouchers available for cruises on the Volga, from Leningrad to Lake Onega, and “along five rivers” from Moscow to Ufa and back. River travel was expensive: a first-class cabin for a twenty-day round-trip cruise from Moscow to Astrakhan cost 1,315 rubles in 1956, and even third-class cost 955 rubles, at a time when the average annual industrial wage was 1,040 rubles. By comparison, a twenty-day voucher to the Yalta tour base cost 562 rubles.Footnote 31 Railway tourism began in 1960. Tourists traveled in especially reserved trains, which provided all meals, living arrangements, and guides. At stops along the way tourists visited local attractions and took scenic hikes and excursions. That first year, tourists could choose from among twenty-day trips along three itineraries: the Caucasus Black Sea coast, “around five republics (the Baltic republics and Leningrad),” and through Ukraine and Crimea. In 1962, fifty-six tourist trains carried 22,215 passengers; by 1965 the number of trains had grown to 250, with tourist trains setting out from dozens of cities across the Soviet Union. Significantly, many of these itineraries took travelers from their home cities to Black Sea destinations and back (“Tomsk-Caucasus-Tomsk”).Footnote 32 In other words, tourists continued to emulate the spa vacationers and sought the well-traveled route to the south. Ocean cruises along the Black Sea coast from Odessa to Sukhumi expanded in the 1960s as well, with twelve liners operating by 1967. These cruises were livelier than the “floating rest homes” on Soviet rivers, and vouchers for them sold out quickly.Footnote 33 Such trips combined seascapes, rest, and pleasure, such as beauty contests, amateur concerts, and an orchestra for dancing.Footnote 34 Tourist officials learned through experience that even train travel was difficult for older people who needed help getting on and off the train; and the train coupés were generally too confining for children. River and ocean cruises offered only limited possibilities for family travel, in part because of safety concerns but also because there was excess adult demand: the liner “Shevchenko” reserved just thirty of its 1,652 places for children for its summer 1966 sailings.Footnote 35
Soviet citizens began to be able to travel abroad in the mid-1950s, and foreign trips, both to eastern European socialist countries and beyond, were highly prized. As Anne Gorsuch has recounted, access to such travel required not only the purchase or grant of a voucher, but careful vetting by local party and trade union organizations.Footnote 36 Some of these trips focused exclusively on sightseeing, but others combined touring with one or two-week stays at resorts and rest homes in fraternal socialist countries. In 1956, 560,000 Soviet citizens traveled abroad, according to one source, a number that had increased to 1,850,000 by 1970.Footnote 37 Despite this significant growth, married couples seldom received permission to travel together, and children almost never did.Footnote 38
The voucher system neatly organized Soviet tourists into ready-made groups: twenty-five or thirty citizens traveled together on the standard itineraries around the Soviet Union and the international tours, several hundreds on the boats and trains. A tourist with a voucher for itinerary number 43, a combined foot and bus trip along the Sukhumi Military Highway, was expected to arrive at the starting point, Teberde, at the designated time, meet the group there, and arrange for transportation home from the end point in Sukhumi.Footnote 39 While the group experience was extolled for promoting collective values and bringing Soviet citizens together from all parts of the country, group package tours were also much easier to plan and to administer, and had become the default form of Soviet tourism already in the 1930s.Footnote 40 Tourism purists emphasized that “the best rest” was a touring vacation conducted independently, by small self-selected groups, carried out primarily through self-locomotion on foot, by boat, or on bicycles.Footnote 41 “Active rest in the form of tourism—this is the most miraculous medicine for the mentally tired person, for his central nervous system, for his heart and lungs.”Footnote 42 Independent tourist groups could choose to follow some of the better known itineraries offered as package tours, and in principle, they could reserve spaces in the tourist bases and even rest homes along the way.Footnote 43 But they were also encouraged to develop their own itineraries, carry their camping equipment with them, and thereby to acquire a more authentic tourism experience than those who followed the crowd. Independent tourists were not limited to the numbered national and regional itineraries, and they could carry out their travels much more inexpensively than those on the package tours. This kind of touring, which had been the basis of the Society for Proletarian Tourism and Excursions in the 1920s and 1930s, appealed particularly to young people, especially university students with long vacations, but it also represented a form of tourism most accessible and affordable for family groups.Footnote 44
As this survey of the expanding forms of Soviet vacation travel indicates, such travel became accessible to increasing numbers of Soviet citizens in the postwar years. In this respect, the Soviet mass vacation developed quite similarly to those in postwar capitalist societies. The total number of vacationers in Soviet sanatoria, rest homes, pensions, and tourist bases increased from 3.7 million in 1950 to 16.8 million in 1970, with the years after 1965 seeing the greatest rate of expansion.Footnote 45 Still, even in 1965, as trade union officials pointed out, vacation places per thousand citizens had not returned to prewar levels. Capacity had increased, but it had not kept up with the growth of the population.Footnote 46 The increase in tourist bases accounted for most of this growth in the 1960s. In 1950, sanatoria accounted for 46 percent of vacationers, and rest homes 51 percent. In 1970, 26 percent of vacationers sojourned in sanatoria, 32 percent in rest homes, and 42 percent in tourist and so-called “rest” bases.Footnote 47 Demand for vacations would only increase after 1968, when a new law shortened the standard workweek to five days and extended the official paid vacation from twelve to fifteen working days.Footnote 48
WHAT DID THE PEOPLE WANT?
Soviet officials paid considerable attention to the demands and needs of the public in monitoring the growing demand for vacation travel and for assessing what kinds of services, destinations, and methods appealed most to the Soviet tourist. This was true even in the 1930s, at the time when officials designed vacation facilities to emphasize recuperative rest. This practice continued into the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of each vacation season, local officials reviewed the written comments of their guests, paying particular attention to complaints, and passed along their findings to the central authorities. Many of these comments reflected joy, wonder, and gratitude for the opportunity to see another part of the country. “The vistas and landscapes of the beautiful Volga constantly changing before our gaze (vzor) develop our aesthetic appreciation of nature and provide much joy to the spirit.”Footnote 49 Coming to Sochi from Uzbekistan's Fergana valley, with its fruit orchards, roses, and cotton fields, one tourist admitted, “I thought there was nowhere as beautiful as the Fergana valley. Alas! I was wrong … I was especially captivated by the extraordinary beauty of the landscape along the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus mountains.”Footnote 50 More pragmatically, tourists demanded better food and more attentive service, as well as clean and cozy accommodations.Footnote 51
Starting in the 1960s, public opinion polling also provided advice to officials about the vacation preferences of the Soviet people. Such polls reflected an admission that consumer-driven preferences were as important in economic planning as the production needs of enterprises to regenerate the work abilities of their employees. The Soviet citizen's role as consumer was now just as vital as the role of producer. An Institute of Public Opinion had been organized under the auspices of the Communist Youth League's newspaper Komsomol'skaia Pravda in 1960 by the sociologist Boris Grushin. In 1963, the scientific institute for health spa planning commissioned a survey (the first and only “market research” carried out by the institute) to determine how Soviet citizens actually vacationed and how they wished to vacation.Footnote 52 First, readers of Komsomol'skaia Pravda were invited to respond to a questionnaire published in the paper in June 1966; over twelve thousand replied. (Some of the responses were published in the newspaper over the course of the summer, but at the time, only the scientific planning institute received the analysis of the quantitative data.Footnote 53) From these respondents, a more scientific sample was constructed, with results that surprised the investigators. When asked about their ideal vacation, 19 percent of the respondents said they would like to travel to one location and rest there (the traditional spa or rest home vacation), but a stunning 72 percent expressed the “Oneginesque desire” to travel from one place to another.Footnote 54 For years, Soviet planners had directed the bulk of its resources toward stationary vacations in health spas and rest homes; now they learned that consumers preferred a different mix. On the other hand, consumers approved of state travel packages, whether for tourism or spa vacations. More than half of the respondents preferred to have their vacations organized through the voucher system rather than making their own retail arrangements. As for the family vacation, 45 percent of the survey preferred to vacation with their families (meaning with spouses alone as well as with spouses and children), 41 percent with friends or co-workers, and 15 percent with strangers.Footnote 55 A study conducted for the Crimea in 1969 showed reality as opposed to preference: while 55 percent of vacationers there were married with children, only 27 percent actually came with their families; 17 percent of them were single parents with children; 20 percent were married couples without their children.Footnote 56 These data suggest a strong but not a resounding preference for the Soviet family vacation. Some of the reasons for this ambivalence can be found in the debates and commentary about the family vacation among providers and consumers of leisure travel in the Soviet Union.
The origin of the Soviet vacation lay in its purposefulness, in its medical necessity to counteract the rigors and exhaustion of the normal working year. Experts in the 1930s even proposed that once the scientific organization of work had been perfected, vacations would no longer be necessary because workers would never need “repair.”Footnote 57 This minority view failed to win adherents even in the 1930s, but the link between work and vacation remained central. Since the state was unable to provide healthful vacations for all of its citizens, priority had to go to those who were most medically needy and those who were most deserving of this state benefit: production workers. “In the summer months when there is a critical shortage of vouchers, we have at our resorts too many nonworking family members and housewives. Health resorts ought to provide treatment and rest to the producers of our material wealth—workers and collective farm workers,” argued the central directorate for trade union health facilities in 1955.Footnote 58 The vacation was for the good of the producer, not the producer's spouse or children.
The medical basis of the Soviet vacation also contributed to the pattern of individual rather than family rest. Health spa vacations in particular had been tied to the particular needs of producers, treating the medical conditions created by the nature of work. The mental strain of intellectual work required primarily a change of scenery and routine, which sun and sea could easily provide. Physiological conditions like lung or heart diseases required more specialized treatments. In assigning vouchers to their workers, factory authorities were expected to consult the staff doctor and select the appropriate destination for their vacationing workers' conditions, using the annual guide to heath resorts, which listed the medical specialties of each institution. Even vouchers to less medicalized rest home vacations were meant to be reserved for those most in need of this form of quiet rest. Children not only threatened to violate the peace and calm required for effective treatment, they also introduced further medical risk. Officials argued against the practice of allowing rest home vacationers' children to join a parent for the last three days of their two-week stays, because the children brought new illnesses into the facility.Footnote 59 A small number of health facilities had been established for mothers to rest together with their children, and for pregnant women, but in these cases too, the goal was to promote the health and well-being of the woman, not to satisfy their affective needs.Footnote 60 With no way to care for their children, mothers in need of medical vacations refused to take them unless they could bring their children along with them.Footnote 61 Rest homes for mothers-to-be were meant to serve as schools for motherhood, not for fun.Footnote 62
Moreover, some parents (and spouses) actively sought the opportunity to escape from the drudgery and routine of their family circumstances.Footnote 63 “It is a fiction that a mother wants to spend a month with her child,” insisted the head of the Yalta spa district in 1965. “There is absolutely no basis in this.”Footnote 64 Children interfered with certain types of behaviors peculiar to the health spa environment: “A person on vacation does not behave as he does at work.”Footnote 65 Since the 1920s, the health spa had been a symbol of extramarital excitement.Footnote 66 Mary Leder discovered in the 1930s that married vacationers expected to pair up with temporary lovers while away from home, and in fact the “resort affair” was restricted to married people vacationing alone.Footnote 67 Films in the 1930s and later reinforced this image of the health spa vacation as an opportunity for casual love without responsibility. In the 1939 Mikhail Verner film, “A Girl Hurries to a Rendezvous,” a henpecked professor, having lost his identity papers, enjoys the attentions of pretty young women in a Caucasian Mineral Waters resort. By 1973, in “Old Walls,” the resort affair had become a normal, if covert part of the vacation, conveyed by a scene in which multiple women slip into their sanatorium rooms after a night spent someplace else.Footnote 68 A longstanding Soviet taboo on discussing any sexual matters in public has made evidence of such “resort affairs” hard to come by, although the practice seems to have been widely accepted. Drawing on testimonies about sexual practices by Soviet émigrés in the 1970s, the writer Mark Popovsky suggests that the entire purpose for women-vacationers of the standard two-week rest home vacation was to “find themselves a man.” Couples formed feverishly on the first day of the vacation; some liaisons lasted the entire two weeks, other vacationers changed partners serially. Such vacations provided a chance, acknowledged Popovsky's informants, for single women to receive their “share of human happiness.”Footnote 69 The normality of such practices are perhaps confirmed in a multi-national survey of sexual attitudes conducted in the mid-1990s: among twenty-four nations, Russia stood out for its tolerance for extramarital sex: only 36 percent of Russians said it was “always wrong,” compared to an overall total of 66 percent, and 17 percent of Russians said extramarital sex was “not wrong at all,” as against only 4 percent of the entire sample that approved.Footnote 70 The vacation could also occasion more “legitimate” forms of romance, courtship leading to marriage, as an oral history from Saratov suggests.Footnote 71 The ubiquitous dance evenings at health spas and tourist bases surely facilitated romantic friendships, but the matchmaking function of vacations was yet another topic left unexamined by the tourism and health spa officials who adhered to the official Soviet ideology of sexophobia.Footnote 72 The common expression “there is no sex in the Soviet Union” notwithstanding, the behavior that took place in Soviet health resorts and rest homes ought not to be witnessed by children (or by spouses).
For some observers, the family vacation seemed ideologically inappropriate for a socialist society, in which the collective was more important than the family, and in which bourgeois consumerism should give way to asceticism and to work. The system of separate vacation facilities for adults and children in part reflected utopian dreams of the withering away of the family, which for some experts meant a withering away of sex altogether.Footnote 73 The official restoration of Soviet family values in the 1930s did not necessarily promote the family as an affective unit, and as Frances Bernstein argues, “Conjugal pleasures of the flesh were even more out of place in the 1930s.”Footnote 74 An official ideology that could not admit in public to the reality of sexual relations could find no justification for facilitating romantic getaways for lawfully married couples: the resort affair was one consequence of this ideological ambivalence toward the idea of healthy marital sex. Furthermore, conjugal units might threaten to undermine more socially important work-based collectives. Soviet rest home vacations as well as tour groups in the 1950s and 1960s brought together individual adults in new collectives, reinforcing work-based identities, teaching habits of cooperation and solidarity, and developing friendships that transcended local or family loyalties.Footnote 75
Finally, a Soviet family vacation (husbands and wives together, or parents with children) may have reflected bourgeois pleasures inappropriate for a socialist society. Given that most families could not afford to purchase vouchers for a vacation together, there was envy and resentment toward those who could: to show up in Sochi with a child in tow risked incurring the wrath of local (and low-paid) medical people resentful of the “big ruble” that permitted such a luxury.Footnote 76 The proper socialist vacation would be rational and utilitarian, providing each member of the collective, young, old, married, or single, with the vacation conditions appropriate to their medical and production needs.
By the 1950s and 1960s, attitudes about family, love, and the emotional needs of Soviet citizens had begun to change. The 45 percent of respondents in 1966 who favored vacationing with their families provide just one indicator of this shift. Still, the Soviet regime was slow to respond to changing demands. I would argue that by the 1970s the biggest obstacle to a Soviet family vacation was not ideology or attitudes, but the logistical and physical constraints of the vacation system itself. Yet these too derived from the history of a medicalized and individualized approach to the public health needs of Soviet citizens. Vacation vouchers remained closely tied to one's work status. They were issued to individuals by their place of work, and it was very difficult for a married couple to arrange to receive two identical vouchers.Footnote 77 In many cases, aspiring family vacationers with a single voucher arrived at their destination en famille, hoping to negotiate places on the spot. “We have an unpleasant picture, especially in summer,” reported a rest home director in 1955. “Papa or mama arrives with children and we won't take them. They raise a fuss, there are tears, pleading, they've spent money already for the trip, they say that the factory committee chairman said, ‘Just go, they won't chase you away.’ But the children cannot be accommodated.”Footnote 78 Even if parents had purchased adult vouchers for their children, they would be refused accommodation.Footnote 79
Soviet health facilities had always been constructed on the principle of sex and age segregation. In the 1950s, most establishments, whether sanatoria, rest homes, or tour bases, lodged their guests in large rooms or tents holding six to twelve people; even married couples had to lodge apart from one another. In more modern facilities in which two-person rooms could accommodate a mother and father, there was no room for children, and the beds were always single and narrow.Footnote 80 The entire regime of the Soviet vacation establishment had been organized around the interests and needs of adults. Children needed their own level of cultural activities, different nutritional norms, and more supervision, insisted health officials.Footnote 81 Other people's children impeded the normal rest of Soviet adults. Nude sunbathing was permissible among adults, but not in the presence of teenagers, and the Yalta resort director reported many complaints on this score. Children and young people were better off with their own age cohorts.Footnote 82
As the polling data suggests, Soviet parents tended not to agree with the experts. Other opinion polls and observers point to the emergence in the late 1950s of a new model of the Soviet family as a primary source of values, of intimacy, and of emotional satisfaction. The importance of psychological closeness between spouses, in particular, received more public support.Footnote 83 For many different reasons, families preferred to spend their annual vacations together, not apart. Some parents would not be able to travel at all unless they could bring their children along. Others actively preferred to spend their holidays together.Footnote 84 Parents and children could bond together over a tourist campfire like in no other setting, wrote a teacher to a Leningrad factory newspaper; the magic of the campfire overcame shyness and encouraged sharing secret thoughts.Footnote 85 As in Western Europe, Soviet citizens also believed that vacationing together strengthened family bonds.Footnote 86
A growing demand for the opportunity for families to vacation together also reflected more assertive Soviet consumers, insisting on the right to choose how they spent their money. “Life has become better, life has become more fun,” said the trade union secretary Shevchenko in 1961 (appropriating the Stalinist slogan of the 1930s). “Laboring people have plenty of money and they can buy a voucher with their own savings.”Footnote 87 The expansion of tourist facilities—especially the tourist-health camps—represented an important concession to consumer demand, since most tourist vouchers could be bought outright for cash. They did not require the intervention of a medical board or an award from the factory committee for hard work.Footnote 88 Increasing access to private automobiles also meant that families could travel south for vacation “in their own car—this is the very best vacation!”Footnote 89 Exposure to alternate vacation regimes in Eastern Europe also fueled a growing demand for family vacations. As Soviet citizens traveled abroad, they noticed that foreigners often vacationed as families in Bulgarian and Romanian health resorts, and they wondered why the same conditions could not obtain at home.Footnote 90 Propaganda celebrated the family vacation. A 1957 poster depicted a father, mother, granny, and two children in a train compartment, sharing a map of Siberia; outside could be seen a broad river and a mountain in the distance, with an airplane overhead. The caption read: “Going on vacation with the whole family.”Footnote 91 And a 1958 documentary film, “On the Tourist Trails of Crimea,” included scenes of a nuclear family happily motoring down to Yalta; even a flat tire could not dampen their spirits. At journey's end, the family drove up to their little cabin at the pension “Primorskaia” (Seaside), happy to begin their vacation.Footnote 92 But the evidence indicates that these Potemkin visions were far from common.
HOW DID THE STATE RESPOND?
By 1960, trade union officials acknowledged that they had to address the growing demand for family vacations, by expanding the number of facilities and by designating a greater proportion of vouchers for cash purchase. Still, the parameters of expansion largely reflected the traditional pattern: the proposed plan for 1960–1965 called for an overall expansion of the capacities of sanatoria, rest homes, and pensions, with more rest homes designated for youth, mothers and children, and pregnant women, categories that had existed since the 1930s. This year, however, special rest homes for families also appeared on the list.Footnote 93 Over the next two decades improvements in facilities and access for families made slow and only grudging progress.
“We need to take in children … life compels us to respond to the desires of the people,” admitted a resort official in 1965, but in the same breath he insisted children were better off in separate facilities.Footnote 94 New types of vacation destinations such as the tourist camps could be more adaptable to family vacations. By the mid-1960s they were replacing their stationary tents with small “Finnish cabins,” each of whose four rooms could accommodate a family.Footnote 95 In addition to the standard volleyball and boating stations, these camps added children's playgrounds to their lists of amenities.Footnote 96 Tourism organizations also tried to respond to the changing demands of Soviet families. While still acknowledging the purists' (“the older generation's”) idea of tourism as “travel with a rucksack on your shoulders,” the head of the trade union tourism administration insisted in 1965 that softer forms of tourism would be more attractive to families and the new model of consuming adults alike: trips on buses, river boats, trains, and by car. Tourist bases needed to replace their tent camps with multistory hotels.Footnote 97
In 1968, eight years after trade union chairman Viktor Grishin had first called for the expansion of family vacation facilities, the Central Trade Union Council once again ordered tourist bases to accommodate parents and their school-age children. Yet the tourist administration director said nothing about family tourism in his 1969 address that seemed to have been a carbon copy of his earlier annual reports. The director of one of six family bases in 1969 criticized the tourism leadership for failing to respond. “In my opinion, this new form of organization of rest—family tourism, deserves much attention and all possible approval. Unfortunately, the report said nothing about it. The desire of parents to rest together with their children is natural.”Footnote 98 The health resort administration pledged in 1972 to expand its places for families and parents and children to 54,000 in the next plan period, up from 28,000 at the end of the 1960s. At a time when the system offered 475,000 places in sanatoria and 320,000 in rest homes, this promised expansion scarcely met the needs of the 45 percent of the population who wished to vacation together with their families. And even now, the health spa administration head warned that any further expansion of family vacations would require “huge preparatory work,” the well-known code for foot-dragging.Footnote 99
Even into the 1970s, despite official instructions from above, tourist administrators would still lament that “it was time” to resolve the question of family tourism, to build new bases that could adapt to the needs of children.Footnote 100 The number of bases and itineraries taking children had expanded by 1974, with 300,000 parents and children traveling on all-union routes. But in the same year, a total of 13,218,000 travelers used tourist base facilities.Footnote 101 Moreover, the pricing structure for tourist vouchers continued to discriminate against the family vacation. The head of the Ukraine tourism council described the case in Yalta in which an “autotourist” arrived at the base, registered his documents, and received his key. Only then did he open his trunk, and “out popped two children, hidden there during the registration process.”Footnote 102
A small number of facilities demonstrated how Soviet tourist bases could be restructured to meet the demand for affordable family vacations. The tourist base in Evpatoriia, on the less fashionable western side of the Crimean peninsula, provided a model for a new “Club Red.” Located near a sandy beach, the base offered greenery, sports, and games for parents and children between the ages of seven and sixteen. Vacationers slept in tents, but the cafeteria provided four meals a day for children, three for their parents. During the days, families could sign up for bus tours to “places of military, revolutionary, and labor glory” (new themes for 1960s tourist itineraries); or they could take trips along the more scenic southern shore of Crimea and learn, with the help of a skilled guide, about the flora, fauna, and military history of the region. During the twenty-day stay, adults and children could participate in overnight hikes of ten to fifteen kilometers and learn tourist skills. Evening activities included literary quizzes, structured debates, sports contests, and films.Footnote 103 Sochi began to build pensions for parents and children in 1968, constructing new high-rise sleeping buildings and offering child-friendly activities such as swimming and crafts lessons, music, hiking, games, and sports. Families dined together three times a day, but with special dishes prepared for the children. Specially trained medical personnel supervised the waterfront. Still in the planning stages in 1976 were a swimming pool, children's dining room, library, and children's amusement park.Footnote 104 Significantly, these concessions to family vacations came only in the form of stationary rest, harkening back to the normative spa vacation of the 1930s. Although Soviet consumers had expressed a strong preference for real (“Oneginesque”) travel, opportunities for organize family tourism, a vacation on the road, remained minimal.
The ability of the Soviet vacation system to accommodate the demand for any kind of family vacations remained extremely limited even into the 1970s. As indicated, many parents tried to circumvent these constraints by showing up at a resort or tour base, with or without an adequate number of vouchers, with or without children hidden in the trunk, hoping for the best. “Whether we like it or not, laboring people are coming here with their families,” acknowledged resort officials in January 1962.Footnote 105 Those without vouchers came as “unorganized” or “wild” vacationers, especially to the seaside resort areas of Crimea and the Black Sea coast. They arrived by train or by car with their families, living in their own tents, or renting rooms from private individuals. In 1960, 1,400,000 people spent their vacations in Crimea, but only 560,000 traveled with a voucher. Sochi welcomed 225,000 laboring people with vouchers, but another 400,000 arrived that summer without reservations.Footnote 106 The Krasnodar region reported that it served 170,000 vacationers on vouchers in 1961, but an additional 1.5 million people came as unorganized vacationers, outside the plan.Footnote 107 Officials recognized their obligation to these unorganized vacationers, who needed somehow to be housed and fed. “The right to a healthy vacation belongs even to those Soviet people who do not manage to receive a voucher—and they are the majority.”Footnote 108 Many towns regulated the private housing market through apartment bureaus, fixed prices, and strict rules about space and facilities. In the Black Sea city of Adler in 1959, for example, the cost of a bed in a private apartment for twenty-eight days would be 170 rubles; children under seven would pay 100 rubles (without their own bed.).Footnote 109
Christian Noack has examined the economies and practices of “wild tourists” in the 1970s, focusing on the Black Sea resort town of Anapa.Footnote 110 Despite the attempts of trade union officials to regulate the rental market there, most vacationers negotiated for lodging privately, using private networks of information to contact reliable or available landlords. Access to food was more difficult to arrange privately. Wild vacationers could shop locally, either paying high prices for provisions at local markets, or queuing interminably at state food stores. Long waits for tables in cafeterias, restaurants, and cafes also characterized the wild tourist experience, especially in the peak summer months of July and August.Footnote 111 Small wonder that opinion polls indicated a strong preference for organized vacation stays, with vouchers that would guarantee meals and lodging, allowing all family members to fully enjoy their time away from home.Footnote 112
CONCLUSION
The head of the Soviet tourism council, A. Kh. Abukov, had to remind his associates in 1969, “We are supposed to serve the tourist, the tourist is not there to serve us. The words ‘no’ and ‘be patient’ must disappear from our lexicon.”Footnote 113 As the Soviet Union evolved from a society predicated on production to one in which the success of socialism was measured by levels of consumption, the role of vacations had changed as well. Vacations had become popularized in the 1930s as a medical respite designed to renew a laborer's work capacity and as a reward for good work. The 1936 constitution turned that reward into a “right.” In the postwar period, the right to rest was promoted as the entitlement of every socialist citizen, but the utilitarian tradition continued to shape the way public health and tourism officials thought about organizing vacations for Soviet people.
The rise in popularity of the family vacation symbolizes the triumph of the idea of popular consumption over purposeful production. Once the vacation was seen as leisure, rather than a necessary element in the reproduction of one's work capability, the state now existed for the consumer, rather than the producer existing for the state. It is worth remembering that the popularity and accessibility of mass family vacations also expanded in Western Europe and the United States at about this same time, but with much less resistance by the state and much more accommodation by private enterprise. The resistance of Soviet state officials to acknowledge the strength of a socialist consumerism is both stunning and symptomatic of long-held prejudices about the role of leisure in a socialist society. Official ideology had preached that leisure should be public, collective, regulated, educational, and morally uplifting. This made concessions to any kind of private life, including all kinds of sexuality, even conjugal, difficult for these officials to contemplate or at least to articulate.
The inability of Soviet officials to respond to the obvious demands for family vacations also illustrates some well-known deficiencies of the command economy. Even if officials wished to overcome the ideology that favored the productive worker over the consuming family, the economy of shortages made innovation difficult: there were no spare resources to experiment with new vacation forms except the most very basic, such as the tourist camps. Fear of failure dictated that officials stayed close to familiar templates: the package tour, expanding the existing forms of leisure travel rather than diversifying the range (and the cost) of what was available. Even in 1983, Abukov could write that the eleventh five-year plan would develop family tourism as “a new, progressive form of the organization of the rest of laboring people, which has huge social and educational significance.”Footnote 114 In fact, his annual reports repeated almost verbatim the achievements and problems he had announced in years before; only the examples selected for shame changed each year. Capital construction received much more attention than improving services. The preference for monumental architecture and the idea that Soviet resorts should be showplaces of socialism required that new construction be grandiose, expensive, and inefficient.Footnote 115 Central control was designed to produce economies of scale, but the ability to respond to local conditions became a casualty of this process. Centralized plans for tour base and resort construction received scathing criticism for their lack of variety and imagination.Footnote 116 Central control over resources led to irresponsible local implementation: the vacation industry became one more locus of the “dolgostroiki”—unfinished construction projects—of the late Soviet period. Admissions of construction delays appear throughout official discussions in the late 1960s and 1970s, and one needs only to fly into today's Sochi-Adler airport to see a legacy of Soviet tourism planning: the half-built “new” terminal, abandoned since the mid-1980s.Footnote 117
The Soviet vacation had begun in the spirit of mobilization, a triumphal benefit of state socialism that reaped even greater benefits for the state as a whole: the recuperated worker ready to resume production. The producer state gave way to a consumer society in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Soviet consumer gained significant economic power and some freedom of choice in the prosperous postwar years. In the realm of vacations, including family vacations, these choices remained constrained by the pattern established in the utilitarian years of industrial mobilization: the normative, capital-intensive, medicalized, stationary, and individual Soviet holiday.
