Diane P. Koenker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The "Right to Rest": Postwar Vacations in the Soviet Union
March 13, 2008
Abstract
The normative Soviet vacation arose from a belief that the primary purpose of vacation was therapeutic, to help individual working people recover from the exertions of work. So the Soviet vacation was originally meant to be taken alone. Yet among Soviet citizens, there was strong sentiment in favor of families vacationing together. Looking at the Soviet family vacation in the 1950s and 1960s, this paper argues that the issue of vacations underlines fundamental ambivalences about the role of the family in the Soviet Union; that discussions of family vacations illustrate the tension in postwar Soviet life between production and consumption, between state interests and citizens' interests; and it shows how the Soviet economic system inhibited innovative responses to consumer demand. Late into the Soviet period, vacation choices remained constrained by the pattern established in the early years of industrial mobilization: the capital-intensive, medicalized, stationary, and solo Soviet holiday.