Vacations in the Soviet Union

Happy May Day! Here's a Twitter thread [0] that has excerpts/paraphrases from an old Soviet pamphlet called "How Soviet Workers Spend Their Leisure." (rolled up version [1])

You can find a scanned version of the pamphlet here [2]. There were many of these pamphlets published. One day I will scan them and post them. There was one on Waterways & Transport in the USSR, one about Soviet theater, one about the food industry in the USSR, one about light industries of the USSR, and one about the countryside of past and present of the USSR. I think these were a series published in 1939.

Article 119 of the Soviet Constitution:

> ARTICLE 119. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to rest and leisure.

>

> The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the reduction of the working day to seven hours for the overwhelming majority of the workers, the institution of annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes and clubs for the accommodation of the working people.

'Sanatoria' being health/medical centers or hospitals.

[0]: https://twitter.com/REVMAXXING/status/1594499770990608385

[1]: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1594499770990608385.html

[2]: https://digital.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/show/4595#?c=...

Growing up in USSR, my mother would take us for a summer in some mountains/vacation destination and work there as a guide. One time in Kandalaksha gulf in White Sea near Murmansk she was a wilderness guide for a few rounds of tourists from elsewhere in Soviet Union for a 8 day hiking in mountains/sailing on the White Sea trip. We had such wide range of people - from experienced outdoors people to the elderly pensioners who were hardly mobile. It was wild, remote with sun endlessly circling and never setting, salmon fishing in rivers/herring fishing in the White Sea. I got to see a nuclear sub float by once, and we came by a remote nuclear-powered remote listening station festooned with antennas, but otherwise it was really remote.

Since then and until recently most people go to Turkey, though. White Sea was hypothermia inducing within a minute even in the height of July.

>It encouraged workers to vacation with groups of relative strangers as opposed to their friends and families.

maybe it's just because I don't have much of a social circle, but this seems appealing to me.

The delta is very much _not_ negligible. Even people’s apartments were not in their property. No private business allowed, all production was government-managed. It is difficult to understand how USSR worked, unless you lived there.

Examples?