Olga I. Sekenova

PhD student of the Center for Gender Studies of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology RAS

The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology RAS

(Moscow, Russia)

Abstract. The article focuses on the sanatorium-resort recreation of the Soviet researchers as the element of leisure in everyday life of the Soviet academic community in 1920 – 1960-ies. The author analyses how the sanatorium-resort system of the Academy of Science have changed in response to contemporary challenges, how the recreation of the researchers was organized, which practices of leisure time were typical for the vacationers. Using the papers of the Academy of Science and the ego-documents of the Soviet historians (personal correspondence, memoirs, diaries, poetry) it is possible to characterize the contingent of the Academy of Science resorts, the process of getting the vouchers to the resorts, material privileges that were available for recreating researchers and the other elements of the academic everyday life. The sanatoriums of the Academy of Sciences, created on the initiative of TSEKUBU (the Central Commission for Improving the Life of Scientists), became one of the most important ways of material encouraging for scientific workers in the USSR. The humanities scientists of the 1920s – 1930s could not dream of going on vacation abroad, so a voucher to a Soviet sanatorium of the TSEKUBU system (and later, the USSR Academy of Sciences) saw them as the best opportunity to experience "the bourgeois rest", escape from professional problems, look aside in memories with old friends and professional like-minded people. Nevertheless, the contingent of sanatoriums of the USSR Academy of Sciences was not limited to scientists and their family members. The special status of these sanatoriums, their "elitism", and the unique atmosphere of intellectual communication forced representatives of other professions to strive for these rest homes. The ability to "get" a ticket to a specialized sanatorium or a holiday home for scientists, or, on the contrary, the ability to lobby the interests of the sanatorium in the government became valuable assets of the Soviet informal economy, a way to obtain other valuable services. Leisure of scientists in sanatoriums in 1920 – 1930 was organized by the vacationers themselves (they organized public lectures, concerts, hikes and excursions), later this function gradually passed to the administration of sanatoriums and rest homes.
Keywords: everyday life, leisure, sanatoriums, Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, TSEKUBU.

Full text of the article (PDF)

*The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 19-09-00191.

For citation:Sekenova, OI 2020, ‘Historians on vacances: everyday life of Tsekubu and Academy of Science sanatoriums in 1920 – 1960-ies’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 3 (3), pp. 39–50, URL: http://tula-vestnik.ru/pdf/2020/vipusk_3_20_12_20.pdf (in Russ.)

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