Whose Right to Rest? Contesting the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union

摘要

The idea of leisure and vacations in the Soviet Union at first glance suggests anparadox. As a system based on the labor theory of value, the USSR emphasizednproduction as the foundation of wealth, personal worth, and the path to ansociety of abundance for all. Work—physical or mental—was the obligationnof all citizens. But work took its toll on the human organism, and along withncreating the necessary incentives and conditions for productive labor a socialistnsystem would also include reproductive rest as an integral element of itsneconomy. The eight-hour work day, a weekly day off from work, and annannual vacation constituted the triad of restorative and healthful restnopportunities in the emerging Soviet system of the 1920s and 1930s.