In the Soviet Union, the government regulated almost every aspect of life. Censors decided which books could be published. Comedians had to submit material for approval before they could step behind a mic. Failing to applaud a speech by Joseph Stalin could get a person arrested. So could listening to bootlegged copy of the Beatles.
Even where, when, and with whom you would vacation was determined by the Communist Party.
In the West, what you do when you leave the office was and is your own business. In the USSR, it was everyone else’s. That fact drove Soviet policy toward time off for the better part of a century, starting in 1922, with the establishment of the Soviet Labor Code. It offered workers 18 years and older a minimum of two weeks paid time off per year; those under 18 were allotted a full month. If illness or emergency prevented a person from taking their vacation, they could punt their time to the next year.
The Soviet Union introduced paid time off well before other industrialized countries. France did not bestow this right until 1936; Great Britain followed two years later. Last was the United States, where PTO remained a luxury reserved for the middle and upper class until the end of the Second World War and where it remains controversial.
However, what truly set the Soviet Union apart in its approach to paid time off was that it also provided ways for workers to fill up that time and with whom to do so. It encouraged workers to vacation with groups of relative strangers as opposed to their friends and families. They were all part of a collective and that umbrella united them. In the Soviet Union, after all, the collective—not the family—was the most important social unit. Under Stalin, the state constructed summer resorts and tourism bases throughout the region. Each year, a limited number of accommodations at these locations were offered at a reduced cost or—in some cases—free of charge to one in every ten Soviet workers.
At first, the Soviet Labor Code and the domestic tourism industry it spawned were hailed by Party members as shining examples of socialist superiority and hints of the bright future awaiting the country’s hardworking citizens. But as time went on, the communist ideology that shaped the Soviet vacation came into conflict with the consumerist behavior holidays inevitably promote.
As members of a collective, citizens were expected to spend their free time in a manner the government and its leading theorists considered beneficial to society as whole, regardless of an individual’s preferences.
In the wake of the October Revolution in 1917 and Civil War, leisure became associated with laziness—a quality of bourgeois existence the Bolsheviks wanted to eradicate. As the country industrialized, it became evident workers needed time away from the job if they were to remain productive when they were on it. Leisure, writes Lawrence Whetten, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, “became a social responsibility as well as a constitutional right.”
The state used leisure as incentive. Decrees from 1930 and 1937 gave three additional days of paid time off to workers who completed two years of uninterrupted employment. These edicts were part of the Stakhanovite movement, a propaganda campaign named for the miner Alexei Stakhanov who was celebrated internationally for mining more than 14 times his quota of ore. The campaign encouraged people to follow suit and go above and beyond their regular responsibilities.
A 1947 issue of the trade union daily Trud cited by Edmund Nash, of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reports that when distributing discounted accommodations at resorts, preference was given to workers with continuous service and record-breaking performance, as well as to invalids of the Great Patriotic War. A survey of Soviet family budgets, meanwhile, finds higher earners were also given larger vacation payments.
While all Soviet citizens were entitled to paid time off, only a small numbe
