Above: One wing of the Mishkor Sanatorium, on the Crimean Peninsula,
as seen from within another wing.
Is this what Marx had in mind when he imagined a society in which citizens
could be bricklayers in the morning and poets in the afternoon? Are these
peeling hallways and oppressive, repetitive forms the apotheosis of leisure
in a world ruled at one time by the most brutal necessity? Is this what
Vladimir Tatlin had in mind when he designed the Monument for the Third
Communist International? Or are these sanatorium-spas, brought to us by
the English photographer Jason Oddy, more like Walt Disney's utopia: a place
where pleasure is regulated, everyone knows your name (or at least your
status in the nomenklatura), and what's inside the gates is not so
much an escape from what's outside as a reverse image of it shaped by paranoia
and political purpose?
The modern spirit--capitalist or communist--has proven ruthlessly ambivalent.
Like the Roman god Janus, it looks backward and forward, nostalgic for an
ordered past yet eager to forge a conditionless, unaffiliated future.
In the former Soviet Union every institution had a Janus face, retrograde
and progressive, and each institution had its peculiar double. These sanatoriums
tell us of modernity's vacillation, and Oddy meticulously delivers them
in all their mysterious banality. What they only hint at is their own double,
the gulag. And like Dostoyevsky's Mr. Golyadkin spotting his alter ego on
the streets of St. Petersburg, any spa-goer looking in the mirror was likely
to see a potential convict staring back.
Recuperative spas and prison colonies grew up simultaneously as an interlocking
system of reward and punishment for the new Soviet state. Both were appropriated
wholesale from the czars and expanded. Many of the sanatoriums that clustered
around the cities of Yalta and Odessa on the comparatively balmy Black Sea
had been palaces and resorts, converted for the health of the glorious workers.
The czars' prison camps lay thousands of miles away, in the taiga of Siberia.
Under Stalin both spas and prisons swelled. By the time the "Evil Empire"
collapsed, there were some 2,500 spas across the country, capable of serving
more than half a million people. They housed not only those recuperating
from epidemic TB but predominately party workers, officials, and trade
union members "rewarded" with three weeks of vacation, all expenses
paid.
Above: Other Mishkor facilities include the changing cabins (left)
on the esplanade. Also on the peninsula, construction on the
Dzhemyet Sanatorium (right) began in the late 1980s but was
never completed.
The spas represent what historian David Shipler has called the "archipelago
of privilege," the perks of a party hierarchy that replaced and mirrored
the old class system. The KGB had the best spots; the Odessa Sanatorium
still caters to a security elite, the Ukrainian Secret Service. Amenities
for the apparatchik include a gigantic lecture hall, dusty plush carpeting,
and TVs that occasionally work, like some Catskills Borscht Belt relic (the
old Nevele, maybe). The prison camps--dubbed the "gulag archipelago"
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn--filled with political undesirables, many
of whom once frequented these same spas. Their numbers reached the millions
before the political thaw of the 1960s. TB was rampant there, too.
Pleasure was a problem in these palaces, just as it is in Disney World.
Too much pleasure for too long was potentially destabilizing; segregation
by social or party function was necessary and continuous surveillance essential.
Guard towers replaced lifeguard stands on the beaches, lest Turkey should
beckon from 200 miles away. Dalliances, dancing, and drinking were expected,
but there was a 9 p.m. curfew. As long as the state knew where and when,
the what didn't much matter. In Orlando and Anaheim no curfew is necessary:
the rides are calculated down to the minute for maximum circulation, keeping
visitors on an endless circuit until the money runs out. The lagoon in Orlando
is not for swimming.
