Tired and overstrained political workers enjoy the good life in 1930s Soviet Russia
Kuznetsov's mansion in Foros, Crimea. Photograph uncredited
It was in the summer of 1935 that I spent a month in Foros, loveliest of all the Crimean holiday resorts. The journey by car from Sevastopol, [sic] where the railway line ends, was hot and dusty, the last forty miles or so climbing steeply up narrow mountain roads, overhanging dizzy precipices, turning and twisting in wicked hairpin bends. The Germans will have found them awkward in their recent headlong flight! Wherever the eye turned there were prosperous-looking vineyards, tended by sturdy, sunburnt men and women, mainly of Tartar stock, who seemed completely unperturbed by the blazing sun.
Our destination was a rest-home in what had once been the pleasure resort of Kuznetsov, one of the pre-revolutionary millionaires in the porcelain and china industry. Every stick and stone necessary for the construction of this great mansion had been brought by sea and carried on the backs of the Tartar labourers up the precipitous cliffs. Built of white marble and surrounded by magnificently terraced grounds, the house was a repository for a collection of great works of art, pictures, statues, almost priceless vases and ornaments, period furniture, and exquisite mosaics. The linen dust-covers still shrouded the tapestry of the Louis-Quinze chairs and the parquet floors gleamed as spotlessly as ever they had in Kuznetsov's day.
To this rest-home came mainly administrative and political workers who were not, strictly speaking, ill but tired and overstrained. Life was strenuous in the Soviet Union in 1935. The Second Five-year Plan was in full swing. Not easily did the Soviet people develop the heavy industry and modernised collective agriculture which has proved the decisive factor in defeating the Nazi war machine. Blood, toil, tears, and sweat went into the miracle of Socialist construction. How utterly exhausted and worn out they looked, these men and women on whose shoulders fell the main burden of coping with difficulties which to the outside world seemed insurmountable. Within a week they were new people. Good food, fresh air, abundant sunshine, regular hours, and the atmosphere of calm serenity all did their work. Many couples brought their children with them. They ate in a separate children's dining-room with special food, prepared under a trained children's dietician.
There were separate bathing stations for men and women, and we all swam and sunbathed naked. By 7 a.m. there was always a crowd, and down would come the woman doctor, with her bath thermometer, and solemnly take the temperature of the sea. If it was on the chilly side mothers were advised only to let the children run in for a duck and a splash, then out to play in the sand and sunbathe. A little warmer and "Five minutes in the water to-day." But usually it was so warm that they splashed in and out of the sea at will for as long as they liked.
The midday meal ended about 2 p.m., and from then until four o'clock everybody disappeared to his room, and silence fell. This was the only rule of the rest-home - the siesta from 2 to 4 p.m. Not that there was any temptation to break it. Rocks, terraces, lawns, and flower-beds lay scorching in a haze of heat. The only sign of life came from the gardeners, who in broad-brimmed straw hats operated the hoses; the only sound the cool splash of water, continuously flowing to prevent this oasis of grass and flowers from degenerating into the scrub and desert from which it had originally sprung.
What has happened to Kuznetsov's beautiful mansion? Beyond doubt it has been left nothing but a shell; all the beautiful art treasures, so carefully and proudly cared for by the Soviet people, sent back to Germany in a vain attempt to bring "culture" to the sitting-rooms of the Fritzes and Hans and Karls; the gracious terraces churned up by shell-fire. Gone like the smoke is the peace, the calm, the health-giving serenity of Foros. Foros is now a battlefield.