Discovering the Weekend in Russia

FIFTY years after the Bolshevik revolution, the Russians finally achieved the two-day weekend. With it, they raised a problem long ago solved by Americans: what to do with the extra day. Naturally the Soviets seek a Marxist-Leninist solution. "We have nothing against your supermarkets and all your material facilities for leisure time," says Sergei Vishnevsky, a Pravda editor with long experience in the U.S. "But they have to be combined with high standards of culture, which your middle classes do not have. Material facilities are dead without the supreme blessing of culture."

Soviet officials encourage the new leisured masses to strive for kulturnost, or "cultivated behavior," which includes not only good manners and respect for learning but observance of the elementary rules of hygiene and sanitation as well. "Free time does not amount to idleness," warns Sociologist G. S. Petrosian. "It is the time devoted to study, the raising of [occupational] qualifications, self-education and self-development." As Pravda puts it with typical elephantine grace, "To care about the cultural recreation of the people is, above all, to ensure the conditions making it possible for the working people to spend their free time in such a way as to raise their general cultural and professional level, to improve [themselves] physically and esthetically."

No Hockey Sticks. Moscow has begun an ambitious building program for leisure-time sport centers, including an Olympic-size saltwater pool. "Our goal," explains Anatoly Eremin, chairman of the Moscow City Council of Sports Societies, "is to provide a sport center for each collective of workers from 500 to 1,000 people." Official spending on hotels and other travel facilities has more than doubled since 1966, and travel is cheap when arranged through the Trade Union Council's group tours.

Yet results are mixed at best, reports TIME'S Moscow Correspondent Jerrold Schecter. The extra day has piled 10 million extra people on top of the 18 million already using the council's facilities. The demand for sports goods has grown so great that hockey sticks disappeared from the shelves of Moscow's stores this winter. There is still a two-to three-year wait for new automobiles, and drivers who plan a long trip must load up with food and extra gas before setting out, since there are few service stations and no motels and restaurants outside the cities.

Out to the Country. New ski hotels in the Caucasus attract rising young bureaucrats and party officials, and diners-out in Moscow can see an elaborate floor show at the huge Arbat restaurant, with gypsy dancing, jugglers and magicians. Yet long lines are still a feature of Moscow life; they form daily outside the Georgian-style Aragvi restaurant and the popular Seventh Heaven, a new yet already shabby revolving restaurant 700 ft. up the 1,600-ft.-high Moscow television tower. The Bolshoi Theater is sold out weeks in advance, and outside the Moscow Circus people queue up in hopes of last-minute cancellations. No wonder the two-day weekend touched off a round of heavy drinking that alarmed officials and brought out the preacher in newspaper editors.

The most welcome new diversion brought by the five-day week is the country weekend. Ten years ago, Muscovites could not understand why Stockholm and other Western capitals emptied out every weekend. Now everyone who can gets out of town, going to dachas in the neighboring countryside or to hastily winterized summer camps for a cheap weekend of cross-country skiing. The two-day weekend also means more time for old-fashioned hobbies such as stamp collecting and chess. Televised soccer and hockey games are popular, and a few privileged children have even taken up gocart racing. Winter and summer, Muscovites splash in the open-air Moskva swimming pool built on the site of a prerevolutionary cathedral.

Mushroom Pickinq. The home remains the center of Russian life, and old-fashioned family visits and parties are an important leisure-time activity. So are mushroom-picking expeditions and visits to the banya, the traditional Russian bathhouse built in czarist times and still found in many districts. It may or may not be kulturnost, but a visit to the banya's steam rooms, barbers and masseurs is a ritual that can take half a day and restore the soul.

Nobody seems to make better use of the five-day week than the young. On a Saturday in summer, the banks of the Moscow River are crowded with young couples strolling and kissing. Even in winter there are ways to beat the restrictions imposed by the chronic housing shortage. The usual way has been to borrow the flat of a friendly couple who are going to the theater or the ballet for an evening, but leisure inspires variations. This past winter one enterprising young man booked a first-class compartment for himself and his girl friend on the Red Arrow express to Leningrad. The trip was expensive, but it took all night, and after a day of sightseeing in Leningrad, there was another long night on the train before getting back to the crowded family flat.

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