Hotel enterprises in Nizhny Novgorod in 1918-1939.

Today, in the context of the transformation of the services market and the acquisition of the status of a mature industry by the hospitality sector, the issue of preserving the national identity of the hotel business is becoming more and more urgent. The domestic hotel industry faced a number of economic and political risks in the context of the global crisis. Often, foreign companies "freeze" or sell their assets in the hotel industry of our country. The result was that the development of the Russian hotel market, which was not characterized by high dynamics and in favorable economic conditions, has become even more complicated in the current conditions. At the same time, the investments that still come to the hotel industry are directed primarily to the development and construction of new hotels, and not to the modernization of existing facilities. Therefore, the situation in many ways resembles the situation in the hotel industry of the late 1920s and 1930s, where the main indicator of development was the volume and pace of hotel construction.

The subject of the research in this article is the hotel industry of Nizhny Novgorod in 1918-1939. At the same time, by a hotel we will understand a property complex designed to provide accommodation services for travelers (a house with furnished rooms or rooms for visitors, as well as inns for peasants).

The process of formation and development of the hotel industry in the USSR in the interwar period is devoted to the works of both Soviet historians, for example, B. Halperstein ^[1], I. Ananov ^[2], L. A. Velikhov ^[3], Ryskulov ^[4], B. I. Koldomasov and I. I. Vereshchakovsky ^[5], and modern researchers.

Among modern scientists, it is particularly worth highlighting the works of I. Orlova and E. V. Yurchikova "Mass tourism in Stalinist everyday life" ^[6], A. A. Gumenyuk "Everyday life of Volga region cities during the NEP years" ^{[7, pp. 83-92]}, N. B. Lebina "Encyclopedia of banalities" ^[8].

The issues of the history of the formation of the USSR hotel industry in the 1920s and 1930s are considered in the dissertation study by E. I. Korneeva ^[9], as well as in the dissertation by M. D. Kressova devoted to the study of the functioning of the Intourist hotel industry in the 1930s ^[10]

  The activities of regional hotel enterprises in the first decades of Soviet power can be studied only through careful work with the funds of local archives. The materials presented in this article make it possible to involve the data of the Central Archive of the Nizhny Novgorod Region (hereinafter - TSANO) and the State Socio-Political Archive of the Nizhny Novgorod Region (hereinafter – GOP NO) in scientific circulation.

 One of the factors that had a great impact on the work of the Soviet hotel industry was the dilapidated state of the hotel sector by October 1917. To overcome the crisis, the authorities are nationalizing and municipalizing hotels, as a result of which some enterprises were closed, others moved to the category of residential buildings, and others were given over to the placement of senior personnel of the new government. For example, the Astoria Hotel in Petrograd became the location of the Petrograd Soviet, and the National Hotel in Moscow housed the Soviet government after moving from Petrograd.

The situation developed similarly in Nizhny Novgorod. At the end of 1917, the following hotel enterprises were operating in Nizhny Novgorod: 29 hotels with rooms for visitors; 25 inns for peasants; 21 apartment buildings renting furnished rooms for a long time ^[11].

Houses with furnished rooms were most often located on Blagoveshchenskaya, Rozhdestvenskaya, Dvoryanskaya, Alexandrovskaya, and the Embankment of the Oka River.

Hotels with rooms for visitors were mainly concentrated in the Fair area (Tsarskaya, Strelochnaya, Orenburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Okskaya embankment, Volzhskaya Embankment). 

The inns were geographically located in Nagorny Lane, on B. Yamskaya Street, the Embankment of the Oka River, on Pochainskaya Street, on Zelensky Congress, on Ilyinsky Congress, Rozhdestvenskaya Street.

There were also lodging houses in Nizhny Novgorod. Kozhevennaya Street, formerly Zhivonosnovskaya, an integral part of the Millionka, was a place where up to one and a half thousand poor people who did not have their own homes lived in the first decade of the twentieth century. There were nine lodging houses on this street. The most popular were bed-and-lodging apartments in the house of G. I. Raspopov (Kozhevennaya str., 14a) and in the house of I. I. Brylin (Kozhevennaya str., 12).

On Rozhdestvenskaya str., 2 there was a "Bugrovskaya nochlezhka", built in 1880 by a representative of the famous Bugrov merchant dynasty and was designed for 450 seats for men and 45 seats for women. The degree of demand for a night shelter is indicated by the fact that in 1912 276 thousand 355 people spent the night in it. ^{[9, c. 6]}. Using the example of the inhabitants of flophouses, Maxim Gorky wrote the immortal images of the heroes of the play "At the Bottom".

Thus, by the end of 1917, a sufficient number of hotel enterprises of various levels were operating in Nizhny Novgorod, capable of accommodating up to 200 thousand people. About as many guests came to Nizhny Novgorod annually during the Fair. But in 1918 the situation changed dramatically.

By the summer of 1918, a large number of migrants and refugees from the central and western regions of the country had accumulated at the Nizhny Novgorod railway station, heading for Siberia, which was closed at that time for travel. Unable to rent premises in inns or hotels, they were forced to live in railway wagons at the station. There were dozens of such refugees in wagons. They posed a danger to the city both in terms of fire (they set bonfires for cooking and heating on railway tracks) and in terms of sanitation (many diseases developed among them, mainly acute gastrointestinal and even cholera). The technical and economic commission of the railway proposed to the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Commissioner to open staging and distribution points for refugees, which was not fulfilled due to the insufficient number of available areas for living ^[12].

This was due to the fact that a number of hotel enterprises were closed, others housed new government authorities, and others were transferred to hospitals for wounded Red Army soldiers. Thus, the furnished rooms of the petty bourgeois Elistratov on Alekseevskaya Street in the Melnikov house were closed in April 1918 for criminal reasons (as a thieves' den) and transferred to permanent residents for resettlement ^[13]. In the summer of 1918, the Soviet City Council requisitioned the rooms of Khanykina (located on the embankment of the Nizhny Bazaar) for the fuel department of the Nizhny Novgorod State Economic Council ^{[14, l. 70]}.  The Lion Hotel was requisitioned by a flying detachment of the Red Army for its own needs ^{[14, l. 58]}. And an infirmary was opened in the Lux Hotel ^[15].

On October 1, 1918, the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of August 20, 1918 on the abolition of the right of private ownership of real estate came into force ^[16]. In Nizhny Novgorod, the process of full municipalization and nationalization of dormitories, hotels and furnished rooms begins. Already in the spring of 1919, the Trade Union of employees of the Nizhny Novgorod tavern industry, summing up the first results of its activities, notes that the Soviet government is "gradually destroying the legacy of a multimillion-dollar economy that occurs among dormitories and hotels" ^{[17, l. 35]}.

The reasons for this are, firstly, the lack of a unified plan for the municipalization and nationalization of hotel enterprises, which leads to such negative results as "theft of inventory and ruin in the business of dormitories and hotels" ^{[17, l. 35]}. Plus, the "epidemic of requisition of rooms, restaurants, etc." causes an increase in the number of unemployed, forcing the Trade Union of employees of the Nizhny Novgorod tavern industry to ask the Requisition Department of the City Council first of all to "requisition private houses and only as a last resort to requisition rooms and hotels" ^{[17, L. 71]}.

Secondly, administrative pressure is increasing. Thus, according to the Decree of the Nizhny Novgorod Soviet Council of June 5, 1918, the owners of hotels, rooms, furnished rooms were obliged to transfer to the income of Nizhny Novgorod a monthly 10% fee from the amount of income received ^{[18, L. 26]}. Since August 8, 1918, a pass regime has been introduced to enter the territory of Nizhny Novgorod. Homeowners, tenants of houses, apartments and rooms, managers and managers of government and public buildings, were forbidden to provide housing and register visitors who did not have the appropriate permission ^{[18, L. 47]}. Those guilty of violating the Regulations were fined or administratively arrested.

All this leads to the fact that the owners of hotel enterprises simply begin to close their businesses. This reaches such a scale that the Trade Union of employees of the Nizhny Novgorod tavern industry, in its charter of 1918, demands that the owners of enterprises not allow closure without a valid reason. If the enterprise is closed "for malicious purposes, then the Union may not allow this" ^{[14, l. 3]}. To do this, it is proposed "to organize local working control over all types of dormitories through local working committees and the introduction of their representatives to the bodies in charge of dormitories and hotels and managing them" ^{[17, L. 35]}.

But these measures did not help much in the development of hotel enterprises. The situation changed only in the mid-1920s.

In the Soviet literature of the 1920s and 30s, there was no unified and more or less clear understanding of the place and importance of hotel enterprises in the general system of urban economy. Some authors wrote about the revival of the communal services of the USSR during the NEP years ^[1], others, on the contrary, wrote critical articles pointing to "gaping gaps in the hotel business" and the "extreme insufficiency" of operated hotels, even in the capital of our homeland – Moscow ^[19]. The situation with hotel companies in provincial towns was even worse.

The most popular hotel-type establishments in Soviet Russia are the "Peasant Houses". By 1928, there were more than 400 of them working in the RSFSR alone. In addition to the opportunity to spend the night, the peasants additionally received the services of inexpensive food, baths, newspaper reading, political information and legal assistance ^{[7, p. 65]}.

In Nizhny Novgorod, the Peasant's House has been operating since 1925 (order No. 5 of the Presidium of the Nizhny Novgorod Gubernatorial Executive Committee dated 01/13/1925) ^[20]. The provincial "Peasant's House" received a 2-storey stone building from the Gubkommunotdel, at the corner of Alekseevskaya and Osypnaya streets. The building was dilapidated in its condition, as repairs had not been carried out for decades. The "Peasant's House" had 37 separate rooms equipped for 110 people ^{[21, l.1]}. In 1926, the hostel and the visiting yard of the "Peasant's House" served peasants – 30 thousand 76 people; Soviet employees – 5 thousand 966 people, i.e. a total of 36 thousand 42 people ^{[21, l.102).  By 1929, the company already had self-financing: 1) a dormitory, 2) a driving yard (for 247 beds), 3) a tea buffet, 4) a kitchen and 5) a feed shop. It was served: 1) peasants and demobilized Red Army soldiers – 16,892 people; 2) Soviet employees of the volost scale – 5,500 people; 3) Soviet employees of the county scale – 4,400 people; 4) participants of congresses and conferences and others – 22,316 people. In total – 49 thousand 108 people [22]}.

Thus, we see that by the 1930s the main contingent of the "Peasant's House" were Soviet employees arriving in the city on official business, which confirms the acute shortage of hotel rooms. Hotels in Nizhny Novgorod often refused to accommodate due to lack of available places, while even bathrooms and utility rooms could be used to accommodate a guest. The reason for this situation was the permanent underfunding of enterprises, hence the deterioration of the material base and the low level of service.

The situation was no better in the hotels where foreign guests stayed. Since 1925, delegations of German, British, and Czechoslovak workers have been coming to Nizhny Novgorod, who were accommodated in the best hotel in the city ^[23]. Representatives of the Western intelligentsia also visited our city. So, the American writer Theodore Dreiser, who visited the USSR in 1927, described his stay in Nizhny Novgorod: "Our New Russia hotel turned out to be next to a beautiful square called Sovetskaya. The square adjoins the walls and towers of the Kremlin, and in its center stands a beautiful white church with silver domes. But at the hotel we got two stuffy, ragged rooms. Mine was especially impressive: soft black armchairs and a sofa gave it the appearance of a gambling hall."^[24]

In the documents of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the issues of improving the hotel industry were considered as part of the general plan for the socialist reconstruction of cities ^[25] and "systematic restructuring of everyday life on socialist principles" ^[26].

Since the beginning of the first five-year plan (1928-1932), a campaign has been unfolding in the country to radically change the public utilities sector on the part of party, state and economic bodies. First of all, it was necessary to shorten the construction time of communal facilities and reduce the cost of work ^[27]. Thus, in terms of the growth rate of capital investments in the years of the first five-year plan, the hotel industry lagged significantly behind other branches of public utilities, including bathing, plumbing and sewerage ^{[28, pp. 7-10]}.

As a result, by July 1, 1932, there were only 842 hotels for 1,583 settlements in the USSR ^{[28, p. 6]}. At the same time, communal hotels have retained a number of significant disadvantages. Thus, in the Resolution of the Commission of Execution under the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR No. 19 "On the condition of hotels in Gorky, Ivanovo and Ufa" dated May 25, 1933, it is indicated that the sanitary condition of hotels and the quality of food in canteens and buffets does not meet accepted standards ^[29]. Bedbugs, cockroaches and dirt in the rooms were commonplace. Furniture (tables, chairs, hangers) and bed linen were sorely lacking. The hotels could not even "provide visitors with an uninterrupted supply of boiling water." There was no cultural service for the guests (radio, newspapers, magazines, chess, etc.). The hotels were extremely overcrowded, individual rooms were turned into solid bunks ^[30].

To improve the situation, it was necessary, firstly, to achieve the liberation of hotels from permanent residents and institutions. Thus, the hotel on Blagoveshchenskaya Street was not operated by the Nizhny Novgorod Municipal Trust of Economic Enterprises, due to the fact that all rooms were occupied as a dormitory for NSU students. It was possible to put the hotel into operation only in 1931 ^{[31, l. 3]}.

Secondly, it was equally important to prevent the further use of the hotel fund for other purposes, which was much more difficult to achieve. For example, in 1936, the Lux Hotel was transferred to the Opera House as apartments for artists ^[32], and in another hotel "engineers from the Automobile Plant lived permanently, whom there was no way to evict" ^[33].

Thirdly, new hotels need to be built urgently. In 1932 Nizhny Novgorod was renamed Gorky. Considering the growing importance of Gorky as an industrial center of the Soviet Union, attracting the attention of foreign tourists from all over the world, since the early 1930s, the Government of the USSR has been turning Gorky from a transit point into a point of permanent tourism, where every tourist had to have a stop for at least one day ^[34].

In the 1930s, three hotels were built in the city together with Intourist: Volna on Lenin Avenue, Intourist on Teatralnaya Square and the Rossiya Hotel on Verkhnevolzhskaya Embankment. These were already high-class hotels.

The Volna Hotel was founded in 1933 according to the project of Gorky architect Vladimir Orelsky. In July 1936, the hotel was already hosting its first guests. "One hundred and five rooms of the hotel are tastefully furnished with beautiful and expensive English furniture. There are all conditions for recreation and work: a hairdresser, a solarium, a billiard room, rest rooms where residents can read newspapers, books, play the piano and chess. Staying at the Volna Hotel is considered very prestigious," the newspapers of the 1930s wrote ^[35]. The Chaika restaurant was opened at the hotel, which immediately became very popular. During the year, on average, about 10 thousand people lived in the hotel, among whom were mainly: Heroes of the Soviet Union, politicians, outstanding artists, foreign guests, who came a lot during the construction and launch of the GAS ^[36].

The five-storey building of the Intourist Hotel (later Moscow) was built in 1933-1935 according to the project of Moscow architects A.Z. Grinberg and M.T. Smurov ^[37]. The authorship of A.Z. Grinberg also belongs to the project of the Rossiya hotel, built at the same time on the Verkhnevolzhskaya embankment, 2a. These were typical buildings of the Stalin era, combining elements of Empire and constructivism. All floors were allocated for rooms, among which single and double rooms, suites and apartments prevailed. There was a restaurant on the ground floor. The Rossiya Hotel had an observation deck at the top of the building, which was visited as part of sightseeing routes ^[38].

Thus, if the problem with the accommodation of foreign guests in Gorky, at least partially, was solved, then for ordinary Soviet citizens, checking into a hotel was still a difficult matter. The situation is aggravated by the fact that since the second half of the 1930s, the country has been reducing hotel construction and even closing existing hotels, both in regional cities and in district ones. Compared with the beginning of the 1930s, the country's hotel fund was reduced by half. The hotel stock of district centers decreased especially strongly (by about three-quarters) ^{[9, p. 18]}. In Gorky at the end of the 1930s, 11 hotels were registered (with a capacity of 138 thousand 502 rooms/day), of which only 7 were operating. The rest were under repair or were transferred to other needs ^{[31, l. 6]}. In addition, the "Peasant's House" with branches and a Night Shelter continued to function. Despite the work done to restore and develop the hotel industry in the 1920s and 1930s, the city's room stock remained at a very low level, both in terms of room availability and the level of service provided.