In 1884, the town of Anapa and the villages of Varvarovka and Pavlovka were transferred to the Kuban Oblast.
Until 1885, authority belonged to the police administration headed by the police chief. In that same year, 1885, “simplified municipal administration” was introduced in Anapa. The first town elder appointed was retired staff captain Ivan Dmitrievich Tolmazov. From the late 1890s, the Anapa Public Assembly existed simultaneously, chaired by “assessor Yuri Dmitrievich Pilenko, an orchard owner and wine merchant.”
Anapa’s population was 8,296. The town had 6 educational institutions and two insurance offices—the “Rossiya” society (agent V.I. Pilenko) and the “Yakor” society (agent D.A. Maevsky). An agency of the Russian Society of Steamship Navigation and Trade operated as well.
The town physician in 1990 was V.A. Budzinsky.
On June 21, 1909, with funds from the founder of the Anapa resort, Dr. V.A. Budzinsky, the “Bimlyuk” sanatorium with an orthopedic institute opened in the locality of Dzhemete, specializing in the treatment of osteoarticular tuberculosis. The institute successfully treated rickets, scrofula, rheumatism, gout, clubfoot, spinal curvatures, hunchback, and various diseases of the skeletal and muscular system.
A “resort commission” appeared within the structure of the town council, resolving many issues: drafting key documents regulating resort life; overseeing maintenance, leasing, and profitability of municipal resort facilities; compiling the season’s touring program and the resort hall’s repertoire plans and supervising its activities; selecting staff for work in municipal resort facilities; studying vacationers’ opinions; considering complaints about violations of order, ecology, trade rules, etc.
During the tenure of the city head Vladimir Illarionovich Pilenko, an excellent resort hall began to operate actively.
Under V.I. Pilenko, many town streets were repaved; a boulevard was laid out along the entire Embankment; a new billiard room opened in the town garden; a stage for musicians and a buffet were built; many benches with sun canopies were installed; municipal bathing facilities were built on the sands; and lighting was improved. In the summer months of 1909, Anapa began publishing its first resort newspaper, “Anapsky Listok,” edited by A.U. Lvovich-Kostritsa. The town authorities paid great attention to advertising the resort: announcements in the capital’s newspapers; a guidebook prospectus about the resort was published; black-and-white and color postcards with views of Anapa; and colorful town plans.
The resort’s popularity grew: in 1888, 1,234 people vacationed in Anapa; the peak of attendance came in 1911—15,480 visitors; that is, over 20 years the number of vacationers increased by more than 12.5 times.
“Anapa as a resort was created by the energy and enterprise of people previously alien to this locality, who devoted all their strength to Anapa and, with honor, managed to draw to Anapa as a resort the attention of all Russia,” the organizing committee of the agricultural and industrial exhibition of the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus stated.
On October 1, 1907, the country’s first private resort gymnasium for weakened and ill students and teachers opened in Anapa.
In 1914, the first departmental sanatorium for “teachers and students” of the Caucasus Educational District opened. For sea bathing in Anapa, specialist physicians arrived and practiced from “university towns”: M.F. Rudnev, A.A. Koltygin, P.L. Fomin, N.S. Troitsky, I.G. Atlas, V.I. Chirihin, A.K. Shenk, and others. Their high professional authority helped attract to the town people in need of consultations with well-known specialists.
In the vicinity of Anapa, the healing properties of a spring located 18 km from the town in the locality of Semigorye had long been known.
Mining engineer V.I. Vinda in 1901 performed the first analysis of the water of the Semigorye spring, confirmed its лечебные properties, and reported this to the regional authorities in a special memorandum.
In 1905, exploitation of the Semigorye spring began; after examining it, Professor I.A. Chuevsky gave a brilliant assessment of the Semigorye mineral water, noting that “by iodine content it surpasses all known Russian springs and occupies one of the first places in Europe.” The water in the spring was identical in analysis and beneficial effect to the water of “Essentuki No. 17,” and in the amount of iodine it had no equal.
In 1911, V.A. Budzinsky, in partnership with entrepreneur A.S. Dobrovolsky, began construction of a sanatorium in Semigorye, which opened on the eve of the 1913 season. The “Luchezarnaya” sanatorium for 100 beds had a specially equipped hydrotherapy facility with baths and showers, as well as separate rooms for air and light baths, and a кабинет for electrification and massage. A питьевой pavilion was equipped at the mineral-water spring.
In June 1913, in Anapa, the “Public Committee for Promoting the Improvement of the Resort and Its Surroundings” was established, headed by V.A. Budzinsky. The society set as its goal “to take care of improving the maintenance of existing roads, footpaths, water channels, shores and мостки, to arrange new public bathing facilities, to establish an information bureau, reading rooms for vacationers, etc.”
In 1913, at the All-Russian Hygiene Exhibition in Petersburg, Dr. V.A. Budzinsky’s лечебные institutions in Anapa were awarded the Small Gold Medal “For the good organization of hydrotherapy.”
In December 1913, in Petersburg, the results of the exhibition of the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, “Russian Riviera,” were summed up. Anapa presented a set of advertising publications about the resort, models of V.A. Budzinsky’s sanatoriums with real Anapa sand, “to hold which many considered a счастье.” The resorts of Anapa and Semigorye were awarded a Gold Medal “For excellent equipment and arrangement of sanatoriums.”
In 1914, V.A. Budzinsky, in order to attract funds, created the joint-stock company “Resorts of Anapa and Semigorye” and transferred to it his three sanatoriums with a total value of 600 thousand rubles.
The world war that began excluded for Russians the possibility of using European resorts. The need to treat wounded soldiers forced the government to pay attention to the young Black Sea resorts. Centralized financing of “balneological treatment of wounded officers and lower ranks” began.
In 1915, V.A. Budzinsky was elected city head, which testified to his high personal authority and to recognition of the significance of the resort industry in Anapa’s life.
In general, the formation of the sanatorium-and-resort sector in Anapa up to 1917 proceeded simultaneously with the economic development of the region and the coast, and was part of this process—complex and often inconsistent.
At the origins of the sanatorium-and-resort sector in Anapa stood enthusiast-ascetics: doctors A.I. Pesochny, V.A. Budzinsky, G.I. Turner, A.K. Shenk, M.F. Rudnev, D.V. Shabanov, G.L. Antokonenko, I.G. Atlas, and others. In resort medicine, private medical practice predominated.
Anapa’s sanatorium-and-resort institutions—multidisciplinary bathing facilities, hydrotherapy establishments, mud-bath clinics—were built both at the expense of the treasury and by private individuals. Specialized sanatoriums were created by Dr. V.A. Budzinsky at his own expense. Resort medicine in Anapa corresponded to the latest achievements of world science and practice and was the best on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus.
After receiving information about the Bolsheviks’ victory during the armed uprising in Petrograd and about their assumption of full power, the ataman of the Kuban Cossack Host A.P. Filimonov (elected October 12, 1917) and the Provisional Kuban Host Government declared that the entirety of power on the territory of the Kuban Oblast belonged to them.
World War I and the revolutions of 1917 changed the natural course of events. The health resorts were expropriated and nationalized.
In August 1917, Budzinsky was dismissed. The city head became the Trudovik Nikifor Ivanovich Morev.
In the summer of 1917, a Council of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies was organized in Anapa. Its chairman became the Social Democratic lawyer Merezhko.
In small Anapa, three authorities were created: the city duma, the civil committee, and the Council of Deputies.
On January 25 (February 7), 1918, the 1st Taman Otdel Separate Revolutionary Congress adopted the Regulations on the Soviets of workers’, soldiers’, peasants’, and Cossack deputies. The positions of atamans, their assistants, and levies were abolished as not meeting the requirements of life. “In all stanitsas, villages, khutors, auls, and other населенные places of the otdel, the revolutionary-democratic population must proceed to organize Soviets of People’s Deputies, to whose jurisdiction all local power passes.”
From August 1918 to March 1920, the Kuban was under White control.
In March 1920, Soviet power was restored.
In August 1920, Baron Wrangel made another attempt to seize the Kuban. In the Sukko valley, 15 kilometers from Anapa, a White Guard landing force was put ashore from Crimea. In the course of stubborn and bloody battles, the landing force was surrounded and destroyed by Red Army units commanded by M.K. Serikov. Under his command there was also a special-purpose detachment (CHON) from Anapa.
On July 19, 1923, the founder of the Anapa resort, Vladimir Adolfovich Budzinsky, died.
The resort’s хозяйство almost everywhere bears traces of poor management and little care and forethought in meeting the resort’s urgent needs. There is no doubt that one of the main reasons for this state of affairs is the too frequent смена of resort directors. Over the year the resort spent more than 8 trillion rubles in 1923 notes, and if at least 1% of these sums had been spent on improvements, one would not have had to see in the sanatoriums, the mud-bath clinic, and other places such intolerable disorders, the elimination of which required relatively negligible monetary expenditures, entirely affordable for the resort economy. Use of the housing stock is completely unorganized, and many buildings are leased by the resort from the municipal housing authority instead of being owned by it in accordance with the decree of March 13. This stock is poorly used, and some buildings transferred to the resort have been left to self-destruction.