GAGRA, Georgia — Employed for nearly four decades at a sanitarium once so exclusive that only the very well connected or heavily armed could get a booking, Tatyana Gaivoronskaya grew accustomed to freeloading Communist Party big shots and the unruly gunmen who took over their fusty rooms.

These days, however, she serves a new and, in these parts, unusual clientele: vacationers who actually pay their own bills.

After a long slump that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and continued through a vicious war of secession along Georgia’s Black Sea coast, the Soviet Riviera, or at least the bits that survived the fighting, is back in business.

Unlike the once grand Gagripsh sanitarium just down the road, now abandoned and daubed with graffiti, the colonnaded property where Ms. Gaivoronskaya ladles out cabbage soup for tourists from Russia is enjoying something of a renaissance, albeit a decidedly backward one.