The Making of the Soviet Dacha, 1917–1941
It is a startling fact that dachas, which had enjoyed such a high profile before the Revolution, had by the 1930s gained a secure niche in a new order that existed under very different social and economic conditions and espoused an ideology radically hostile to cultural remnants of the old regime. But is this continuity real or illusory? Can one really see any meaningful connection between the dachas depicted in Chekhov’s stories and those of the Soviet elite in the 1930s? Are not these two sets of phenomena separated by a violent rupture that makes continuity hard to conceptualize in any satisfactory way?
Improbable as it might seem, points of connection can be found. The survival of the dacha calls into question the notion of the Revolution as a clean break in the social and cultural history of the major cities. The dacha is hardly the only thing that survived, of course: ostensibly improbable continuities have been traced in other areas of early Soviet life ever since Nicholas S. Timasheff, in a pioneering work of 1946, coined the term “Great Retreat” for the partial abandonment of radical social policies and values by the elite of the 1930s.1 In the light of the cogent arguments made by Timasheff and others, the dacha might well be seen as just one of several prerevolutionary cultural status symbols that were appropriated by a new Soviet “middle class.”
Even if we find signs of the past in Stalin-era culture, however, we are still left with important questions unanswered. For example: What were the causes of the Great Retreat—social or political expediency, the self-interest of an elite, or some more complex set of historical factors? How did it fit in with other aspects of Soviet life that, far from suggesting a retreat from revolutionary aspirations, remained aggressively radical and transformative? There is a need, in other words, to test the Timasheff paradigm against detailed social history: to show how the interaction of continuity and change took place in practice, how it informed social practice and affected people’s lives.
These tasks can usefully be related to an enduring historical debate that investigates the balance between “traditional” and “modernizing” principles in the working of the emerging Soviet system: the Great Retreat, so one argument runs, took place in a society that was very self-consciously entering a form of modernity, and it is this assertively modern orientation of Soviet society, not its traditional or conservative aspects, that needs to be emphasized.2 Another approach directs attention elsewhere: to the ways in which modernizing structures, policies, and intentions led to “neotraditional” results.3 One example is the Soviet bureaucracy, which, though designed to strengthen the centralized state and inculcate impersonal standardized practice, may actually have forced people into greater reliance on more “traditional” forms of behavior, ranging from unofficial networking to the cultivation of allotments for subsistence.
To seek out traditional and modern elements in Soviet society, then, is a worthwhile project but on its own it is inadequate. The next step is to examine their interaction over time, and we can best do so microcosmically—by fixing our attention on limited objects of study, such as the dacha. As well as bringing us face to face with the charged issue of periodization in Soviet history, the dacha can thus also provide insights into the workings of early Soviet urban society.
Exurbia in Revolution and Civil War
The revolutions of 1917 brought a rapid depopulation of the dacha areas surrounding the major cities. Just as in 1905, when popular unrest in the outlying areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg had scared away some dachniki for years, people were unwilling to expose themselves to the risk of revolutionary violence and in many cases simply left their property behind. Other dachas fell vacant not because they had been abandoned but because their owners had been called away—to the front, to the city, on business, or to relatives in other regions.
Housing in the major cities was liable to be suddenly and violently appropriated by the new regime. In Petrograd, for example, where revolutionary vengefulness was intense, “bourgeois” families had good reason to fear instant eviction from their homes.4 The situation in exurban locations was less clear and more variable. Although in some places privately owned houses were municipalized almost instantly, the authorities had neither the time nor the inclination to take full control of the dacha stock. The action taken in a particular village or settlement depended on the vigilance and activism of the local soviet—and, not least, on the behavior of the local population. Isaiah Berlin (b. 1909) and his mother escaped “the increasing tension and violence in the city” by moving to Staraia Russa for the summer of 1917. And, at least in the eyes of a young boy, life proceeded much as normal: “There were fancy-dress parties, tombolas, and afternoons in the park listening to an Italian orchestra playing at a bandstand.” The Berlins spent the next two summers in Pavlovsk, though here the Revolution did catch up with them, as they were subjected to a humiliating search by the Cheka in 1919.5
In general, dachniki seem to have been considerably less vulnerable than estate owners to revolutionary violence: many of them rented their houses, and even those who were owners of private property could not be seen by peasants as egregiously laying claim to large tracts of land they did not use or need. A case in point was Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, professor of history and associate director of the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow, who by September 1918 had resigned himself to losing the modest estate in Tver’ guberniia where he and his family had passed their summers before the Revolution. Instead, for the following few years Got’e spent time in various villages and dacha locations in the Moscow region; most often he sought refuge in Pestovo (forty kilometers north of Moscow), a settlement that during the Civil War was reached by a twelve-verst trek from the nearest railway station. Pestovo had few comforts but offered compensating advantages—it offered a more reliable supply of basic foodstuffs than did the city, and it was largely ignored by the Soviet authorities; by engaging in hard physical activities, moreover, Got’e achieved brief periods of oblivion from the underlying despair he felt at Russia’s catastrophic social and political situation.6
The dacha zones most at risk were those that had been all but swallowed up by the city. In Moscow’s Sokol’niki, any dachas left unattended were liable to be looted, and wooden constructions were sometimes completely dismantled for firewood.7 In Petrograd, one of the first victims of the breakdown of political authority after the February Revolution was the Durnovo dacha on the Neva, seized by anarchists and converted into a “house of rest” for workers. After a lengthy standoff between the anarchists and the Ministry of Justice, the unlawful occupants were evicted by force. But to keep the dacha in private ownership was still unrealistic; even Durnovo’s own staff, on being informed by the anarchists that the dacha was now the “property of the people,” had readily believed this to be the case. In September 1917, Durnovo offered to hand over the dacha as a hospital for tuberculosis patients.8
The Durnovo dacha was a very public and obvious target in view of its central location (by the early twentieth century it was a dacha in name only) and of the fact that P. P. Durnovo had a lengthy record of state service (he had been governor general of Moscow during the 1905 Revolution). Dachas farther from the public eye, however, might also fall victim to revolutionary violence. Aleksandr Blok was one dismayed observer of the devastation of resorts outside Petrograd that had been among his favorite haunts before the Revolution.9 The damage inflicted by looters would often stretch to several thousand rubles’ worth in a single property as houses were laid waste, their fittings stolen, and their interiors vandalized.10
Many dacha owners had already fled, but not everyone was so lucky: some were forced to look on as their property was raided or requisitioned. A woman named Efremova, resident at a dacha in the Moscow region, had in the summer of 1919 been away in the town of Kolomna, where her husband, employed in the financial department of the local soviet, had just died of typhus. On her return, she discovered that neighbors had lured her infirm mother over to their house by promising her regular meals and had taken the opportunity to steal numerous pieces of furniture and other household items. They had plundered property not only from the living quarters but also from the two outbuildings, the keys to which they had confiscated. And they had let out one of the buildings, taking all the rent money for themselves.
Efremova was a typical minor dacha owner of the period. She, her husband, and her father-in-law had bought a plot of 1,209 square sazhens in 1911 and on this land had built three dachas (only one of which was equipped for year-round habitation) with the aim, in Efremova’s words, of “securing the old age” of their parents (in all probability, she intended to rent out the two surplus houses each summer for a modest unearned income). Efremova’s father-in-law, who worked as a typesetter in Moscow, had died in 1915, and since then she and her husband had lived at their dacha continuously.11 People such as the Efremovs, although two of the three “dachas” on their plot were little more than outbuildings, were soon to be classified as multiple property owners and the surplus housing made subject to appropriation by the municipal authorities.
During the Civil War and the first half of the 1920s a huge free-for-all took place in areas lying just outside the city limits. Peasants and other locals were able to occupy houses that had been left vacant. Owners occasionally wrote anxiously to the authorities asking for a protection order on their property, but in most cases were powerless to do anything. The scholar, critic, and children’s writer Kornei Chukovskii was one such victim of theft. When he returned to his dacha in Kuokkala (now on the other side of the Soviet-Finnish border) in January 1925 after an absence of several years, Chukovskii found that his furniture and a large part of his library had been sold by an unscrupulous acquaintance whom he had unsuspectingly allowed to sit out the Civil War there.12 In 1923 the people’s courts were still being swamped with appeals concerning what was often euphemistically called the “unauthorized seizure of property” in exurban locations; it was decided that such cases should have top priority, as any delay meant that the dacha season might come to an end before a verdict was passed.13
Burglaries and acts of random violence against property were, however, by no means the only concern of dacha owners. They also had the new regime and its representatives to reckon with. Municipalization of the housing stock began immediately in Moscow and Petrograd, in adjacent towns, and in high-profile dacha locations with a large number of wealthy householders. In Moscow, all such areas located within the railway ring (Petrovskii Park, Petrovsko-Razumovskoe, Ostankino, Sokol’niki, Serebrianyi Bor, and a few others) were subject to automatic municipalization in 1919.14 A total of 543 country palaces and dachas were used as vacation resorts for workers between 1918 and 1924.15Thirteen dachas on Petrograd’s Kamennyi Island, formerly reserved for high-ranking state personnel, were turned over to a children’s labor colony (named after the first minister of enlightenment, A. V. Lunacharskii) at the beginning of 1919. One dacha owner, Klara Eduardovna Shvarts, was informed abruptly (in person) on 26 December 1918 that her house and its contents were to be appropriated by the Commissariat of Education. This decision was carried out unceremoniously: the house was broken into continuously, and furniture and other items were removed without written authorization.16 The vulnerability felt by prerevolutionary property owners was captured by Got’e in a diary entry of 3 May 1918: “A strange feeling. It is as if everything were as before, but the fact is that the gorillas can come and drive out the legal owners on ‘legal’ grounds.”17
The dacha’s vulnerability to the depredations of the new regime was exacerbated by its suspect ideological standing. Many representatives of Soviet power in the early 1920s considered summer houses to be among the least acceptable manifestations of private property. In 1924, for example, Foreign Minister Boris Chicherin and the head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, had to enter into correspondence with the Leningrad regional executive committee to force this organization to assist Soviet citizens who were reasserting their rights to dachas that were now on the other side of the Finnish border. The committee had refused to support the establishment of a “Society of Dacha Owners in Finland,” claiming that the existing provisions in the Civil Code were quite sufficient and that to encourage such an organization would contradict the “rigorously implemented” policy of municipalizing privately owned houses in Leningrad.18
Policies on dacha ownership during the Civil War were correspondingly severe. A three-month absence was sufficient for a dacha to be classified as ownerless, and failure to register one’s property was also grounds for confiscation. Owners of more than one dacha in a single settlement would typically be left with only one house. Yet evictions by local soviets in dacha areas tended to have only a shaky legal foundation. Strictly speaking, the early Soviet decree on the abolition of private property related only to cities, not to settlements; here, as later in the Soviet period, exurban locations represented an area of uncertainty for Soviet legal procedure.19 In any case, the law, such as it was, seems to have been only haphazardly interpreted and implemented in the early 1920s; influential contacts were the most reliable guarantee of preserving property, though determination and sheer good luck also helped.20
As the new regime sought to extend its control over the capitals and their outlying areas, the newly formed basic territorial units of Soviet power—the district executive committees, or raiispolkoms—were entrusted with supervising the dacha stock. The Primorsko-Sestroretskii raiispolkom, for example—based in one of the most popular St. Petersburg dacha locations of the years before 1917—was kept frantically busy in 1919 and 1920 as it tried to keep some measure of control over the properties that had suddenly fallen under its jurisdiction. In February 1920 its department of local services (Otdel mestnogo khoziaistva, or OMKh) was warned by the regional authorities that it should stop handing out furniture and other household goods to private citizens until it had carried out an inventory of all abandoned and requisitioned property. Even so, the local ispolkom continued to be inundated with requests from individuals for household items, articles of furniture, and entire houses. The range of confiscated items was considerable, from bed linen to clothes brushes, from pots and pans to wallpaper.21
In the early 1920s the pressure on housing was enormous as people flocked to the major cities. As a result, the prerevolutionary dacha stock had been almost entirely redistributed by 1922. In September of that year, the department of local services in Petrograd uezd wrote to the Pargolovo ispolkom inquiring about dachas that could be made available for rest homes, sanatoria, children’s summer camps, and summer vacation homes for people working in regional state institutions. The answer was that all dachas suitable for these uses had already been allocated to new owners and tenants; none had been, or would be, handed out to organizations.22
An impulse to impose some measure of order on the chaotic dacha stock had been provided by a Soviet government decree of 24 May 1922 that called on ispolkoms to compile within two months a precise list of all municipalized dachas (that is, all dachas that were under the control of the soviets). This decree did not signal the start of dacha municipalization (which, as we have seen, was under way in some locations as early as 1918); rather it launched a period of stocktaking.23 During the Civil War, houses had often been municipalized on local initiative, not according to any coherent overall policy; the absence of such a policy had also permitted many dachas ripe for municipalization to stay in private hands. In the way of Soviet decrees, the 1922 decree was promptly translated into an NKVD instruktsiia (that is, a set of guidelines as to how the decree was to be implemented in practice). The latter document called for restraint in redistribution of dacha properties: given the huge demand, only “well-founded applications” should be given consideration; and the transfer of whole dacha settlements to a single institution was strictly forbidden. The communal dacha stock was to be made up, first, of dachas whose owners were absent; second, of “lordly” (barskie) dachas (defined as dachas with at least one of the following attributes: running water, bathroom, electricity, heating; outbuildings; extensive gardens and parks; and fancy fittings); and third, of dachas whose owners had other such property in the same area (in such cases, the owners were to be left with one dacha only). The NKVD suggested a further criterion for those areas (and we must assume they were the majority) where the dacha pool obtained by the above methods was insufficient: on plots where there were several residential buildings, the owners were to be left with one building only.24
In June 1923 the Communal Department of the Moscow uezd soviet reported on its implementation of the municipalization policy.25 It estimated that “up to 35 percent” of all dachas in its territory had now been municipalized. A breakdown by district revealed that the traditionally “bourgeois” settlements located on the Kazan’ and Northern (Iaroslavl’) railway lines had borne the brunt of reappropriation. In all, well over 5,000 dachas had been municipalized: nearly half (49.2 percent) of them had been deemed “unfit” (beskhoziaistvennye); 46.6 percent had been appropriated on the grounds that 125 their owners had other dachas; and 4.1 percent were classified as “lordly” (though it may safely be assumed that many of the “unfit” dachas would have fallen into this category had their owners stuck around to find out).
In order to avoid municipalization, dacha owners had to register their property with the local soviet. By the time of the report, 5,001 private dachas had been registered and a further 2,918 applications were being considered. The understaffed department was struggling to keep pace, especially as applications required proper investigation (apparently many families registered several dachas in the names of various members).
What, though, did the Moscow regional administration do with the 6,000 dachas that were under its control as of summer 1923? The first task it defined was to “review the social composition of those renting municipalized dachas and to take them away from nonlaboring elements [netrudovye elementy] if their number exceeds the regulation maximum.” Municipalized dachas, in other words, were to be subjected to the dreaded “compression” (uplotnenie). No less than 90 percent of the communal dacha stock was to be allocated to the “laboring masses” and to institutions. Rents were set prohibitively high for those outside legitimate employment: from 1 October 1922 to 1 May 1923, nonlaboring elements occupied 75 municipalized dachas and paid 119,341 rubles in rent; workers and employees (sluzhashchie) were allocated 2,223 dachas and charged only 37,516 for the privilege.
Yet the same report contains ample evidence that there were ways around these punitive policies. For one thing, employees generally outnumbered workers, especially in dachas that were rented out to institutions. The category of sluzhashchie was elastic enough to include almost anyone in a nonmanual occupation. The Communal Department clearly distrusted certain tenant organizations, which it suspected were doing little to institute the desired affirmative action policy. In some cases, it was alleged, they simply reinstated the former owners. Such abuses were especially galling given the continuing shortage of accommodations for institutions: in summer 1923 more than 600 institutional applications for dacha space had not been satisfied. Above all, however, dacha owners were putting up resistance to the expropriation of their property. As the report concluded: “In effect a civil war is being played out around the municipalization and demunicipalization of dachas.”26
NEP and Its Liquidation
In due course, however, this civil war showed signs of abating. Citizens were able to appeal for the reregistration of a property in their name as legal regulations and bureaucratic procedures became slightly more stable. Norms for property registration were not so restrictive as they became later in the Soviet period: plots might vary wildly in size, from under 1,000 square meters to over 10,000; in general, however, the area was in the range of 1,500–2,000.27 The demunicipalization policy introduced in 1921 for housing in general began to increase the opportunities for dacha ownership. Glosses on demunicipalization emphasized that its main purpose was to ensure that the housing stock was better maintained. To this end, the criteria for dacha municipalization were to be interpreted more loosely: the mere fact of a Dutch stove was no longer grounds for removing a dacha from private possession. Rather, only “a combination of comfortable appliances and conveniences” gave local authorities the right to put a dacha in the “lordly” category.28
Despite the draconian policies of the preceding period, housing legislation of the 1920s seems laissez-faire compared to that of much of the later Soviet era. The desperately underresourced Soviet state was willing to sanction various kinds of local and private initiative in order to reduce the burden on the center. Until the first five-year plan, nationalized housing played a relatively insignificant role: in 1926, local soviets controlled nearly 60 percent of the overall state sector, and this state sector itself accounted for only around 20 percent of total housing.29 Private and cooperative building were encouraged as a temporary solution to the housing crisis.
But this overview of NEP housing policy is misleading, for two main reasons. First, cooperative housing—which, in the major cities especially, tended to predominate—was by no means independent of Party and state authorities (as the sudden elimination of most urban housing cooperatives in 1937 would subsequently demonstrate). Second, there was great variation from one city to another. The housing crisis was always particularly acute in the major urban centers, and demunicipalization was extremely uncommon there. It was by and large only in provincial towns that urban single-family houses remained in private possession.30
Dachas had an intermediate status. In many ways they were analogous to single-family dwellings in small towns or villages, but they also fell within the catchment area of the major cities where housing policy was most interventionist. In Moscow and Leningrad especially, municipal authorities strove increasingly to establish administrative control not only over the urban housing stock but also over the traditional administrative blind spot of suburban settlements. By 1929, the “trust” now responsible for municipal dacha administration in the Moscow region had taken over 3,100 dachas in around forty settlements.31 In Leningrad, similarly, a separate “communal trust” was formed to supervise and administer the dacha sector. As of July 1926 it reckoned to have control over more than 3,500 dachas.
The intention was to use these new administrative structures to push through centrally directed measures more effectively. By the beginning of 1926, the Moscow soviet had formulated a set of rules for the drawing up of contracts and the renting out of municipalized dachas to institutions and individuals. The rent varied according to the occupation of the tenants: for people working in state, Party, trade union, and cooperative organizations the annual payment was to fall between 5 and 10 percent of the cost of the dacha; factory and office workers and artisans were to pay 3–10 percent; but the “nonlaboring element” was expected to pay not less than 15 percent.32
These new regulations were, however, at best only partially successful in putting dacha ownership and rental on a sound legal footing. Dacha municipalization was never conducted with the thoroughness suggested by policy statements on the subject. There were three main reasons for this failure. First, the huge housing crisis, which, once the Civil War had ended, turned former dacha areas around Moscow and St. Petersburg into shanty settlements inhabited by daily commuters (and so a house, even if classified as a dacha, was likely to be appropriated for year-round habitation). Second, the weakness and disorganization of the local authorities, which often were not able to keep pace with new instructions from the center. Third, the openness of the instructions to variable interpretation (a “lordly” dacha, for example, was very much in the eye of the beholder, and a timely and well-directed bribe would presumably have swayed the judgment of many inspectors from the local housing department).
In the 1920s, Muscovites were so desperate for living space that they were not put off by the disastrous state of most suburban housing. The municipalized stock in 1923 contained 725 dachas (12.8 percent) that were “dilapidated,” 1,771 (31.1 percent) that were “semidilapidated,” and 2,531 (31.1 percent) that required “minor repairs.”33 Yet reports suggest that dachas were almost never left vacant; a very high proportion, moreover, were occupied by commuting year-round residents. As one journalist reported of a village outside Moscow: “Most of the dachniki here are dachniki against their will, they live here all year round because it’s closer to the city where they can’t find an apartment.”34 Special concessions were made to encourage residents to rebuild the housing stock: if a dacha required “major repairs,” tenants were exempted from rent for the first five years they lived there.35 The regional and local authorities received numerous requests for permission to demolish existing buildings and start afresh. Given the acute shortage of housing in the postrevolutionary era, it is little wonder that many people tried to take over or build themselves houses outside the city. The building control committee (Upravlenie stroitel’nogo kontrolia, or USK) of each okrug tried to keep up with this wave of individual construction. Many people, having obtained a plot of land, went ahead and built with or without the necessary permission; others turned former dachas into houses for year-round habitation by installing a heating system; still others converted outbuildings into dachas or shacks for permanent habitation.36 The result of these make-do solutions was a spread of shanty settlements with very low standards of maintenance. One observant British visitor recalled coming across “what appeared from the outside to be a ten-roomed villa or datcha of wood” on a trip into Leningrad’s northern dacha zone in 1937. This house, despite its impressive scale, “was surrounded by a potato-patch and looked so neglected that I thought it must be empty, but I was assured that anything from fifty to eighty people slept there.”37
It is little wonder, then, that the dacha trusts had enormous difficulty persuading local ispolkoms to admit to free dacha space. When the Leningrad okrug administration tried to gauge the extent of the dacha stock in the summer of 1927, very few local ispolkoms volunteered information, mainly because most former dachas had been converted to year-round residences. The one that did provide dacha statistics was the Rozhdestveno volost (taking in Siverskaia and several other settlements to the southwest of Leningrad), which gave a total of over 500 municipalized dachas spread over thirteen settlements. Of these, 152 were being rented out to individuals, 110 were being used by the local ispolkom, 197 were controlled by the education sector, and the rest were empty or unfit for habitation.38
Given that available dacha space was so scarce, the trusts had almost no accommodations to offer the many applicants for a rented summer house. On their own, they had no way of alleviating the shortage, and so more publicity was given to alternative approaches. Some land was offered to individual dacha builders on long-term leases.39 A more striking new development was the coverage given to the cooperative movement. House-building cooperatives had been sanctioned from the beginning of NEP as a means of making good the inadequacies of municipal housing provision. The one-family house of one or two stories was regularly proposed as a solution to the problems facing Soviet urban planning; the prerevolutionary vogue for Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities had not yet run its course.40 The showcase development of this kind was the Sokol settlement in the suburbs of Moscow, where construction began in 1923. This settlement consisted mainly of one-family houses of varied design: from the pseudo-Karelian log house to wood-paneled and even brick houses. The design of the houses emphasized their individual character, while the layout of the settlement—with its small tree-lined streets, some of them curving to form an arc—contrasted with the rectilinear, aggressively modernizing patterns of much early Soviet urban planning.41
A house at Sokol
The houses at Sokol were not dachas but were designed for permanent residence. In the mid-1920s, however, the idea of dacha cooperatives received fresh encouragement, the idea being that they would generate the resources to restore dilapidated dacha stock and to build new settlements.42 Cooperative building projects were further supported by the publication of standard designs for prefabricated dachas that could be assembled in a day without knocking in a single nail and with the help of just a few casual workers.43
Dacha cooperatives established in the second half of the 1920s were suitably modest in their objectives. Most houses built under their auspices were small and made of plywood. Even so, the practical difficulties proved to be immense. Cooperatives required considerable startup capital at a time when bank loans and other kinds of institutional funding were not easy to come by, and individual members did not generally have the personal means to make up the shortfall.44 At the start of the next decade construction projects became more ambitious. In 1932, cooperatives were entrusted with building 1,300 new dachas in the Moscow region (each to a standard design with two apartments, each of three rooms). But here too the press reported severe practical difficulties in obtaining the necessary credits and in coordinating the activities of the cooperative’s various branches.45In due course, attempts would be made to resolve these problems by tying the activities of a cooperative ever more closely to its sponsor organization; as we shall see, the “departmental” principle in dacha management triumphed comprehensively in 1937, when the cooperative movement was dealt a severe blow. Despite the negative press coverage, however, it seems that cooperatives functioned as efficiently as could reasonably have been expected, given the bottlenecked state of the Soviet economy. They also had a deserved reputation for apportioning space more liberally than did municipal settlements. In 1928–29 a dacha cooperative in the Leningrad area, for example, built new settlements at Toksovo and Tarkhovka. By later Soviet standards, these dachas stood on extremely spacious plots. The Toksovo settlement had forty-two plots that averaged 250 square meters, and the proportion of area given up to roads was unusually high; typically, only three or four plots stood in a row.46
But most Muscovites and Leningraders looking for a dacha in the 1920s did not have access to the municipalized stock and were not able to join a cooperative. Instead, they rented rooms or a whole dacha from locals. In April 1926, a representative of the Moscow dacha trust publicly admitted that his organization could not realistically compete with the private dacha market.47 A guidebook to the environs of Moscow, published in 1928, estimates a total of around 300 settlements populated in summer by vacationing Muscovites (these included both dacha settlements proper and peasant villages where houses were rented to city dwellers).48 Dachas were differentiated according to location and amenities. Prices could range from a few dozen rubles for the summer to around 300.49The dacha’s social constituency was by and large urban, educated people for whom the annual migration into the countryside was both a deeply ingrained habit and a cheap and relatively well provisioned alternative to maintaining an urban apartment through the summer months. Memoir accounts suggest that members of the intelligentsia perceived the dacha as a haven for prerevolutionary traditions, a place where they could take their family (and in many cases servants too) and reestablish domestic patterns that were under severe threat in the early Soviet city.50 Even so, there was no concealing the fact that most people’s exurban living conditions had taken a substantial turn for the worse. One memoirist, born in 1915 into a noble family resident in Petrograd, recalled being taken to the dacha each year in the 1920s. In 1927, for example, his mother and aunt rented two rooms in the village of Gorelovo in a “large izba” where everyone slept on hay mattresses; Gorelovo was known at the time to be one of the cheapest dacha locations and was renowned for the quality of its potatoes (a detail that conveys the low expectations of 1920s dachniki).51
Newspapers of the period show the dacha concept being employed in broad and variegated ways. In advertisements of the 1920s and 1930s, the word “dacha” very often expands to mean, approximately, “any single-occupancy house out of town but not in the country.”52 As one would expect for a period of unceasing housing shortage, there were frequent references to “winter dachas” (that is, houses for year-round habitation). Dachas’ size and level of comfort varied enormously, from a dozen rooms to two or three, from full heating, electricity, and running water to zero amenities. Location was another significant variable: for the most part advertisements concentrated on places familiar to the prerevolutionary dachnik, yet other locations were several hours’ journey away. Boris Pasternak, for example, spent the summer of 1930 with his wife at a winterized dacha “of a substantial size” near Kiev.53 The wife of the prominent Soviet writer Vsevolod Ivanov recalled frantically consulting the advertisements in Vecherniaia Moskva in 1929 when she was searching for summer accommodations for herself and her children; in the end she had to settle for a modest izba-style dwelling.54
For certain categories of the population such assiduity was not required. The more comfortable dachas in prime locations in the Moscow and Leningrad regions were soon made available to the families of highly placed Party workers. Dachas in Serebrianyi Bor were seized immediately and the first rest home (dom otdykha) there was set up in August 1921 by decree of Lenin. By 1924 this location contained three children’s homes and one sanatorium, and also accommodated 648 permanent residents in ninety-one buildings. During the 1920s and 1930s many Old Bolsheviks and other prominent figures spent their summers there.55 A dacha settlement named after Mikhail Kalinin was set up by taking over wealthy dachas on the Moscow-Kazan’ railway line; the dacha complex comprised twenty-four houses, many of them spacious prerevolutionary bourgeois residences with parquet floors and charmingly colored Dutch stoves.56 In January 1928 the secretary of the Society of Old Bolsheviks (OSB) wrote to the Central Communal Bank asking for credits toward the construction of twenty two-story dachas, each with accommodations for four families, in Serebrianyi Bor or Kratovo. The letter of application mentioned that some dachas were already in use by the society, but that they were limited to a “select” few. After the bank expressed reluctance to oblige, maintaining that its credit limit for the year had been exhausted and authorization was required to eat into its reserves, a further appeal was made, directly to the Soviet government, and treated more favorably. The main settlement run by the OSB became the one at Kratovo, where the prerevolutionary dacha stock was substantially taken over by the new regime.57
Other favored citizens might spend their vacations in attractive resorts that did not have an exclusively organizational profile. Elena Bonner (b. 1923), daughter of an Old Bolshevik summoned in 1926 to Leningrad after a period of exile in Chita, recalled a carefree summer in Sestroretsk in 1928. Here she was left with her brother and their grandmother and nanny; their parents spent their vacation at a southern resort and made only brief appearances. Life was comfortable and untroubled. The children were indulged with ice cream sandwiches and frequently taken on outings and picnics; the local station had a restaurant with live music and even a kursaal; and the dacha itself was in a wonderfully unspoiled location—in pine forest, not fenced in on any side.58
Yet even for Party families dacha life was not always so idyllic. The following year Bonner was again sent to Sestroretsk for the summer, but this time the dacha fitted a very different model: not unblemished wooded expanses but cramped suburbia. The family did not even have use of the vegetable garden to the rear of the house, and the restaurant had closed down. The year after that (1930) conditions became still less comfortable: Bonner spent the summer in what was effectively a “dacha commune”—a large two-story house, reserved for Party workers occupying “positions of responsibility,” which accommodated three or four families on each floor. Each family had a room of its own (sometimes two). Again her parents were absent for practically the whole summer.59
The leading Bolsheviks’ personal willingness to enjoy “bourgeois” leisure facilities was not, of course, reflected in publicly expressed attitudes toward the dacha. Newspaper reports of the late 1920s concentrated on the outrageous prices asked for summer rental of even a tiny izba. As early as February, people were looking for somewhere to spend the summer months, but most of them were disappointed: dachas at affordable rents were simply not available. The beneficiaries of this situation were, predictably, alleged to be the nepmen, the nouveaux riches of the 1920s: “Only the wives of nepmen in their sealskin and astrakhan coats go around with radiant smiles on their faces. The best dachas in the thousand [rubles] bracket are theirs.”60 As the summer season approached, however, landlords began to lose their nerve if their property had still not been booked, and it was possible to snap up a dacha for less than half the original asking price. Potential tenants still had to be firm in their dealings with the “dacha brokers” who hung around all suburban stations: “they hike up the prices dreadfully, so you simply have to bargain with them. So for a small three-room house with the inevitable veranda they’ll first name you a price of 60 tenners (so as not to scare off the clientele with figures in the hundreds, everything comes in tenners), then they reduce it to 50, and in the end they come down to 400 rubles.”61
The existence of a dacha market was tolerated for most of the 1920s, but it was still treated with deep suspicion. The authorities were especially keen to follow up accusations of profiteering on the dacha market. In 1927 the engineer for Luga okrug (in the Leningrad region) wrote to the presidium of the Luga city soviet to report on alleged serial “speculation”: a current applicant for a building plot by the name of Semenov-Pushkin had several times in recent years registered himself as the owner of empty plots or semidilapidated dachas, only to sell his right to build (pravo zastroiki) without even starting (re)construction work.62 Dachas were further tainted by their association with corrupt practices: in a decade of desperate shortage, it was commonly alleged that the only way to obtain decent summer accommodations, if one was not a bourgeois, was to abuse one’s official position.63
To remark on the unwholesomeness of the dacha became a commonplace of the time. A detailed guidebook of 1926 treated with frank approval any dacha settlement located in the vicinity of an industrial enterprise, but was unremittingly scornful of locations that had apparently preserved their “traditional” clientele and way of life. The following account of a settlement on the Kazan’ railway line was clearly based on prerevolutionary stereotypes (with, to be sure, a generous admixture of anti-NEP ideology):
The train pulls into a noisy, bustling platform—it’s Malakhovka. Various people clamber out of the carriages: “dacha husbands” loaded up with more packages than they can carry; “ladies” with dazzling toilettes; flighty Soviet dames with square “valises” and people in “positions of responsibility” with respectable briefcases that are probably full of old newspapers and journals. . . .
Visitors from Moscow stretch out in a long line along the streets of Malakhovka living in luxurious dachas that are for the most part occupied by moneyed Moscow—by the nepmen.64
The general distaste for the dacha on ideological grounds was mirrored by the attitudes of the artistic and literary avant-garde, for whom the dacha was synonymous with the social and cultural arrière. Note, for example, the metaphors chosen by Sergei Tret’iakov, a prominent figure in the revolutionary arts organization LEF, in this 1923 rallying cry:
[Representatives of the Party] always remember that they are in the trenches and that the enemy’s muzzles are in front of them. Even when they grow potatoes around this trench and stretch out their cots beneath the ramparts, they never allow themselves the illusion that the trench is not a trench but a dacha . . . or that their enemies are simply the neighbors in the dacha next door.65
A journalistic piece of 1922 by Isaac Babel’ describing the conversion of a dacha settlement in Georgia into a resort for working people mixes class hatred with a distaste for everyday life and material comfort typical of Russian modernism: “You petty bourgeois who built yourselves these ‘dachlets,’ who are mediocre and useless as a tradesman’s paunch, if only you saw how we are enjoying our rest here. . . . If only you saw how faces chewed up by the steel jaws of machinery are being refreshed.”66
This unease in publicly expressed attitudes toward the dacha was exacerbated by the uncertain legal status of ownership. Land disputes were rife in former dacha areas in the 1920s. The review of dacha municipalization after the decree of May 1922 had, it turned out, been far from comprehensive, rigorous, and consistent. On inspection (for example, after the death of the owner), a house might turn out to be on neither the municipal nor the nonmunicipal list, which left the local ispolkom unsure how to act. Neighbors might appeal to the local authorities for land bordering their plots. And, especially toward the end of the decade, people’s property rights might be undermined by investigation of their social origins. In 1928, for example, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) insisted that a local ispolkom investigate the social origins of the family of a former “hereditary honored citizen” (that is, a former merchant) and then dispossess them. The property in question, a spacious two-story “lordly” dacha (total area: 233 square meters), had anomalously not been municipalized in 1922. The ispolkom concluded after its investigation that the house should indeed have been municipalized, but that it was now impossible to change the situation because the latest government circular forbade any further action of this kind.67 Many local soviets did not have such scruples, inspecting dachas that earlier slipped through the net of municipalization for signs of “lordliness.”68
Official controls on exurban communities may have been relaxed somewhat in the mid-1920s, but they were reapplied with greater zeal and violence in 1928 and (especially) 1929, when a crackdown on unregistered and misregistered dacha owners formed part of the campaign against “former people” (that is, people of “bourgeois” social origins). Demuncipalization was in many cases reversed without due legal process; registration of private property was canceled on the grounds that administrative errors had occurred.
Not that administrative errors were too hard to find, given the haziness of legal arrangements in the 1920s. Take the following case cited as exemplary in a guide to dacha legislation published in 1935. In 1923, in the settlement Novogireevo (Moscow region), a dacha belonging to one Shchedrin was classified by representatives of the NKVD as being of the “lordly” type and hence municipalized; but Shchedrin had sold it by private agreement to a woman named Ivanova, who in 1922 had gone to court to have herself recognized as the de facto owner. Armed with this judgment, she was then able (in 1923) to register the property in her name. In 1927 she sold it to a new owner, Dobrov. In 1931, in the course of verifying property registration, the local ispolkom uncovered these legal irregularities (that is, the fact that a building originally municipalized was now registered as someone’s private property) and went to court to have Dobrov evicted. The court concluded that Dobrov should indeed be forced to vacate the property, but only after he and his family had been allocated equivalent living space elsewhere.69
So the municipalization decree continued to cause dacha folk enormous trouble even several years after it had supposedly been implemented—but it might also be ignored or manipulated to their advantage until the housing authorities decided to examine the situation more closely. Legal processes, it seems, tended to reflect the specific relationship between individual dacha residents and the representatives of state or municipal power whom they encountered. The class warfare of the late 1920s, however, tipped the balance of power comprehensively in favor of the local ispolkoms and against dachniki. The brutal design of this campaign is clear from an NKVD circular of 1930 that explicitly extended the war against “former people” to dacha locations. The earlier municipalization measures were deemed to have been insufficiently thorough; now the aim was to check the whole of the private dacha stock and to eliminate “profiteering.” Absolutely no more demunicipalization was to be permitted. Even before this, however, the regional department of local services had instructed the dacha trust to check the social composition of tenants throughout the uezd, paying particular attention to “locations that formerly served as vacation places for the bourgeoisie and now for nepmen and people of free professions.”70
The hard-line policies of the late 1920s had the predictable effect of encouraging localized and personal abuses in the war against social undesirables. Local soviets were aided in their work by a wave of denunciations,71 though it seems they scarcely needed this assistance, as in many cases they were already itching to take control of dachas occupied by “former people.” In 1927–28 a resident of Kuntsevo named Perevezentsev, who had lived with his wife in the same dacha for seventeen years, had had to suffer the forced occupation of several rooms by the secretary of the local soviet. The justification for this action was that he and his wife, having owned seven dachas in Kuntsevo before the Revolution, had retained one dacha each; the local soviet argued that they should move together into one. To add to the pressure, the secretary of the Party cell of the soviet and secretary of the local police committee moved in and began to terrorize the owners, storming into the house drunk at night and threatening them with a revolver. For this behavior the people’s court gave him a derisory fine of 10 rubles for “arbitrariness” (samoupravstvo); the dacha’s owners were evicted all the same.72
The 1920s thus culminated in an assault on exurban settlements whose aim was to eliminate the prerevolutionary dacha owner. Yet far from spelling the end of the dacha, the offensive prepared the way for its further development in the Stalin era.
Dachas in Stalin’s Time
In the 1920s leisure was not a well-established concept for Soviet society. Public discussion of the off-work behavior of Soviet citizens clustered around two opposing poles. On the one hand, mention was made of private activities such as drinking, dancing, and dacha rental; these were usually treated in an ambivalent, not to say hostile, manner. On the other hand, more approving accounts were given of collective and politicized recreational institutions such as rest homes (doma otdykha) and children’s colonies. Thus Serebrianyi Bor, formerly the “favorite residence for prominent Moscow merchants,” now became a leisure complex consisting of thirteen collective dachas, each accommodating between fifty and seventy people. One report explained: “There aren’t any sick people here. The people here just need a rest.” The daily timetable was strictly laid out: early rising was followed by calisthenics, swimming, walking, and sunbathing; drinking was strictly forbidden, and smoking was permitted only outside the buildings.73
All this changed in the early 1930s. Soviet society started to acquire a new ideology of leisure not just as a means of weaving citizens into a seamless collective or as a brief interlude between bouts of shock labor and social combat on the factory floor but rather as a cultural experience that could make an important contribution to the new Soviet way of life and the formation of a new Soviet citizen. It is around this time that the Soviet discourse on leisure—as something quite distinct from work—begins in earnest. As one slogan of the time ran: “Working in the new way means relaxing in the new way too.” In part, the new attitude toward leisure was reflected in practical measures. Existing facilities were to be expanded and improved.74 Parks, such as those surrounding the palaces in the Leningrad region, were to have extra facilities provided. In Detskoe (formerly Tsarskoe) Selo, accordingly, the number of visitors was expected to increase from 500,000 in 1933 to 945,000 in 1934.75 Quantitative improvements were matched by qualitative changes, as leisure institutions took account of the cultural advances proclaimed on behalf of Soviet society. New rest homes retained their function of collective, organized recreation, but the pattern of life they imposed was not so militarized as in the 1920s. As one article explained, things had moved on greatly from earlier vacation camps, where the only cultural work that went on was folk dancing, the only way of combating drunkenness was to destroy all alcoholic drinks on the premises, and the staff were dismayed by the uncivilized behavior of the “masses.”76
In a booklet of 1933 Soviet functionaries and their families were offered advice on how “correctly to organize their recreation, [how] most rationally to make use of their day off.” Such people were urged to take advantage of leisure and to take part in mass events in such prime greenbelt locations as Gorki, Arkhangel’skoe, Zvenigorod, and Kolomenskoe; in moments free from physical activities they might indulge in a bit of local history in a museum.77 In 1934, about 800 institutions were offering summer leisure activities in the Moscow region; the total number of beds was 90,000. Each summer weekend, approximately 500,000 Muscovites set off into the greenbelt.78 In 1936 Vecherniaia Moskva (the Moscow evening newspaper) proudly reported that from one station alone 250,000 Muscovites had headed out of town last weekend—and that most of these people were not permanent residents of satellite settlements or even dachniki but day trippers.79 The increased scope for leisure came to be seen as an important symptom of the general well-being of Soviet society; the history of dacha locations was mentioned only to contrast the vanity and frippery of the prerevolutionary leisured classes with the wholesomeness of Soviet recreational activities.80
The new approach to leisure had a parallel in public discussion of housing and settlement. Debates on architecture and town planning in the first half of the 1920s had been dominated by a generation that took seriously Marx’s promise of a communist lifestyle that would harmoniously integrate urban and rural environments. The three main models proposed (linear urban growth, the compact city [sotsgorod] and deurbanization) had something very important in common: they all presupposed the thoroughgoing resettlement of the Soviet population with the aim of eliminating urban agglomerations.81 The implications of these projects were as negative for the prerevolutionary dacha as they were for the major cities: the idea was to break down the dualism whereby economically productive life proceeded in overcrowded urban settlements and recreation in the greenbelt.
At the end of the 1920s, however, it was decided that the Soviet Union should not aspire to the harmonious, integrated life of the small town. As before, people would have to live in city centers or in densely populated industrial suburbs. The reasons for the abandonment of “utopian” planning projects were in large part economic: a spread of low-density settlement required too high and even a level of infrastructure, and it did not square with the absolute commitment to headlong industrialization.82 But the more traditional planning policies of the 1930s also reflected a new concern with everyday life and the individual. The conflict between the culture of the 1920s and that of the 1930s forms the subject of a 1931 story by Konstantin Paustovskii in which an avant-garde architect named Gofman leads a ski party to a part-built vacation camp that he has designed. The main building is cylindrical, its curved windows are made of unbreakable glass, the climate inside is artificially controlled so as to be summery all year round, and its walls are so thin that they let in the sounds of the natural world from outside. As Gofman combatively explains: “Cities have had their day. If you . . . think that this is incorrect, then Engels thought otherwise. Each state system has its own particular forms of human settlement. Socialism doesn’t need cities.” The accompanying journalist, however, finds the design cold and impersonal: “In every house . . . there should be a certain stock of useless objects. In every house there should be at least one mistake.” Gofman is duly summoned to a committee meeting, where he is accused of “unnecessary functionalism” and objections are made to the costliness of his design. At the end of the story he goes swimming and conveniently drowns before the Soviet architectural community has had time to show him the error of his ways (and before the author has had to face up to the moral implications of the conflict he has outlined).83
Paustovskii’s story accurately reflects the movement away from deurbanizing projects, a tendency that enabled the dacha to regain some of the positive connotations it had lost in the 1920s. The Soviet Union, it was commonly argued, must avoid the suburban sprawl so characteristic of England and America, and dachas could help to preserve the greenbelts around the major cities. They had the further virtue of lessening the pressure on rest homes and sanatoria, of which the provision was inadequate throughout the Soviet period and especially in the 1920s. And summer houses were in fact more important to the Russians than to the British and the Americans, given the long winters, the short building season, and the unsanitary conditions that prevailed in cities. “Dacha in the narrow sense of the word is a purely Russian phenomenon,” claimed the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1930.
Positive assessments of this kind could not, however, bring practical improvements on their own. The dacha’s increasing public respectability was not matched by the pace of exurban construction. The Moscow city administration, when it took stock of the available dacha resources in 1933, found little to gladden the hearts of the vacationing masses: the municipal dacha stock was badly depleted (the basic unit of dacha allocation in this period was the room, not the house), and other organizations had not done much to improve the situation.84 Leningrad faced very much the same problems. In July 1931, for example, the oblast ispolkom instructed various organizations to inspect properties (especially former palaces and estates) that might provide dacha space. The conclusion reached was quick and unequivocal: “The municipal dacha stock, after inspection on site, consists of isolated lodgings of the following types: mezzanines, small attic rooms, and small outbuildings. On transfer of the entire housing stock to the ZhAKTs [housing cooperatives], the latter have adapted accommodations formerly used as dachas to form winter housing.”85 Despite regular attempts to free up dacha space, it was clear that municipal provision, as in the 1920s, was not competing effectively with the private market.86
Given the inadequacy of the existing publicly administered dacha stock, the construction of new settlements became a matter of urgency. The Leningrad housing organization Zhilsoiuz was required to set up “dacha and allotment cooperatives” at the raion level and also under the auspices of particular factories. The production of prefabricated wooden dachas was to be stepped up; the housing department (Zhilotdel) was required to organize a competition for dacha design and to develop designs for cheap and simple furniture suitable for dachas. According to the stipulations of this competition, vacation accommodations were to come in three main types: the “single-apartment dacha” (odnokvartimaia dacha) intended for summer use only, with a plot of 600 square meters; the sblochennaia dacha (i.e., two semidetached dachas) designed for use all year round; and the pansionat for fifty people, which was also destined for year-round use.87 The plan was to put up no fewer than 5,000 standard dachas during 1932.88
The organization burdened with these considerable tasks was the Trust for Dacha and Suburban Housing Construction in Leningrad oblast (operational from August 1931). Over the three years of its existence, the trust was beset with the problems that afflicted all areas of production in the Stalin era: a poorly trained, inexperienced, and ill-disciplined workforce; a shortage of resources and of ready cash, given that debtors were slow to pay; constant struggles with other branches of production for access to equipment and raw materials; the pressure of relentless and unrealistic production targets (including the construction of many houses of the “winter type,” which were not the trust’s prime responsibility); and the cumbersome bureaucracy that any branch of the supply system entailed.
This dacha at Lisii Nos, which faces directly on the Gulf of Finland, would have been the ideal of many 1930s dachniki.
Despite these difficulties, the Leningrad dacha trust helped to create a new, centralized model of dacha rental and ownership for its region. It did not rent houses to private individuals but worked only with organizations: dachas were to be rented through trade unions, factories, and other state and Party institutions at standard rates. By 1934 such organizations were sending in a steady stream of applications requesting accommodations for their employees.89
The dachas built by the trust were of two main types: individual (for one family) and collective. The former typically consisted of two rooms and contained the following standard-issue furniture: two beds with mattresses (cost 210 rubles), six chairs (60 rubles), two tables (80 rubles), two buckets (5 rubles), one washstand (5 rubles). A list compiled in 1933 gave a total of 108 families resident in the trust’s flagship building developments at Mel’nichii Ruchei (just beyond Vsevolozhsk, on the railway line heading toward Lake Ladoga) and Lisii Nos (on the north side of the Gulf of Finland). The size of the houses they inhabited varied from one to six rooms, but the average was around two. Canteens were to provide meals for the regular dacha population, as well as for shorter-term visitors from the same kinds of organization. The tenants included employees of the following institutions: the dacha trust itself, the OGPU (the political police), banks, supply organizations, and various factories (including the Karl Marx, Sverdlov, and Stalin works).90
Many members of this middling stratum of the Soviet elite, however, were dismayed when they arrived at their dachas. The houses (especially their interiors) were often not completed, rubbish was still lying about the building sites, and amenities were very basic (and sometimes nonexistent). The canteens had not opened and there was little sign of a compensating supply of basic foodstuffs to the dacha settlements. In a report compiled at the end of 1932, the newly appointed head of the trust’s operational department was frank about the problems he faced: building standards were low, as was morale among the construction workers, given the abysmal conditions in which they worked; denied adequate temporary housing, workers had put up in semiconstructed dachas and left them in a wretched state.91 The press relentlessly kept such failings in the public eye.92
Newspapers also alleged that municipal dachas in the more desirable locations were allocated by personal acquaintance (by blat, in Soviet parlance). One journalist commented in 1933:
There are no rules for the distribution of dachas in the Moscow region. There are only memos [zapiski]. Memos come in three varieties: the friendly blat type, the string-pulling, and the naive, the last kind being written by organizations and enterprises that are appealing on behalf of their workers. The first kind is invariably successful, the second sometimes works, but the third—never.93
Although the trust was certainly a convenient target for accusations of corruption—one of the main Soviet techniques of governance, in the 1930s and after, was to attribute “popular” grievances to the failings of middle administration rather than to the Party elite or the system as a whole—there seems no reason to doubt that the administrative mechanisms of the time left ample scope for the practice of blat.94
In 1934 the trust was liquidated and replaced by local managing organizations 142 (dachnye khoziaistva) under the umbrella of Leningrad’s housing administration (Lenzhilupravlenie). A parallel development took place in Moscow with the transfer of dacha management to the regional communal department in April 1934.95 Control over the existing stock was further devolved by offering dachas for sale to factories and other organizations. But these administrative reshuffles did not change the general direction of policy: the trust had served as a means of transition from the chaotic situation of the 1920s to a more regulated system of distribution via state and Party organizations.
The prevailing trend was reinforced by developments in the cooperative movement. As we have seen, dacha cooperatives had existed since the 1920s, but in the 1930s their number and the strength of their institutional backing increased considerably.96 Cooperatives were recognized by the Moscow soviet as a way of mobilizing the resources both of individuals and of enterprises and of easing problems that the dacha trusts alone were clearly incapable of tackling. By November 1935, the managing organization Mosgordachsoiuz was able to report that the number of cooperatives had risen from 61 to 114 in little more than a year. But this was not necessarily grounds for self-congratulation: the funds available for dacha construction had not risen proportionately, and there were now 6,000 cooperative members on the waiting list for dachas; the total number of completed dachas was only 378.97 Individual settlements received grants (known as limity) out of the overall city budget, but this money went only a very small part of the way toward the costs of construction; the rest of the working capital was made up of members’ preliminary contributions, bank loans, and whatever funds were forthcoming from the cooperative’s sponsor organization (in many cases, the members’ employer).
The houses built and administered by the cooperatives were reserved for people occupying positions of responsibility and influence in particular organizations. Even for these people, however, dachas were not easy to come by. As the waiting list for dachas lengthened and resources remained scarce, many prospective dachniki could not contain their frustration and gave vent to grievances at general meetings of the cooperative or in personal petitions to Mosgordachsoiuz or some other branch of the city government. The most common allegation was that the rightful order of priority had been outweighed by personal considerations: that managers of the dacha stock had been swayed by blat, by the corrupt rendering of personal favors, instead of observing the cooperative statutes. It is impossible to judge how legitimate these protests were, especially as many are couched in the language of denunciation.98 What is clear, however, is that the prevailing economic conditions placed the managers of settlements in a position where they would have been hard pressed not to employ blat. To make use of contacts and to engage in practices that were not officially sanctioned was essential if construction work was to make any progress.
It is also clear that many members of dacha cooperatives served as unpaid “fixers” (tolkachi), or at least contributed a substantial amount of legwork, going from one institution to another to conduct the cooperative’s business. To be a cooperative aktivist did not primarily imply political duties: it meant having to negotiate deliveries of timber, standing in line to get the cooperative’s registration rubber-stamped, hiring casual laborers, and keeping an eye on them once they started work. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many of these people, who had made a real practical contribution to the cooperative’s activities, felt they deserved preferential allocation of dacha space.99 Nor is.it surprising that their claims often met an outraged response from other cooperative members: Stalin-era fixers by definition were not open and accountable in their actions, and the criteria for determining priority in the allocation of dachas were often unclear.
The suspicions of ordinary members were fueled by the murky closed-doors deals that the cooperative boards of administration seemed to be making with the sponsor organization. They were dismayed by a general trend of dacha settlements to become more organizationally (or “departmentally”) based and less cooperative-like. That is to say, members tended to come from a single institution or a small number of linked institutions that retained close control over the construction and allocation of dachas. Settlements that had been established in the late 1920s were on the whole more heterogeneous. Mosgordachsoiuz complained in 1936 that at the Vneshtorgovets settlement, the sponsoring organization, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, was claiming a number of the dachas for its own people: “in such a situation the collective has no cooperative characteristics whatsoever and this construction is organizational under the cover of a cooperative.”100
Dachniki without such organizational backing, still the majority, continued, as they had done in the 1920s, to rent from house owners in villages and settlements accessible from Leningrad and Moscow. As a representative of the dacha trust noted in a report to the Leningrad soviet of April 1932 regarding the continuing shortage of dachas: “If Leningraders do in spite of all this manage to get out to a dacha during the summer, this is because they get living space by virtue of the self-compression [samouplotnenie] of the permanent population of the suburban district and thanks to the modest private housing stock.”101 A further source of dachas for rent, especially in the second half of the 1930s, was cooperative settlements: subletting a cooperative dacha was forbidden by Mosgordachsoiuz, and some people were expelled from their cooperative for such an offense, but in many settlements this practice seems to have been tolerated.102
A middling white-collar family would typically rent a house in a village where the local population would keep them supplied with basic produce; the time-consuming task of running the household through the summer months could further be alleviated by hiring a local girl as a servant (especially after the violent onset of collectivization, there was no shortage of peasant women willing to enter the domestic service of city folk).103 The dacha formed part of the way of life of overworked urban parents, who were able to send their children away for part of the summer. A Leningrad woman (born in 1929) recalled: “When I was a child we rented a dacha in Ozerki [very close to the city]. No kind of facilities, just a box of a room. And of course there was no space round about. . . . My mother was working almost without a break. . . . Meanwhile we spent the time at the dacha. . . . Our granny lived with us.”104 Similar were the experiences of Elena Bonner, who recalled spending one summer in the mid-1930s in a large house rented by her extended family in a village near Luga; as in the 1920s, the children and most of the women lived there all through the summer, while her politically active parents remained in the city.105 And Mikhail and Elena Bulgakov packed their family off to dachas to which they would make only occasional short trips during the summer; for the most part they made do with swimming in the Moscow River.106
This pattern of life—to remain in the city over the summer but make regular forays into the surrounding countryside—was by no means unusual in the 1930s, judging by the increase in summer rail traffic.107 On a typical day during the summer over 10 percent of Moscow’s population would head for the forests and lakes surrounding the city. And they had plenty of territory to choose from: the “suburban zone” was taken up predominantly by agriculture and forest (48 and 42 percent respectively) and only very slightly by towns and urban settlements (2.4 percent). That said, leisure facilities were still underdeveloped: the problem of keeping up with the increasing demand for leisure—without, however, violating the forest zone—was discussed regularly in the 1930s and after.108 Given the still inadequate leisure facilities in the Moscow area, it was argued that more land should be released for dacha construction in order to encourage workers to build. Settlements should not be allowed to grow too large (the proposed limit was 1,500 people), and dacha zones should be kept quite separate from other places of leisure. If construction was stepped up in this way, prices would be brought down.109 Yet if dacha building was allowed to continue unchecked, there was a serious danger that urban settlements would expand unacceptably, or that smaller dacha settlements would spring up in inappropriate places. Recent experience had shown that dacha plots were often too big (up to 2.5 hectares) to be ecologically sustainable.110
It seems that the greater part of the expansion of dacha settlements in the Moscow region in the 1930s can be put down to a process of creeping suburbanization: in 1936 it was estimated that 70 percent of the population of such settlements was made up by commuters (zagorodniki). As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explained in 1930, dachas had “changed their function: they are not so much a summer dwelling for city people in need of a summer break as a dwelling for urban toilers, thus increasing the housing stock of the latter.”111 As for dachas proper (i.e., dachas as places for summer leisure), in 1934 there were places for 165,000 people (around 5 percent of the city’s population) in the Moscow region (compare this with 86,000 for rest homes, 35,000 for Pioneer camps, and 28,500 for preschool colonies). These 1930s dachniki were predominantly women (75 percent), presumably because draconian labor legislation kept men tied to the workplace (two weeks’ annual vacation was the norm in this period). Their class origin was likewise clearly marked: “There are no single dachniki. Very few workers. In the main, they are the families of employees [sluzhashchie].”112 In December 1934, Mosgordachsoiuz reported to Nikita Khrushchev, then Moscow Party boss, that of the 6,400 members of dacha cooperatives in the Moscow area only 455 (that is, 7 percent) were workers.113 But while the underrepresentation of proletarians was common knowledge, it rarely occasioned any public soul-searching.114 Rather, the Soviet press emphasized how urban “toilers” were benefiting from the new Soviet social welfare contract with the state: they were offered subsidized trips to rest homes, and the luckier ones might enjoy a full-blown vacation at a resort in the Crimea or the Caucasus.
The notion of a social divide between dacha residents and “mass” vacationers is supported by memoir accounts. One Muscovite’s recollections of childhood in the 1930s included walks past charming old dachas beyond the Sokol’niki gate that outwardly were unchanged since prerevolutionary times. “It seemed to us that these were some kind of ‘former people’ who were quietly living out their time behind tulle curtains.”115 The actress Galina Ivanovna Kozhakina recalled her 1930s experiences of dacha life in a similar light: “The dachas on neighboring plots were occupied by princes, former priests, and ruined nepmen. Our neighbor, once a noble lady, bred a huge flock of turkeys.”116 The presence of “former people” in dacha settlements was evidence not of privilege but of stigma. Nadezhda Mandelstam, for example, recounted how social undesirables such as her husband were commonly forbidden to live within a hundred-kilometer radius of Moscow. For this reason, they tended to cluster in village settlements just beyond that limit.117Closer to the city, conditions were often no better for less oppressed dacha residents: the more spacious dachas were turned into multiple-occupancy dwellings, the suburban equivalent of the communal apartment.
Such ad hoc arrangements were made possible by the still rather low penetration of outlying areas by the municipal authorities: private owners in former dacha settlements accounted for 59 percent of the total stock, while kolkhoz and peasant ownership was 28 percent. Cooperatives managed only 11 percent. Of the 274 population centers inhabited by dachniki in the Moscow region in the mid-1930s, 51 were “old” settlements, 55 were “new,” and the rest were ordinary villages. Prices for the season varied spectacularly, from 70 to 1,000 rubles.118
Once again advertisements can provide some information on the state of the dacha market. The back pages of newspapers in the 1930s were filled with notices concerning apartment swaps, lost dogs, household help, music lessons, and pieces of furniture, yet dachas were also featured. (As in the 1920s, we must assume that it was primarily a sellers’ market, and that most potential landlords had no need to go looking for tenants.) Dacha advertisements began to appear very early in the year—in the middle of the winter—and continued through to May and June, when they gave way to notices concerning the rental of rooms in city apartments (generally sublet by departed dachniki).119 Perhaps the most common type of dacha advertisement from February to May was that placed by institutions looking to rent or buy accommodations. Many organizations urgently needed to find living space for specialists arriving from other cities (hence the frequently encountered formula “Corners, rooms, dachas”). The demand for dachas was paralleled by the significant numbers of people who were trying to swap houses outside the city for central apartments, though it seems unlikely that these two types of demand were complementary: housing of all kinds—urban, suburban, and exurban—was in short supply.
The dacha shortage was exacerbated by the reluctance of many villagers to let out rooms because of concern that they would be liable for extra taxes. In Leningrad in 1932 it was noted that ordinary people could obtain dachas only through acquaintances, and even then at ridiculously high prices; the local authorities were often blamed for imposing extra charges that discouraged villagers from renting out their property and ultimately resulted in inflation.120 The ispolkom of Moscow oblast had already (in May 1932) taken the initiative in this matter by allowing collective farm workers and all other non-“kulak” landlords 300 rubles of untaxed nonagricultural income, by giving the dacha economy full exemption from the agricultural tax, and by forbidding local soviets to impose any unauthorized new charges on landlords and tenants. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, village people needed much convincing that they would not be treated as kulaks if they rented out their property over the summer.121
At the same time that they offered encouragement to peasant landlords, the Leningrad city authorities tried to cap dacha rents by imposing pricing norms. According to this system, dacha locations were divided into four categories, from the highly desirable northern side of the Gulf of Finland to more remote and less attractive locations. The norm for living space per person was 6 square meters; tenants were charged double for anything above that. A discount of 10 percent was given for dachas more than three kilometers from the nearest station. Rents were partially means-tested.122 Summer train timetables were introduced to make travel to and from the dacha more attractive. On one suburban Moscow line, a “model train” was supposedly introduced: clean and welcoming, it was bedecked with curtains and portraits of political leaders; music was permanently turned on in a special “radio compartment”; the conductor dispensed reading matter; and a particularly comfortable carriage was reserved for mothers and children.123
But these reports of measures to regulate and improve the quality of dacha life brought dachniki little practical benefit. In many settlements the promised canteens had failed to materialize, and in their absence there was nowhere to buy even the most basic foodstuffs. Supply organizations had failed to account for the annual dacha exodus and continued to send food to the cities when it was needed much more in exurban settlements.124 It was forbidden to transport paraffin by suburban train, a rule that even the most law-abiding Soviet dachniki were forced to flout, given the absence of alternative supply channels.125 The transport of furniture and bulkier household items to the dacha was extremely complicated and time-consuming.126 Leaky roofs, glass-free windows, and unplastered walls were commonly encountered on arrival.127
To cope with the dacha shortage, a typical Soviet solution was attempted: to shift the burden of construction to the population. Articles in the Leningrad press in 1935 told “individual builders” that they could expect to obtain credits from various organizations as well as practical assistance and building materials from the housing section of the city soviet (no help would be provided, however, for window and door frames, windowpanes and interior decoration).128 Citizens were advised that if they pooled the family’s earnings, they could save themselves the bother of a rented dacha and build their own modest out-of-town house.129 The dacha was now, in the mid-1930s, presented as an amenity to which the ordinary Soviet worker could legitimately aspire. One exemplary article features a shop superintendent from the Stalin Car Factory by the name of Iakov Rafailovich Fainshtein, along with his friend, colleague, and dacha neighbor Rustem. The factory has given both of them cars, which at first were objects of enormous fascination but are now taken for granted. Fainshtein has brought back a vacuum cleaner and a phonograph, and these have taken their places in the household alongside the “bicycle, car, radio, electrical appliances, and other new things that have been acquired by the family in recent years.” Clearly Stalin-era culture circa 1935 placed a premium on a comfortable standard of living and lifestyle for those who were held to deserve them. And here the dacha had an important role to play:
While they’re drinking tea on the terrace, Iakov Rafailovich reads the second volume of Peter I while his wife reads Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid. They plunge into a little discussion of the works of the author of these books, Aleksei Tolstoi. Liusia Kharitonovna [Rustem’s wife], turning over the latest issue of the newspaper, interrupts the discussion by asking: “What is a stratosphere balloon made of?” Then the two friends—the engineer Rustem and the head of section Fainshtein—share the latest factory news. When there is nothing left to tell and the tea has been drunk, silence falls. Some of them carry on reading, others just “breathe,” as this pursuit in a pine wood in the freshness of the night itself offers no little enjoyment.
“It’s so quiet,” someone quips, “that you can hear the onions growing in our vegetable plot.”
“I should hope so too! We gave it a good enough watering at the end of the day. But look how the potatoes have got going! They’re surging up from the ground!” . . .
When the light goes out in the windows, this dachlet is completely swallowed up by the woods. Near Moscow there are lots of woods like this, lots of dachas like this, and lots of people like this relaxing in them. But the people who enjoy their rest most are those who work hardest!130
This account is highly representative of the time in its mixture of legitimizing strategies: a trip to the dacha is unashamedly a leisure activity and is quite explicitly linked to material aspirations, yet at the same time it is linked to a rural “good life,” to the values of “cultured” and purposeful work.
The model of dacha life fostered by the Stalin era comes over clearly in architectural handbooks of the 1930s. As Vladimir Papernyi observes, “individual wooden houses, cottages, and dachas became an increasingly legitimate category for architectural design and probable architectural commission.”131 A book published in 1939 identified 200 basic types of dacha design (the variation depended on climate and function) but advocated above all “communal” plots with shared or “paired” dachas, thus implying a criticism of a ministry regulation of the same year stipulating that buildings should take up no more than 10 percent of the territory of any plot of land.132 The “mass” dacha generally lacked running water and other basic amenities, but for people with greater resources the legal restraints were fewer than later in the Soviet period:
There are no restrictions on the design of the accommodation, and dachas can have verandas (either open or with windows), terraces, balconies, oriel windows, galleries, bathrooms, washrooms, various other facilities (such as a cellar, a boiler for central heating, or a laundry room and so on), rooms for special purposes (a darkroom) and so on.
To provide parking space for cars arriving at the dacha it is possible to attach to the house a carport or a lightweight summer garage.
The recommended exterior was simple and unshowy; light building materials (other than brick) were to be used in order to reduce the cost of construction; nor was the dacha to approach a town house in its external features. The “pretensions to originality” and “tackiness” of prerevolutionary dachas were now quite out of place—even if, regrettably, they persisted in some locations.133
But normative documents such as architectural and planning handbooks have an extremely problematic relation to social practice throughout the Soviet period, and perhaps never more so than in the Stalin era, which may be said to have institutionalized a disjuncture between rule and action, word and deed. The reality of “individual construction” in the 1930s was, of course, very different from the moderate material gratification promised in the pro-consumerist public campaign of 1935; to build a dacha without the direct and explicit protection of an organization was one of the greatest feats that could be achieved by 1930s blat.134
Soviet design for a “paired” dacha (from G.M. Bobov, Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo dach [Moscow, 1939])
Layout of a medium-sized prewar dacha plot (from Vremennye tekhnicheskie pravila [Moscow, 1940])
Contemporary published sources also fail to mention the dachas reserved for the upper echelons of the Party and leading figures in other areas of Soviet life (notably, favored writers, artists, performers, scholars, and scientists). The provision of elite settlements of this kind had begun in the 1920s (Serebriannyi Bor, Malakhovka, Kratovo, Nikolina Gora, Zubalovo, and others), but in the 1930s it proceeded more intensively and systematically. Top Party and government cadres in Moscow and the corresponding regional elites had virtually carte blanche to build themselves enormous—by Soviet standards—country residences. The most sought-after dacha locations of the 1930s were to the west of Moscow, where heavily policed and intensively maintained compounds began to take over from the more ad hoc elite enclaves of the 1920s.135 Stalin, for example, moved to a new dacha at Kuntsevo in 1934. This move marked a change in lifestyle quite consistent with the estrangement from his extended family that resulted from the suicide of his wife in 1932. When Svetlana Allilueva recalled her father’s behavior at the earlier dacha at Zubalovo, she remembered a peasantlike feeling for nature, modest tastes, and an easy way with the servants. Now, however, Stalin’s down-to-earth lifestyle was demolished piece by piece: members of the domestic staff who had known Allilueva’s mother were soon laid off, the number of servants and guards was greatly increased (there were always two sets of cooks and cleaners so that they could work around the clock, in two shifts), and Stalin’s entourage conducted a purge of old artifacts and furniture. The dacha interior became faceless and official. One observer who visited Kuntsevo in the spring of 1953, just a few weeks after Stalin’s death, gave the following description of the main area for meetings:
A room about 30 meters long. The far end was oval, as in noble families’ residences of the century before last. Lots of identical windows securely sealed with heavy white curtains such as you find in all major institutions in the center of Moscow.
The lower part of the walls, about a meter and a half off the ground, was brown and covered with Karelian birchwood, which looked rather official [kazenno]. Under the windows there were electric radiators cased in the same birchwood.136
Although Stalin had several dachas, in the Moscow region and elsewhere, all kept in a state of constant readiness, he chose to make the Kuntsevo dacha his main residence, a decision that both fed and reflected his growing suspiciousness and disengagement from people. Kuntsevo provided a new model for the elite dacha not only in its interior furnishings: Stalin actually chose to conduct a lot of his business there, regularly summoning colleagues to give briefings. Meetings of the Politburo would be conducted in the dacha’s large egg-shaped conference room adorned with portraits of major Soviet political figures, and Stalin’s associates 153 would be placed so that each man was seated underneath his painted image.137
The case of Stalin’s dacha has great historical resonance: the Leader’s move from the family dacha at Zubalovo to a gray official residence at Kuntsevo may be seen as emblematic of his break with the values of the Old Bolsheviks and his repudiation of revolutionary asceticism. As might be expected, Stalin’s comrades were quick to follow their boss’s lead: by the mid-1930s it was rare for senior Party figures to be making their own dacha arrangements; most of them had “personal” dachas that were officially state-owned but were rented out indefinitely to members of the political elite.138
Yet privileged dachniki could be as vulnerable as anyone else in the 1930s to the changing political winds. In 1933, for example, the village of Roslovka (Moscow region) had been developed as a comfortable dacha settlement for the managerial elite of the baking industry, but in 1937 and 1938 its character changed again: most of its residents disappeared in the purges, and other members of the elite were reluctant to take their place. As a result, the settlement was in due course occupied by factory workers (with five or six families to each house).139
Dacha settlements were almost certainly affected even more severely by the Terror than the cities where their residents had their main dwellings. For one thing, they were populated by precisely the categories of people—above all, Party/state functionaries and middle managers—who were most vulnerable to unmasking as “enemies of the people.” And the unofficial channels through which the governing boards of dacha cooperatives were forced to operate gave ample material for conspiracy theorists among the rank-and-file membership. As economic bottlenecks remained tightly sealed, there may well have been a tendency to admit to cooperatives “random people” (sluchainye liudi) whose relation to the sponsor organization might be tenuous but who were well equipped to negotiate the shortage economy and obtain building materials.140
But, for as long as they remained in favor, men highly placed in the apparat could allow themselves almost anything. Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and of course Stalin wasted little time in carving out plots in elite locations and having spacious residences built at public expense.141 By the mid-1930s, all semblance of self-restraint had gone. In one particularly unsavory episode, the state prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, maneuvered to acquire the dacha of the Old Bolshevik Leonid Serebriakov even as he was demanding the death penalty for him at one of the Moscow show trials. Vyshinsky transferred the plot of land from cooperative to state ownership and in the process pocketed the money that Serebriakov had paid into the cooperative pool for his dacha.142
By the mid-1930s the net of privilege was cast wider to include new categories of beneficiary. In 1932 Literaturnaia gazeta noted pointedly that the only existing rest homes for writers could accommodate only fifteen people a month and were located an awkward fifteen-kilometer journey from a rail station two and a half hours’ ride from Moscow. Fifty-six people (mainly writers’ families rather than the writers themselves) were crammed into a building of seventeen rooms.143 Construction of the famous writers’ colony at Peredelkino started in 1934, shortly after the first congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, as a means of remedying this situation. Sovnarkom allocated 1.5 million rubles toward the cost of the first thirty dachas, and prominent writers and literary bureaucrats appealed successfully for further substantial injections of cash.144 We have no reason to believe that the allocation of these funds was any more open, accountable, or equitable than in any other sector of the Soviet economy. As Gorky noted with alarm to a member of the Politburo in 1935:
Money is often allocated without due attention, without consideration for the real needs of the union members. A needy writer can be refused help, but the sister of a writer receives 5,000 rubles. The government gave money for the construction of a dacha settlement, and 700,000 of this sum disappears like straw in the wind. There are many instances of generosity of this kind.145
Such doubts had earlier been raised from time to time by major Party figures.146 But now, in the mid-1930s, Gorky’s was a lone—and, given his own lavish accommodations, somewhat compromised—voice. Well-known writers had been petitioning the Central Committee for material privileges since the early 1920s, and by the mid-1930s the Party was coming to acknowledge their right to a peaceful creative environment in return for obedient membership in the union.
Boris Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino (from Natal’ia Poltavtseva)
The state’s encouragement of “creativity” by providing dachas gave rise to a new model of dacha life, which revived the prerevolutionary concept of the writer’s retreat and underpinned it with the resources of the Soviet state. The result, in the words of one sardonic observer of Peredelkino, was a “feudal” settlement where the titans of Soviet literature took the role of lords of the manor.147 Among the most prominent beneficiaries of these resources was Boris Pasternak, who in the second half of the 1930s took to spending large parts of the winter alone in Peredelkino (he visited Moscow about twice a month). Pasternak, like so many members of the intelligentsia, had been tormented by abysmal living conditions in his Moscow apartment in the 1920s; in Peredelkino he saw an opportunity to recreate the inspiring solitude of the student garret: “I am an incorrigible and convinced frequenter of bunks and attics (the student who ‘rents a cubbyhole’) and my very best recollections are of the difficult and modest periods of my existence: in them there is always more earth, more color, more Rembrandt content.” Pasternak later confessed his discomfort after the substantial renovation and extension of the dacha in 1953–54: “I feel uncomfortable in these surroundings; it is above my station. I am ashamed at the walls of my enormous study with its parquet floor and central heating.” So great was Pasternak’s debt to his country retreat that his son saw fit to defend him against the charge of being a “dachnik” (perhaps he sensed an upsetting incongruity in the fact that his father had composed much of Doctor Zhivago, among other things a sprawling paean to nature as the life force of art, history, and Russia, while holed up in the pseudo-wilderness of the Soviet writer’s village): “But if twentieth-century art is pre-eminently city art, it is quite natural for contemporary man to encounter nature in his country cottage; and for his reflection to derive from his impressions of genteel suburban rusticity.”148
Soviet society was everywhere structured by hierarchies that governed people’s access to goods and services. At the same time that the first dachas in Peredelkino were going up, slightly less favored writers were petitioning the authorities to obtain land for a dacha cooperative. Here the plan was for fifty modest wooden dachas of two to four rooms as well as one hostel for thirty people. The petition was signed by cultural figures little associated with collective actions of this kind: Osip Brik, Iurii Olesha, Iakov Protazanov, and, most surprising, Mikhail Bulgakov.149 Galina Vladimirovna Shtange, social activist and wife of a professor whose position entitled him to build a dacha in the Academy of Sciences cooperative, was a typical upper-middling member of the intelligentsia. After three years of tense anticipation and frequent delays, the Shtanges were allocated a building lot in January 1938; while grateful for the chance to have “our own little corner to go to in our old age,” Galina Vladimirovna was under no illusions about its level of comfort: “Like all these cooperatives, ours, the ‘Academic,’ turned out to be not the best quality and the dachas are not quite what we were promised. They’re not equipped for winter, there’s no stove, no fence, no icebox, no shed.”150 Nor were standards always much higher in prestige settlements like Peredelkino. Boris Pasternak complained in 1939 that his spacious retreat was rotting and collapsing a mere three years after it had been built; the new dacha to which he moved that year was supplied with gas and running water only in the winter of 1953–54.151
The allocation of land for dacha construction, which surged in the years 1934–36, was by no means restricted to members of the Party elite and the arts intelligentsia. Any Soviet enterprise might put in an application for land, planning permission, and resources. In a typical case, the Moscow oblast ispolkom allocated eight plots of land to a dacha cooperative from a chemicals factory. At the time of its application for building permission, the cooperative had thirty-five members, most of whom had been working at the factory since 1929 or 1930. Half were Party members. The factory bosses were included in the cooperative, but so were senior workmen, electricians, and carpenters. The original request, sent in July 1934, had mentioned that the dachas were intended for “the factory’s best shockworkers.” Construction was to be subsidized to a total of nearly a million rubles (provided by the branch of the relevant ministry, by a trust, and by the factory itself). The remaining funds were to be supplied by the cooperative members themselves.152
The types of dachas built by cooperatives varied significantly from one settlement to another, and often within a single settlement. Some cooperatives were egalitarian to a fault, building well over one hundred low-cost plywood dachas of an identical standard design, each with two or three rooms and somewhere between 25 and 40 square meters in living space. Others chose the more expensive option of log cabins and built more spacious summer houses (of 70, 80, or 90 square meters). Still others had a mix of two or more standard designs. A few smaller settlements—mainly for people of the “free” professions—had no standard designs at all. But even the larger and more standardized cooperatives might have a handful of dachas that were substantially larger than the rest, presumably occupied by people in positions of particular importance either in the cooperative management or in the sponsor organization. Thus there appears to have been a distinct hierarchy of status in many dacha cooperatives, but such differentiation was obscured by the language used to categorize residents. As we have seen, very few of them could be called “workers”; the categories most widely used were “engineering and technical workers” (ITR) and (especially) “employees” (sluzhashchie). But this last category was a real catchall in Soviet Russia. In reality, the members of dacha cooperatives were not humble bottom-of-the-ladder clerks but bureaucrats and functionaries of middling and upper rank. And even within this band of employees there was a huge gulf in status between, say, the senior accountant at a minor Moscow publishing house and the director of a major industrial enterprise. Such differences between specific employees and between whole organizations were, it seems, amply reflected in the types of dachas built and in the speed with which they were built.153
All settlements, however, were forced to reckon with a Soviet government decree of 17 October 1937 that effectively brought an end to the cooperative housing movement in the major cities. Cooperatives stood accused of failing to manage their assets with the necessary efficiency and thus not justifying the considerable state investment made in them. For this reason, they were now forced to relinquish their quasi-independent status and come under the authority of local soviets or of organizations (enterprises, ministries, trade unions, and so on).154 The 1937 decree is usually and with justification seen as having clinched the “departmentalization” of a crucial sector of the socialist welfare state.155
The decree mainly targeted high-density urban housing, but its strictures were extended to exurban locations too. Dacha cooperatives had been berated throughout the 1930s for overspending and choosing unrealistically expensive dacha designs. Now, the government asserted, the time had come to call in all debts and assess which cooperatives were financially self-sustaining. Dacha settlements where less than half of the capital had been generated by members’ contributions were to be liquidated forthwith. In the days that followed the decree, Mosgordachsoiuz “activists” met with representatives of various cooperatives in efforts to clarify the situation. Of the many questions asked during these meetings, the most common and the most urgent was: What can I do to secure the right to continue using my dacha (or dacha plot, if the house was unfinished or partially built) even after the cooperative has been liquidated? The answer given was that each person should make a personal application to the Moscow city soviet; each case would be decided individually.156 The standard procedure, later confirmed by practice, was that members of liquidated dacha cooperatives were allowed, at the discretion of the relevant soviet, to keep their dachas as “personal property” on condition that they repaid any outstanding loan within six months.157
A good many dacha cooperatives, however, remained intact after the decree of October 1937: the survival rate given by Mosgordachsoiuz for cooperatives in the Moscow region was 50 percent, and this is likely to be a conservative estimate, given this organization’s interest in demonstrating its zealous execution of state policy.158 However, the settlements that were financially secure enough to ride the storm were in practice likely to be those that already enjoyed a close working relationship with a sponsor organization. In other words, a great number of dacha cooperatives may indeed have survived the shake-up of 1937, but they arrived at this defining moment in a distinctly Soviet form: the October decree should be regarded as merely the culmination of the process whereby dacha cooperatives became ever more “departmentalized” and ever less cooperative-like.
It is worth dwelling on one other effect of October 1937: a significant number of dachas passed from cooperative into personal ownership.159 This shift served to resolve an issue that had been moot for dacha cooperatives throughout the 1930s: Was it acceptable to allow members who had paid their initial contributions to go ahead and build dachas under their own steam if they had the necessary money, resources, and know-how? Confronted by the prospect of a long and frustrating wait for their turn to arrive, many people applied to the management of their cooperative or to Mosgordachsoiuz for permission to engage in “extrabudgetary construction” (vnelimitnoe stroitel’stvo). But in most cases, Mosgordachsoiuz, as the ultimate authority, denied permission. As the 1930s wore on, however, and the supply system failed to improve, this refusal came to seem all the more unreasonable. The matter was raised by several speakers at the meeting of the Mosgordachsoiuz activists in July 1937. The head of Moscow’s housing administration was not unsympathetic but was unable to accede to their demands:
I wrote a memo raising the issue of construction either wholly or partly at one’s own expense, and at 70 percent, and at 50 percent [of the cost of the dacha]. I gave three options. The question was discussed three times. Three times meetings were called in Gosplan, but this question still wasn’t resolved. There have been instances when Sovnarkom has allowed individual comrades to build dachas at their own expense. I think that if we continue to raise this issue in particular instances we will get permission.160
Quite in line with this policy, de facto private building continued into the period of the third five-year plan, even after the cooperative movement had been dealt a severe blow. This may seem paradoxical: the Soviet state undermined a form of collective undertaking and continued to support a form of individual activity. But actually this policy fits very nicely into a characterization of the Stalin-era system. First of all, it shows how apparently “nonnegotiable” ideological requirements could be waived in the interests of economy and expediency; how, in fact, ideology was never separate from economics. Second, it suggests how difficult it was for the regime to commit itself on matters of principle: the ad hoc resolution of problems was preferable to an unambiguous and realistic statement of policy. Third, the effective encouragement of individual construction was absolutely consistent with the Stalinist aim of eliminating “horizontal” social forms of cooperation and bringing state agencies into more direct contact with the individual. The “personal” builder may in theory have been free to construct a spacious five-room residence in an attractive part of the greenbelt, but in practice his success in this undertaking depended entirely on the discretion of his enterprise director, factory trade union committee, and a range of bureaucrats in the local and regional administrations.
A STUDY of published materials of the 1920s and 1930s suggests that the dacha fits perfectly the models that have gained most currency in social and cultural history as a means of differentiating those two decades: Timasheff’s “Great Retreat” and Papernyi’s “two cultures” model. In the early years of Soviet power dachas were commonly treated as an undesirable “remnant of the past” that had no place in a society informed by the principles of collectivism and Bolshevik self-denial. In practice, however, they were silently tolerated: partly because they served the important practical purpose of helping to alleviate the housing shortage in the major cities and partly because the overworked new state did not have the resources to administer them more closely. Then, after the first five-year plan had broken resistance to the Soviet social project and given rise to new, powerful interest groups, a significant change of orientation took place: individual property was relegitimized; prominence was given to symbols of material abundance; Soviet society became hierarchical and patriarchal. As a result, the dacha, that prime accoutrement of the comfortable prerevolutionary lifestyle, found favor once again.
This schema has many virtues, but it needs to be qualified. For one thing, public statements on the dacha, though in general softer in the 1930s, were by no means unqualified in their approval. For every writer, engineer, or skilled worker shown basking contentedly on a canopied veranda, there was an industrial manager subjected to public “indignation” for undue self-enrichment by the acquisition of a country retreat. And the collective forms of leisure with which the dacha is often contrasted—the parade, the expedition, the summer camp—became more, not less, prominent as the 1930s wore on.
But these are relatively small points that do not fundamentally undermine the “two cultures” account of interwar Soviet history. A more serious objection is that to view the 1930s as a step backward, as a kind of sociocultural Thermidor, is to underestimate the extent to which Soviet society was radically re-formed in the 1930s; such an interpretation runs the risk, moreover, of conflating public discourse and social practice. The Great Retreat was always much more a rejection of revolutionary utopianism than an enthusiastic adoption of “traditional” mores. The 1930s did much to establish what may now be seen as crucial characteristics of Soviet-style societies. At least two of these characteristics come sharply into focus in the history of the early Soviet dacha. First, the life chances of individual citizens, as we have seen, became firmly tied to their organizational allegiance. Second, access to and use of goods and benefits were valued more highly than ownership of them. Twenty years of Soviet life were more than enough to demonstrate both the risks associated with retaining property at all costs and the opportunities for status and well-being provided by regular, unproblematic access to basic necessities and to the objects of consumerly desire.
These two facets of Soviet society—the “organizational” principle and the emphasis on consumption—were, of course, connected. By the mid-1930s most Soviet people in the major cities (and it is of them alone that I am speaking) were fast learning the lesson that access could best be obtained and maintained by the protection of a sponsoring organization: a factory, a trade union, a creative union, or the Party apparat.
Although these twin characteristics would figure large in any ideal-typical account of the Soviet experience, their real implications for the lives of Soviet people varied over time. In the 1930s the regime’s attempts to recast the relationship between state institutions and the individual were carried out in the face of various preexisting forms of social relationship. Institutions are, after all, made up of people, and Soviet citizens of the 1930s found their own ways of operating within new structures. The system was much more personalistic than the large volume of contemporary normative statements would allow; people were forced constantly to problematize the relationship between written rules and actual social practice, between public and private statements and values. The ways in which dachas were allocated and received may be seen as both symptoms of and contributions to the networks that gave Soviet society structure: ties that were neither properly bureaucratic nor wholly clan-based and particularistic, networks where the horizontal and vertical dimensions were rarely separate.
That is not to suggest that the vertical and the horizontal were ever wholly conflated, either in people’s social practice or in their understanding of that practice. Soviet hierarchies of status were quick to emerge in the Stalin era, and they are palpable in the distribution of dacha space. Moreover, the informal social practices that people engaged in may have helped them to cut themselves some slack under an authoritarian regime and to get by in their everyday lives, but they also had human costs. Social relationships had been severely fractured by the social warfare waged by the Soviet regime, and they had not reformed to any adequate extent. According to one persuasive sociological account, blat, glossed as the “informal exchange of favors,” was both social glue and lubricant in the later Soviet period.161 But it is difficult to put the phenomenon in the 1930s in such a benign light. Even if the horizontal and the vertical were rarely separate, the vertical tended to overshadow and constrain the horizontal. Blat was oriented less toward ongoing sociability than toward the accomplishment of specific tasks. As the constant bickering in dacha cooperatives demonstrates, blat was a source of tension and fragmentation, not of cohesion.
Perhaps the most disastrous result of the collision between old social practices and new ideological goals and institutional structures was that it left people quite unsure of what the rules of social life were. Here the dacha sheds light on Soviet society for one other reason: it was a product and a symbol of hierarchical networks that were vulnerable. In the 1930s it reclaimed something of its medieval and Petrine meanings: a piece of property that was bestowed at the discretion of the leader and could just as easily be taken away. Now, however, the role of leader was taken by Soviet ideology, a notoriously fluid mélange of beliefs, programs, and practical policies that in turn was interpreted and administered by an equally fluid body of state officials. The dacha, then, can serve as a specific example of the mingling of modernization and traditionalism that has plausibly been seen as characteristic of the Soviet and other communist systems: it was valued as a symbol of material progress and for its association with “civilized” values (specifically, those of the officially approved Russian intellectual tradition); but it also reflected the particularistic and personalistic realities of Soviet society. On the one hand, the Soviet dacha gestured toward the older meaning of the term—a plot of land handed out entirely at the discretion of state authorities—yet it was also bound up with markedly modern phenomena: the bureaucratization of the distribution system, the emphasis placed on leisure as an attribute of the Soviet way of life, and an emerging (if tortuous) discourse on property rights.
But the balance between the modernizing impulses of the Soviet regime and other social inputs was never fixed. As we survey the later Soviet period, it becomes clear that traditional practices (that is, practices deriving their strength from patterns of behavior more long-standing or deep-seated than the socially transformative Soviet project) should be seen not as a dead weight of passive resistance to state violence but rather as a dynamic set of responses that were, in the long run, transformative in their own right. As we survey developments of the later Soviet period, we will find new forms of social relationship (including a new kind of blat), a new intelligentsia, new attitudes toward property, and a new form of dacha that hybridized the country retreat of the Soviet leisure class with the humble allotment.
1. See Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946). Timasheff’s sociological approach has an important cultural-historical analogue in Vladimir Papernyi’s Kul’tura “dva” (1985; Moscow, 1996), which, to state crudely a rich argument, reveals a shift from a dynamic, decentered, avant-garde “Culture One” (which pervaded the public discourse of the 1920s) to a static, monumentalist “Culture Two” (which increasingly took over in the 1930s and 1940s).
2. For more on this kind of argument, see D. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke, 2000).
3. See K. Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,” Soviet Studies 35 (1983), and T. Martin, “Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. S. Fitzpatrick (London, 2000). For a thought-provoking comparative case, see A.G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1986).
4. See H.F. Jahn, “The Housing Revolution in Petrograd, 1917–1920,” JfGOE 38 (1990), and N.B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg, 1999), 178–84.
5. M. Ignatiefff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), 25 and 28. Another young witness recalled that the Revolution had brought Udel’naia (a dacha location significantly closer to Petrograd) only relatively slight changes: policemen were no longer in evidence and passers-by wore red ribbons. See L. I. Petrusheva, ed., Deti russkoi emigratsii (Moscow, 1997), 484.
6. Iu. V. Got’e, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, trans. and ed. T. Emmons (Princeton, 1988). Similarly, old residents of Moscow’s Udel’naia recalled that this dacha settlement had provided a refuge for members of the city’s intelligentsia in the years after 1917 (in the mid-1920s, however, it was dealt a heavy blow by the campaign against “former people”). See N. Chetverikova, “Byt’ li muzeiu dachnoi kul’tury,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 4321, 8–14 June 2000, 19.
7. TsMAM, f. 2311, op. 1, d. 28, 1. 520b.
8. See the Durnovo correspondence published in “Zakhvatchiki, imenuiushchie sebia “narod” . . .’: Neskol’ko dokumentov iz fonda P.P. Durnovo (1917–1919),” Zvezda, no. 11 (1994), 156–68, and the general account in P. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, 1967), 130–32.
9. Blok’s account of Lakhta in a diary entry of 11 June 1919 is in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh(Leningrad, 1960–63), 7:365–67
10. See, e.g., the report by a local housing committee in TsGA SPb, f. 78 (Primorsko-Sestroretskii raiispolkom), op. 1, d. 158, l. 63.
11. TsGAMO, f. 2591 (Moskovskii uezdnyi otdel kommunal’nogo khoziaistva), op. 3, d. 1, ll. 27–29, 33.
12. K. Chukovskii, Dnevnik, 1901–1929 (Moscow, 1997), 312–17. For a typical appeal to the authorities from a dacha owner whose property had been plundered, see TsGA SPb, f. 78, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 236–37.
13. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, l. 3450b.
14. TsMAM, f. 2311, op. 1, d. 28, l. 47.
15. M. Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing during the Experimental Years, 1918 to 1933,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. W. C. Brumfield and B. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 85–86.
16. A short memoir by a resident of the children’s colony and a letter of complaint by Klara Shvarts to her local commissar for education are to be found in V. Vitiazeva, Kamennyi ostrov (Leningrad, 1986), 244–58.
17. Got’e, Time of Troubles, 140. “Gorillas” is the term Got’e uses throughout his diary to refer to the Bolsheviks.
18. RGASPI, f. 78, op. 7, d. 32.
19. An appeal to the letter of the law is made by an evicted dacha owner in TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 32, l. 288 (though it did not lead to his reinstatement).
20. One example: a woman who had married a wealthy Moscow merchant’s son before the Revolution managed to hold on to the family’s spacious dacha in the village of Dunino, thanks to her personal acquaintance with the revolutionary Vera Figner (interview with the woman’s granddaughter, September 1999). The two other families I spoke to in Dunino were also the direct descendants of the well-to-do prerevolutionary owners of their dachas; one household had retained the property by gathering the large extended family in it and arguing that they were occupying no more than their normal housing entitlement, the other simply by going through the necessary bureaucratic procedures to register the dacha in their name with the Soviet authorities.
21. TsGA SPb, f. 78, op. 1, d. 158, l. 216.
22. Ibid., f. 469, op. 2, d. 5, ll. 35, 42. The OMKh did not desist, however: it subsequently issued several requests to investigate the social background of residents at particular addresses.
23. There was some confusion at the time on this point: see the clarification offered in S. Kisin, “Dachi i desiatiprotsentnaia norma,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 24 (1927), 10–12.
24. P. A. Portugalov and V. A. Dlugach, eds., Dachi i okrestnosti Moskvy: Spravochnik-putevoditel’ (Moscow, 1935), 176–77.
25. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, ll. 329–57.
26. Ibid., l. 349.
27. See, e.g., TsGA SPb, f. 469, op. 2, d. 784.
28. D. I. Sheinis, Zhilishchnoe zakonodatel’stvo, 3d ed. (Moscow, 1926), 150.
29. G. D. Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (Albany, 1984), chap. 2.
30. See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (New York, 1999), 46, esp. n. 22.
31. TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 13, l. 12. At the beginning of 1930, Moscow’s municipal dacha stock was distributed as follows: 4,000 under the trust; 7,300 under local ispolkoms; 1,000 under the oblast department of education (BSE, 1st ed.).
32. Portugalov and Dlugach, Dachi, 166.
33. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, l. 339
34. K. N., “Po dacham,” VM, 7 May 1925, 2. Moscow’s municipalized stock was reported to comprise 3,000 dachas in 1927, but more than half of them were occupied by permanent residents: see M. K., “Dachi,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 16 (1927), 12–13. Leningrad was similar: as many as 40% of houses in its satellite towns (such as Detskoe Selo, Slutsk, and Ligovo) were taken up by commuters: see Mikhail [sic], “O derevne, prigorodakh i okrainakh,” Zhilishchnoe delo, no. 13 (1925), 8
35. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, l. 346. The encouragement of private reconstruction in dacha areas is signaled in A. Sheinis, “Stroit’ li zanovo ili dostraivat’ i vosstanavlivat’?” Zhilishchnoe stroitel’stvo, no. 4 (1922), 15.
36. LOGAV, f. R-3736, op. 1, d. 16; f. R-3758, op. 1, d. 117.
37. U. Pope-Hennessy, Leningrad: The Closed and Forbidden City (London, 1938), 40.
38. LOGAV, f. R-2907, op. 1, d. 47, l. 2. It seems, however, that the municipalized housing stock was not always managed with great efficiency: the OMKh produced a list of seventy-two unused municipalized buildings in Slutsk (formerly Gatchina) as of 1 Oct. 1928 (ibid., ll. 71–72).
39. “Rasshirenie dachnogo stroitel’stva,” VM, 27 Apr. 1925, 2. It is unlikely, however, that many of the dachas built on this scheme were used as summer houses (as opposed to year-round residences).
40. Reports on English garden cities and on other Western European models of deurbanization appeared quite regularly in the press: see, e.g., “Goroda-sady,” Zhilishchnoe tovarishchestvo, no. 6 (1922), 29; V. Flerov, “Tipy rabochikh poselkov,” Zhilishchnoe delo, no. 4 (1924), 18–21; S. Chaplygin, “Poselok-sad,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 1 (1927), 9; S. Lebedev, “Letnii otdykh v Germanii,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 22 (1927), 16–17.
41. A good short account of the Sokol settlement is M. V. Nashchokina, “Poselok ‘Sokol’—gorod-sad 1920-kh godov,” Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo Rossii, no. 12 (1994), 2–7. Sokol was a high-prestige project that espoused the “modern” values of comfort and convenience rather than any socialist collectivism. By January 1924 the cooperative already had 250 members, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia.
42. In 1928 there was even a move to transfer part of the Leningrad dacha trust’s holdings to cooperatives (LOGAV, f. R-2907, op. 1, d. 47, l. 49).
43. See “Perenosnaia dacha,” VM, 5 May 1925, 2, and “Razbornye dachi,” VM, 10 May 1927, 2.
44. V.S. Plotnikov, Deshevoe dachnoe stroitel’stvo (Moscow, 1930), chap. 2. The 1920s press, similarly, reported that dacha cooperatives were slow to develop: see Andr., “O dache, pochkakh i kooperatsii,” VM, 15 May 1926, 2.
45. VM, 31 Mar. 1932, 2.
46. LOGAV, f. R-3758, op. 1, d. 132.
47. See “Appetity dachevladel’tsev,” VM, 2 Apr. 1926, 2.
48. The distinction between “dacha settlements” and “rural settlements” had real administrative significance: inhabitants of dacha settlements were automatically granted Moscow registration (propiska), while in rural settlements this right was extended only to temporary residents (i.e., dachniki). See the resolution of the Moscow uezd ispolkom of 23 Apr. 1928, published in Zhilishchnoe zakonodatel’stvo: Spravochnik postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii tsentral’noi i mestnoi vlasti s prilozheniem sudebnoi praktiki za 1928 god (Moscow, 1929), 388–89.
49. Dachi i okrestnosti Moskvy: Putevoditel’ (Moscow, 1928).
50. For an account that argues that prerevolutionary habits were preserved “in a truncated form” in 1920s Leningrad, see “‘ . . . I kazhdyi vecher za shlagbaumami . . .,’” interview with E. E. Friken by Tat’iana Vol’skaia, Nevskoe vremia, 10 Aug. 1996. Similar is V. Pozdniakov, “Petrograd glazami rebenka,” Neva, no. 2 (1994), 285, 288. This view of the social composition of the dacha public of the 1920s is also shared by N. B. Lebina in her Povsedtievnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda, 251–52 (Lebina cites several other memoir sources).
51. V. Shefner, “Barkhatnyi put’: Letopis’ vpechatlenii,” Zvezda, no. 4 (1995), 26.
52. Thus a 1935 collection of “dacha” designs included only houses that were equipped for year-round habitation: see G. Liudvig, ed., Rekomendovannye proekty: Al’bom dach (Moscow, 1935). Note also G.M. Sudeikin, Al’bom proektov zimnikh dach . . . (Moscow, 1928). Here the author acknowledges the difficulty of establishing a precise classification of types of dwelling: “The designs do not give the buildings names such as izba, worker’s house, dacha, and so on . . . because several names apply to a single design, and this can cause confusion for the nonspecialist reader” (v). A handbook of the following decade divides dachas into four categories: zimnii, poluzimnii, letnii, and palatochnyi (“winter,” “semiwinter,” “summer,” and “camping”): see G.M. Bobov, Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo dach (Moscow, 1939).
53. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 1930–60 (London, 1990), 25–26.
54. T. Ivanova, Moi sovremenniki, kakimi ia ikh znala: Ocherki (Moscow, 1984), 30.
55. A. S. Livshits and К. V. Avilova, “Serebrianyi bor,” in Severo-zapadnyi okrug Moskvy (Moscow, 1997), 233–34. It was in Serebrianyi Bor that the sixteen-year-old Anna Larina was courted by Nikolai Bukharin in 1930: see Larina, This I Cannot Forget (London, 1993). Larina was the stepdaughter of Iurii Larin, a leading Bolshevik intellectual close to Lenin’s inner circle.
56. See the inventory in TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 238–42.
57. Details of correspondence with the Communal Bank and Sovnarkom are drawn from RGASPI, f. 124, op. 3, d. 368.
58. E. Bonner, Dochki-materi (Moscow, 1994), 50–54.
59. Ibid., 60–63, 80–81. Memoir material suggests that Bonner’s experiences were quite typical of the Old Bolshevik milieu. Nina Kosterina (b. 1921), daughter of two members of a Civil War partisan unit, spent much of her childhood in government institutions and Young Pioneer camps; in the summer of 1937 she was farmed out to relatives in a village near Tuchkovo, on the Moscow River. See The Diary of Nina Kosterina, trans. M. Ginsburg (London, 1972). The diary was first published, to great acclaim, in Novyi mir in December 1962. Kosterina was killed in action in December 1941. The most famous absent parents of the 1920s were Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Allilueva, who would commonly spend the summer in Sochi while their children lived at their dacha, mostly in Zubalovo, an estate formerly owned by prominent industrialists (the Zubalovs) that was turned into an enclave for the Party elite in 1919. See S. Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem k drugu (London, 1967).
60. “Ugroza dachnomu sezonu,” VM, 8 Feb. 1927, 2.
61. “Tseny na dachi upali,” VM, 14 May 1927, 2.
62. LOGAV, f. R-3736, op. 1, d. 16, ll. 67–68.
63. See, e.g., the cartoon “Dachi i protektsionizm” (VM, 20 May 1927, 2), which has as its caption the following dialogue: Peasant: “Do you need a big place?” Fat dachnik in checked jacket: “No, not that big, just for the general section of our organization: my mother-in-law, my wife, and the kids.”
64. Illiustrirovannyi putevoditel’ po okrestnostiam Moskvy (Moscow, 1926), 57. This example could be supplemented by innumerable newspaper reports of predatory dacha landlords and nouveau riche tenants.
65. S. Tret’iakov, “LEF i NEP,” LEF, no. 2 (1923), 72, quoted in E. Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), 11.
66. I. Babel’, “V dome otdykha,” in Zabytyi Babel’ (Ann Arbor, 1979), 130.
67. Details in this paragraph are from LOGAV, f. R-2907 (Leningradskii okruzhnoi otdel mestnogo khoziaistva), op. 1, d. 167.
68. See, e.g., TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 252–53.
69. Portugalov and Dlugach, Dachi, 173–74.
70. TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 5a, ll. 66, 76–79; d. 20, l. 90. The locations named were Malakhovka, Kliaz’ma, Mamontovka, Tarasovka, Tomilino, and Kraskovo.
71. For examples, see ibid., d. 8, l. 390, and d. 20, l. 8.
72. Ibid., d. 20, l. 135.
73. M. A., “Otdykh v Serebrianom boru,” VM, 7 June 1927, 2.
74. Note, e.g., the efforts of the OMKh of the Leningrad oblispolkom to boost the Sestroretsk resort in 1930 (see TsGA SPb, f. 3199, op. 4, d. 14, ll. 381–83, 592–93, 632).
75. A. Ianvarskii, “Leto ne zhdet,” SP, 30 Mar. 1934, 4.
76. E. Simonov, “Dom otdykha i otdykh doma,” VM, 10 Mar. 1932, 1.
77. Ekskursionnyi spravochnik na leto 1933 g. (Moscow, 1933).
78. V. Baburov, “Prigorodnaia zona Moskvy,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 12 (1935), 27.
79. A. V., “Progulka za gorod,” VM, 25 May 1936, 2.
80. Otdykh pod Moskvoi: Spravochnik po lodochnym pristaniam i pliazham na leto 1940 goda (Moscow, 1940); V. L. Nekrasova, Putevoditel’ po severnym okrestnostiam Leningrada (Leningrad, 1935).
81. On the debates of the 1920s, see Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing,” 85–148.
82. A critique of the Sokol settlement on economic grounds is to be found in N. Markovnikov, “Poselok ‘Sokol,’” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 12 (1929), 1071–76. Ironically, Markovnikov one year earlier had published a short book in which he presented a sympathetic analysis of garden city projects abroad; in 1929, presumably, he buckled under the pressure of incipient Stalinism.
83. K. Paustovskii, “Moskovskoe leto,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1981–86), 6:90–111.
84. TsMAM, f. 718, op. 8, d. 35, 1. 96.
85. TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 2, l. 284.
86. In 1933, for example, the Moscow-based dacha trusts were ordered to evict citizens who had moved into dachas without the necessary official permission and tenants who had been subletting rooms or not paying their rent on time; these measures were confidently expected to free up “not fewer than 300 substantial dachas.” See “Spekulianty budut vyseleny,” VM, 17 Feb. 1933, 2.
87. Programma vsesoiuznogo otkrytogo konkursa na sostavlenie proektov (Leningrad, 1934). The designs presented in this competition were intended to be used in Lisii Nos, Mel’nichii Ruchei, and other areas of current dacha construction. Further standard designs of the mid-1930s are to be found in Liudvig, Rekomendovannye proekty. This book advocates the standardized mass production of prefabricated dachas and claims to be presenting the best of the current design solutions.
88. A transcript of the relevant meeting of the presidium of the oblispolkom can be found at TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 240–42.
89. TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 271, 317, and d. 78.
90. Ibid., d. 3, l. 87, and d. 46, ll. 251–52.
91. Ibid., d. 46, ll. 402–3.
92. See Radiukov, “Tish’ i glad’ vmesto dach,” and D. Taver, “Propala programma dachnogo stroitel’stva,” VKG, 2 Jan. 1932, 2, and 15 Mar. 1932, 2, respectively. Other examples in VKG, 14 Apr. and 8 and 10 May 1933; in Moscow, VM, 3 Apr. 1935. The question of dacha provision even found its way into the all-union press: e.g., S. Bogorad, “Khozhdenie po dacham,” Pravda, 13 Apr. 1937, 6.
93. E. Bermont, “Ia khochu dachu,” VM, 10 Apr. 1933, 3.
94. Corruption cases involving the acquisition of dachas by workers in the blat-ridden trade distribution system are described in E. Osokina, Za fasadom “stalinskogo izobiliia” (Moscow, 1999), 225, 226.
95. Text of the resolution by the Moscow oblispolkom in Portugalov and Dlugach, Dachi, 164.
96. For examples of public encouragement, see “Stroite dachi!,” VM, 15 July 1932, 1, and “Zabota o sebe samom: Est’ dachi, stolovye, detploshchadki,” VM, 3 Apr. 1933, 2.
97. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 46–460b. By mid-summer of 1937, the number of cooperatives had risen to 168, but only 85 had dachas completed and ready for use (ibid., d. 24, l. 30).
98. E.g., ibid., d. 42, l. 23; d. 378, ll. 49–51.
99. For statements of people’s perceived moral right to a dacha on these grounds, see ibid., d. 42, l. 117; d. 231, ll. 10-11, 60.
100. Ibid., d. 48, l. 2380b.
101. TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 27, l. 151.
102. At a meeting of members of specific dacha cooperatives with representatives of Mosgordachsoiuz on 28 July 1937, several speakers complained that policy on subletting was formulated and implemented inconsistently; the head of the Moscow housing administration asserted that to forbid the practice would be foolish and counterproductive, given the drastic shortage of dacha accommodations in the region; cooperatives should, however, ensure that the prices asked were not extortionate (TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24, l.16).
103. See, e.g., “‘ . . . I kazhdyi vecher za shlagbaumami . . .’” Servants were often employed in city apartments in the 1920s and 1930s by working couples with children, and at the dacha they may have been even more commonly encountered (because the need for child care was greater, given the prolonged absences of parents in the city, and because the labor pool—peasant women—was closer at hand).
104. Irina Chekhovskikh’s interviews, no. 2, 6. (See “Note on Sources.”).
105. Bonner, Dochki-materi, 184–85.
106. E. S. Bulgakova, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1990).
107. The number of suburban passengers was reported to have gone up by 39.3% from 1931 to 1932 (“V poezde na dachu,” VKG, 22 Mar. 1933, 4).
108. The problems (as well as the achievements) are registered in A. I. Kuznetsov, “Arkhitekturnye problemy planirovki prigorodnoi zony,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 21–22 (1940), 3–7.
109. P. Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona i problema otdykha naseleniia Moskvy,” Sotsialisticheskii gorod, no. 5 (1936), 16–21.
110. no. V. Baburov, “Prigorodnaia zona Moskvy,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 12 (1935), 27–31. The same author reiterates his agenda with a view to the third five-year plan in “Osvoenie lesoparkovoi zony,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 9 (1937), 17–18.
111. See BSE, 1st ed., s.v. “Dacha.” By effectively redefining “dacha” as any form of suburban habitation, this entry made the claim that “up to 84%” of people living in dachas were “toilers.”
112. Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona,” 17.
113. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 10, l. 1. This picture of the dacha’s class profile is confirmed by the available lists of cooperative members (assembled ibid., dd. 26, 27, 28).
114. In one Pravda commentary, for example, the growth of dacha settlements was seen as indicative of the “enormous demand for a dacha by people who previously couldn’t even have dreamed of it,” and hence of the rising cultural level of Soviet society: see “Dacha,” Pravda, 23 Apr. 1935, 3.
115. Ia. M. Belitskii, Okrest Moskvy (Moscow, 1996), 22.
116. I.N. Sergeev, Tsaritsyno. Sukhanovo: Liudi, sobytiia, fakty (Moscow, 1998), 80–81.
117. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir, trans. M. Hayward (London, 1971), 293.
118. Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona,” 17.
119. Muscovites away at the dacha between 15 Apr. and 30 Sept. retained rights to their living space in the city and were also entitled to sublet this space for the summer, as long as the prices asked were not “extortionate” (spekuliativnye): see “Nakanune dachnogo sezona,” VM, 9 May 1933, 1.
120. VKG, 15 May 1932, 4.
121. “Na dachu! Novyi poriadok naima dach!” VM, 12 May 1932, 3. This policy had to be reiterated in the press the following year, because peasants were unwilling to believe that it remained in force (see “V mae na dachu. L’goty ostaiutsia,” VM, 30 Apr. 1933, 2).
122. “Skol’ko platit’ za dachu?” VKG, 7 Apr. 1932, 2.
123. A. Vetrov, “Kontsert v dachnom poezde: Obraztsovyi prigorodnyi poezd,” VM, 4 Apr. 1934, 3.
124. M. Iv., “Dachnikov eto interesuet!” VKG, 23 May 1933, 2. In 1935 it was estimated that dacha areas needed to be supplied with 20 tons of bread daily (“Chto zhdet dachnika?” VKG, 16 May 1935, 3). For a survey of supply problems in Moscow dacha locations, see V. Starov, “Ot dachnika trebuiut podvigov, a on ishchet otdykha,” VM, 27 Apr. 1933, 2.
125. D. Maslianenko, “Dachnye kontrabandisty,” VKG, 2 June 1935, 3.
126. “Kаk perevezti veshchi na dachu?” VM, 22 Apr. 1935, 2.
127. A rhymed reflection on the imperfection of the Lisii Nos development is A. Flit, “Razmyshlenie na Lis’em nosu,” VKG, 3 June 1933, 2.
128. A. Kagan, “‘Samostroi,’” VKG, 28 Mar. 1935, 3.
129. I. Girbasova, “Sem’ia Stroit dachu,” VKG, 26 Apr. 1935, 3.
130. A. Gerb, “Dacha v lesu,” VM, 3 July 1935, 2.
131. V. Paperny, “Men, Women, and the Living Space,” in Brumfield and Ruble, Russian Housing, 162. Some published materials of the 1930s called for increased public coverage of dacha construction projects and for greater architectural experimentation. One article recommended hexagonal clusters instead of the usual rectilinear street plans of dacha settlements: see V. P. Kalmykov, “Dachnye poselki,” Sovetskaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1934), 46–51. The same article criticized the “architectural conservatism” of the izba-style dacha.
132. That the “communal” dacha lifestyle was unpopular can be surmised from the construction policy of the Moscow dacha cooperative, which by the mid-1930s had amassed 3,081 dachas with only 3,791 sets of living quarters (Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona,” 18).
133. Bobov, Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo dach, 12, 21.
134. Examples are given in Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 100–101.
135. One example was the village of Zhukovka, where many peasants were dekulakized and exiled and their land was made available for the construction of elite dachas: see L.M. Trizna, “Zhukovka,” in Istoriia sel i dereven’ podmoskov’ia XIV–XX vv., vol. 5 (Moscow, 1993), 10.
136. Iurii Druzhnikov, quoted in L. Vasil’eva, Kremlevskie zheny (Moscow, 1994), 109.
137. Ibid. Other details on Stalin’s dacha taken from Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem. A map of elite dacha settlements in the Moscow region is given in T. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Sodalist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 512.
138. Bonner, Dochki-materi, 196.
139. E. N. Machul’skii, “Roslovka,” in Severo-zapadnyi okrug Moskvy, 312–13. The dacha was, from the point of view of the secret police, a perfectly convenient working location: Nina Kosterina, for example, saw her family’s dacha landlord arrested in the summer of 1937 (Diary, 42–43).
140. In July 1937 a representative of Mosgordachsoiuz reported that in the past year thirty-four members of the Podpol’shchik cooperative (run by Old Bolsheviks) had been arrested, and that a similar pattern of events could be observed in many other cooperatives. His conclusion was that “anyone who feels like it can infiltrate our cooperatives. We have provided enemies of the people with dachas” (TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24, l. 29).
141. On the nomenklatura dacha prerogative, see Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class, trans. E. Mosbacher (London, 1984), 228–39. The personalistic nature of dacha allocation in the 1930s is suggested by archival materials from the Sovnarkom apparat: see, e.g., GARF, f. R-5446, op. 34, d. 1, ll. 12, 147.
142. Details in Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s’ Moscow Show Trials, trans. J. Butler (London, 1990), 86–93. Nor was this Vyshinsky’s only intervention in the life of dacha settlements during the Terror: in October 1938 he wrote to the manager of Sovnarkom affairs complaining that although several members of Ranis (a cooperative for representatives of academia and the arts) had recently been arrested, their dachas had been sealed up and their redistribution had been delayed (GARF, f. R-9542, op. 1, d. 41, l. 2).
143. “V Maleevke stalo luchshe, no eshche ne stalo khorosho,” LG, 11 July 1932, 1, and E. Pel’son, “V Maleevke ne stalo luchshe,” LG, 29 July 1932, 4.
144. D. Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury”: Gosudarstvo i pisateli 1925–1938: Dokumenty (Moscow, 1997), 177–78, 197–98. Similar expenditure was sanctioned by other Soviet organizations: the Union of Soviet Architects, for example, resolved in 1936 to “increase funding for building and buy dachas from 100,000 rubles to 300,000 rubles” (Paperny, “Men, Women, and the Living Space,” 162).
145. Quoted in Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury,” 202.
146. See, e.g., a letter of September 1933 in which Kalinin advises Voroshilov against setting up individual dachas in Sochi, given the expense of maintaining them, the potential for corruption in their allocation, and their impracticality: if a war were to erupt in the region, it would not be easy to turn them into hospitals; for this reason, collective rest homes should be preferred: RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 42, l.38. The tendency of Party officials to affect “democratic” manners when on vacation is attested by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who recalls her husband’s improbable encounter with Nikolai Ezhov, a future administrator of the Terror, in Sukhumi in 1930 (Hope against Hope, 322). A similar account of free-and-easy socializing is given by Anna Larina, who saw Bukharin in 1930 while staying in Mukhalatka “in a rest home for members of the Politburo and other leaders” (Bukharin, however, stayed at a separate dacha in Gurzuf) (This I Cannot Forget, 107).
147. L. Sobolev, Neizmennomu drugu: Dnevniki. Stat’i. Pis’ma (Moscow, 1986), 280 (a letter of May 1938).
148. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 111–12, 209, 125. Pasternak’s Peredelkino period coincided with his general withdrawal from and disgust with Soviet public life, his cultivation of a simpler prose style and authorial persona, his growing interest in Chekhov rather than Tolstoi as a model, and, not least, his engagement with the usad’ba tradition in Russian literature: see B. Zingerman, “Turgenev, Chekhov, Pasternak: K probleme prostranstva v p’esakh Chekhova,” in his Teatr Chekhova i ego mirovoe znachenie (Moscow, 1988), esp. 145–67. Numerous other accounts echo Pasternak’s attachment to his country retreat. Note, e.g., a 1938 diary entry where the alcoholic writer and literary functionary Vladimir Stavskii launches into an undistinguished but nonetheless rapturous description of the views from his dacha at Skhodnia: V. Garros, N. Korenevskaya, and T. Lahusen. eds., Intimacy and Terror (New York, 1995), 219–21.
149. TsGAMO, f. 7539, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 1–36.
150. Quotation from Shtange’s diary, in Garros et al., Intimacy and Terror, 193.
151. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 111–12, 209.
152. TsGAMO, f. 7539, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 1–21.
153. Condusions in this paragraph are based on a study of the lists of cooperative members and dachas built in TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, dd. 26, 27, 28. Variation in the size and style of cooperative dachas is subject to disapproving comment in A. R., “Voprosy dachnogo stroitel’stva,” Zhilishchnaia kooperatsiia, no. 6 (1935), 43–45.
154. “O sokhranenii zhilishchnogo fonda i uluchshenii zhilishchnogo khoziaistva v gorodakh,” Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva, no. 69 (1937), art. 314.
155. This is the argument of, e.g., Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development, 36–37.
156. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 23.
157. See Zhilishchnye zakony: Sbornik vazhneishikh zakonov SSSR i RSFSR, postanovlenii, instruktsii i prikazov po zhilishchnomu khoziaistvu (Moscow and Leningrad, 1947), 9.
158. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 23, l. 102.
159. The rights of people who owned houses as personal property (e.g., the right to evict tenants once the term of their lease had expired if it could be proved the house was needed for the owner’s personal requirements) are given due emphasis in an authoritative gloss on the October 1937 decree: see R. Orlov, “Poriadok primeneniia novogo zhilishchnogo zakona,” Sovetskaia iustitsiia, no. 1 (1938), 20–24.
160. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24, l. 16.
161. See A. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998).