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
