Summerfolk полностью

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.