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
