Summerfolk полностью

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