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 (
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
