A journalistic piece of 1922 by Isaac Babel’ describing the conversion of a dacha settlement in Georgia into a resort for working people mixes class hatred with a distaste for everyday life and material comfort typical of Russian modernism: “You petty bourgeois who built yourselves these ‘dachlets,’ who are mediocre and useless as a tradesman’s paunch, if only you saw how we are enjoying our rest here. . . . If only you saw how faces chewed up by the steel jaws of machinery are being refreshed.”66
This unease in publicly expressed attitudes toward the dacha was exacerbated by the uncertain legal status of ownership. Land disputes were rife in former dacha areas in the 1920s. The review of dacha municipalization after the decree of May 1922 had, it turned out, been far from comprehensive, rigorous, and consistent. On inspection (for example, after the death of the owner), a house might turn out to be on neither the municipal nor the nonmunicipal list, which left the local ispolkom unsure how to act. Neighbors might appeal to the local authorities for land bordering their plots. And, especially toward the end of the decade, people’s property rights might be undermined by investigation of their social origins. In 1928, for example, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) insisted that a local ispolkom investigate the social origins of the family of a former “hereditary honored citizen” (that is, a former merchant) and then dispossess them. The property in question, a spacious two-story “lordly” dacha (total area: 233 square meters), had anomalously not been municipalized in 1922. The ispolkom concluded after its investigation that the house should indeed have been municipalized, but that it was now impossible to change the situation because the latest government circular forbade any further action of this kind.67 Many local soviets did not have such scruples, inspecting dachas that earlier slipped through the net of municipalization for signs of “lordliness.”68
Official controls on exurban communities may have been relaxed somewhat in the mid-1920s, but they were reapplied with greater zeal and violence in 1928 and (especially) 1929, when a crackdown on unregistered and misregistered dacha owners formed part of the campaign against “former people” (that is, people of “bourgeois” social origins). Demuncipalization was in many cases reversed without due legal process; registration of private property was canceled on the grounds that administrative errors had occurred.
Not that administrative errors were too hard to find, given the haziness of legal arrangements in the 1920s. Take the following case cited as exemplary in a guide to dacha legislation published in 1935. In 1923, in the settlement Novogireevo (Moscow region), a dacha belonging to one Shchedrin was classified by representatives of the NKVD as being of the “lordly” type and hence municipalized; but Shchedrin had sold it by private agreement to a woman named Ivanova, who in 1922 had gone to court to have herself recognized as the de facto owner. Armed with this judgment, she was then able (in 1923) to register the property in her name. In 1927 she sold it to a new owner, Dobrov. In 1931, in the course of verifying property registration, the local ispolkom uncovered these legal irregularities (that is, the fact that a building originally municipalized was now registered as someone’s private property) and went to court to have Dobrov evicted. The court concluded that Dobrov should indeed be forced to vacate the property, but only after he and his family had been allocated equivalent living space elsewhere.69
