Summerfolk полностью

So the municipalization decree continued to cause dacha folk enormous trouble even several years after it had supposedly been implemented—but it might also be ignored or manipulated to their advantage until the housing authorities decided to examine the situation more closely. Legal processes, it seems, tended to reflect the specific relationship between individual dacha residents and the representatives of state or municipal power whom they encountered. The class warfare of the late 1920s, however, tipped the balance of power comprehensively in favor of the local ispolkoms and against dachniki. The brutal design of this campaign is clear from an NKVD circular of 1930 that explicitly extended the war against “former people” to dacha locations. The earlier municipalization measures were deemed to have been insufficiently thorough; now the aim was to check the whole of the private dacha stock and to eliminate “profiteering.” Absolutely no more demunicipalization was to be permitted. Even before this, however, the regional department of local services had instructed the dacha trust to check the social composition of tenants throughout the uezd, paying particular attention to “locations that formerly served as vacation places for the bourgeoisie and now for nepmen and people of free professions.”70

The hard-line policies of the late 1920s had the predictable effect of encouraging localized and personal abuses in the war against social undesirables. Local soviets were aided in their work by a wave of denunciations,71 though it seems they scarcely needed this assistance, as in many cases they were already itching to take control of dachas occupied by “former people.” In 1927–28 a resident of Kuntsevo named Perevezentsev, who had lived with his wife in the same dacha for seventeen years, had had to suffer the forced occupation of several rooms by the secretary of the local soviet. The justification for this action was that he and his wife, having owned seven dachas in Kuntsevo before the Revolution, had retained one dacha each; the local soviet argued that they should move together into one. To add to the pressure, the secretary of the Party cell of the soviet and secretary of the local police committee moved in and began to terrorize the owners, storming into the house drunk at night and threatening them with a revolver. For this behavior the people’s court gave him a derisory fine of 10 rubles for “arbitrariness” (samoupravstvo); the dacha’s owners were evicted all the same.72

The 1920s thus culminated in an assault on exurban settlements whose aim was to eliminate the prerevolutionary dacha owner. Yet far from spelling the end of the dacha, the offensive prepared the way for its further development in the Stalin era.

Dachas in Stalin’s Time

In the 1920s leisure was not a well-established concept for Soviet society. Public discussion of the off-work behavior of Soviet citizens clustered around two opposing poles. On the one hand, mention was made of private activities such as drinking, dancing, and dacha rental; these were usually treated in an ambivalent, not to say hostile, manner. On the other hand, more approving accounts were given of collective and politicized recreational institutions such as rest homes (doma otdykha) and children’s colonies. Thus Serebrianyi Bor, formerly the “favorite residence for prominent Moscow merchants,” now became a leisure complex consisting of thirteen collective dachas, each accommodating between fifty and seventy people. One report explained: “There aren’t any sick people here. The people here just need a rest.” The daily timetable was strictly laid out: early rising was followed by calisthenics, swimming, walking, and sunbathing; drinking was strictly forbidden, and smoking was permitted only outside the buildings.73