At the end of the 1920s, however, it was decided that the Soviet Union should not aspire to the harmonious, integrated life of the small town. As before, people would have to live in city centers or in densely populated industrial suburbs. The reasons for the abandonment of “utopian” planning projects were in large part economic: a spread of low-density settlement required too high and even a level of infrastructure, and it did not square with the absolute commitment to headlong industrialization.82 But the more traditional planning policies of the 1930s also reflected a new concern with everyday life and the individual. The conflict between the culture of the 1920s and that of the 1930s forms the subject of a 1931 story by Konstantin Paustovskii in which an avant-garde architect named Gofman leads a ski party to a part-built vacation camp that he has designed. The main building is cylindrical, its curved windows are made of unbreakable glass, the climate inside is artificially controlled so as to be summery all year round, and its walls are so thin that they let in the sounds of the natural world from outside. As Gofman combatively explains: “Cities have had their day. If you . . . think that this is incorrect, then Engels thought otherwise. Each state system has its own particular forms of human settlement. Socialism doesn’t need cities.” The accompanying journalist, however, finds the design cold and impersonal: “In every house . . . there should be a certain stock of useless objects. In every house there should be at least one mistake.” Gofman is duly summoned to a committee meeting, where he is accused of “unnecessary functionalism” and objections are made to the costliness of his design. At the end of the story he goes swimming and conveniently drowns before the Soviet architectural community has had time to show him the error of his ways (and before the author has had to face up to the moral implications of the conflict he has outlined).83
Paustovskii’s story accurately reflects the movement away from deurbanizing projects,
a tendency that enabled the dacha to regain some of the positive connotations it had
lost in the 1920s. The Soviet Union, it was commonly argued, must avoid the suburban
sprawl so characteristic of England and America, and dachas could help to preserve
the greenbelts around the major cities. They had the further virtue of lessening the
pressure on rest homes and sanatoria, of which the provision was inadequate throughout
the Soviet period and especially in the 1920s. And summer houses were in fact more important to the Russians
than to the British and the Americans, given the long winters, the short building
season, and the unsanitary conditions that prevailed in cities. “
Positive assessments of this kind could not, however, bring practical improvements on their own. The dacha’s increasing public respectability was not matched by the pace of exurban construction. The Moscow city administration, when it took stock of the available dacha resources in 1933, found little to gladden the hearts of the vacationing masses: the municipal dacha stock was badly depleted (the basic unit of dacha allocation in this period was the room, not the house), and other organizations had not done much to improve the situation.84 Leningrad faced very much the same problems. In July 1931, for example, the oblast ispolkom instructed various organizations to inspect properties (especially former palaces and estates) that might provide dacha space. The conclusion reached was quick and unequivocal: “The municipal dacha stock, after inspection on site, consists of isolated lodgings of the following types: mezzanines, small attic rooms, and small outbuildings. On transfer of the entire housing stock to the ZhAKTs [housing cooperatives], the latter have adapted accommodations formerly used as dachas to form winter housing.”85 Despite regular attempts to free up dacha space, it was clear that municipal provision, as in the 1920s, was not competing effectively with the private market.86
