Summerfolk полностью

Newspapers also alleged that municipal dachas in the more desirable locations were allocated by personal acquaintance (by blat, in Soviet parlance). One journalist commented in 1933:

There are no rules for the distribution of dachas in the Moscow region. There are only memos [zapiski]. Memos come in three varieties: the friendly blat type, the string-pulling, and the naive, the last kind being written by organizations and enterprises that are appealing on behalf of their workers. The first kind is invariably successful, the second sometimes works, but the third—never.93

Although the trust was certainly a convenient target for accusations of corruption—one of the main Soviet techniques of governance, in the 1930s and after, was to attribute “popular” grievances to the failings of middle administration rather than to the Party elite or the system as a whole—there seems no reason to doubt that the administrative mechanisms of the time left ample scope for the practice of blat.94

In 1934 the trust was liquidated and replaced by local managing organizations 142 (dachnye khoziaistva) under the umbrella of Leningrad’s housing administration (Lenzhilupravlenie). A parallel development took place in Moscow with the transfer of dacha management to the regional communal department in April 1934.95 Control over the existing stock was further devolved by offering dachas for sale to factories and other organizations. But these administrative reshuffles did not change the general direction of policy: the trust had served as a means of transition from the chaotic situation of the 1920s to a more regulated system of distribution via state and Party organizations.

The prevailing trend was reinforced by developments in the cooperative movement. As we have seen, dacha cooperatives had existed since the 1920s, but in the 1930s their number and the strength of their institutional backing increased considerably.96 Cooperatives were recognized by the Moscow soviet as a way of mobilizing the resources both of individuals and of enterprises and of easing problems that the dacha trusts alone were clearly incapable of tackling. By November 1935, the managing organization Mosgordachsoiuz was able to report that the number of cooperatives had risen from 61 to 114 in little more than a year. But this was not necessarily grounds for self-congratulation: the funds available for dacha construction had not risen proportionately, and there were now 6,000 cooperative members on the waiting list for dachas; the total number of completed dachas was only 378.97 Individual settlements received grants (known as limity) out of the overall city budget, but this money went only a very small part of the way toward the costs of construction; the rest of the working capital was made up of members’ preliminary contributions, bank loans, and whatever funds were forthcoming from the cooperative’s sponsor organization (in many cases, the members’ employer).

The houses built and administered by the cooperatives were reserved for people occupying positions of responsibility and influence in particular organizations. Even for these people, however, dachas were not easy to come by. As the waiting list for dachas lengthened and resources remained scarce, many prospective dachniki could not contain their frustration and gave vent to grievances at general meetings of the cooperative or in personal petitions to Mosgordachsoiuz or some other branch of the city government. The most common allegation was that the rightful order of priority had been outweighed by personal considerations: that managers of the dacha stock had been swayed by blat, by the corrupt rendering of personal favors, instead of observing the cooperative statutes. It is impossible to judge how legitimate these protests were, especially as many are couched in the language of denunciation.98 What is clear, however, is that the prevailing economic conditions placed the managers of settlements in a position where they would have been hard pressed not to employ blat. To make use of contacts and to engage in practices that were not officially sanctioned was essential if construction work was to make any progress.