Summerfolk полностью

It is also clear that many members of dacha cooperatives served as unpaid “fixers” (tolkachi), or at least contributed a substantial amount of legwork, going from one institution to another to conduct the cooperative’s business. To be a cooperative aktivist did not primarily imply political duties: it meant having to negotiate deliveries of timber, standing in line to get the cooperative’s registration rubber-stamped, hiring casual laborers, and keeping an eye on them once they started work. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many of these people, who had made a real practical contribution to the cooperative’s activities, felt they deserved preferential allocation of dacha space.99 Nor is.it surprising that their claims often met an outraged response from other cooperative members: Stalin-era fixers by definition were not open and accountable in their actions, and the criteria for determining priority in the allocation of dachas were often unclear.

The suspicions of ordinary members were fueled by the murky closed-doors deals that the cooperative boards of administration seemed to be making with the sponsor organization. They were dismayed by a general trend of dacha settlements to become more organizationally (or “departmentally”) based and less cooperative-like. That is to say, members tended to come from a single institution or a small number of linked institutions that retained close control over the construction and allocation of dachas. Settlements that had been established in the late 1920s were on the whole more heterogeneous. Mosgordachsoiuz complained in 1936 that at the Vneshtorgovets settlement, the sponsoring organization, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, was claiming a number of the dachas for its own people: “in such a situation the collective has no cooperative characteristics whatsoever and this construction is organizational under the cover of a cooperative.”100

Dachniki without such organizational backing, still the majority, continued, as they had done in the 1920s, to rent from house owners in villages and settlements accessible from Leningrad and Moscow. As a representative of the dacha trust noted in a report to the Leningrad soviet of April 1932 regarding the continuing shortage of dachas: “If Leningraders do in spite of all this manage to get out to a dacha during the summer, this is because they get living space by virtue of the self-compression [samouplotnenie] of the permanent population of the suburban district and thanks to the modest private housing stock.”101 A further source of dachas for rent, especially in the second half of the 1930s, was cooperative settlements: subletting a cooperative dacha was forbidden by Mosgordachsoiuz, and some people were expelled from their cooperative for such an offense, but in many settlements this practice seems to have been tolerated.102

A middling white-collar family would typically rent a house in a village where the local population would keep them supplied with basic produce; the time-consuming task of running the household through the summer months could further be alleviated by hiring a local girl as a servant (especially after the violent onset of collectivization, there was no shortage of peasant women willing to enter the domestic service of city folk).103 The dacha formed part of the way of life of overworked urban parents, who were able to send their children away for part of the summer. A Leningrad woman (born in 1929) recalled: “When I was a child we rented a dacha in Ozerki [very close to the city]. No kind of facilities, just a box of a room. And of course there was no space round about. . . . My mother was working almost without a break. . . . Meanwhile we spent the time at the dacha. . . . Our granny lived with us.”104 Similar were the experiences of Elena Bonner, who recalled spending one summer in the mid-1930s in a large house rented by her extended family in a village near Luga; as in the 1920s, the children and most of the women lived there all through the summer, while her politically active parents remained in the city.105 And Mikhail and Elena Bulgakov packed their family off to dachas to which they would make only occasional short trips during the summer; for the most part they made do with swimming in the Moscow River.106