When the light goes out in the windows, this dachlet is completely swallowed up by the woods. Near Moscow there are lots of woods like this, lots of dachas like this, and lots of people like this relaxing in them. But the people who enjoy their rest most are those who work hardest!130
This account is highly representative of the time in its mixture of legitimizing strategies: a trip to the dacha is unashamedly a leisure activity and is quite explicitly linked to material aspirations, yet at the same time it is linked to a rural “good life,” to the values of “cultured” and purposeful work.
The model of dacha life fostered by the Stalin era comes over clearly in architectural handbooks of the 1930s. As Vladimir Papernyi observes, “individual wooden houses, cottages, and dachas became an increasingly legitimate category for architectural design and probable architectural commission.”131 A book published in 1939 identified 200 basic types of dacha design (the variation depended on climate and function) but advocated above all “communal” plots with shared or “paired” dachas, thus implying a criticism of a ministry regulation of the same year stipulating that buildings should take up no more than 10 percent of the territory of any plot of land.132 The “mass” dacha generally lacked running water and other basic amenities, but for people with greater resources the legal restraints were fewer than later in the Soviet period:
There are no restrictions on the design of the accommodation, and dachas can have verandas (either open or with windows), terraces, balconies, oriel windows, galleries, bathrooms, washrooms, various other facilities (such as a cellar, a boiler for central heating, or a laundry room and so on), rooms for special purposes (a darkroom) and so on.
To provide parking space for cars arriving at the dacha it is possible to attach to the house a carport or a lightweight summer garage.
The recommended exterior was simple and unshowy; light building materials (other than brick) were to be used in order to reduce the cost of construction; nor was the dacha to approach a town house in its external features. The “pretensions to originality” and “tackiness” of prerevolutionary dachas were now quite out of place—even if, regrettably, they persisted in some locations.133
But normative documents such as architectural and planning handbooks have an extremely
problematic relation to social practice throughout the Soviet period, and perhaps
never more so than in the Stalin era, which may be said to have institutionalized
a disjuncture between rule and action, word and deed. The reality of “individual construction”
in the 1930s was, of course, very different from the moderate material gratification
promised in the pro-consumerist public campaign of 1935; to build a dacha without
the direct and explicit protection of an organization was one of the greatest feats that
could be achieved by 1930s
Soviet design for a “paired” dacha (from G.M. Bobov,
Layout of a medium-sized prewar dacha plot (from
