Contemporary published sources also fail to mention the dachas reserved for the upper echelons of the Party and leading figures in other areas of Soviet life (notably, favored writers, artists, performers, scholars, and scientists). The provision of elite settlements of this kind had begun in the 1920s (Serebriannyi Bor, Malakhovka, Kratovo, Nikolina Gora, Zubalovo, and others), but in the 1930s it proceeded more intensively and systematically. Top Party and government cadres in Moscow and the corresponding regional elites had virtually carte blanche to build themselves enormous—by Soviet standards—country residences. The most sought-after dacha locations of the 1930s were to the west of Moscow, where heavily policed and intensively maintained compounds began to take over from the more ad hoc elite enclaves of the 1920s.135 Stalin, for example, moved to a new dacha at Kuntsevo in 1934. This move marked a change in lifestyle quite consistent with the estrangement from his extended family that resulted from the suicide of his wife in 1932. When Svetlana Allilueva recalled her father’s behavior at the earlier dacha at Zubalovo, she remembered a peasantlike feeling for nature, modest tastes, and an easy way with the servants. Now, however, Stalin’s down-to-earth lifestyle was demolished piece by piece: members of the domestic staff who had known Allilueva’s mother were soon laid off, the number of servants and guards was greatly increased (there were always two sets of cooks and cleaners so that they could work around the clock, in two shifts), and Stalin’s entourage conducted a purge of old artifacts and furniture. The dacha interior became faceless and official. One observer who visited Kuntsevo in the spring of 1953, just a few weeks after Stalin’s death, gave the following description of the main area for meetings:
A room about 30 meters long. The far end was oval, as in noble families’ residences of the century before last. Lots of identical windows securely sealed with heavy white curtains such as you find in all major institutions in the center of Moscow.
The lower part of the walls, about a meter and a half off the ground, was brown and
covered with Karelian birchwood, which looked rather official [
Although Stalin had several dachas, in the Moscow region and elsewhere, all kept in a state of constant readiness, he chose to make the Kuntsevo dacha his main residence, a decision that both fed and reflected his growing suspiciousness and disengagement from people. Kuntsevo provided a new model for the elite dacha not only in its interior furnishings: Stalin actually chose to conduct a lot of his business there, regularly summoning colleagues to give briefings. Meetings of the Politburo would be conducted in the dacha’s large egg-shaped conference room adorned with portraits of major Soviet political figures, and Stalin’s associates 153 would be placed so that each man was seated underneath his painted image.137
The case of Stalin’s dacha has great historical resonance: the Leader’s move from the family dacha at Zubalovo to a gray official residence at Kuntsevo may be seen as emblematic of his break with the values of the Old Bolsheviks and his repudiation of revolutionary asceticism. As might be expected, Stalin’s comrades were quick to follow their boss’s lead: by the mid-1930s it was rare for senior Party figures to be making their own dacha arrangements; most of them had “personal” dachas that were officially state-owned but were rented out indefinitely to members of the political elite.138
Yet privileged dachniki could be as vulnerable as anyone else in the 1930s to the changing political winds. In 1933, for example, the village of Roslovka (Moscow region) had been developed as a comfortable dacha settlement for the managerial elite of the baking industry, but in 1937 and 1938 its character changed again: most of its residents disappeared in the purges, and other members of the elite were reluctant to take their place. As a result, the settlement was in due course occupied by factory workers (with five or six families to each house).139
