Summerfolk полностью

Dacha settlements were almost certainly affected even more severely by the Terror than the cities where their residents had their main dwellings. For one thing, they were populated by precisely the categories of people—above all, Party/state functionaries and middle managers—who were most vulnerable to unmasking as “enemies of the people.” And the unofficial channels through which the governing boards of dacha cooperatives were forced to operate gave ample material for conspiracy theorists among the rank-and-file membership. As economic bottlenecks remained tightly sealed, there may well have been a tendency to admit to cooperatives “random people” (sluchainye liudi) whose relation to the sponsor organization might be tenuous but who were well equipped to negotiate the shortage economy and obtain building materials.140

But, for as long as they remained in favor, men highly placed in the apparat could allow themselves almost anything. Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and of course Stalin wasted little time in carving out plots in elite locations and having spacious residences built at public expense.141 By the mid-1930s, all semblance of self-restraint had gone. In one particularly unsavory episode, the state prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, maneuvered to acquire the dacha of the Old Bolshevik Leonid Serebriakov even as he was demanding the death penalty for him at one of the Moscow show trials. Vyshinsky transferred the plot of land from cooperative to state ownership and in the process pocketed the money that Serebriakov had paid into the cooperative pool for his dacha.142

By the mid-1930s the net of privilege was cast wider to include new categories of beneficiary. In 1932 Literaturnaia gazeta noted pointedly that the only existing rest homes for writers could accommodate only fifteen people a month and were located an awkward fifteen-kilometer journey from a rail station two and a half hours’ ride from Moscow. Fifty-six people (mainly writers’ families rather than the writers themselves) were crammed into a building of seventeen rooms.143 Construction of the famous writers’ colony at Peredelkino started in 1934, shortly after the first congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, as a means of remedying this situation. Sovnarkom allocated 1.5 million rubles toward the cost of the first thirty dachas, and prominent writers and literary bureaucrats appealed successfully for further substantial injections of cash.144 We have no reason to believe that the allocation of these funds was any more open, accountable, or equitable than in any other sector of the Soviet economy. As Gorky noted with alarm to a member of the Politburo in 1935:

Money is often allocated without due attention, without consideration for the real needs of the union members. A needy writer can be refused help, but the sister of a writer receives 5,000 rubles. The government gave money for the construction of a dacha settlement, and 700,000 of this sum disappears like straw in the wind. There are many instances of generosity of this kind.145

Such doubts had earlier been raised from time to time by major Party figures.146 But now, in the mid-1930s, Gorky’s was a lone—and, given his own lavish accommodations, somewhat compromised—voice. Well-known writers had been petitioning the Central Committee for material privileges since the early 1920s, and by the mid-1930s the Party was coming to acknowledge their right to a peaceful creative environment in return for obedient membership in the union.

Boris Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino (from Natal’ia Poltavtseva)