Summerfolk полностью

The allocation of land for dacha construction, which surged in the years 1934–36, was by no means restricted to members of the Party elite and the arts intelligentsia. Any Soviet enterprise might put in an application for land, planning permission, and resources. In a typical case, the Moscow oblast ispolkom allocated eight plots of land to a dacha cooperative from a chemicals factory. At the time of its application for building permission, the cooperative had thirty-five members, most of whom had been working at the factory since 1929 or 1930. Half were Party members. The factory bosses were included in the cooperative, but so were senior workmen, electricians, and carpenters. The original request, sent in July 1934, had mentioned that the dachas were intended for “the factory’s best shockworkers.” Construction was to be subsidized to a total of nearly a million rubles (provided by the branch of the relevant ministry, by a trust, and by the factory itself). The remaining funds were to be supplied by the cooperative members themselves.152

The types of dachas built by cooperatives varied significantly from one settlement to another, and often within a single settlement. Some cooperatives were egalitarian to a fault, building well over one hundred low-cost plywood dachas of an identical standard design, each with two or three rooms and somewhere between 25 and 40 square meters in living space. Others chose the more expensive option of log cabins and built more spacious summer houses (of 70, 80, or 90 square meters). Still others had a mix of two or more standard designs. A few smaller settlements—mainly for people of the “free” professions—had no standard designs at all. But even the larger and more standardized cooperatives might have a handful of dachas that were substantially larger than the rest, presumably occupied by people in positions of particular importance either in the cooperative management or in the sponsor organization. Thus there appears to have been a distinct hierarchy of status in many dacha cooperatives, but such differentiation was obscured by the language used to categorize residents. As we have seen, very few of them could be called “workers”; the categories most widely used were “engineering and technical workers” (ITR) and (especially) “employees” (sluzhashchie). But this last category was a real catchall in Soviet Russia. In reality, the members of dacha cooperatives were not humble bottom-of-the-ladder clerks but bureaucrats and functionaries of middling and upper rank. And even within this band of employees there was a huge gulf in status between, say, the senior accountant at a minor Moscow publishing house and the director of a major industrial enterprise. Such differences between specific employees and between whole organizations were, it seems, amply reflected in the types of dachas built and in the speed with which they were built.153

All settlements, however, were forced to reckon with a Soviet government decree of 17 October 1937 that effectively brought an end to the cooperative housing movement in the major cities. Cooperatives stood accused of failing to manage their assets with the necessary efficiency and thus not justifying the considerable state investment made in them. For this reason, they were now forced to relinquish their quasi-independent status and come under the authority of local soviets or of organizations (enterprises, ministries, trade unions, and so on).154 The 1937 decree is usually and with justification seen as having clinched the “departmentalization” of a crucial sector of the socialist welfare state.155