Quite in line with this policy, de facto private building continued into the period of the third five-year plan, even after the cooperative movement had been dealt a severe blow. This may seem paradoxical: the Soviet state undermined a form of collective undertaking and continued to support a form of individual activity. But actually this policy fits very nicely into a characterization of the Stalin-era system. First of all, it shows how apparently “nonnegotiable” ideological requirements could be waived in the interests of economy and expediency; how, in fact, ideology was never separate from economics. Second, it suggests how difficult it was for the regime to commit itself on matters of principle: the ad hoc resolution of problems was preferable to an unambiguous and realistic statement of policy. Third, the effective encouragement of individual construction was absolutely consistent with the Stalinist aim of eliminating “horizontal” social forms of cooperation and bringing state agencies into more direct contact with the individual. The “personal” builder may in theory have been free to construct a spacious five-room residence in an attractive part of the greenbelt, but in practice his success in this undertaking depended entirely on the discretion of his enterprise director, factory trade union committee, and a range of bureaucrats in the local and regional administrations.
A STUDY of published materials of the 1920s and 1930s suggests that the dacha fits perfectly the models that have gained most currency in social and cultural history as a means of differentiating those two decades: Timasheff’s “Great Retreat” and Papernyi’s “two cultures” model. In the early years of Soviet power dachas were commonly treated as an undesirable “remnant of the past” that had no place in a society informed by the principles of collectivism and Bolshevik self-denial. In practice, however, they were silently tolerated: partly because they served the important practical purpose of helping to alleviate the housing shortage in the major cities and partly because the overworked new state did not have the resources to administer them more closely. Then, after the first five-year plan had broken resistance to the Soviet social project and given rise to new, powerful interest groups, a significant change of orientation took place: individual property was relegitimized; prominence was given to symbols of material abundance; Soviet society became hierarchical and patriarchal. As a result, the dacha, that prime accoutrement of the comfortable prerevolutionary lifestyle, found favor once again.
This schema has many virtues, but it needs to be qualified. For one thing, public statements on the dacha, though in general softer in the 1930s, were by no means unqualified in their approval. For every writer, engineer, or skilled worker shown basking contentedly on a canopied veranda, there was an industrial manager subjected to public “indignation” for undue self-enrichment by the acquisition of a country retreat. And the collective forms of leisure with which the dacha is often contrasted—the parade, the expedition, the summer camp—became more, not less, prominent as the 1930s wore on.
