But these are relatively small points that do not fundamentally undermine the “two cultures” account of interwar Soviet history. A more serious objection is that to view the 1930s as a step backward, as a kind of sociocultural Thermidor, is to underestimate the extent to which Soviet society was radically re-formed in the 1930s; such an interpretation runs the risk, moreover, of conflating public discourse and social practice. The Great Retreat was always much more a rejection of revolutionary utopianism than an enthusiastic adoption of “traditional” mores. The 1930s did much to establish what may now be seen as crucial characteristics of Soviet-style societies. At least two of these characteristics come sharply into focus in the history of the early Soviet dacha. First, the life chances of individual citizens, as we have seen, became firmly tied to their organizational allegiance. Second, access to and use of goods and benefits were valued more highly than ownership of them. Twenty years of Soviet life were more than enough to demonstrate both the risks associated with retaining property at all costs and the opportunities for status and well-being provided by regular, unproblematic access to basic necessities and to the objects of consumerly desire.
These two facets of Soviet society—the “organizational” principle and the emphasis on consumption—were, of course, connected. By the mid-1930s most Soviet people in the major cities (and it is of them alone that I am speaking) were fast learning the lesson that access could best be obtained and maintained by the protection of a sponsoring organization: a factory, a trade union, a creative union, or the Party apparat.
Although these twin characteristics would figure large in any ideal-typical account of the Soviet experience, their real implications for the lives of Soviet people varied over time. In the 1930s the regime’s attempts to recast the relationship between state institutions and the individual were carried out in the face of various preexisting forms of social relationship. Institutions are, after all, made up of people, and Soviet citizens of the 1930s found their own ways of operating within new structures. The system was much more personalistic than the large volume of contemporary normative statements would allow; people were forced constantly to problematize the relationship between written rules and actual social practice, between public and private statements and values. The ways in which dachas were allocated and received may be seen as both symptoms of and contributions to the networks that gave Soviet society structure: ties that were neither properly bureaucratic nor wholly clan-based and particularistic, networks where the horizontal and vertical dimensions were rarely separate.
That is not to suggest that the vertical and the horizontal were ever wholly conflated,
either in people’s social practice or in their understanding of that practice. Soviet
hierarchies of status were quick to emerge in the Stalin era, and they are palpable
in the distribution of dacha space. Moreover, the informal social practices that people
engaged in may have helped them to cut themselves some slack under an authoritarian
regime and to get by in their everyday lives, but they also had human costs. Social
relationships had been severely fractured by the social warfare waged by the Soviet
regime, and they had not reformed to any adequate extent. According to one persuasive
sociological account,
