132. That the “communal” dacha lifestyle was unpopular can be surmised from the construction
policy of the Moscow dacha cooperative, which by the mid-1930s had amassed 3,081 dachas
with only 3,791 sets of living quarters (Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona,” 18).
133. Bobov, Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo dach, 12, 21.
134. Examples are given in Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 100–101.
135. One example was the village of Zhukovka, where many peasants were dekulakized and
exiled and their land was made available for the construction of elite dachas: see
L.M. Trizna, “Zhukovka,” in Istoriia sel i dereven’ podmoskov’ia XIV–XX vv., vol. 5 (Moscow, 1993), 10.
136. Iurii Druzhnikov, quoted in L. Vasil’eva, Kremlevskie zheny (Moscow, 1994), 109.
137. Ibid. Other details on Stalin’s dacha taken from Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem. A map of elite dacha settlements in the Moscow region is given in T. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Sodalist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 512.
138. Bonner, Dochki-materi, 196.
139. E. N. Machul’skii, “Roslovka,” in Severo-zapadnyi okrug Moskvy, 312–13. The dacha was, from the point of view of the secret police, a perfectly
convenient working location: Nina Kosterina, for example, saw her family’s dacha landlord
arrested in the summer of 1937 (Diary, 42–43).
140. In July 1937 a representative of Mosgordachsoiuz reported that in the past year
thirty-four members of the Podpol’shchik cooperative (run by Old Bolsheviks) had been
arrested, and that a similar pattern of events could be observed in many other cooperatives.
His conclusion was that “anyone who feels like it can infiltrate our cooperatives.
We have provided enemies of the people with dachas” (TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24,
l. 29).
141. On the nomenklatura dacha prerogative, see Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class, trans. E. Mosbacher (London, 1984), 228–39. The personalistic nature of dacha allocation
in the 1930s is suggested by archival materials from the Sovnarkom apparat: see, e.g.,
GARF, f. R-5446, op. 34, d. 1, ll. 12, 147.
142. Details in Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s’ Moscow Show Trials, trans. J. Butler (London, 1990), 86–93. Nor was this Vyshinsky’s only intervention
in the life of dacha settlements during the Terror: in October 1938 he wrote to the
manager of Sovnarkom affairs complaining that although several members of Ranis (a
cooperative for representatives of academia and the arts) had recently been arrested,
their dachas had been sealed up and their redistribution had been delayed (GARF, f.
R-9542, op. 1, d. 41, l. 2).
143. “V Maleevke stalo luchshe, no eshche ne stalo khorosho,” LG, 11 July 1932, 1, and E. Pel’son, “V Maleevke ne stalo luchshe,” LG, 29 July 1932, 4.
144. D. Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury”: Gosudarstvo i pisateli 1925–1938: Dokumenty (Moscow, 1997), 177–78, 197–98. Similar expenditure was sanctioned by other Soviet
organizations: the Union of Soviet Architects, for example, resolved in 1936 to “increase
funding for building and buy dachas from 100,000 rubles to 300,000 rubles” (Paperny,
“Men, Women, and the Living Space,” 162).
145. Quoted in Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury,” 202.
