Summerfolk полностью

146. See, e.g., a letter of September 1933 in which Kalinin advises Voroshilov against setting up individual dachas in Sochi, given the expense of maintaining them, the potential for corruption in their allocation, and their impracticality: if a war were to erupt in the region, it would not be easy to turn them into hospitals; for this reason, collective rest homes should be preferred: RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 42, l.38. The tendency of Party officials to affect “democratic” manners when on vacation is attested by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who recalls her husband’s improbable encounter with Nikolai Ezhov, a future administrator of the Terror, in Sukhumi in 1930 (Hope against Hope, 322). A similar account of free-and-easy socializing is given by Anna Larina, who saw Bukharin in 1930 while staying in Mukhalatka “in a rest home for members of the Politburo and other leaders” (Bukharin, however, stayed at a separate dacha in Gurzuf) (This I Cannot Forget, 107).

147. L. Sobolev, Neizmennomu drugu: Dnevniki. Stat’i. Pis’ma (Moscow, 1986), 280 (a letter of May 1938).

148. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 111–12, 209, 125. Pasternak’s Peredelkino period coincided with his general withdrawal from and disgust with Soviet public life, his cultivation of a simpler prose style and authorial persona, his growing interest in Chekhov rather than Tolstoi as a model, and, not least, his engagement with the usad’ba tradition in Russian literature: see B. Zingerman, “Turgenev, Chekhov, Pasternak: K probleme prostranstva v p’esakh Chekhova,” in his Teatr Chekhova i ego mirovoe znachenie (Moscow, 1988), esp. 145–67. Numerous other accounts echo Pasternak’s attachment to his country retreat. Note, e.g., a 1938 diary entry where the alcoholic writer and literary functionary Vladimir Stavskii launches into an undistinguished but nonetheless rapturous description of the views from his dacha at Skhodnia: V. Garros, N. Korenevskaya, and T. Lahusen. eds., Intimacy and Terror (New York, 1995), 219–21.

149. TsGAMO, f. 7539, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 1–36.

150. Quotation from Shtange’s diary, in Garros et al., Intimacy and Terror, 193.

151. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 111–12, 209.

152. TsGAMO, f. 7539, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 1–21.

153. Condusions in this paragraph are based on a study of the lists of cooperative members and dachas built in TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, dd. 26, 27, 28. Variation in the size and style of cooperative dachas is subject to disapproving comment in A. R., “Voprosy dachnogo stroitel’stva,” Zhilishchnaia kooperatsiia, no. 6 (1935), 43–45.

154. “O sokhranenii zhilishchnogo fonda i uluchshenii zhilishchnogo khoziaistva v gorodakh,” Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva, no. 69 (1937), art. 314.

155. This is the argument of, e.g., Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development, 36–37.

156. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 23.

157. See Zhilishchnye zakony: Sbornik vazhneishikh zakonov SSSR i RSFSR, postanovlenii, instruktsii i prikazov po zhilishchnomu khoziaistvu (Moscow and Leningrad, 1947), 9.

158. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 23, l. 102.

159. The rights of people who owned houses as personal property (e.g., the right to evict tenants once the term of their lease had expired if it could be proved the house was needed for the owner’s personal requirements) are given due emphasis in an authoritative gloss on the October 1937 decree: see R. Orlov, “Poriadok primeneniia novogo zhilishchnogo zakona,” Sovetskaia iustitsiia, no. 1 (1938), 20–24.

160. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24, l. 16.

161. See A. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998).

6

Between Consumption and Ownership

Exurban Life, 1941–1986