Summerfolk полностью

But there were grounds for dissatisfaction nonetheless. Disagreements had arisen concerning the permissibility of building small shacks on individual garden plots. Gardening collectives argued strongly that their plots required hard work and regular attention: inasmuch as many plots were located inconveniently far from people’s apartments (and thus differed significantly from allotments, which for the most part were located within or very close to the city limits), a small structure in which to store tools and take shelter from bad weather was simply essential. The Moscow soviet partially recognized this point by allowing the construction of watch booths and toolsheds in its resolution of August 1949. In what was perhaps a rather loose interpretation of this provision, many organizations then contacted the appropriate ispolkom and obtained permission to build summer shacks (letnie domiki); the maximum dimensions of these structures were at the discretion of each particular ispolkom. Two years later, however, it was found that garden collectives had abused the freedom they had been granted: some “watch booths” were as large as 28 square meters, and garden settlements almost everywhere had been building without the necessary strict supervision. As a result, the Moscow oblast ispolkom and the Moscow city soviet resolved in November and December 1951 that all buildings contravening their original instructions should be removed. Members of the garden collectives were, predictably, dismayed, and through their trade union organizations petitioned the municipal and regional authorities for permission to build summer shacks in the range of 6-10 square meters.14 Similar pleas were heard in Leningrad, whose ispolkom in August 1951 forbade all construction on individual plots and prescribed instead collective “pavilions,” each to accommodate 70 to 80 people.15

The collective nature of garden settlements was similarly in many cases open to dispute. The original idea was for them to consist of large “production plots” of 600 or more square meters, but in practice most organizations, even if they did ensure that certain zones were allocated for collective cultivation, gave their workers individual plots. In 1951, for example, machine-building factories reported that they had nine strictly collective gardens occupying 223 hectares and cultivated by 1,130 workers; individual plots, by contrast, were worked by 7,563 people on 265 hectares. Reports of the early 1950s consistently reported significant increases in numbers of gardeners, who tended to fall into the “individual” rather than the “collective” category (where a distinction was made between the two). Quite often, however, the “individual” reality of the garden collective was passed over in silence: the “collective” tag was used consistently, even when it clearly gave a misleading impression of the gardeners’ real activities.16