The mass return to the land in the late 1940s conformed to a pattern of behavior all too familiar in Russian history: the population, confronted by yet another social cataclysm, looked to the land for temporary survival and perhaps longer-term security. This change in orientation was reflected not only in factory-sponsored allotment areas but also in dacha settlements proper. One memoirist recalls “the spirit of the farm” in the settlement of Firsanovka (in the Moscow region, on the Leningrad railway line), where she lived with her parents in 1947 and 1948. The family’s dacha landlords were Old Bolsheviks, and the settlement was populated largely by architects and musicians; their next-door neighbors were a “conservatory dynasty.” In the evening the village fell silent as music wafted out of the neighbors’ dacha, but in the daytime things were quite different: “The maestro often stood in ‘dacha regalia’ on the roof of the barn and shouted to his helper, so loud that the whole settlement could hear, ‘Ivan! Don’t forget to put the dung on the vegetable patches!’”17 The demands of subsistence did not leave untouched even an exalted cultural enclave such as Peredelkino. Early in the war, in September 1941, the author Vsevolod Ivanov wrote to his wife and children (who had already been evacuated) that he and the few remaining locals were salting their own cucumbers, picking their own berries, and digging their own potatoes; the dacha settlement was beginning to resemble an underinhabited island, and Ivanov already felt like “Robinson Crusoe.”18 Just after the war, the poet Nikolai Zabolotskii, until recently an inmate of the gulag, found refuge at the dacha of an acquaintance in Peredelkino. Devoid of any regular source of income, he gained permission from the owners to grow vegetables on the dacha’s land.19 Zabolotskii’s need was doubtless exceptionally great, but he was not alone among Peredelkino dwellers in cultivating more than just his poetic gift; Boris Pasternak, for one, was well known for digging his own potato patch.20
In the immediate postwar years, then, we can already see signs of the convergence between dacha and allotment. Dacha owners were more likely now to work the soil with their own hands; more important, allotment cultivators were beginning to refashion their plots in the manner of dachniki, to use or at least envision them as dwelling places. For this potential to be realized, a great many social and ideological changes still had to take place. But some of these changes, as we shall see, also had their roots in the postwar period.
The Dacha as Dwelling: The Property Issue in Postwar Russia
The extreme circumstances of the war can be seen to have triggered both quantitative
and qualitative change in the relation of Soviet city dwellers to the land. But this
was not the only large consequence of wartime experiences that had significance for
the history of the dacha: there were also profound implications for the dacha as a
piece of property, as a house and a domestic environment rather than simply as a plot
of land for cultivation. In the late 1940s, single-family dwellings began to enjoy
greater respectability than previously. More relaxed policies on land use were accompanied
by a new encouragement of individual building.21 As in the 1920s, the private sector was called on to repair the devastated housing
stock. Land was distributed by local soviets. Resources (in the form of building loans)
were handed out by ministries to enterprises under their control, and the enterprises
then distributed the money among their workforce in consultation with the trade union
organizations. The single-family
