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And so we come to another postwar innovation: renewed and more purposeful discussion of the nature and the limits of the right to property. Public debate on these matters was fueled by the large number of specific cases that needed resolution. Property disputes were less common in sites of new construction than in areas already provided with housing where people returned from the front or from evacuation. As can be imagined, the question of ownership was especially hard to resolve in former zones of occupation. These grave practical difficulties provided the stimulus for a rather more inclusive definition of property rights in legal policy of the 1940s.24 Much discussion was devoted to the concept of “personal property” (lichnaia sobstvennost’), which differed from private property (as found in the capitalist West) by being limited to people’s personal use. As one jurist explained, “personal property is property involving objects and products of consumption, that is, things that do not include weapons and means of production, which have become public, socialist property.”25 The new term had been catapulted into Soviet legal discourse by the 1936 Stalin Constitution, but it did not gain a secure place as part of the Civil Code’s basic typology of property until the post-Stalin era, when a basic distinction came to be made between “socialist” and “personal” property. In the meantime, it represented a big gray area for Soviet legal theory. Article 10 of the Civil Code in the late 1940s mentioned that personal property was “protected by law” and presented a short list of items and sources of income that might fall into this category, but this brief treatment of the issue raised more questions than it answered. Debate was especially fierce with regard to ownership of housing. Was it permissible, for example, for Soviet people to own more than one house? Some argued categorically that it was not. Others took the same basic view but allowed certain exceptions (the acquisition of second houses by marriage or by inheritance). Still others asserted that the injunction against second houses related only to sale and purchase. But all tended to agree that to rent out a part of a house was not illegal, and that houses put up since 1921 on the basis of a mere “right to build” could now be reclassified as “personal property.”26

In the postwar period, then, the uncertainty of Soviet property relations—which had of course been exacerbated by the huge upheavals of the previous few years—was confronted by a new urge to codify, a new (albeit partial) commitment to abstract principle. The dacha was a particularly ambiguous case for Soviet legal theory. It combined characteristics of a piece of property with those of an item of consumption; it was both a second home—thus affording its occupant the opportunity for illegitimate unearned income—and a wholly legitimate social and cultural amenity, the availability of which confirmed the rising living standards of the Soviet people. This tension was never resolved in principle; it is hard to see how it could have been, given the constraints of Soviet ideology. The precise nature of a dacha—the balance it struck between property and consumption—could be established only in practice: by a detailed examination of a dacha’s use in each individual case.