The stratification of the dacha population even in a single location was noted by Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva. In Zhukovka, an unspoiled village to the west of Moscow, residents—who for the most part worked not at the nearby collective farm but rather commuted each day to factories on the outskirts of Moscow—would rent out their houses to academics and writers of modest means for the summer, as before the war. At the same time, however, special dachas were built for scientists working in “secret” fields (mainly atomic physics and the space program).35 The third element in Zhukovka was a dacha settlement for the government. It was in this section that Allilueva lived as a privileged observer of its closed community: residents had special shops provided, and entrance into the settlement was by pass only. The only real place for the three dacha strata of Zhukovka to encounter one another was the local cinema, where the young people regularly brawled on weekends.36
State-owned “nomenklatura” dachas were, by Soviet standards, luxurious; they would
often come complete with such desirable features as housekeeper, billiard table, and
a real stone fireplace,37 and they tended to be located in settlements equipped with a good shop, a canteen,
even a cinema. The elite settlement of Gorki-io, for example, had a staff of 428 in
1949.38 The mentality of the residents also differed fundamentally from that of “individual”
dachniki. These privileged few were able to enjoy comfortable vacations while at the
same time protecting themselves from charges of petty bourgeois materialism; for,
after all, these dachas were not even their “personal,” let alone “private,” property.
They received their dacha perks, so the largely unspoken rationale went, not for who
they were but for the post they held. In some settlements nomenklaturists were reminded
of this fact by the official inventory numbers that were stamped on the furniture.
It was apparently
The evidence suggests, moreover, that even nonnomenklaturists, if they felt the dacha privilege to be their right, were more active after the war in requesting it directly from powerful Party-state figures; such people—many of them prominent members of the arts or scientific intelligentsia—also seem to have been more successful with their requests than in the 1930s, when they more often had to rely on institutional “brokers” than on personal appeals to authority. Peredelkino residents, for example, were not afraid to go straight to Viacheslav Molotov (the head of the Soviet government) and ask for a car to facilitate their trips to the city or for financial assistance in renovating their dachas. In the 1940s, it appears, the regime established a more stable modus vivendi with the various institutional structures of privilege; state policy remained repressive in all spheres, but those writers and artists who knew the limits and did not overstep them found that rewards and privileges, once granted, could more easily be retained.40
