Summerfolk

Even so, it would be wrong to suppose that the residents of institutionally controlled settlements were able to remain loftily indifferent to the issue of property, which could be so thorny for most Soviet owners or occupiers of dachas. In the postwar period, questions arose regarding the transmission of privilege: the original recipients changed jobs or died, leaving their widows and children to fight to maintain the dacha as personal property. Over the period 1940–50, for example, N. A. Peshkova, the wife of Maxim Gorky’s son, launched a series of appeals to authority in an effort to retain control of her late father-in-law’s country residence. Gorky’s dacha in the Gorki-10 settlement was converted into a rest home in 1940, but Peshkova, instead of accepting the new dacha she was offered in a different location, requested a plot of land in the same area on which to build a new dacha; in the meantime she asked permission to live in the smaller house on Gorky’s plot that had formerly been used as the servants’ quarters. A more acrimonious case came in 1946, when the widow of the prominent Soviet writer A. N. Tolstoi wrote to Molotov asking for permission to remain at the dacha in Barvikha occupied by Tolstoi and his family from 1938 until his death in 1945 and to oversee the creation of a literary museum in her husband’s memory; she was not prepared to relocate to the alternative dacha she had been offered in Malakhovka (thirty-five kilometers from Moscow), which stood in what was by Soviet standards a manorial estate of 2,700 square meters. In a memo of March 1947, the Services Department gave its side of the story: the dacha had been given major repairs at state expense when Tolstoi returned from evacuation; since Tolstoi’s death people had been living there “without authorization . . . who have no connection whatsoever to A.N. Tolstoi or to his family”; and in any case, it was curtly pointed out, the dacha had never actually belonged to Tolstoi—he had rented it.41

Such cases served to remind even highly privileged members of Soviet society that the right to use or occupy was, despite much evidence to the contrary, not quite indistinguishable from the right to ownership. Occasionally it was argued that lengthy occupation of a state-owned dacha should be converted to personal ownership on the grounds that protracted state service precluded the acquisition of a house by ordinary means (that is, purchase). In 1947, for example, a resident of a dacha in the settlement administered by the state publishing network (OGIZ) complained that the new head of the organization was forcing him to vacate his summer house. Citing his long and dedicated service to Party and state, he insisted that the dacha should be confirmed as his personal property. “I was employed by the state without interruption. And as usually happens I have an official apartment, official transport, official dacha”—but as a result, he claimed, he hadn’t earned enough money to build his own country retreat.42