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Others, however, managed to avoid these problems by acquiring a house privately. It is easy, given the undoubted advantages of explicit institutional backing and the reticence of the sources, to overlook the fact that private dacha ownership endured all the way through the Soviet period. Some owners had retained property from before the Revolution by slipping through the net of municipalization in the 1920s; others had managed to build or purchase their own houses during the first half of the Soviet period. To be sure, such undertakings were not possible without a certain status in Soviet society (so as to ensure official permission to build or buy, or to secure the necessary building materials, or to raise the money necessary to buy the house outright), but the house thus obtained was largely independent of institutional control. In Iurii Trifonov’s novella The House on the Embankment (1976), for example, the house owned by a Moscow professor and his family in 1947 has a run-down appearance that would not be tolerated by any moderately conscientious cooperative administration: it is “disorderly, on the point of falling apart, with a rotting porch and an unfinished second floor”; but even so, this house, with its enormous plot (4,000 square meters), its fence, pine trees, and wild vines around the veranda, and its little kitchen garden, represents the “private property” that in Soviet society was as highly valued by individuals as it was publicly decried.43 One nonfictional owner of a spacious country property was the artist P. P. Konchalovskii, who bought a house with extensive gardens and outbuildings in 1929 and retained it until his death in 1956. All the while he conducted himself like a true gentleman farmer; the property “remained miraculously intact as a fragment of the life of the prerevolutionary estate.”44

Private dachas were not well documented and certainly did not receive much public attention, but surely they only benefited from this neglect. Owners were able to lie low and for the most part were left untroubled. Not only that, official silence left opportunities for manipulation of the regulations by sure-footed and well-connected citizens: privileged members of the system apparently were able to make use of state resources when they built their dachas and to enjoy a legitimacy derived from their association with the state, yet in reality to flout all planning regulations and to claim the dacha as private, not socialist or cooperative, property. The scope for such abuses seems to have increased significantly toward the end of the Soviet period (and, as we shall see, it reached its peak in the period of privatization of state assets in the early 1990s). The boundary between state and personal property remained conveniently blurred, and it is safe to assume that, as the Soviet period wore on, specially favored citizens and their families gained a surer sense of what they could get away with. A Politburo member observed in a discussion of elite privilege in 1983: “The size of dachas is not observed. There is no strict control. There are whole palaces built by certain academicians and figures in the arts in Nikolina Gora, all from materials obtained at state expense.”45

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Культурология