Summerfolk

To join a dacha construction cooperative (DSK) was a more accessible but considerably more arduous way to ensure long-term ownership. Even if postwar cooperative members were allocated land on which to build, many found that they were on their own when it came to putting up a house. The grandfather of one memoirist, a highly placed worker in the then prestigious railway sector, was offered the opportunity to join a DSK in 1949. He considered that acquiring property of this kind was dangerous, but his misgivings were overcome by the cooperative form of the settlement and by his concern to improve his family’s living conditions. The land allocated to the prospective settlement was in a prestigious location, near the former Mamontov estate of Abramtsevo; but it was also densely wooded, and the dacha settlers had to clear the trees to make paths. For this project the necessary permission had to be obtained and foresters hired to fell the trees. After the cooperative members had joined forces to clear pathways and put up fences (in the process their treasurer disappeared with a large part of the money contributed), they were confronted with another enormous difficulty: how to obtain building materials. Even the simplest wooden boards could not be obtained through official channels—so dachniki here, as in so many other settlements, filched their wood from state building sites and hired a state-employed driver to transport it to their plot during his working hours. Even then, life was made difficult by fussy regulations passed on by the president of the cooperative from higher authority: dacha builders were, for example, required to plant sixty new trees on their plots to compensate for those that had been felled to clear the paths. Luckily, no serious effort was ever made to enforce such instructions.

This lack of strict administrative supervision was hardly untypical of the period. After the cataclysm of the war, dacha settlements offered refuge, subsistence, and extra living space for many people, but often they became lawless and chaotic places. Andrei Sergeev, in his stylized memoir, A Stamp Album, recalls seeing a stream of beggars on suburban trains along the Kazan’ line in the mid-i940s; this was a “bare, dull time without dachniki.” In other words, settlements had filled up with permanent residents—who had every reason to fear for their property. “The half-empty houses were bolted up using all available locks, hooks, and bars.”46 According to another account, lawlessness remained a feature of dacha settlements for many years:

A dacha built in the 1940s, located at Mel’nichii Ruchei (near Vsevolozhsk, east of St. Petersburg). This Soviet dacha plot has not been left unmarked by the post-Soviet era: it is overlooked by a “New Russian” residence that infringes all known planning regulations.

Accounts of forced entries to dachas were passed on from mouth to mouth, each day acquiring fresh details. Dachas were burglarized frequently—very few people got by without experiencing this. The dacha thief was not, as a rule, a professional. In the 1950s and 1960s these were most often escaped or amnestied prisoners who were hungry and had absolutely nowhere to go. They forced their way into empty houses, not looking for riches but just hoping for a roof over their heads and a bite to eat. They devoured fruit conserves left behind by the owners, the odd can of something or other, last year’s dried crusts, and left behind them empty bottles, cigarette butts, and a big mess.