Summerfolk

Other factors besides the threat of crime might make membership in a dacha settlement problematic. The cooperative form of property was liable to bring dachniki into conflict with one another, with the administration of their settlement, or with higher authorities. In the immediate postwar period especially, individual dachas seem quite often to have been subdivided into apartments; a government circular of December 1953 had to offer specific instructions on the correct way to proceed if land disputes arose between people sharing a single plot within a dacha cooperative.47 The aim of 1950s legislation on dacha cooperatives was to regularize the procedures for acquiring and transferring their plots and houses and to put an end to “abuses” involving the de facto sale of patches of land or of rooms in a dacha. A building in a dacha cooperative could be transferred to another person on condition that that person was accepted as a member of the cooperative.48 But the fact that proscribed informal arrangements persisted was reflected in the quantity of advice given on the legal resolution of conflicts arising from shared use of dachas.49 In one publicly cited case of 1956, the wife of a cooperative member sold a room and part of a terrace to another family for 27,000 rubles; but she ran into difficulties when the new neighbors moved into another room in the dacha without relinquishing the first. The result of this awkward situation was three lawsuits: the first was brought by the member of the dacha cooperative, who sought the eviction of his unwanted neighbors; the second by the defendants in the first suit, who sought compensation for money they had spent on repairs; the third by the cooperative, which protested against the illegality of selling the room in the first place. The oblast court decided against all three parties, but in 1959 the Supreme Court of the RSFSR reviewed the case and concluded that the cooperatives appeal ought to be upheld in the interests of safeguarding the sanctity of “cooperative property.”50

Other cases of the late 1950s supported adherence to a settlements statutes in defiance of intuitive notions of justice. For example, in 1958 it was decided that people restored to a dacha cooperative after an earlier expulsion did not have the right to have their property returned if the property had been legally occupied by another member of the cooperative in the meantime. This was a situation quite likely to arise after 1956, when hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps and some of them took steps to reclaim property that had been confiscated on their arrest. In one case, a former cooperative member by the name of Aronov, rehabilitated in 1956 after six years, was promptly reinstated as a member of his cooperative; a few months later he was allotted 450 square meters of land and two rooms on the second floor of the dacha that used to be his. Soon after, he and his neighbors were presenting rival suits to the local court. When his case was rejected at this level of the legal hierarchy, Aronov turned to the oblast court, which found in his favor. But Soviet legal commentary considered this decision misguided, as according to its statutes a dacha cooperative did not have the right to take over any part of a member’s accommodation unless the member had been expelled from the cooperative.51

The dacha’s relation to Soviet notions of property can further be explored through cases in which families broke down and spouses or relatives presented their rival claims for ownership. In one (by no means exceptional) example from the late 1940s, the breakup of the marriage of Anastasiia Shvaichenko and Aleksandr Gushcha led to a long-running dispute over entitlement to dacha space. The marriage was officially contracted in 1942, but it had fallen apart after Gushcha’s return from the Red Army in 1943; Gushcha found himself a new woman in 1947, and the marriage was dissolved in February 1949. Gushcha and Shvaichenko managed to come to an agreement over the division of their city apartment (Shvaichenko took the larger of the two rooms, as was only fair, since she had had by far the better accommodations of the two before they married), but their dacha presented a much thornier issue: Gushcha claimed all of it, Shvaichenko half.