Summerfolk

According to Soviet civil law, a wife was entitled to an equal share in all property acquired during the marriage, irrespective of whether this property was acquired by her money or her labor. Gushcha had received his dacha plot in 1938 and begun to build in April 1939, so Shvaichenko’s case seemed initially to be weak. But here she alleged that they had initiated “marital relations” in 1937, and it was to this time that her right to property should be dated, not to 1942. After the Moscow city court denied her any right to the dacha, Shvaichenko appealed to the civil law division of the Supreme Court, which in June 1949 overturned the earlier ruling, deciding that the period of dacha construction had coincided with actual married relations (although it dated the start of these relations back to 1939, not to 1937). Even so, it judged, Shvaichenko’s share should be somewhat less than half, as Gushcha had invested substantially in building materials for the dacha before the start of their relations. Shvaichenko appealed again, and after another few months of legal wrangling succeeded in obtaining more than a third share in the dacha (at some expense; the dacha was to be converted into two discrete dwellings).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this dispute is the way both parties—but especially the plaintiff, Shvaichenko—combined appeals to rights guaranteed by law with assertion of moral right. Strictly speaking, it was immaterial whether Shvaichenko took an active part in organizing the construction of the dacha: the crucial point was to establish whether she and Gushcha had conjugal relations at that time. But even so, in her petitions she laid great emphasis on the expertise she had brought to the project (she claimed, as a construction engineer, to have supervised all the building, which was carried out by hired workers, while her husband’s involvement had been limited to obtaining the building materials through his contacts in the supply system). This dacha had been built with private resources on the basis of a “right to build” that Gushcha had obtained in 1937 under the assumption that it would translate into “personal” property for him. Of course, such perceived conflicts between moral and legalistic notions of rights are universal in societies with legal systems. But the Soviet system left unusually large scope for them, as the property issue was constantly fudged. It seems that the status of cooperative and “personally” owned dachas was perfectly clear to social actors until differences arose; at that point it emerged that there was little firm legal ground to stand on.52

Property under Attack: The Khrushchev Era

In the late 1940s dachas were presented as a legitimate aspiration for ordinary Soviet people, albeit one that was unlikely to be satisfied in the immediate future. In the first half of the 1950s state-directed dacha provision proceeded more or less as it had done in the 1930s. The new ten-year plan for the reconstruction of Moscow was to create dacha space for 100,000 more people. This expansion of the exurban zone was to be centrally directed, inasmuch as cooperative settlements, in the view of the central planners, had failed to achieve the necessary coordination either with other construction projects or with the natural environment; architectural designs (even for outbuildings) were to be provided by central planning institutions. Dacha dwellers could show their individuality only by their choice of gates, decorative window surrounds, and door design.53

Much grander in its projections was the general construction drive of the late 1950s. As part of Khrushchev’s ambitious program, Soviet citizens were presented with the opportunity to build their own (albeit very modest) houses. The seven-year plan from 1959 to 1965 aimed to build 15 million new apartments and 7 million small homes, the latter mainly for the rural population. The government resolved to encourage individual participation in this construction work by giving credits more freely and improving the infrastructure in potential settlement areas.54 Specific instructions were delivered to do-it-yourself builders in dozens of books published between 1957 and i960 that differed from one another only to take account of regional variations in climate and building materials.