Summerfolk

These policies might have sounded liberal, but in reality access to land was strictly policed. Numerous bureaucratic mechanisms had to be engaged if permission to build were to be granted. Applicants were first to send a set of documents to the office of the chief architect of the town; if they were attached to an enterprise, they were also required to enclose letters of approval from their trade union organization and their workplace administration. A legal agreement was then signed with the communal department of the local soviet. The act of transferal (of land from public to personal ownership) stipulated that the applicant might construct a house on the plot as his or her “personal property.” The house then had to be built within three years for the agreement to remain valid. Loans were generally available (for a sum not to exceed 50 percent of building costs) at an interest rate of 2 percent.55

The recommended size of an individual house remained modest: one room for a family of two or three people, two to three rooms for four or five people; the legal maximum was five rooms. The total living space was not to exceed 60 square meters. Prospective builders were urged not to trust their own judgment but to contact the Institute of Standard Designs in Moscow. The size of the plot of land was to be 300-600 square meters in the town, 700-1,200 “outside the town,” and up to 2,500 in rural areas.56

New dacha sites were given similarly ambivalent treatment. On the one hand, achievements in dacha construction were given public coverage. On the other hand, restrictions, as with individual construction more generally, were quite severe. They specified the number of stories permitted (one) and the number of windows. Stoves were forbidden. Most do-it-yourselfers of this period ended up with a plain, functional dwelling.57 Individual dacha construction could never be entirely respectable in the Soviet period, and everything was done to prevent “excess” in architectural forms and undue comfort in the interiors. Planners of the 1960s were consistently hostile to all dachas whose construction was not directed from the center: these they saw as pests guzzling a region’s resources and polluting its environment.58 As a slightly later handbook explained: “The dacha cottage is not the family’s fixed place of habitation; it serves as a place to spend the summer vacation and weekends. For this reason any excessive and pointless ostentation is out of place here.”59

A strong blow against “individualism” was struck in 1960–61, when the Soviet government prohibited dacha construction outside some form of collective. The original Khrushchev legislation of 1957 had sanctioned the allocation of plots of land for individual construction, but three years later would-be owners of summer houses were forced to sign up in a dacha construction cooperative (DSK).60 The change in the official line often caused great uncertainty, and its real impact seems to have varied from one settlement to another according to the actions both of individuals and of sponsor organizations. The dacha settlement to which one respondent belonged had been formed in the late 1950s on the basis of “individual construction,” but the Khruschchevian twist in policy put its future on hold. After one year had passed, some members of the settlement lost patience and started to build their dachas without waiting for official clarification of the issue. In due course the settlement was converted quite painlessly into a DSK. Even settlements that adopted the cooperative format from the outset, however, were by no means guaranteed permission to proceed with building as they wished; they quite often ran into difficulties at one or other level of the administrative hierarchy. Such delays sometimes led cooperative members to relinquish their plots before they had begun to build on them. Their plots were generally reallocated by personal approaches to potential replacements within the same organization.

A dacha at Abramtsevo, northeast of Moscow. This house was built in the early 1960s according to one of the standard designs of the time; the paneled facade especially is typical of Soviet dacha construction in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, however, the dacha has undergone changes that were prohibited in the Khrushchev era: a heating system has been installed, windows have been added, and an extension has been built.