Summerfolk

Despite such potential hiccups, the general rules governing the new dacha settlements were clear enough. For a cooperative to be formed, a group of not fewer than ten people at a particular enterprise had to write to the administration; if sanctioned, the cooperative was then allocated land “for permanent use” (v bessrochnoe pol’zovanie). Its members were then required to put the building work out to contract (even if they themselves ended up taking part).61 Building was expected to be carried out to standard designs, though special dispensation for individual designs could be obtained. All buildings became “cooperative property”; that is, they could not be sold or transferred to organizations or to individuals, although they could, with the approval of a general meeting of the cooperative, be passed on to parents, children, or spouses, and they could without qualification be inherited. The amount of space allocated to a member of the cooperative depended on the dues paid and the size of the family; living space was never to exceed 60 square meters.62 In the Khrushchev era vigilance was heightened even with respect to state-run dachas. In 1958, for example, a set of charges were introduced for overhead and for depreciation of furniture and other household items in dachas owned by ministries and subordinate organizations. Prices were differentiated according to location and type of room.63 In 1961, moreover, the senior ranks of the army were deprived of their privileged access to plots for building individual dachas.64

Legislative measures were backed up with publicized acts of surveillance. Investigative journalists of the late 1950s and early 1960s were in the habit of conducting “raids” on institutions and enterprises in order to uncover malpractice in various areas of Soviet life, and dacha locations were among the targets of their crusading vigilance. In 1959, two reporters from the satirical magazine Krokodil paid a visit to a new garden plot settlement for workers in the central planning organization (Gosplan). They quickly found that things were not being done in accordance with the Gardener’s Handbook. Many plots were strewn with felled trees: the owners were clearly planning to convert their houses from the anonymous prefabricated design to a more prestigious log-cabin look. Worse still, a cistern for weed killer turned out to be a steam boiler to provide central heating for the dacha of the president of the gardening collective. The journalists concluded that under the cover of growing food, people were really busy putting up full-blown dachas.65 Numerous other exposés of the same period drew attention to discrepancies between people’s salaries and the luxurious residences they were having built.66 More generally, the dacha was treated with great suspicion because it gave free rein to people’s proprietary instincts; the definition of “personal property” implied by public discourse of the Khrushchev era seemed both to harden and to narrow.67 Building regulations might on occasion be strictly enforced: tales abounded of “commissions” arriving to remove terraces and pavilions. Fences around individual plots were strictly forbidden. And land was generally vulnerable to unheralded state incursions—when territory needed to be reclaimed for an institution, for example.68

“Lady goldfish, turn my dacha into a smashed-up washtub! Just for half an hour, until the inspectors have gone . . .”: a satirical cartoon alluding to a well-known Russian folktale (from Krokodil, no. 24 [1964])