Summerfolk

The dacha also engaged Soviet anxieties about the operation of the market. Not for the first time in Russian history, peasants were the objects of especial disapproval (mixed with scorn) for obtaining rental income instead of living by the sweat of their brows.69 But all private dacha landlords, not just peasants, were regularly attacked in the press.70 Dacha “profiteering,” moreover, formed a convenient target for mainstream literary satirists. In one far from untypical story, an impractical young couple who have just inherited a crumbling dacha invite a relative to help repair it, but he has all too eager an eye for its commercial possibilities (he wants to keep a pig, he grows flowers for sale, he even lets out the house for a meeting of evangelical Christians).71 A more historically resonant treatment of the issue was The Twelfth Hour (1959), a play by the successful time-serving dramatist Aleksei Arbuzov, where the decline and fall of the nepmen is played out during a single evening at an opulent Pavlovsk dacha in 1928.72

The measures taken against the dacha market went much further than cultural disapprobation, however. In 1963 limits were imposed on the rent a private dacha owner could charge: no more that 3 rubles 60 kopecks per square meter in the Moscow and Leningrad regions.73 The well-known practice of diversion of state property to private building sites also received attention; the risk of “speculation” was (correctly) assessed as being particularly high given the large number of state construction projects under way at this time.74According to resolutions at the republic level in 1962, dachas built or acquired by “nonlabor income” were subject to confiscation. In one case of 1963, a couple bought two cars and a spacious dacha (of 80 square meters; the price they paid was 8,000 rubles), partially concealing these transactions by registering the dacha and one of the cars in the names of family members. When challenged in court to explain how they had obtained so much cash, they were unable to do so. The husband worked as an assistant in a textile shop; his wife did not work. The clear implication was that he had earned his surplus money through involvement in the black market. Lottery winnings, interest on savings accounts, gifts, and inheritance were among the few permitted sources of income besides basic wages. Even money raised by selling produce from a kitchen garden was illegal unless it could be proved that such produce was grown primarily with the individual family’s needs in mind.75

The public voice of the Khrushchev era was informed by an ethos of collectivist vigilance that was at times even more strident than that of the Stalin period.76 Newspapers laid the same emphasis on monitoring construction and on collective forms of leisure in the late 1950s as they had done in 1935. Measures to provide more hotels, pensions, and sanatoria were given much greater publicity than encouragement of individual construction. Reports on the dacha were incongruous in this discursive context: not only did the dacha prioritize the individual over the collective, it also presented people with second houses that were indistinguishable from private property. That this development presented ideological problems is shown by the legal debates on the principles of inheritance within a dacha cooperative. In the 1970s, as in the 1950s, it was often unclear whether priority should be given to blood relatives or to those who had “used” the dacha most.77

“Dacha for Нуrе”: a cartoon targeting the rapacious (and illiterate) dacha landlord (from Krokodil, no. 5 [1962])