Summerfolk

Trifonov’s focus in The Old Man is one of the traditional dacha cooperatives that by the post-Stalin era were strongly associated with the material comfort, prosperity, and security of the families that lived in them. One of my informants recalled being embarrassed to tell her schoolmates in the 1950s that she spent the summer at a proper dacha, as this would have seemed suspiciously bourgeois; instead she took to saying that she went to visit her grandmother in the country (which was a wholly unremarkable pattern of life; in the eyes of her classmates, a couple of weeks at a resort would have been the most attractive and prestigious way to spend the summer). Cooperative housing was associated with privileged access to “collective” resources, material wealth (given the relatively substantial cash contributions required), and the sponsorship of an influential employer organization (locations allocated for cooperative dacha construction tended to be closer to the city and in more scenic spots).

But to join a dacha cooperative was possible only for a minority, and, especially in the Khrushchev period, it was not considered desirable to encourage such undertakings excessively, given the dacha’s unhealthy association with private property. The most acceptable way of reconciling the aspiration to acquire a plot of land with the ideological animus against individual property was to promote the garden-plot movement. Garden collectives formed steadily during the 1950s, and to an even greater extent than in the late 1940s they tended to consist of individual plots rather than large territories for collective use.97In the first half of the 1960s, the rate of increase slowed significantly and existing settlements were subjected to closer scrutiny. After Khrushchev’s removal, however, the garden association was revived once more. Encouraging signals were sent out to enterprises and 191 organizations, and the authorities were soon inundated with requests for land. In 1967, for example, the Ministry of Agriculture reported that 3,870 workplaces in Moscow city and oblast had applied for allocation of a total of 38,000 hectares for new garden associations; in Leningrad, data had been received for only eight districts out of sixteen, but there were already 834 institutional applications for a prospective membership of 53,000 workers and employees. By this time 1.5 million Soviet families were already engaged in collective gardening.98

Reports on the development of garden associations compiled by the trade union authorities were far from being exclusively self-congratulatory, however. Goings-on in garden settlements often gave the lie to their “collective” label, as the first action of most garden administrations was to break up the available land into individual plots. But the most serious criticisms, as in the early 1950s, concerned the right to build houses on individual plots. Small summer dwellings were commonly built without due architectural control and with black-market building materials. And yet by the second half of the 1960s, no one seriously attempted to outlaw individual summer dwellings of some kind in garden collectives; the most that was done was to insist that such dwellings be built according to approved standard (and cheap) designs, to “recommend” that enterprises build collective hostels for the gardeners among their workforce, and to advocate the cooperative form of organization above the “association” (tovarishchestvo)—as if that would make any real difference to the way garden settlements were run.99