Summerfolk

The garden settlement was the major new form of exurban life in the postwar era. It was presented as a new form of “active leisure,” to be distinguished from the dacha by its more modest function of allotment gardening instead of extended summer habitation. Its legal status had the virtue of being tied to use of the plot, not to ownership of the house that stood on it.100 Unlike dacha cooperatives, whose members were instructed to contract out construction work, garden settlements positively required members to contribute their own labor to the construction of a house. Yet the garden plot was still to be distinguished from the allotment on several counts. First, the amount of land allocated, though not enormous, was greater. Second, the house built on a garden plot, though not large or well equipped, did more than provide shelter and a place to store tools; allotments, by contrast, were typically provided from wasteland on the outskirts of the city and did not bring with them the right to build. Third, garden settlements were located farther away from cities than allotments. Fourth, the garden plot, though oriented primarily toward kitchen gardening, could have decorative flowerbeds and front lawn.101

A standard design for a garden-plot house (from L. I. Kreindlin, Letnie sadovye domiki [Moscow, 1967])

A simple garden-plot house at Siniavino, one hundred kilometers east of St. Petersburg

Garden settlements came in two main varieties—the association (tovarishchestvo) and the cooperative. The only real difference between the two was that associations were created under the auspices of local trade union organizations, while cooperatives had a wider range of possible sponsor institutions. The method of land distribution, however, was generally the same in both cases: the local ispolkom would allocate land to a particular factory or institution, and the organization in question would distribute the land among its employees. Holders of garden plots were obliged to abide by the statutes of the cooperative. For an initial five-year period, members had to remain at the same enterprise (with certain commonsensical exceptions, notably retirement), but thereafter they received the plots for “permanent use.” This was effectively private property disguised and made palatable to Soviet ideology by a collective form, and my interview material strongly suggests that people regarded it as such.

The land allotted to garden settlements was generally inhospitable, consisting (especially in the Leningrad region) of marshy or densely wooded terrain. Giving up collective farm land for individual gardeners within an association was regarded as deeply suspect, even if land was unproductive and neglected in collective agricultural use. In the late 194 1960s, for example, local state organizations were proving so ready to distribute land for this purpose that they earned a public reproach from the RSFSR government.102

Such reproaches were more common and more forceful earlier in the decade, when the public hostility to private enrichment during the Khrushchev era was regularly extended to garden collectives. Local authorities were bombarded with instructions from on high. It would probably be futile to seek consistency or rationality in these multifarious interdictions, but local ispolkoms often took them seriously, either because they were too cowed to do otherwise or because they stood to gain something by asserting their power in this way (or, most likely, for a combination of these reasons). Some of my informants have made serious allegations of malpractice, asserting, for example, that ispolkoms harassed garden and dacha cooperatives with the intention of seizing plots that had fallen vacant. Such accounts fit very plausibly into the history of post-Stalin housing policy, which gave rise to periodic conflicts between the rival power bases of local government organizations (soviets) and workplaces (enterprises).