Summerfolk

Even more persistence and ingenuity was required to build a house on a garden plot: this was often such an uncomfortably drawn-out process that people might remain without adequate shelter for two or three years. Over the summer, while toiling on their land, they could spend the night in a tent or in a house in a neighboring village; they might also put together a temporary hut (vremianka), but the only structure they were likely to have in the early stages was a flimsy lean-to encasing a short-drop toilet. This, according to one memoir account, was equivalent to marking out one’s possession of the plot, planting one’s flag on the territory.

Dacha construction was slowed most of all by the Soviet shortage economy. Even the simplest building materials were unavailable in state shops and so had to be obtained through unofficial channels. Constructing a dacha prompted Soviet people to engage in their full repertoire of blat practices—which, by the 1960s, seem to have been tied to ongoing social relations and circular networks to a much greater extent than in the 1930s, when the word blat had more disreputable overtones of corruption and criminality. The ubiquity of such practices, as well as their relative freedom from stigma, is suggested by a play set in the late 1970s or early 1980s in which three men join together to build a dacha. They draw up a list of costs totaling 15,846 rubles (an enormous sum, given that two of them earn less than 150 rubles a month). When they take stock of their blat resources, however, the estimate is whittled down to a third of that figure.103

A temporary hut (vremianka), made largely of old doors, at the Krasnitsy garden settlement, one hundred kilometers southeast of St Petersburg

Other ways of making progress with dacha construction did not depend to any great extent on the intricacies of the Soviet “economy of favors.” Members of Kravchenko’s settlement were typical in filching bricks from Moscow building sites or picking up choice bits of timber (doors were an especially prized find) after a row of old wooden houses on the city’s outskirts had been demolished. The materials thus obtained were then commonly transported to the dacha settlements by moonlighting state taxi drivers. In due course, a rumor spread through the settlement that inspectors were coming to demand invoices for building materials used in the construction of garden houses. (No one in the settlement could provide such documentation, of course, as they had all obtained their bricks, nails, and wood through unofficial channels.) Kravchenko did indeed receive such an inspection, but again thought quickly on his feet and claimed he had given money to the watchman to buy his materials; unfortunately, the watchman had since died. Anecdotal evidence of this kind is well corroborated by reports of official inspections, which suggest that infringements of the rules could be found wherever the authorities bothered to look. Yet even where “abuses” were exposed, retribution was by no means bound to follow: the restrictions were so unreasonable that even Soviet bureaucrats did not often insist on their precise observance. One string of reports from 1958 soberly listed the number of houses that had broken the rules in various settlements but also mentioned the achievements of these same garden collectives in making their territory fit for habitation and equipping it with various amenities. Only in one case was any indication given of what action might be taken to correct the failings identified.104