Summerfolk

As we have seen, the discourse and practice of the 1930s left much more scope for consumption than for ownership. Most dachniki, for example, either rented a dacha on the private market or were allocated accommodations by their organization: in both cases, use of a dacha was markedly temporary and active engagement with it as a domestic environment was minimal. By the second half of the 1960s, if not earlier, Soviet citizens were able to feel a much greater sense of ownership, even if they usually achieved it under the cover of a cooperative or garden association. The history of the dacha in the postwar period points, in fact, to an important mechanism that Soviet citizens could use to acquire and transmit property rights. Soviet law had firmly established the principle that legitimacy of individual ownership of an object depended in large measure on the nature of its use. Every Soviet family had the right to living space, but to acquire and profit from living space that exceeded ones personal requirements was strictly forbidden. Dachas were a particularly gray area: as a second dwelling, they were by definition not “necessary” items in the strictest sense of that term, yet in practice dacha ownership was permitted, as summer houses were classified as an item of consumption; as a recreational facility, not a second home.129 So in the case of the dacha we see that consumption, besides being a source of difficulty for citizens whose wants were deemed to exceed their needs, might also be an effective guarantee of property rights in Soviet society.

The postwar period was associated with an important set of changes in people’s attitudes toward land, property, leisure, consumer culture, and, not least, domesticity; all these may be seen reflected in the garden-plot movement and its gradual convergence with the dacha proper. With the fall of the Soviet system this convergence became all but total; the dacha became even more of a mass phenomenon, but its social and cultural significance underwent a further shift in line with the traumatic uncertainty that so many Russians experienced in the 1990s.

1. J. Hessler, “A Postwar Perestroika? Towards a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR,” SR 57 (1998): 524.

2. See U.G. Cherniavskii, Voina i prodovol’stvie: Snabzhenie gorodskogo naseleniia v Velikuiu Otechestvennuiu Voinu (1941–1945 gg.) (Moscow, 1964), 130–50, and William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II (Cambridge, 1990), chap. 5. Cherniavskii (p. 142) relates that in 1942 almost a third of urban people had individual allotments or helped to cultivate collective allotments; in 1943 that figure rose to two-fifths; in 1944, to half.

3. A brief account of “food gardens” during the siege of Leningrad is given in Moskoff, Bread of Affliction, 201–3. The decision to grow vegetables in every available space within the city was taken in February 1942; by late summer of that year about 270,000 Leningraders were engaged in private vegetable gardening.

4. J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London, 1991), 83.

5. Moskva poslevoennaia, 1945–1947: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 2000), 384. For more on the desperate food shortages of the postwar years, see V. F. Zima, Golod v SSSR, 1946–1947 godov: Proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia (Moscow, 1996), and E. Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost’, 1945–1953 (Moscow, 2000), 69–78.

6. “Prakticheskie sovety ogorodnikam,” Ogonek, no. 20 (1948), 29. There are numerous similar examples in Ogonek and Rabotnitsa in the second half of the 1940s.

7. M. Basin and I. Shmelev, “V sadakh i ogorodakh odnogo zavoda,” Trud, 21 May 1949, 4.