Summerfolk

28. See TsGAMO, f. 2157, op. 3, d. 355, ll. 522, 528, and d. 345, l. 349. A Sovnarkom decree of June 1945 had set the goal of improving living conditions for the senior ranks of the army. A particular instance was the settlement built for the Stalin Military Academy in 1947: see TsGAMO, f. 7974, op. 1-t, d. 12, ll. 1-39. Requests for dachas and other privileges from high-ranking members of the Soviet army and their families are to be found in GARF, f. R-9542, op. 1, d. 95.

29. According to Svetlana Allilueva, this policy can be traced directly to Stalin’s trip south in the summer of 1946 (for the first time since 1937): see her Dvadtsat’ pisem к drugu (London, 1967), 182–83.

30. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 80, d. 107, ll. 121, 279; d. 110, ll. 106–7.

31. Ibid., d. 191, l. 9; d. 107, ll. 280–81.

32. GARF, f. R-9542, op. 1, d. 130.

33. See TsGAMO, f. 7572, op. 1, d. 553.

34. TsGAMO, f. 7974, op. 1-t, d. 41.

35. Later on, the prominent people at Zhukovka came to include figures from a wider range of fields. In the summer of 1972, for example, Mstislav Rostropovich, Andrei Sakharov, and the guitar poet Aleksandr Galich lived on the same street in the settlement: see R. Orlova, Vospominaniia o neproshedshem vremeni (Ann Arbor, 1983), 286.

36. S. Allilueva, Tol’ko odin god (New York, 1970), 218–20.

37. The interior of one such dacha, witnessed in 1959, is described in some detail in M. Matthews, Mila and Mervusya: A Russian Wedding (Bridgend, 1999), 17–20.

38. GARF, f. R-9542, op. 1, d. 130, l. 5.

39. See M. Voslensky, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class (London, 1984), 205–6.

40. I draw here on V. Tolz, “Cultural Bosses as Patrons and Clients: The Functioning of the Soviet Creative Unions in the Post-war Period,” paper presented at a seminar of the Soviet Industrialisation Project Series, University of Birmingham, U.K., December 2000. My own archival research suggests a similar picture.

41. GARF, f. R-9542, op. 1, d. 56; d. 18, ll. 10–13. Further examples include requests from the overachieving coal miner A.G. Stakhanov and from the family of V. V. Kuibyshev (Kuibyshev’s first and second wives were for some time in competition for the privileges attendant upon an association with the great man): see respectively ibid., dd. 55 and 75. Such requests did not pertain only to dachas, of course: petitions concerning apartments, cars, and free Kremlin lunches were just as common.

42. Ibid., d. 18, l. 56. Examples from the 1970s and 1980s suggest that areas of uncertainty remained until much later in the Soviet period: appeals by widows of Soviet officials continued to be dutifully filed in the archives of the Services Department of Sovmin until the mid-1980s, when they finally began to fade out, presumably as a result of Andropov’s and Gorbachev’s campaigns against protectionism and patronage.

43. Iu. Trifonov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow, 1985–86), 2:418.

44. Ivanova, Moi sovremenniki, 125.

45. I am grateful to Jana Howlett for providing me with a transcript of this discussion.

46. A. Sergeev, Al’bom dlia marok, in his Omnibus: Roman, rasskazy, vospominaniia (Moscow, 1997), 206. Looting of dachas was also rife during the war, when settlements were left unattended: in 1942, for example, government-owned furniture from dachas at Gorki-10 was reported to have found its way into the homes of private citizens (GARF, f. R-9542, op. 1, d. 82).

47. “O poriadke pol’zovaniia zemel’nymi uchastkami v dachakh DSK” (22 Dec. 1953), in Zhilishchnye za-kotiy, 3d ed., expanded, ed. T. D. Alekseev (Moscow, 1957). The recommended procedure—that such disputes be settled before “comrades’ courts” within the dacha cooperative—was discussed in more detail in a later article: see B. Erofeev and M. Lipetsker, “Sudebnye spory ob ustanovlenii poriadka pol’zovaniia zemel’nymi uchastkami,” SZ, no. 4 (1959), 39–42.

48. This policy is spelled out in SZ, no. 5 (1950), 60–61. In the cautionary case cited (from the late 1940s), a cooperative member had sold an outbuilding on his plot without consulting the administration; it then transpired that the outbuilding was subject to removal, as it had been put up without the necessary permission. The original sale agreement was accordingly voided.