Summerfolk

93. A. Galich, “Gorodskoi romans (Tonechka),” in his Pokolenie obrechennykh (Frankfurt, 1972), 174. Another poem by Galich, “Za sem’iu zaborami,” directs its scorn more specifically at the dacha compounds of the Party elite (ibid., 228”29). Ironically, Lidiia Chukovskaia found Galich himself to be disgustingly materialistic when she rode with him and his wife from Peredelkino to Moscow in the early 1960s. Raisa Orlova quotes Chukovskaia as saying: “They spent the whole way back chattering about some piece of Finnish furniture and about sideboards. I haven’t had to take such self-satisfied vulgarity for ages” (Orlova, Vospominaniia, 278).

94. He has also known prerevolutionary dacha life: his family rented part of a house in the same settlement as the family of Asia, the object of Letunov’s silent and unreciprocated love, who own their own property (see “Starik,” in Trifonov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:432–43 passim). The cooperative was set up in 1926 by “a few Moscow intellectuals of proletarian origins” (3:516) on the site of a country estate that burned down during a peasant uprising in the summer of 1917.

95. Ibid., 503.

96. In The Exchange (1969), a rather better known story, Trifonov presents a slightly different take on Bolshevik dacha settlements. Here again the contrast is between “true Leninism” and upwardly mobile materialism; but the opposition of these two principles is complicated by the fact that they do not correspond to a division along generational lines. Moreover, the author’s value judgments are more successfully concealed here than in The Old Man.

97. The general direction of policy was confirmed by the new standard statutes for garden associations approved by a resolution of the RSFSR Council of Ministers on 15 Oct. 1956 (Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh aktov o zemle, 102). On the move away from collective gardens, see B. Erofeev and M. Lipetsker, “Pravovaia organizatsiia kollektivnogo sadovodstva rabochikh i sluzhashchikh,” SZ, no. 10 (1958), 37. Several of my respondents reported the common perception in the late 1950s (especially among white-collar workers) that garden plots were becoming relatively easily available.

98. GARF, f. R-5451, op. 30, d. 543, ll. 1–5 (a report compiled by the central trade union administration for the Central Committee of the KPSS in 1967).

99. Ibid. Similar reports of construction of unwarrantedly large dwellings on garden plots are to be found in d. 564, esp. ll. 6–8 (a report compiled by a department of the central trade union administration in July 1968).

100. See K.B. Iaroshenko, “Spory o chlenstve v sadovodcheskikh tovarishchestvakh,” in Kommentarii sudebnoi praktiki za 1980 god, ed. E.V. Boldyreva and A.I. Pergament (Moscow, 1981). An excellent social anthropological account of the garden-plot dacha can be found in Naomi Rozlyn Galtz, “Space and the Everyday: A Historical Sociology of the Moscow Dacha” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000). This work came to my attention too late for me to take account of it in my text.

101. This decorative function was given some emphasis in instructional literature: see Kherkel’, Vasha dacha.

102. In some regions, it was alleged in a central decree, kolkhoz lands had been handed over to individual gardeners without due attention either to agricultural productivity or to the environment. See “Ob ustranenii nedostatkov v rabote sadovodcheskikh tovarishchestv rabochikh i sluzhashchikh v RSFSR” (2 Aug. 1968), SPP RSFSR, no. 13 (1968), art. 69. The other point of view—that of gardeners faced with arduous weekly journeys to bleak and remote settlements—is presented in GARF, f. R-5451, op. 30, d. 543, ll. 8–12 (a 1967 trade union report on the development of collective gardening in Leningrad oblast).

103. S. Vasil’, Dacha na troikh, in his Dacha na troikh: P’esy zastol’nykh vremen (Rostov-on-Don, 1989).

104. See GARF, f. R-718, op. 12, d. 768.

105. L. Kuznetsova, “Snimu dachu!. . . ,” LG, 2 July 1975, 13.