106. Note, e.g., the roundtable “Vremena goda: Problemy otdykha,” LG
, 18 July 1973, 12, where one of the contributors, Iu. N. Lobanov, reported the results
of a survey of leisure habits in Leningrad: “Before we began the study many of us
held the conviction that ‘dachas are on the way out.’ But the figures show the reverse,
and people’s responses confirm that ‘we’d like to have a place out of town!’”107. Renting out private houses as dachas was permitted by the Civil Code in the 1960s,
on condition that rents were capped. Even so, it is hardly surprising that private
landlordism received plenty of negative coverage in the Soviet press: see G. D. Andrusz,
Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (Albany, 1984), 104–6.108. Published information on dacha construction in the 1960s–70s is scanty, some of
it is summarized in D. Shaw, “Recreation and the Soviet City,” in
The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy, ed. R.A. French and F. E. I. Hamilton (Chichester, 1979), esp. 129–31. A survey
of workers and employees at a Leningrad engineering works in 1965 found that 87.9%
of respondents did not have a dacha, plot of land, or kitchen garden; by 1970 there was a slight but marked
increase, and “mental workers” outnumbered physical laborers by 2 to 1. See I. Trufanov,
Problems of Soviet Urban Life, trans. J. Riordan (Newtonville, 1977).109. S. Kozlov, “Puti organizatsii massovogo otdykha v prigorodnoi zone,” in Sozdanie krupnykh kompleksov kurortov, mest otdykha i turizma
, ed. A.V. Roshchina (Moscow, 1972), 54, 56.110. See Iu. A. Vedenin, S.I. Panchuk, L.S. Filippovich, and E.G. Iudina, “Formirovanie
dachnykh poselkov i sadovykh kooperativov na territorii moskovskoi aglomeratsii,”
Izv. AN SSSR: Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 3 (1976), 72–79.111. V. S. Preobrazhenskii, Iu. A. Vedenin, N. M. Stupina, L. S. Filippovich, and I.
Chalaia, “Problemy territorial’noi organizatsii rekreatsionnoi deiatel’nosti v Moskovskoi
oblasti,”
Izv. AN SSSR: Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 6 (1982), 90. In 1982 the Moscow trade union organization reported that over
1,000 enterprises and organizations in the city had garden associations; in 1980 a
“Moscow voluntary society of gardeners” had been set up (TsMAM, f. 718, op. 1, d.
2528, ll. 6–7). The available evidence suggests that demand for garden plots remained
high in the provinces too during the 1970s: see GARF, f. R-5451, op. 30, d. 646 (trade
union reports from 1979).112. A. Denisov, “Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo,” Ekonomika sel’skogo khoziaistva
, no. 4 (1978), 125. According to this article, garden plot occupiers in the RSFSR
were allowed to build summer houses with solid-fuel heating of between 12 and 25 square
meters in “useful area” with a terrace of up to 10 square meters; the outbuilding
could be up to 15 square meters, and rabbits and chickens could be kept there. This
does not mean, of course, that official attitudes were by any means laissez-faire
in the 1970s. There was still the occasional sally against garden settlements as hotbeds
of private property and the unofficial economy. But it is perhaps significant that
a crude example of this genre (K. Kozhevnikova, “Sad za gorodom,” LG, 10 Nov. 1976, 11) met a response from more than 150 irritated readers, some of whose
letters were published the following year (ibid., 26 Jan. 1977, 11).113. Iaroshenko, “Spory o chlenstve v sadovodcheskikh tovarishchestvakh.”
114. Irina Chekhovskikh, interview no. 4 (see “Note on Sources”). The involvement of
men in home repairs and in cultivation of the “personal subsidiary farming plot” was
noted by Soviet sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s: see L. Gordon and E. Klopov,
Man after Work (Moscow, 1975), 91.115. V. Zikunov, “Kondratova dacha,” in his Rodinskie kolodtsy: Rasskazy
(Krasnoiarsk, 1990), 41, 44116. Ibid., 42.
117. These quotations are taken from another piece of standard-issue late Soviet fiction:
T. Nikolaeva, “Prodaetsia dacha,” in her
Na malen’koi stantsii: Povesti i rasskazy (Gor’kii, 1987), 114 and 94, respectively.