The dacha’s vulnerability to the depredations of the new regime was exacerbated by its suspect ideological standing. Many representatives of Soviet power in the early 1920s considered summer houses to be among the least acceptable manifestations of private property. In 1924, for example, Foreign Minister Boris Chicherin and the head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, had to enter into correspondence with the Leningrad regional executive committee to force this organization to assist Soviet citizens who were reasserting their rights to dachas that were now on the other side of the Finnish border. The committee had refused to support the establishment of a “Society of Dacha Owners in Finland,” claiming that the existing provisions in the Civil Code were quite sufficient and that to encourage such an organization would contradict the “rigorously implemented” policy of municipalizing privately owned houses in Leningrad.18
Policies on dacha ownership during the Civil War were correspondingly severe. A three-month absence was sufficient for a dacha to be classified as ownerless, and failure to register one’s property was also grounds for confiscation. Owners of more than one dacha in a single settlement would typically be left with only one house. Yet evictions by local soviets in dacha areas tended to have only a shaky legal foundation. Strictly speaking, the early Soviet decree on the abolition of private property related only to cities, not to settlements; here, as later in the Soviet period, exurban locations represented an area of uncertainty for Soviet legal procedure.19 In any case, the law, such as it was, seems to have been only haphazardly interpreted and implemented in the early 1920s; influential contacts were the most reliable guarantee of preserving property, though determination and sheer good luck also helped.20
As the new regime sought to extend its control over the capitals and their outlying areas, the newly formed basic territorial units of Soviet power—the district executive committees, or raiispolkoms—were entrusted with supervising the dacha stock. The Primorsko-Sestroretskii raiispolkom, for example—based in one of the most popular St. Petersburg dacha locations of the years before 1917—was kept frantically busy in 1919 and 1920 as it tried to keep some measure of control over the properties that had suddenly fallen under its jurisdiction. In February 1920 its department of local services (Otdel mestnogo khoziaistva, or OMKh) was warned by the regional authorities that it should stop handing out furniture and other household goods to private citizens until it had carried out an inventory of all abandoned and requisitioned property. Even so, the local ispolkom continued to be inundated with requests from individuals for household items, articles of furniture, and entire houses. The range of confiscated items was considerable, from bed linen to clothes brushes, from pots and pans to wallpaper.21
In the early 1920s the pressure on housing was enormous as people flocked to the major cities. As a result, the prerevolutionary dacha stock had been almost entirely redistributed by 1922. In September of that year, the department of local services in Petrograd uezd wrote to the Pargolovo ispolkom inquiring about dachas that could be made available for rest homes, sanatoria, children’s summer camps, and summer vacation homes for people working in regional state institutions. The answer was that all dachas suitable for these uses had already been allocated to new owners and tenants; none had been, or would be, handed out to organizations.22
An impulse to impose some measure of order on the chaotic dacha stock had been provided by a Soviet government decree of 24 May 1922 that called on ispolkoms to compile within two months a precise list of all municipalized dachas (that is, all dachas that were under the control of the soviets). This decree did not signal the start of dacha municipalization (which, as we have seen, was under way in some locations as early as 1918); rather it launched a period of stocktaking.23 During the Civil War, houses had often been municipalized on local initiative, not according to any coherent overall policy; the absence of such a policy had also permitted many dachas ripe for municipalization to stay in private hands. In the way of Soviet decrees, the 1922 decree was promptly translated into an NKVD instruktsiia (that is, a set of guidelines as to how the decree was to be implemented in practice). The latter document called for restraint in redistribution of dacha properties: given the huge demand, only “well-founded applications” should be given consideration; and the transfer of whole dacha settlements to a single institution was strictly forbidden. The communal dacha stock was to be made up, first, of dachas whose owners were absent; second, of “lordly” (barskie) dachas (defined as dachas with at least one of the following attributes: running water, bathroom, electricity, heating; outbuildings; extensive gardens and parks; and fancy fittings); and third, of dachas whose owners had other such property in the same area (in such cases, the owners were to be left with one dacha only). The NKVD suggested a further criterion for those areas (and we must assume they were the majority) where the dacha pool obtained by the above methods was insufficient: on plots where there were several residential buildings, the owners were to be left with one building only.24
In June 1923 the Communal Department of the Moscow uezd soviet reported on its implementation of the municipalization policy.25 It estimated that “up to 35 percent” of all dachas in its territory had now been municipalized. A breakdown by district revealed that the traditionally “bourgeois” settlements located on the Kazan’ and Northern (Iaroslavl’) railway lines had borne the brunt of reappropriation. In all, well over 5,000 dachas had been municipalized: nearly half (49.2 percent) of them had been deemed “unfit” (beskhoziaistvennye); 46.6 percent had been appropriated on the grounds that 125 their owners had other dachas; and 4.1 percent were classified as “lordly” (though it may safely be assumed that many of the “unfit” dachas would have fallen into this category had their owners stuck around to find out).
In order to avoid municipalization, dacha owners had to register their property with the local soviet. By the time of the report, 5,001 private dachas had been registered and a further 2,918 applications were being considered. The understaffed department was struggling to keep pace, especially as applications required proper investigation (apparently many families registered several dachas in the names of various members).