What, though, did the Moscow regional administration do with the 6,000 dachas that were under its control as of summer 1923? The first task it defined was to “review the social composition of those renting municipalized dachas and to take them away from nonlaboring elements [netrudovye elementy] if their number exceeds the regulation maximum.” Municipalized dachas, in other words, were to be subjected to the dreaded “compression” (uplotnenie). No less than 90 percent of the communal dacha stock was to be allocated to the “laboring masses” and to institutions. Rents were set prohibitively high for those outside legitimate employment: from 1 October 1922 to 1 May 1923, nonlaboring elements occupied 75 municipalized dachas and paid 119,341 rubles in rent; workers and employees (sluzhashchie) were allocated 2,223 dachas and charged only 37,516 for the privilege.
Yet the same report contains ample evidence that there were ways around these punitive policies. For one thing, employees generally outnumbered workers, especially in dachas that were rented out to institutions. The category of sluzhashchie was elastic enough to include almost anyone in a nonmanual occupation. The Communal Department clearly distrusted certain tenant organizations, which it suspected were doing little to institute the desired affirmative action policy. In some cases, it was alleged, they simply reinstated the former owners. Such abuses were especially galling given the continuing shortage of accommodations for institutions: in summer 1923 more than 600 institutional applications for dacha space had not been satisfied. Above all, however, dacha owners were putting up resistance to the expropriation of their property. As the report concluded: “In effect a civil war is being played out around the municipalization and demunicipalization of dachas.”26
NEP and Its Liquidation
In due course, however, this civil war showed signs of abating. Citizens were able to appeal for the reregistration of a property in their name as legal regulations and bureaucratic procedures became slightly more stable. Norms for property registration were not so restrictive as they became later in the Soviet period: plots might vary wildly in size, from under 1,000 square meters to over 10,000; in general, however, the area was in the range of 1,500–2,000.27 The demunicipalization policy introduced in 1921 for housing in general began to increase the opportunities for dacha ownership. Glosses on demunicipalization emphasized that its main purpose was to ensure that the housing stock was better maintained. To this end, the criteria for dacha municipalization were to be interpreted more loosely: the mere fact of a Dutch stove was no longer grounds for removing a dacha from private possession. Rather, only “a combination of comfortable appliances and conveniences” gave local authorities the right to put a dacha in the “lordly” category.28
Despite the draconian policies of the preceding period, housing legislation of the 1920s seems laissez-faire compared to that of much of the later Soviet era. The desperately underresourced Soviet state was willing to sanction various kinds of local and private initiative in order to reduce the burden on the center. Until the first five-year plan, nationalized housing played a relatively insignificant role: in 1926, local soviets controlled nearly 60 percent of the overall state sector, and this state sector itself accounted for only around 20 percent of total housing.29 Private and cooperative building were encouraged as a temporary solution to the housing crisis.
But this overview of NEP housing policy is misleading, for two main reasons. First, cooperative housing—which, in the major cities especially, tended to predominate—was by no means independent of Party and state authorities (as the sudden elimination of most urban housing cooperatives in 1937 would subsequently demonstrate). Second, there was great variation from one city to another. The housing crisis was always particularly acute in the major urban centers, and demunicipalization was extremely uncommon there. It was by and large only in provincial towns that urban single-family houses remained in private possession.30
Dachas had an intermediate status. In many ways they were analogous to single-family dwellings in small towns or villages, but they also fell within the catchment area of the major cities where housing policy was most interventionist. In Moscow and Leningrad especially, municipal authorities strove increasingly to establish administrative control not only over the urban housing stock but also over the traditional administrative blind spot of suburban settlements. By 1929, the “trust” now responsible for municipal dacha administration in the Moscow region had taken over 3,100 dachas in around forty settlements.31 In Leningrad, similarly, a separate “communal trust” was formed to supervise and administer the dacha sector. As of July 1926 it reckoned to have control over more than 3,500 dachas.
The intention was to use these new administrative structures to push through centrally directed measures more effectively. By the beginning of 1926, the Moscow soviet had formulated a set of rules for the drawing up of contracts and the renting out of municipalized dachas to institutions and individuals. The rent varied according to the occupation of the tenants: for people working in state, Party, trade union, and cooperative organizations the annual payment was to fall between 5 and 10 percent of the cost of the dacha; factory and office workers and artisans were to pay 3–10 percent; but the “nonlaboring element” was expected to pay not less than 15 percent.32
These new regulations were, however, at best only partially successful in putting dacha ownership and rental on a sound legal footing. Dacha municipalization was never conducted with the thoroughness suggested by policy statements on the subject. There were three main reasons for this failure. First, the huge housing crisis, which, once the Civil War had ended, turned former dacha areas around Moscow and St. Petersburg into shanty settlements inhabited by daily commuters (and so a house, even if classified as a dacha, was likely to be appropriated for year-round habitation). Second, the weakness and disorganization of the local authorities, which often were not able to keep pace with new instructions from the center. Third, the openness of the instructions to variable interpretation (a “lordly” dacha, for example, was very much in the eye of the beholder, and a timely and well-directed bribe would presumably have swayed the judgment of many inspectors from the local housing department).
In the 1920s, Muscovites were so desperate for living space that they were not put off by the disastrous state of most suburban housing. The municipalized stock in 1923 contained 725 dachas (12.8 percent) that were “dilapidated,” 1,771 (31.1 percent) that were “semidilapidated,” and 2,531 (31.1 percent) that required “minor repairs.”33 Yet reports suggest that dachas were almost never left vacant; a very high proportion, moreover, were occupied by commuting year-round residents. As one journalist reported of a village outside Moscow: “Most of the dachniki here are dachniki against their will, they live here all year round because it’s closer to the city where they can’t find an apartment.”34 Special concessions were made to encourage residents to rebuild the housing stock: if a dacha required “major repairs,” tenants were exempted from rent for the first five years they lived there.35 The regional and local authorities received numerous requests for permission to demolish existing buildings and start afresh. Given the acute shortage of housing in the postrevolutionary era, it is little wonder that many people tried to take over or build themselves houses outside the city. The building control committee (Upravlenie stroitel’nogo kontrolia, or USK) of each okrug tried to keep up with this wave of individual construction. Many people, having obtained a plot of land, went ahead and built with or without the necessary permission; others turned former dachas into houses for year-round habitation by installing a heating system; still others converted outbuildings into dachas or shacks for permanent habitation.36 The result of these make-do solutions was a spread of shanty settlements with very low standards of maintenance. One observant British visitor recalled coming across “what appeared from the outside to be a ten-roomed villa or datcha of wood” on a trip into Leningrad’s northern dacha zone in 1937. This house, despite its impressive scale, “was surrounded by a potato-patch and looked so neglected that I thought it must be empty, but I was assured that anything from fifty to eighty people slept there.”37