It is little wonder, then, that the dacha trusts had enormous difficulty persuading local ispolkoms to admit to free dacha space. When the Leningrad okrug administration tried to gauge the extent of the dacha stock in the summer of 1927, very few local ispolkoms volunteered information, mainly because most former dachas had been converted to year-round residences. The one that did provide dacha statistics was the Rozhdestveno volost (taking in Siverskaia and several other settlements to the southwest of Leningrad), which gave a total of over 500 municipalized dachas spread over thirteen settlements. Of these, 152 were being rented out to individuals, 110 were being used by the local ispolkom, 197 were controlled by the education sector, and the rest were empty or unfit for habitation.38
Given that available dacha space was so scarce, the trusts had almost no accommodations to offer the many applicants for a rented summer house. On their own, they had no way of alleviating the shortage, and so more publicity was given to alternative approaches. Some land was offered to individual dacha builders on long-term leases.39 A more striking new development was the coverage given to the cooperative movement. House-building cooperatives had been sanctioned from the beginning of NEP as a means of making good the inadequacies of municipal housing provision. The one-family house of one or two stories was regularly proposed as a solution to the problems facing Soviet urban planning; the prerevolutionary vogue for Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities had not yet run its course.40 The showcase development of this kind was the Sokol settlement in the suburbs of Moscow, where construction began in 1923. This settlement consisted mainly of one-family houses of varied design: from the pseudo-Karelian log house to wood-paneled and even brick houses. The design of the houses emphasized their individual character, while the layout of the settlement—with its small tree-lined streets, some of them curving to form an arc—contrasted with the rectilinear, aggressively modernizing patterns of much early Soviet urban planning.41
A house at Sokol
The houses at Sokol were not dachas but were designed for permanent residence. In the mid-1920s, however, the idea of dacha cooperatives received fresh encouragement, the idea being that they would generate the resources to restore dilapidated dacha stock and to build new settlements.42 Cooperative building projects were further supported by the publication of standard designs for prefabricated dachas that could be assembled in a day without knocking in a single nail and with the help of just a few casual workers.43
Dacha cooperatives established in the second half of the 1920s were suitably modest in their objectives. Most houses built under their auspices were small and made of plywood. Even so, the practical difficulties proved to be immense. Cooperatives required considerable startup capital at a time when bank loans and other kinds of institutional funding were not easy to come by, and individual members did not generally have the personal means to make up the shortfall.44 At the start of the next decade construction projects became more ambitious. In 1932, cooperatives were entrusted with building 1,300 new dachas in the Moscow region (each to a standard design with two apartments, each of three rooms). But here too the press reported severe practical difficulties in obtaining the necessary credits and in coordinating the activities of the cooperative’s various branches.45In due course, attempts would be made to resolve these problems by tying the activities of a cooperative ever more closely to its sponsor organization; as we shall see, the “departmental” principle in dacha management triumphed comprehensively in 1937, when the cooperative movement was dealt a severe blow. Despite the negative press coverage, however, it seems that cooperatives functioned as efficiently as could reasonably have been expected, given the bottlenecked state of the Soviet economy. They also had a deserved reputation for apportioning space more liberally than did municipal settlements. In 1928–29 a dacha cooperative in the Leningrad area, for example, built new settlements at Toksovo and Tarkhovka. By later Soviet standards, these dachas stood on extremely spacious plots. The Toksovo settlement had forty-two plots that averaged 250 square meters, and the proportion of area given up to roads was unusually high; typically, only three or four plots stood in a row.46
But most Muscovites and Leningraders looking for a dacha in the 1920s did not have access to the municipalized stock and were not able to join a cooperative. Instead, they rented rooms or a whole dacha from locals. In April 1926, a representative of the Moscow dacha trust publicly admitted that his organization could not realistically compete with the private dacha market.47 A guidebook to the environs of Moscow, published in 1928, estimates a total of around 300 settlements populated in summer by vacationing Muscovites (these included both dacha settlements proper and peasant villages where houses were rented to city dwellers).48 Dachas were differentiated according to location and amenities. Prices could range from a few dozen rubles for the summer to around 300.49The dacha’s social constituency was by and large urban, educated people for whom the annual migration into the countryside was both a deeply ingrained habit and a cheap and relatively well provisioned alternative to maintaining an urban apartment through the summer months. Memoir accounts suggest that members of the intelligentsia perceived the dacha as a haven for prerevolutionary traditions, a place where they could take their family (and in many cases servants too) and reestablish domestic patterns that were under severe threat in the early Soviet city.50 Even so, there was no concealing the fact that most people’s exurban living conditions had taken a substantial turn for the worse. One memoirist, born in 1915 into a noble family resident in Petrograd, recalled being taken to the dacha each year in the 1920s. In 1927, for example, his mother and aunt rented two rooms in the village of Gorelovo in a “large izba” where everyone slept on hay mattresses; Gorelovo was known at the time to be one of the cheapest dacha locations and was renowned for the quality of its potatoes (a detail that conveys the low expectations of 1920s dachniki).51