To remark on the unwholesomeness of the dacha became a commonplace of the time. A detailed guidebook of 1926 treated with frank approval any dacha settlement located in the vicinity of an industrial enterprise, but was unremittingly scornful of locations that had apparently preserved their “traditional” clientele and way of life. The following account of a settlement on the Kazan’ railway line was clearly based on prerevolutionary stereotypes (with, to be sure, a generous admixture of anti-NEP ideology):
The train pulls into a noisy, bustling platform—it’s Malakhovka. Various people clamber out of the carriages: “dacha husbands” loaded up with more packages than they can carry; “ladies” with dazzling toilettes; flighty Soviet dames with square “valises” and people in “positions of responsibility” with respectable briefcases that are probably full of old newspapers and journals. . . .
Visitors from Moscow stretch out in a long line along the streets of Malakhovka living in luxurious dachas that are for the most part occupied by moneyed Moscow—by the nepmen.64
The general distaste for the dacha on ideological grounds was mirrored by the attitudes of the artistic and literary avant-garde, for whom the dacha was synonymous with the social and cultural arrière. Note, for example, the metaphors chosen by Sergei Tret’iakov, a prominent figure in the revolutionary arts organization LEF, in this 1923 rallying cry:
[Representatives of the Party] always remember that they are in the trenches and that the enemy’s muzzles are in front of them. Even when they grow potatoes around this trench and stretch out their cots beneath the ramparts, they never allow themselves the illusion that the trench is not a trench but a dacha . . . or that their enemies are simply the neighbors in the dacha next door.65
A journalistic piece of 1922 by Isaac Babel’ describing the conversion of a dacha settlement in Georgia into a resort for working people mixes class hatred with a distaste for everyday life and material comfort typical of Russian modernism: “You petty bourgeois who built yourselves these ‘dachlets,’ who are mediocre and useless as a tradesman’s paunch, if only you saw how we are enjoying our rest here. . . . If only you saw how faces chewed up by the steel jaws of machinery are being refreshed.”66
This unease in publicly expressed attitudes toward the dacha was exacerbated by the uncertain legal status of ownership. Land disputes were rife in former dacha areas in the 1920s. The review of dacha municipalization after the decree of May 1922 had, it turned out, been far from comprehensive, rigorous, and consistent. On inspection (for example, after the death of the owner), a house might turn out to be on neither the municipal nor the nonmunicipal list, which left the local ispolkom unsure how to act. Neighbors might appeal to the local authorities for land bordering their plots. And, especially toward the end of the decade, people’s property rights might be undermined by investigation of their social origins. In 1928, for example, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) insisted that a local ispolkom investigate the social origins of the family of a former “hereditary honored citizen” (that is, a former merchant) and then dispossess them. The property in question, a spacious two-story “lordly” dacha (total area: 233 square meters), had anomalously not been municipalized in 1922. The ispolkom concluded after its investigation that the house should indeed have been municipalized, but that it was now impossible to change the situation because the latest government circular forbade any further action of this kind.67 Many local soviets did not have such scruples, inspecting dachas that earlier slipped through the net of municipalization for signs of “lordliness.”68
Official controls on exurban communities may have been relaxed somewhat in the mid-1920s, but they were reapplied with greater zeal and violence in 1928 and (especially) 1929, when a crackdown on unregistered and misregistered dacha owners formed part of the campaign against “former people” (that is, people of “bourgeois” social origins). Demuncipalization was in many cases reversed without due legal process; registration of private property was canceled on the grounds that administrative errors had occurred.
Not that administrative errors were too hard to find, given the haziness of legal arrangements in the 1920s. Take the following case cited as exemplary in a guide to dacha legislation published in 1935. In 1923, in the settlement Novogireevo (Moscow region), a dacha belonging to one Shchedrin was classified by representatives of the NKVD as being of the “lordly” type and hence municipalized; but Shchedrin had sold it by private agreement to a woman named Ivanova, who in 1922 had gone to court to have herself recognized as the de facto owner. Armed with this judgment, she was then able (in 1923) to register the property in her name. In 1927 she sold it to a new owner, Dobrov. In 1931, in the course of verifying property registration, the local ispolkom uncovered these legal irregularities (that is, the fact that a building originally municipalized was now registered as someone’s private property) and went to court to have Dobrov evicted. The court concluded that Dobrov should indeed be forced to vacate the property, but only after he and his family had been allocated equivalent living space elsewhere.69
So the municipalization decree continued to cause dacha folk enormous trouble even several years after it had supposedly been implemented—but it might also be ignored or manipulated to their advantage until the housing authorities decided to examine the situation more closely. Legal processes, it seems, tended to reflect the specific relationship between individual dacha residents and the representatives of state or municipal power whom they encountered. The class warfare of the late 1920s, however, tipped the balance of power comprehensively in favor of the local ispolkoms and against dachniki. The brutal design of this campaign is clear from an NKVD circular of 1930 that explicitly extended the war against “former people” to dacha locations. The earlier municipalization measures were deemed to have been insufficiently thorough; now the aim was to check the whole of the private dacha stock and to eliminate “profiteering.” Absolutely no more demunicipalization was to be permitted. Even before this, however, the regional department of local services had instructed the dacha trust to check the social composition of tenants throughout the uezd, paying particular attention to “locations that formerly served as vacation places for the bourgeoisie and now for nepmen and people of free professions.”70
The hard-line policies of the late 1920s had the predictable effect of encouraging localized and personal abuses in the war against social undesirables. Local soviets were aided in their work by a wave of denunciations,71 though it seems they scarcely needed this assistance, as in many cases they were already itching to take control of dachas occupied by “former people.” In 1927–28 a resident of Kuntsevo named Perevezentsev, who had lived with his wife in the same dacha for seventeen years, had had to suffer the forced occupation of several rooms by the secretary of the local soviet. The justification for this action was that he and his wife, having owned seven dachas in Kuntsevo before the Revolution, had retained one dacha each; the local soviet argued that they should move together into one. To add to the pressure, the secretary of the Party cell of the soviet and secretary of the local police committee moved in and began to terrorize the owners, storming into the house drunk at night and threatening them with a revolver. For this behavior the people’s court gave him a derisory fine of 10 rubles for “arbitrariness” (samoupravstvo); the dacha’s owners were evicted all the same.72