The 1920s thus culminated in an assault on exurban settlements whose aim was to eliminate the prerevolutionary dacha owner. Yet far from spelling the end of the dacha, the offensive prepared the way for its further development in the Stalin era.
Dachas in Stalin’s Time
In the 1920s leisure was not a well-established concept for Soviet society. Public discussion of the off-work behavior of Soviet citizens clustered around two opposing poles. On the one hand, mention was made of private activities such as drinking, dancing, and dacha rental; these were usually treated in an ambivalent, not to say hostile, manner. On the other hand, more approving accounts were given of collective and politicized recreational institutions such as rest homes (doma otdykha) and children’s colonies. Thus Serebrianyi Bor, formerly the “favorite residence for prominent Moscow merchants,” now became a leisure complex consisting of thirteen collective dachas, each accommodating between fifty and seventy people. One report explained: “There aren’t any sick people here. The people here just need a rest.” The daily timetable was strictly laid out: early rising was followed by calisthenics, swimming, walking, and sunbathing; drinking was strictly forbidden, and smoking was permitted only outside the buildings.73
All this changed in the early 1930s. Soviet society started to acquire a new ideology of leisure not just as a means of weaving citizens into a seamless collective or as a brief interlude between bouts of shock labor and social combat on the factory floor but rather as a cultural experience that could make an important contribution to the new Soviet way of life and the formation of a new Soviet citizen. It is around this time that the Soviet discourse on leisure—as something quite distinct from work—begins in earnest. As one slogan of the time ran: “Working in the new way means relaxing in the new way too.” In part, the new attitude toward leisure was reflected in practical measures. Existing facilities were to be expanded and improved.74 Parks, such as those surrounding the palaces in the Leningrad region, were to have extra facilities provided. In Detskoe (formerly Tsarskoe) Selo, accordingly, the number of visitors was expected to increase from 500,000 in 1933 to 945,000 in 1934.75 Quantitative improvements were matched by qualitative changes, as leisure institutions took account of the cultural advances proclaimed on behalf of Soviet society. New rest homes retained their function of collective, organized recreation, but the pattern of life they imposed was not so militarized as in the 1920s. As one article explained, things had moved on greatly from earlier vacation camps, where the only cultural work that went on was folk dancing, the only way of combating drunkenness was to destroy all alcoholic drinks on the premises, and the staff were dismayed by the uncivilized behavior of the “masses.”76
In a booklet of 1933 Soviet functionaries and their families were offered advice on how “correctly to organize their recreation, [how] most rationally to make use of their day off.” Such people were urged to take advantage of leisure and to take part in mass events in such prime greenbelt locations as Gorki, Arkhangel’skoe, Zvenigorod, and Kolomenskoe; in moments free from physical activities they might indulge in a bit of local history in a museum.77 In 1934, about 800 institutions were offering summer leisure activities in the Moscow region; the total number of beds was 90,000. Each summer weekend, approximately 500,000 Muscovites set off into the greenbelt.78 In 1936 Vecherniaia Moskva (the Moscow evening newspaper) proudly reported that from one station alone 250,000 Muscovites had headed out of town last weekend—and that most of these people were not permanent residents of satellite settlements or even dachniki but day trippers.79 The increased scope for leisure came to be seen as an important symptom of the general well-being of Soviet society; the history of dacha locations was mentioned only to contrast the vanity and frippery of the prerevolutionary leisured classes with the wholesomeness of Soviet recreational activities.80
The new approach to leisure had a parallel in public discussion of housing and settlement. Debates on architecture and town planning in the first half of the 1920s had been dominated by a generation that took seriously Marx’s promise of a communist lifestyle that would harmoniously integrate urban and rural environments. The three main models proposed (linear urban growth, the compact city [sotsgorod] and deurbanization) had something very important in common: they all presupposed the thoroughgoing resettlement of the Soviet population with the aim of eliminating urban agglomerations.81 The implications of these projects were as negative for the prerevolutionary dacha as they were for the major cities: the idea was to break down the dualism whereby economically productive life proceeded in overcrowded urban settlements and recreation in the greenbelt.
At the end of the 1920s, however, it was decided that the Soviet Union should not aspire to the harmonious, integrated life of the small town. As before, people would have to live in city centers or in densely populated industrial suburbs. The reasons for the abandonment of “utopian” planning projects were in large part economic: a spread of low-density settlement required too high and even a level of infrastructure, and it did not square with the absolute commitment to headlong industrialization.82 But the more traditional planning policies of the 1930s also reflected a new concern with everyday life and the individual. The conflict between the culture of the 1920s and that of the 1930s forms the subject of a 1931 story by Konstantin Paustovskii in which an avant-garde architect named Gofman leads a ski party to a part-built vacation camp that he has designed. The main building is cylindrical, its curved windows are made of unbreakable glass, the climate inside is artificially controlled so as to be summery all year round, and its walls are so thin that they let in the sounds of the natural world from outside. As Gofman combatively explains: “Cities have had their day. If you . . . think that this is incorrect, then Engels thought otherwise. Each state system has its own particular forms of human settlement. Socialism doesn’t need cities.” The accompanying journalist, however, finds the design cold and impersonaclass="underline" “In every house . . . there should be a certain stock of useless objects. In every house there should be at least one mistake.” Gofman is duly summoned to a committee meeting, where he is accused of “unnecessary functionalism” and objections are made to the costliness of his design. At the end of the story he goes swimming and conveniently drowns before the Soviet architectural community has had time to show him the error of his ways (and before the author has had to face up to the moral implications of the conflict he has outlined).83