Paustovskii’s story accurately reflects the movement away from deurbanizing projects, a tendency that enabled the dacha to regain some of the positive connotations it had lost in the 1920s. The Soviet Union, it was commonly argued, must avoid the suburban sprawl so characteristic of England and America, and dachas could help to preserve the greenbelts around the major cities. They had the further virtue of lessening the pressure on rest homes and sanatoria, of which the provision was inadequate throughout the Soviet period and especially in the 1920s. And summer houses were in fact more important to the Russians than to the British and the Americans, given the long winters, the short building season, and the unsanitary conditions that prevailed in cities. “Dacha in the narrow sense of the word is a purely Russian phenomenon,” claimed the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1930.
Positive assessments of this kind could not, however, bring practical improvements on their own. The dacha’s increasing public respectability was not matched by the pace of exurban construction. The Moscow city administration, when it took stock of the available dacha resources in 1933, found little to gladden the hearts of the vacationing masses: the municipal dacha stock was badly depleted (the basic unit of dacha allocation in this period was the room, not the house), and other organizations had not done much to improve the situation.84 Leningrad faced very much the same problems. In July 1931, for example, the oblast ispolkom instructed various organizations to inspect properties (especially former palaces and estates) that might provide dacha space. The conclusion reached was quick and unequivocaclass="underline" “The municipal dacha stock, after inspection on site, consists of isolated lodgings of the following types: mezzanines, small attic rooms, and small outbuildings. On transfer of the entire housing stock to the ZhAKTs [housing cooperatives], the latter have adapted accommodations formerly used as dachas to form winter housing.”85 Despite regular attempts to free up dacha space, it was clear that municipal provision, as in the 1920s, was not competing effectively with the private market.86
Given the inadequacy of the existing publicly administered dacha stock, the construction of new settlements became a matter of urgency. The Leningrad housing organization Zhilsoiuz was required to set up “dacha and allotment cooperatives” at the raion level and also under the auspices of particular factories. The production of prefabricated wooden dachas was to be stepped up; the housing department (Zhilotdel) was required to organize a competition for dacha design and to develop designs for cheap and simple furniture suitable for dachas. According to the stipulations of this competition, vacation accommodations were to come in three main types: the “single-apartment dacha” (odnokvartimaia dacha) intended for summer use only, with a plot of 600 square meters; the sblochennaia dacha (i.e., two semidetached dachas) designed for use all year round; and the pansionat for fifty people, which was also destined for year-round use.87 The plan was to put up no fewer than 5,000 standard dachas during 1932.88
The organization burdened with these considerable tasks was the Trust for Dacha and Suburban Housing Construction in Leningrad oblast (operational from August 1931). Over the three years of its existence, the trust was beset with the problems that afflicted all areas of production in the Stalin era: a poorly trained, inexperienced, and ill-disciplined workforce; a shortage of resources and of ready cash, given that debtors were slow to pay; constant struggles with other branches of production for access to equipment and raw materials; the pressure of relentless and unrealistic production targets (including the construction of many houses of the “winter type,” which were not the trust’s prime responsibility); and the cumbersome bureaucracy that any branch of the supply system entailed.
This dacha at Lisii Nos, which faces directly on the Gulf of Finland, would have been the ideal of many 1930s dachniki.
Despite these difficulties, the Leningrad dacha trust helped to create a new, centralized model of dacha rental and ownership for its region. It did not rent houses to private individuals but worked only with organizations: dachas were to be rented through trade unions, factories, and other state and Party institutions at standard rates. By 1934 such organizations were sending in a steady stream of applications requesting accommodations for their employees.89
The dachas built by the trust were of two main types: individual (for one family) and collective. The former typically consisted of two rooms and contained the following standard-issue furniture: two beds with mattresses (cost 210 rubles), six chairs (60 rubles), two tables (80 rubles), two buckets (5 rubles), one washstand (5 rubles). A list compiled in 1933 gave a total of 108 families resident in the trust’s flagship building developments at Mel’nichii Ruchei (just beyond Vsevolozhsk, on the railway line heading toward Lake Ladoga) and Lisii Nos (on the north side of the Gulf of Finland). The size of the houses they inhabited varied from one to six rooms, but the average was around two. Canteens were to provide meals for the regular dacha population, as well as for shorter-term visitors from the same kinds of organization. The tenants included employees of the following institutions: the dacha trust itself, the OGPU (the political police), banks, supply organizations, and various factories (including the Karl Marx, Sverdlov, and Stalin works).90
Many members of this middling stratum of the Soviet elite, however, were dismayed when they arrived at their dachas. The houses (especially their interiors) were often not completed, rubbish was still lying about the building sites, and amenities were very basic (and sometimes nonexistent). The canteens had not opened and there was little sign of a compensating supply of basic foodstuffs to the dacha settlements. In a report compiled at the end of 1932, the newly appointed head of the trust’s operational department was frank about the problems he faced: building standards were low, as was morale among the construction workers, given the abysmal conditions in which they worked; denied adequate temporary housing, workers had put up in semiconstructed dachas and left them in a wretched state.91 The press relentlessly kept such failings in the public eye.92
Newspapers also alleged that municipal dachas in the more desirable locations were allocated by personal acquaintance (by blat, in Soviet parlance). One journalist commented in 1933: