There are no rules for the distribution of dachas in the Moscow region. There are only memos [zapiski]. Memos come in three varieties: the friendly blat type, the string-pulling, and the naive, the last kind being written by organizations and enterprises that are appealing on behalf of their workers. The first kind is invariably successful, the second sometimes works, but the third—never.93
Although the trust was certainly a convenient target for accusations of corruption—one of the main Soviet techniques of governance, in the 1930s and after, was to attribute “popular” grievances to the failings of middle administration rather than to the Party elite or the system as a whole—there seems no reason to doubt that the administrative mechanisms of the time left ample scope for the practice of blat.94
In 1934 the trust was liquidated and replaced by local managing organizations 142 (dachnye khoziaistva) under the umbrella of Leningrad’s housing administration (Lenzhilupravlenie). A parallel development took place in Moscow with the transfer of dacha management to the regional communal department in April 1934.95 Control over the existing stock was further devolved by offering dachas for sale to factories and other organizations. But these administrative reshuffles did not change the general direction of policy: the trust had served as a means of transition from the chaotic situation of the 1920s to a more regulated system of distribution via state and Party organizations.
The prevailing trend was reinforced by developments in the cooperative movement. As we have seen, dacha cooperatives had existed since the 1920s, but in the 1930s their number and the strength of their institutional backing increased considerably.96 Cooperatives were recognized by the Moscow soviet as a way of mobilizing the resources both of individuals and of enterprises and of easing problems that the dacha trusts alone were clearly incapable of tackling. By November 1935, the managing organization Mosgordachsoiuz was able to report that the number of cooperatives had risen from 61 to 114 in little more than a year. But this was not necessarily grounds for self-congratulation: the funds available for dacha construction had not risen proportionately, and there were now 6,000 cooperative members on the waiting list for dachas; the total number of completed dachas was only 378.97 Individual settlements received grants (known as limity) out of the overall city budget, but this money went only a very small part of the way toward the costs of construction; the rest of the working capital was made up of members’ preliminary contributions, bank loans, and whatever funds were forthcoming from the cooperative’s sponsor organization (in many cases, the members’ employer).
The houses built and administered by the cooperatives were reserved for people occupying positions of responsibility and influence in particular organizations. Even for these people, however, dachas were not easy to come by. As the waiting list for dachas lengthened and resources remained scarce, many prospective dachniki could not contain their frustration and gave vent to grievances at general meetings of the cooperative or in personal petitions to Mosgordachsoiuz or some other branch of the city government. The most common allegation was that the rightful order of priority had been outweighed by personal considerations: that managers of the dacha stock had been swayed by blat, by the corrupt rendering of personal favors, instead of observing the cooperative statutes. It is impossible to judge how legitimate these protests were, especially as many are couched in the language of denunciation.98 What is clear, however, is that the prevailing economic conditions placed the managers of settlements in a position where they would have been hard pressed not to employ blat. To make use of contacts and to engage in practices that were not officially sanctioned was essential if construction work was to make any progress.
It is also clear that many members of dacha cooperatives served as unpaid “fixers” (tolkachi), or at least contributed a substantial amount of legwork, going from one institution to another to conduct the cooperative’s business. To be a cooperative aktivist did not primarily imply political duties: it meant having to negotiate deliveries of timber, standing in line to get the cooperative’s registration rubber-stamped, hiring casual laborers, and keeping an eye on them once they started work. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many of these people, who had made a real practical contribution to the cooperative’s activities, felt they deserved preferential allocation of dacha space.99 Nor is.it surprising that their claims often met an outraged response from other cooperative members: Stalin-era fixers by definition were not open and accountable in their actions, and the criteria for determining priority in the allocation of dachas were often unclear.
The suspicions of ordinary members were fueled by the murky closed-doors deals that the cooperative boards of administration seemed to be making with the sponsor organization. They were dismayed by a general trend of dacha settlements to become more organizationally (or “departmentally”) based and less cooperative-like. That is to say, members tended to come from a single institution or a small number of linked institutions that retained close control over the construction and allocation of dachas. Settlements that had been established in the late 1920s were on the whole more heterogeneous. Mosgordachsoiuz complained in 1936 that at the Vneshtorgovets settlement, the sponsoring organization, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, was claiming a number of the dachas for its own people: “in such a situation the collective has no cooperative characteristics whatsoever and this construction is organizational under the cover of a cooperative.”100
Dachniki without such organizational backing, still the majority, continued, as they had done in the 1920s, to rent from house owners in villages and settlements accessible from Leningrad and Moscow. As a representative of the dacha trust noted in a report to the Leningrad soviet of April 1932 regarding the continuing shortage of dachas: “If Leningraders do in spite of all this manage to get out to a dacha during the summer, this is because they get living space by virtue of the self-compression [samouplotnenie] of the permanent population of the suburban district and thanks to the modest private housing stock.”101 A further source of dachas for rent, especially in the second half of the 1930s, was cooperative settlements: subletting a cooperative dacha was forbidden by Mosgordachsoiuz, and some people were expelled from their cooperative for such an offense, but in many settlements this practice seems to have been tolerated.102
A middling white-collar family would typically rent a house in a village where the local population would keep them supplied with basic produce; the time-consuming task of running the household through the summer months could further be alleviated by hiring a local girl as a servant (especially after the violent onset of collectivization, there was no shortage of peasant women willing to enter the domestic service of city folk).103 The dacha formed part of the way of life of overworked urban parents, who were able to send their children away for part of the summer. A Leningrad woman (born in 1929) recalled: “When I was a child we rented a dacha in Ozerki [very close to the city]. No kind of facilities, just a box of a room. And of course there was no space round about. . . . My mother was working almost without a break. . . . Meanwhile we spent the time at the dacha. . . . Our granny lived with us.”104 Similar were the experiences of Elena Bonner, who recalled spending one summer in the mid-1930s in a large house rented by her extended family in a village near Luga; as in the 1920s, the children and most of the women lived there all through the summer, while her politically active parents remained in the city.105 And Mikhail and Elena Bulgakov packed their family off to dachas to which they would make only occasional short trips during the summer; for the most part they made do with swimming in the Moscow River.106