To provide parking space for cars arriving at the dacha it is possible to attach to the house a carport or a lightweight summer garage.
The recommended exterior was simple and unshowy; light building materials (other than brick) were to be used in order to reduce the cost of construction; nor was the dacha to approach a town house in its external features. The “pretensions to originality” and “tackiness” of prerevolutionary dachas were now quite out of place—even if, regrettably, they persisted in some locations.133
But normative documents such as architectural and planning handbooks have an extremely problematic relation to social practice throughout the Soviet period, and perhaps never more so than in the Stalin era, which may be said to have institutionalized a disjuncture between rule and action, word and deed. The reality of “individual construction” in the 1930s was, of course, very different from the moderate material gratification promised in the pro-consumerist public campaign of 1935; to build a dacha without the direct and explicit protection of an organization was one of the greatest feats that could be achieved by 1930s blat.134
Soviet design for a “paired” dacha (from G.M. Bobov, Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo dach [Moscow, 1939])
Layout of a medium-sized prewar dacha plot (from Vremennye tekhnicheskie pravila [Moscow, 1940])
Contemporary published sources also fail to mention the dachas reserved for the upper echelons of the Party and leading figures in other areas of Soviet life (notably, favored writers, artists, performers, scholars, and scientists). The provision of elite settlements of this kind had begun in the 1920s (Serebriannyi Bor, Malakhovka, Kratovo, Nikolina Gora, Zubalovo, and others), but in the 1930s it proceeded more intensively and systematically. Top Party and government cadres in Moscow and the corresponding regional elites had virtually carte blanche to build themselves enormous—by Soviet standards—country residences. The most sought-after dacha locations of the 1930s were to the west of Moscow, where heavily policed and intensively maintained compounds began to take over from the more ad hoc elite enclaves of the 1920s.135 Stalin, for example, moved to a new dacha at Kuntsevo in 1934. This move marked a change in lifestyle quite consistent with the estrangement from his extended family that resulted from the suicide of his wife in 1932. When Svetlana Allilueva recalled her father’s behavior at the earlier dacha at Zubalovo, she remembered a peasantlike feeling for nature, modest tastes, and an easy way with the servants. Now, however, Stalin’s down-to-earth lifestyle was demolished piece by piece: members of the domestic staff who had known Allilueva’s mother were soon laid off, the number of servants and guards was greatly increased (there were always two sets of cooks and cleaners so that they could work around the clock, in two shifts), and Stalin’s entourage conducted a purge of old artifacts and furniture. The dacha interior became faceless and official. One observer who visited Kuntsevo in the spring of 1953, just a few weeks after Stalin’s death, gave the following description of the main area for meetings:
A room about 30 meters long. The far end was oval, as in noble families’ residences of the century before last. Lots of identical windows securely sealed with heavy white curtains such as you find in all major institutions in the center of Moscow.
The lower part of the walls, about a meter and a half off the ground, was brown and covered with Karelian birchwood, which looked rather official [kazenno]. Under the windows there were electric radiators cased in the same birchwood.136
Although Stalin had several dachas, in the Moscow region and elsewhere, all kept in a state of constant readiness, he chose to make the Kuntsevo dacha his main residence, a decision that both fed and reflected his growing suspiciousness and disengagement from people. Kuntsevo provided a new model for the elite dacha not only in its interior furnishings: Stalin actually chose to conduct a lot of his business there, regularly summoning colleagues to give briefings. Meetings of the Politburo would be conducted in the dacha’s large egg-shaped conference room adorned with portraits of major Soviet political figures, and Stalin’s associates 153 would be placed so that each man was seated underneath his painted image.137
The case of Stalin’s dacha has great historical resonance: the Leader’s move from the family dacha at Zubalovo to a gray official residence at Kuntsevo may be seen as emblematic of his break with the values of the Old Bolsheviks and his repudiation of revolutionary asceticism. As might be expected, Stalin’s comrades were quick to follow their boss’s lead: by the mid-1930s it was rare for senior Party figures to be making their own dacha arrangements; most of them had “personal” dachas that were officially state-owned but were rented out indefinitely to members of the political elite.138
Yet privileged dachniki could be as vulnerable as anyone else in the 1930s to the changing political winds. In 1933, for example, the village of Roslovka (Moscow region) had been developed as a comfortable dacha settlement for the managerial elite of the baking industry, but in 1937 and 1938 its character changed again: most of its residents disappeared in the purges, and other members of the elite were reluctant to take their place. As a result, the settlement was in due course occupied by factory workers (with five or six families to each house).139
Dacha settlements were almost certainly affected even more severely by the Terror than the cities where their residents had their main dwellings. For one thing, they were populated by precisely the categories of people—above all, Party/state functionaries and middle managers—who were most vulnerable to unmasking as “enemies of the people.” And the unofficial channels through which the governing boards of dacha cooperatives were forced to operate gave ample material for conspiracy theorists among the rank-and-file membership. As economic bottlenecks remained tightly sealed, there may well have been a tendency to admit to cooperatives “random people” (sluchainye liudi) whose relation to the sponsor organization might be tenuous but who were well equipped to negotiate the shortage economy and obtain building materials.140
But, for as long as they remained in favor, men highly placed in the apparat could allow themselves almost anything. Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and of course Stalin wasted little time in carving out plots in elite locations and having spacious residences built at public expense.141 By the mid-1930s, all semblance of self-restraint had gone. In one particularly unsavory episode, the state prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, maneuvered to acquire the dacha of the Old Bolshevik Leonid Serebriakov even as he was demanding the death penalty for him at one of the Moscow show trials. Vyshinsky transferred the plot of land from cooperative to state ownership and in the process pocketed the money that Serebriakov had paid into the cooperative pool for his dacha.142