By the mid-1930s the net of privilege was cast wider to include new categories of beneficiary. In 1932 Literaturnaia gazeta noted pointedly that the only existing rest homes for writers could accommodate only fifteen people a month and were located an awkward fifteen-kilometer journey from a rail station two and a half hours’ ride from Moscow. Fifty-six people (mainly writers’ families rather than the writers themselves) were crammed into a building of seventeen rooms.143 Construction of the famous writers’ colony at Peredelkino started in 1934, shortly after the first congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, as a means of remedying this situation. Sovnarkom allocated 1.5 million rubles toward the cost of the first thirty dachas, and prominent writers and literary bureaucrats appealed successfully for further substantial injections of cash.144 We have no reason to believe that the allocation of these funds was any more open, accountable, or equitable than in any other sector of the Soviet economy. As Gorky noted with alarm to a member of the Politburo in 1935:
Money is often allocated without due attention, without consideration for the real needs of the union members. A needy writer can be refused help, but the sister of a writer receives 5,000 rubles. The government gave money for the construction of a dacha settlement, and 700,000 of this sum disappears like straw in the wind. There are many instances of generosity of this kind.145
Such doubts had earlier been raised from time to time by major Party figures.146 But now, in the mid-1930s, Gorky’s was a lone—and, given his own lavish accommodations, somewhat compromised—voice. Well-known writers had been petitioning the Central Committee for material privileges since the early 1920s, and by the mid-1930s the Party was coming to acknowledge their right to a peaceful creative environment in return for obedient membership in the union.
Boris Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino (from Natal’ia Poltavtseva)
The state’s encouragement of “creativity” by providing dachas gave rise to a new model of dacha life, which revived the prerevolutionary concept of the writer’s retreat and underpinned it with the resources of the Soviet state. The result, in the words of one sardonic observer of Peredelkino, was a “feudal” settlement where the titans of Soviet literature took the role of lords of the manor.147 Among the most prominent beneficiaries of these resources was Boris Pasternak, who in the second half of the 1930s took to spending large parts of the winter alone in Peredelkino (he visited Moscow about twice a month). Pasternak, like so many members of the intelligentsia, had been tormented by abysmal living conditions in his Moscow apartment in the 1920s; in Peredelkino he saw an opportunity to recreate the inspiring solitude of the student garret: “I am an incorrigible and convinced frequenter of bunks and attics (the student who ‘rents a cubbyhole’) and my very best recollections are of the difficult and modest periods of my existence: in them there is always more earth, more color, more Rembrandt content.” Pasternak later confessed his discomfort after the substantial renovation and extension of the dacha in 1953–54: “I feel uncomfortable in these surroundings; it is above my station. I am ashamed at the walls of my enormous study with its parquet floor and central heating.” So great was Pasternak’s debt to his country retreat that his son saw fit to defend him against the charge of being a “dachnik” (perhaps he sensed an upsetting incongruity in the fact that his father had composed much of Doctor Zhivago, among other things a sprawling paean to nature as the life force of art, history, and Russia, while holed up in the pseudo-wilderness of the Soviet writer’s village): “But if twentieth-century art is pre-eminently city art, it is quite natural for contemporary man to encounter nature in his country cottage; and for his reflection to derive from his impressions of genteel suburban rusticity.”148
Soviet society was everywhere structured by hierarchies that governed people’s access to goods and services. At the same time that the first dachas in Peredelkino were going up, slightly less favored writers were petitioning the authorities to obtain land for a dacha cooperative. Here the plan was for fifty modest wooden dachas of two to four rooms as well as one hostel for thirty people. The petition was signed by cultural figures little associated with collective actions of this kind: Osip Brik, Iurii Olesha, Iakov Protazanov, and, most surprising, Mikhail Bulgakov.149 Galina Vladimirovna Shtange, social activist and wife of a professor whose position entitled him to build a dacha in the Academy of Sciences cooperative, was a typical upper-middling member of the intelligentsia. After three years of tense anticipation and frequent delays, the Shtanges were allocated a building lot in January 1938; while grateful for the chance to have “our own little corner to go to in our old age,” Galina Vladimirovna was under no illusions about its level of comfort: “Like all these cooperatives, ours, the ‘Academic,’ turned out to be not the best quality and the dachas are not quite what we were promised. They’re not equipped for winter, there’s no stove, no fence, no icebox, no shed.”150 Nor were standards always much higher in prestige settlements like Peredelkino. Boris Pasternak complained in 1939 that his spacious retreat was rotting and collapsing a mere three years after it had been built; the new dacha to which he moved that year was supplied with gas and running water only in the winter of 1953–54.151
The allocation of land for dacha construction, which surged in the years 1934–36, was by no means restricted to members of the Party elite and the arts intelligentsia. Any Soviet enterprise might put in an application for land, planning permission, and resources. In a typical case, the Moscow oblast ispolkom allocated eight plots of land to a dacha cooperative from a chemicals factory. At the time of its application for building permission, the cooperative had thirty-five members, most of whom had been working at the factory since 1929 or 1930. Half were Party members. The factory bosses were included in the cooperative, but so were senior workmen, electricians, and carpenters. The original request, sent in July 1934, had mentioned that the dachas were intended for “the factory’s best shockworkers.” Construction was to be subsidized to a total of nearly a million rubles (provided by the branch of the relevant ministry, by a trust, and by the factory itself). The remaining funds were to be supplied by the cooperative members themselves.152
The types of dachas built by cooperatives varied significantly from one settlement to another, and often within a single settlement. Some cooperatives were egalitarian to a fault, building well over one hundred low-cost plywood dachas of an identical standard design, each with two or three rooms and somewhere between 25 and 40 square meters in living space. Others chose the more expensive option of log cabins and built more spacious summer houses (of 70, 80, or 90 square meters). Still others had a mix of two or more standard designs. A few smaller settlements—mainly for people of the “free” professions—had no standard designs at all. But even the larger and more standardized cooperatives might have a handful of dachas that were substantially larger than the rest, presumably occupied by people in positions of particular importance either in the cooperative management or in the sponsor organization. Thus there appears to have been a distinct hierarchy of status in many dacha cooperatives, but such differentiation was obscured by the language used to categorize residents. As we have seen, very few of them could be called “workers”; the categories most widely used were “engineering and technical workers” (ITR) and (especially) “employees” (sluzhashchie). But this last category was a real catchall in Soviet Russia. In reality, the members of dacha cooperatives were not humble bottom-of-the-ladder clerks but bureaucrats and functionaries of middling and upper rank. And even within this band of employees there was a huge gulf in status between, say, the senior accountant at a minor Moscow publishing house and the director of a major industrial enterprise. Such differences between specific employees and between whole organizations were, it seems, amply reflected in the types of dachas built and in the speed with which they were built.153