All settlements, however, were forced to reckon with a Soviet government decree of 17 October 1937 that effectively brought an end to the cooperative housing movement in the major cities. Cooperatives stood accused of failing to manage their assets with the necessary efficiency and thus not justifying the considerable state investment made in them. For this reason, they were now forced to relinquish their quasi-independent status and come under the authority of local soviets or of organizations (enterprises, ministries, trade unions, and so on).154 The 1937 decree is usually and with justification seen as having clinched the “departmentalization” of a crucial sector of the socialist welfare state.155
The decree mainly targeted high-density urban housing, but its strictures were extended to exurban locations too. Dacha cooperatives had been berated throughout the 1930s for overspending and choosing unrealistically expensive dacha designs. Now, the government asserted, the time had come to call in all debts and assess which cooperatives were financially self-sustaining. Dacha settlements where less than half of the capital had been generated by members’ contributions were to be liquidated forthwith. In the days that followed the decree, Mosgordachsoiuz “activists” met with representatives of various cooperatives in efforts to clarify the situation. Of the many questions asked during these meetings, the most common and the most urgent was: What can I do to secure the right to continue using my dacha (or dacha plot, if the house was unfinished or partially built) even after the cooperative has been liquidated? The answer given was that each person should make a personal application to the Moscow city soviet; each case would be decided individually.156 The standard procedure, later confirmed by practice, was that members of liquidated dacha cooperatives were allowed, at the discretion of the relevant soviet, to keep their dachas as “personal property” on condition that they repaid any outstanding loan within six months.157
A good many dacha cooperatives, however, remained intact after the decree of October 1937: the survival rate given by Mosgordachsoiuz for cooperatives in the Moscow region was 50 percent, and this is likely to be a conservative estimate, given this organization’s interest in demonstrating its zealous execution of state policy.158 However, the settlements that were financially secure enough to ride the storm were in practice likely to be those that already enjoyed a close working relationship with a sponsor organization. In other words, a great number of dacha cooperatives may indeed have survived the shake-up of 1937, but they arrived at this defining moment in a distinctly Soviet form: the October decree should be regarded as merely the culmination of the process whereby dacha cooperatives became ever more “departmentalized” and ever less cooperative-like.
It is worth dwelling on one other effect of October 1937: a significant number of dachas passed from cooperative into personal ownership.159 This shift served to resolve an issue that had been moot for dacha cooperatives throughout the 1930s: Was it acceptable to allow members who had paid their initial contributions to go ahead and build dachas under their own steam if they had the necessary money, resources, and know-how? Confronted by the prospect of a long and frustrating wait for their turn to arrive, many people applied to the management of their cooperative or to Mosgordachsoiuz for permission to engage in “extrabudgetary construction” (vnelimitnoe stroitel’stvo). But in most cases, Mosgordachsoiuz, as the ultimate authority, denied permission. As the 1930s wore on, however, and the supply system failed to improve, this refusal came to seem all the more unreasonable. The matter was raised by several speakers at the meeting of the Mosgordachsoiuz activists in July 1937. The head of Moscow’s housing administration was not unsympathetic but was unable to accede to their demands:
I wrote a memo raising the issue of construction either wholly or partly at one’s own expense, and at 70 percent, and at 50 percent [of the cost of the dacha]. I gave three options. The question was discussed three times. Three times meetings were called in Gosplan, but this question still wasn’t resolved. There have been instances when Sovnarkom has allowed individual comrades to build dachas at their own expense. I think that if we continue to raise this issue in particular instances we will get permission.160
Quite in line with this policy, de facto private building continued into the period of the third five-year plan, even after the cooperative movement had been dealt a severe blow. This may seem paradoxicaclass="underline" the Soviet state undermined a form of collective undertaking and continued to support a form of individual activity. But actually this policy fits very nicely into a characterization of the Stalin-era system. First of all, it shows how apparently “nonnegotiable” ideological requirements could be waived in the interests of economy and expediency; how, in fact, ideology was never separate from economics. Second, it suggests how difficult it was for the regime to commit itself on matters of principle: the ad hoc resolution of problems was preferable to an unambiguous and realistic statement of policy. Third, the effective encouragement of individual construction was absolutely consistent with the Stalinist aim of eliminating “horizontal” social forms of cooperation and bringing state agencies into more direct contact with the individual. The “personal” builder may in theory have been free to construct a spacious five-room residence in an attractive part of the greenbelt, but in practice his success in this undertaking depended entirely on the discretion of his enterprise director, factory trade union committee, and a range of bureaucrats in the local and regional administrations.