A STUDY of published materials of the 1920s and 1930s suggests that the dacha fits perfectly the models that have gained most currency in social and cultural history as a means of differentiating those two decades: Timasheff’s “Great Retreat” and Papernyi’s “two cultures” model. In the early years of Soviet power dachas were commonly treated as an undesirable “remnant of the past” that had no place in a society informed by the principles of collectivism and Bolshevik self-denial. In practice, however, they were silently tolerated: partly because they served the important practical purpose of helping to alleviate the housing shortage in the major cities and partly because the overworked new state did not have the resources to administer them more closely. Then, after the first five-year plan had broken resistance to the Soviet social project and given rise to new, powerful interest groups, a significant change of orientation took place: individual property was relegitimized; prominence was given to symbols of material abundance; Soviet society became hierarchical and patriarchal. As a result, the dacha, that prime accoutrement of the comfortable prerevolutionary lifestyle, found favor once again.
This schema has many virtues, but it needs to be qualified. For one thing, public statements on the dacha, though in general softer in the 1930s, were by no means unqualified in their approval. For every writer, engineer, or skilled worker shown basking contentedly on a canopied veranda, there was an industrial manager subjected to public “indignation” for undue self-enrichment by the acquisition of a country retreat. And the collective forms of leisure with which the dacha is often contrasted—the parade, the expedition, the summer camp—became more, not less, prominent as the 1930s wore on.
But these are relatively small points that do not fundamentally undermine the “two cultures” account of interwar Soviet history. A more serious objection is that to view the 1930s as a step backward, as a kind of sociocultural Thermidor, is to underestimate the extent to which Soviet society was radically re-formed in the 1930s; such an interpretation runs the risk, moreover, of conflating public discourse and social practice. The Great Retreat was always much more a rejection of revolutionary utopianism than an enthusiastic adoption of “traditional” mores. The 1930s did much to establish what may now be seen as crucial characteristics of Soviet-style societies. At least two of these characteristics come sharply into focus in the history of the early Soviet dacha. First, the life chances of individual citizens, as we have seen, became firmly tied to their organizational allegiance. Second, access to and use of goods and benefits were valued more highly than ownership of them. Twenty years of Soviet life were more than enough to demonstrate both the risks associated with retaining property at all costs and the opportunities for status and well-being provided by regular, unproblematic access to basic necessities and to the objects of consumerly desire.
These two facets of Soviet society—the “organizational” principle and the emphasis on consumption—were, of course, connected. By the mid-1930s most Soviet people in the major cities (and it is of them alone that I am speaking) were fast learning the lesson that access could best be obtained and maintained by the protection of a sponsoring organization: a factory, a trade union, a creative union, or the Party apparat.
Although these twin characteristics would figure large in any ideal-typical account of the Soviet experience, their real implications for the lives of Soviet people varied over time. In the 1930s the regime’s attempts to recast the relationship between state institutions and the individual were carried out in the face of various preexisting forms of social relationship. Institutions are, after all, made up of people, and Soviet citizens of the 1930s found their own ways of operating within new structures. The system was much more personalistic than the large volume of contemporary normative statements would allow; people were forced constantly to problematize the relationship between written rules and actual social practice, between public and private statements and values. The ways in which dachas were allocated and received may be seen as both symptoms of and contributions to the networks that gave Soviet society structure: ties that were neither properly bureaucratic nor wholly clan-based and particularistic, networks where the horizontal and vertical dimensions were rarely separate.
That is not to suggest that the vertical and the horizontal were ever wholly conflated, either in people’s social practice or in their understanding of that practice. Soviet hierarchies of status were quick to emerge in the Stalin era, and they are palpable in the distribution of dacha space. Moreover, the informal social practices that people engaged in may have helped them to cut themselves some slack under an authoritarian regime and to get by in their everyday lives, but they also had human costs. Social relationships had been severely fractured by the social warfare waged by the Soviet regime, and they had not reformed to any adequate extent. According to one persuasive sociological account, blat, glossed as the “informal exchange of favors,” was both social glue and lubricant in the later Soviet period.161 But it is difficult to put the phenomenon in the 1930s in such a benign light. Even if the horizontal and the vertical were rarely separate, the vertical tended to overshadow and constrain the horizontal. Blat was oriented less toward ongoing sociability than toward the accomplishment of specific tasks. As the constant bickering in dacha cooperatives demonstrates, blat was a source of tension and fragmentation, not of cohesion.
Perhaps the most disastrous result of the collision between old social practices and new ideological goals and institutional structures was that it left people quite unsure of what the rules of social life were. Here the dacha sheds light on Soviet society for one other reason: it was a product and a symbol of hierarchical networks that were vulnerable. In the 1930s it reclaimed something of its medieval and Petrine meanings: a piece of property that was bestowed at the discretion of the leader and could just as easily be taken away. Now, however, the role of leader was taken by Soviet ideology, a notoriously fluid mélange of beliefs, programs, and practical policies that in turn was interpreted and administered by an equally fluid body of state officials. The dacha, then, can serve as a specific example of the mingling of modernization and traditionalism that has plausibly been seen as characteristic of the Soviet and other communist systems: it was valued as a symbol of material progress and for its association with “civilized” values (specifically, those of the officially approved Russian intellectual tradition); but it also reflected the particularistic and personalistic realities of Soviet society. On the one hand, the Soviet dacha gestured toward the older meaning of the term—a plot of land handed out entirely at the discretion of state authorities—yet it was also bound up with markedly modern phenomena: the bureaucratization of the distribution system, the emphasis placed on leisure as an attribute of the Soviet way of life, and an emerging (if tortuous) discourse on property rights.