But the balance between the modernizing impulses of the Soviet regime and other social inputs was never fixed. As we survey the later Soviet period, it becomes clear that traditional practices (that is, practices deriving their strength from patterns of behavior more long-standing or deep-seated than the socially transformative Soviet project) should be seen not as a dead weight of passive resistance to state violence but rather as a dynamic set of responses that were, in the long run, transformative in their own right. As we survey developments of the later Soviet period, we will find new forms of social relationship (including a new kind of blat), a new intelligentsia, new attitudes toward property, and a new form of dacha that hybridized the country retreat of the Soviet leisure class with the humble allotment.
1. See Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946). Timasheff’s sociological approach has an important cultural-historical analogue in Vladimir Papernyi’s Kul’tura “dva” (1985; Moscow, 1996), which, to state crudely a rich argument, reveals a shift from a dynamic, decentered, avant-garde “Culture One” (which pervaded the public discourse of the 1920s) to a static, monumentalist “Culture Two” (which increasingly took over in the 1930s and 1940s).
2. For more on this kind of argument, see D. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke, 2000).
3. See K. Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,” Soviet Studies 35 (1983), and T. Martin, “Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. S. Fitzpatrick (London, 2000). For a thought-provoking comparative case, see A.G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1986).
4. See H.F. Jahn, “The Housing Revolution in Petrograd, 1917–1920,” JfGOE 38 (1990), and N.B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg, 1999), 178–84.
5. M. Ignatiefff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), 25 and 28. Another young witness recalled that the Revolution had brought Udel’naia (a dacha location significantly closer to Petrograd) only relatively slight changes: policemen were no longer in evidence and passers-by wore red ribbons. See L. I. Petrusheva, ed., Deti russkoi emigratsii (Moscow, 1997), 484.
6. Iu. V. Got’e, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, trans. and ed. T. Emmons (Princeton, 1988). Similarly, old residents of Moscow’s Udel’naia recalled that this dacha settlement had provided a refuge for members of the city’s intelligentsia in the years after 1917 (in the mid-1920s, however, it was dealt a heavy blow by the campaign against “former people”). See N. Chetverikova, “Byt’ li muzeiu dachnoi kul’tury,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 4321, 8–14 June 2000, 19.
7. TsMAM, f. 2311, op. 1, d. 28, 1. 520b.
8. See the Durnovo correspondence published in “Zakhvatchiki, imenuiushchie sebia “narod” . . .’: Neskol’ko dokumentov iz fonda P.P. Durnovo (1917–1919),” Zvezda, no. 11 (1994), 156–68, and the general account in P. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, 1967), 130–32.
9. Blok’s account of Lakhta in a diary entry of 11 June 1919 is in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh(Leningrad, 1960–63), 7:365–67
10. See, e.g., the report by a local housing committee in TsGA SPb, f. 78 (Primorsko-Sestroretskii raiispolkom), op. 1, d. 158, l. 63.
11. TsGAMO, f. 2591 (Moskovskii uezdnyi otdel kommunal’nogo khoziaistva), op. 3, d. 1, ll. 27–29, 33.
12. K. Chukovskii, Dnevnik, 1901–1929 (Moscow, 1997), 312–17. For a typical appeal to the authorities from a dacha owner whose property had been plundered, see TsGA SPb, f. 78, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 236–37.
13. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, l. 3450b.
14. TsMAM, f. 2311, op. 1, d. 28, l. 47.
15. M. Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing during the Experimental Years, 1918 to 1933,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. W. C. Brumfield and B. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 85–86.
16. A short memoir by a resident of the children’s colony and a letter of complaint by Klara Shvarts to her local commissar for education are to be found in V. Vitiazeva, Kamennyi ostrov (Leningrad, 1986), 244–58.
17. Got’e, Time of Troubles, 140. “Gorillas” is the term Got’e uses throughout his diary to refer to the Bolsheviks.
18. RGASPI, f. 78, op. 7, d. 32.
19. An appeal to the letter of the law is made by an evicted dacha owner in TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 32, l. 288 (though it did not lead to his reinstatement).
20. One example: a woman who had married a wealthy Moscow merchant’s son before the Revolution managed to hold on to the family’s spacious dacha in the village of Dunino, thanks to her personal acquaintance with the revolutionary Vera Figner (interview with the woman’s granddaughter, September 1999). The two other families I spoke to in Dunino were also the direct descendants of the well-to-do prerevolutionary owners of their dachas; one household had retained the property by gathering the large extended family in it and arguing that they were occupying no more than their normal housing entitlement, the other simply by going through the necessary bureaucratic procedures to register the dacha in their name with the Soviet authorities.
21. TsGA SPb, f. 78, op. 1, d. 158, l. 216.
22. Ibid., f. 469, op. 2, d. 5, ll. 35, 42. The OMKh did not desist, however: it subsequently issued several requests to investigate the social background of residents at particular addresses.
23. There was some confusion at the time on this point: see the clarification offered in S. Kisin, “Dachi i desiatiprotsentnaia norma,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 24 (1927), 10–12.
24. P. A. Portugalov and V. A. Dlugach, eds., Dachi i okrestnosti Moskvy: Spravochnik-putevoditel’ (Moscow, 1935), 176–77.
25. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, ll. 329–57.
26. Ibid., l. 349.
27. See, e.g., TsGA SPb, f. 469, op. 2, d. 784.
28. D. I. Sheinis, Zhilishchnoe zakonodatel’stvo, 3d ed. (Moscow, 1926), 150.
29. G. D. Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (Albany, 1984), chap. 2.
30. See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (New York, 1999), 46, esp. n. 22.
31. TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 13, l. 12. At the beginning of 1930, Moscow’s municipal dacha stock was distributed as follows: 4,000 under the trust; 7,300 under local ispolkoms; 1,000 under the oblast department of education (BSE, 1st ed.).