Official encouragement of individual gardening continued in the late 1940s, when local ispolkoms were ordered to make land available and trade unions began to distribute allotments among their members. This policy was particularly marked in the wake of the catastrophic famine of 1946–47: the government was forced once again to recognize the expediency of devolving agricultural production to the urban population—of letting people feed themselves. Growers were exhorted to emulate the feats of heroic allotment cultivators such as the man who grew 2.5 tons of vegetables on a plot of 150 square meters.6 Factories negotiated with regional and local authorities and with collective farms to provide their workers with land; the bigger enterprises provided transport for their workers to visit their allotments on days off. Yet at the same time problems were acknowledged. Allotment collectives often had to fend for themselves, receiving little support from factories and trade union organizations; seeds and tools were in short supply; and the land people cultivated did not belong to them even de facto (let alone de jure), but rather was reallocated to them each year on a temporary basis.7
However slim the prospects for long-term ownership, allotments still offered the Soviet urbanite significant benefits. They guaranteed a supply of basic vegetables and provided the opportunity for limited side earnings, as surplus produce could be sold at the market: the immediate postwar period was marked by a relative tolerance of individual economic activity and private trade.8 Digging a potato patch was, moreover, a form of “active leisure,” and as such was encouraged in public discussions. It also enabled Soviet citizens to engage in a healthy form of “socialist competition”: to strive, in typical voluntarist fashion, for the maximum yield from their plot of a few dozen square meters. In 1949, allotment gardening was still common enough for one agricultural expert to observe with dismay that many trees on the outskirts of Moscow were dying because vegetables had been planted too close to them.9 The number of growers remained reasonably stable in the early 1950s. In 1952, for example, 903,000 families in Moscow were reported to have allotments, an increase of 56,000 families over the previous year; in 1953 the number fell back to the previous level, and in Leningrad (both city and oblast) there was a similar slight decline.10 Numbers also held up well outside the major cities: allotments were a truly national phenomenon, and progress reports poured in to the central trade union authorities from all corners of the Union.11
Cultivation of the land by factory workers had received further encouragement in the form of a government decree of February 1949, which, besides reiterating official support for allotments (ogorody) boosted a related but distinct activity: food gardening (sadovodstvo).12 The Moscow city and regional authorities responded in August 1949 with a resolution urging that available agricultural land be allocated for “collective gardens” with plots ranging from 400 to 800 square meters. By the start of 1952, the Moscow trade union organization was able to report that 162 such gardens had been set up on 762 hectares; moreover, the 7,885 members of these collectives contained a healthy proportion of proletarians.13
But there were grounds for dissatisfaction nonetheless. Disagreements had arisen concerning the permissibility of building small shacks on individual garden plots. Gardening collectives argued strongly that their plots required hard work and regular attention: inasmuch as many plots were located inconveniently far from people’s apartments (and thus differed significantly from allotments, which for the most part were located within or very close to the city limits), a small structure in which to store tools and take shelter from bad weather was simply essential. The Moscow soviet partially recognized this point by allowing the construction of watch booths and toolsheds in its resolution of August 1949. In what was perhaps a rather loose interpretation of this provision, many organizations then contacted the appropriate ispolkom and obtained permission to build summer shacks (letnie domiki); the maximum dimensions of these structures were at the discretion of each particular ispolkom. Two years later, however, it was found that garden collectives had abused the freedom they had been granted: some “watch booths” were as large as 28 square meters, and garden settlements almost everywhere had been building without the necessary strict supervision. As a result, the Moscow oblast ispolkom and the Moscow city soviet resolved in November and December 1951 that all buildings contravening their original instructions should be removed. Members of the garden collectives were, predictably, dismayed, and through their trade union organizations petitioned the municipal and regional authorities for permission to build summer shacks in the range of 6-10 square meters.14 Similar pleas were heard in Leningrad, whose ispolkom in August 1951 forbade all construction on individual plots and prescribed instead collective “pavilions,” each to accommodate 70 to 80 people.15
The collective nature of garden settlements was similarly in many cases open to dispute. The original idea was for them to consist of large “production plots” of 600 or more square meters, but in practice most organizations, even if they did ensure that certain zones were allocated for collective cultivation, gave their workers individual plots. In 1951, for example, machine-building factories reported that they had nine strictly collective gardens occupying 223 hectares and cultivated by 1,130 workers; individual plots, by contrast, were worked by 7,563 people on 265 hectares. Reports of the early 1950s consistently reported significant increases in numbers of gardeners, who tended to fall into the “individual” rather than the “collective” category (where a distinction was made between the two). Quite often, however, the “individual” reality of the garden collective was passed over in silence: the “collective” tag was used consistently, even when it clearly gave a misleading impression of the gardeners’ real activities.16