The mass return to the land in the late 1940s conformed to a pattern of behavior all too familiar in Russian history: the population, confronted by yet another social cataclysm, looked to the land for temporary survival and perhaps longer-term security. This change in orientation was reflected not only in factory-sponsored allotment areas but also in dacha settlements proper. One memoirist recalls “the spirit of the farm” in the settlement of Firsanovka (in the Moscow region, on the Leningrad railway line), where she lived with her parents in 1947 and 1948. The family’s dacha landlords were Old Bolsheviks, and the settlement was populated largely by architects and musicians; their next-door neighbors were a “conservatory dynasty.” In the evening the village fell silent as music wafted out of the neighbors’ dacha, but in the daytime things were quite different: “The maestro often stood in ‘dacha regalia’ on the roof of the barn and shouted to his helper, so loud that the whole settlement could hear, ‘Ivan! Don’t forget to put the dung on the vegetable patches!’”17 The demands of subsistence did not leave untouched even an exalted cultural enclave such as Peredelkino. Early in the war, in September 1941, the author Vsevolod Ivanov wrote to his wife and children (who had already been evacuated) that he and the few remaining locals were salting their own cucumbers, picking their own berries, and digging their own potatoes; the dacha settlement was beginning to resemble an underinhabited island, and Ivanov already felt like “Robinson Crusoe.”18 Just after the war, the poet Nikolai Zabolotskii, until recently an inmate of the gulag, found refuge at the dacha of an acquaintance in Peredelkino. Devoid of any regular source of income, he gained permission from the owners to grow vegetables on the dacha’s land.19 Zabolotskii’s need was doubtless exceptionally great, but he was not alone among Peredelkino dwellers in cultivating more than just his poetic gift; Boris Pasternak, for one, was well known for digging his own potato patch.20
In the immediate postwar years, then, we can already see signs of the convergence between dacha and allotment. Dacha owners were more likely now to work the soil with their own hands; more important, allotment cultivators were beginning to refashion their plots in the manner of dachniki, to use or at least envision them as dwelling places. For this potential to be realized, a great many social and ideological changes still had to take place. But some of these changes, as we shall see, also had their roots in the postwar period.
The Dacha as Dwelling: The Property Issue in Postwar Russia
The extreme circumstances of the war can be seen to have triggered both quantitative and qualitative change in the relation of Soviet city dwellers to the land. But this was not the only large consequence of wartime experiences that had significance for the history of the dacha: there were also profound implications for the dacha as a piece of property, as a house and a domestic environment rather than simply as a plot of land for cultivation. In the late 1940s, single-family dwellings began to enjoy greater respectability than previously. More relaxed policies on land use were accompanied by a new encouragement of individual building.21 As in the 1920s, the private sector was called on to repair the devastated housing stock. Land was distributed by local soviets. Resources (in the form of building loans) were handed out by ministries to enterprises under their control, and the enterprises then distributed the money among their workforce in consultation with the trade union organizations. The single-family kottedzh gained new prominence in design and planning.22 At the same time, however, regulations pertaining to construction remained strict. Agreements were signed between the individual builder and the local soviet, and if the builder deviated from them in any way—for example, by bringing in someone else to help with the building work—the documents had to be redrawn. Often people did not bother to make the necessary adjustments and disputes arose between the legal owner and other people who, because of the labor they had contributed, had a moral right to a share in the dwelling.23
And so we come to another postwar innovation: renewed and more purposeful discussion of the nature and the limits of the right to property. Public debate on these matters was fueled by the large number of specific cases that needed resolution. Property disputes were less common in sites of new construction than in areas already provided with housing where people returned from the front or from evacuation. As can be imagined, the question of ownership was especially hard to resolve in former zones of occupation. These grave practical difficulties provided the stimulus for a rather more inclusive definition of property rights in legal policy of the 1940s.24 Much discussion was devoted to the concept of “personal property” (lichnaia sobstvennost’), which differed from private property (as found in the capitalist West) by being limited to people’s personal use. As one jurist explained, “personal property is property involving objects and products of consumption, that is, things that do not include weapons and means of production, which have become public, socialist property.”25 The new term had been catapulted into Soviet legal discourse by the 1936 Stalin Constitution, but it did not gain a secure place as part of the Civil Code’s basic typology of property until the post-Stalin era, when a basic distinction came to be made between “socialist” and “personal” property. In the meantime, it represented a big gray area for Soviet legal theory. Article 10 of the Civil Code in the late 1940s mentioned that personal property was “protected by law” and presented a short list of items and sources of income that might fall into this category, but this brief treatment of the issue raised more questions than it answered. Debate was especially fierce with regard to ownership of housing. Was it permissible, for example, for Soviet people to own more than one house? Some argued categorically that it was not. Others took the same basic view but allowed certain exceptions (the acquisition of second houses by marriage or by inheritance). Still others asserted that the injunction against second houses related only to sale and purchase. But all tended to agree that to rent out a part of a house was not illegal, and that houses put up since 1921 on the basis of a mere “right to build” could now be reclassified as “personal property.”26
In the postwar period, then, the uncertainty of Soviet property relations—which had of course been exacerbated by the huge upheavals of the previous few years—was confronted by a new urge to codify, a new (albeit partial) commitment to abstract principle. The dacha was a particularly ambiguous case for Soviet legal theory. It combined characteristics of a piece of property with those of an item of consumption; it was both a second home—thus affording its occupant the opportunity for illegitimate unearned income—and a wholly legitimate social and cultural amenity, the availability of which confirmed the rising living standards of the Soviet people. This tension was never resolved in principle; it is hard to see how it could have been, given the constraints of Soviet ideology. The precise nature of a dacha—the balance it struck between property and consumption—could be established only in practice: by a detailed examination of a dacha’s use in each individual case.