As always, the surest way to ensure that such difficulties were overlooked was to enjoy the protection of a powerful sponsor. “Legitimate” use differed significantly from one organization to another. Certain branches of the government found themselves particularly favored in the late 1940s. The most prestigious dacha zones—mainly west and north of Moscow—were colonized by ministries and Party organizations.27 The army, understandably enough, was also among the main beneficiaries. General majors tended to receive plots of 0.75 hectares, while 0.5 was the norm for lower ranks within the officer corps.28 The leisure complex of the Central Committee and its ever-expanding apparat was supplemented by new settlements. Spacious vacation homes in the south were built for elite cadres.29 In 1946 the dacha locations available for the Central Committee administrative machine were relatively few—Berezhki, Kratovo, Mamontovka, Skhodnia, and Bykovo-Udel’naia—but their number soon grew to include such places as Usovo, Uspenskoe, Serebrianyi Bor, and Kuntsevo. The annual budget for maintaining these settlements in the late 1940s was in the region of 5 million rubles. All settlements were heavily subsidized. The proportion of costs met out of the state budget varied from 70 to 90 percent; some residents did not pay even a nominal fee for their accommodations. The accounts for Kuntsevo and Barvikha in the early 1950s, for example, contained no receipts at all. The budget for 1951 projected an average subsidy of 1,024 rubles for each of the 1,040 families due to be resident in Central Committee dachas. Besides running costs for the dachas themselves, services included canteens where meals were available at cost, laundry, medical care, and special bus connections. Electricity bills were unusually high because of the large number of electrical appliances the residents owned and used. The dacha stock in 1950 consisted of thirteen settlements with a total of 271 dachas and 1,569 rooms inhabited by 950 families.30
These figures clearly demonstrate, however, that the dacha—even for people working in the Central Committee apparat—was not always a thing of luxury. A family was on average granted little more than a room and a half. In the mid-1950s, for example, the 90 families resident at the dacha settlement of Mamontovka had at their disposal a total of 1,865 square meters. Allocation of dacha space proceeded according to a particular institutional hierarchy. Just over 230 dachas were reserved for use by families in the most prestigious sectors of the apparat; the remaining 700 or so dachas had to be fought for by other branches of the administration. The Services Department allocated dachas directly to the higher cadres—to heads of departments, for example—while lower down the hierarchy space was allocated by the secretariats in question.31 A similar hierarchy existed with regard to the dachas of the Soviet government: members of the government were granted “personal” dachas equipped for year-round habitation, while leading workers in the apparat had the right to summer dachas.32 The rest, the humble clerks of the government administration, could, we must assume, only hope for a room or two per family.
Middle-of-the-range institutionally sponsored dachas, such as those put up by the Ministry for Construction in the Oil Industry (Minneftestroi) in 1956, would have two or three rooms, be built according to a standard design, be equipped with electricity, plumbing, and central heating, and stand on a plot of 1,000 square meters. The cost, as the ministry stipulated to the designers, was not to exceed 25,000 rubles per dacha.33 For certain categories of dacha client, however, the limits were much looser. In 1947 a Hero of the Soviet Union was built a dacha with a “hall-vestibule,” a drawing room, a study, a kitchen, a servant’s room, two bedrooms, and a nursery. The total cost was 250,000 rubles.34
The stratification of the dacha population even in a single location was noted by Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva. In Zhukovka, an unspoiled village to the west of Moscow, residents—who for the most part worked not at the nearby collective farm but rather commuted each day to factories on the outskirts of Moscow—would rent out their houses to academics and writers of modest means for the summer, as before the war. At the same time, however, special dachas were built for scientists working in “secret” fields (mainly atomic physics and the space program).35 The third element in Zhukovka was a dacha settlement for the government. It was in this section that Allilueva lived as a privileged observer of its closed community: residents had special shops provided, and entrance into the settlement was by pass only. The only real place for the three dacha strata of Zhukovka to encounter one another was the local cinema, where the young people regularly brawled on weekends.36
State-owned “nomenklatura” dachas were, by Soviet standards, luxurious; they would often come complete with such desirable features as housekeeper, billiard table, and a real stone fireplace,37 and they tended to be located in settlements equipped with a good shop, a canteen, even a cinema. The elite settlement of Gorki-io, for example, had a staff of 428 in 1949.38 The mentality of the residents also differed fundamentally from that of “individual” dachniki. These privileged few were able to enjoy comfortable vacations while at the same time protecting themselves from charges of petty bourgeois materialism; for, after all, these dachas were not even their “personal,” let alone “private,” property. They received their dacha perks, so the largely unspoken rationale went, not for who they were but for the post they held. In some settlements nomenklaturists were reminded of this fact by the official inventory numbers that were stamped on the furniture. It was apparently mauvais ton for them to buy their own dacha or even to show too proprietary a concern for the dachas provided for them by the state.39
The evidence suggests, moreover, that even nonnomenklaturists, if they felt the dacha privilege to be their right, were more active after the war in requesting it directly from powerful Party-state figures; such people—many of them prominent members of the arts or scientific intelligentsia—also seem to have been more successful with their requests than in the 1930s, when they more often had to rely on institutional “brokers” than on personal appeals to authority. Peredelkino residents, for example, were not afraid to go straight to Viacheslav Molotov (the head of the Soviet government) and ask for a car to facilitate their trips to the city or for financial assistance in renovating their dachas. In the 1940s, it appears, the regime established a more stable modus vivendi with the various institutional structures of privilege; state policy remained repressive in all spheres, but those writers and artists who knew the limits and did not overstep them found that rewards and privileges, once granted, could more easily be retained.40