Even so, it would be wrong to suppose that the residents of institutionally controlled settlements were able to remain loftily indifferent to the issue of property, which could be so thorny for most Soviet owners or occupiers of dachas. In the postwar period, questions arose regarding the transmission of privilege: the original recipients changed jobs or died, leaving their widows and children to fight to maintain the dacha as personal property. Over the period 1940–50, for example, N. A. Peshkova, the wife of Maxim Gorky’s son, launched a series of appeals to authority in an effort to retain control of her late father-in-law’s country residence. Gorky’s dacha in the Gorki-10 settlement was converted into a rest home in 1940, but Peshkova, instead of accepting the new dacha she was offered in a different location, requested a plot of land in the same area on which to build a new dacha; in the meantime she asked permission to live in the smaller house on Gorky’s plot that had formerly been used as the servants’ quarters. A more acrimonious case came in 1946, when the widow of the prominent Soviet writer A. N. Tolstoi wrote to Molotov asking for permission to remain at the dacha in Barvikha occupied by Tolstoi and his family from 1938 until his death in 1945 and to oversee the creation of a literary museum in her husband’s memory; she was not prepared to relocate to the alternative dacha she had been offered in Malakhovka (thirty-five kilometers from Moscow), which stood in what was by Soviet standards a manorial estate of 2,700 square meters. In a memo of March 1947, the Services Department gave its side of the story: the dacha had been given major repairs at state expense when Tolstoi returned from evacuation; since Tolstoi’s death people had been living there “without authorization . . . who have no connection whatsoever to A.N. Tolstoi or to his family”; and in any case, it was curtly pointed out, the dacha had never actually belonged to Tolstoi—he had rented it.41
Such cases served to remind even highly privileged members of Soviet society that the right to use or occupy was, despite much evidence to the contrary, not quite indistinguishable from the right to ownership. Occasionally it was argued that lengthy occupation of a state-owned dacha should be converted to personal ownership on the grounds that protracted state service precluded the acquisition of a house by ordinary means (that is, purchase). In 1947, for example, a resident of a dacha in the settlement administered by the state publishing network (OGIZ) complained that the new head of the organization was forcing him to vacate his summer house. Citing his long and dedicated service to Party and state, he insisted that the dacha should be confirmed as his personal property. “I was employed by the state without interruption. And as usually happens I have an official apartment, official transport, official dacha”—but as a result, he claimed, he hadn’t earned enough money to build his own country retreat.42
Others, however, managed to avoid these problems by acquiring a house privately. It is easy, given the undoubted advantages of explicit institutional backing and the reticence of the sources, to overlook the fact that private dacha ownership endured all the way through the Soviet period. Some owners had retained property from before the Revolution by slipping through the net of municipalization in the 1920s; others had managed to build or purchase their own houses during the first half of the Soviet period. To be sure, such undertakings were not possible without a certain status in Soviet society (so as to ensure official permission to build or buy, or to secure the necessary building materials, or to raise the money necessary to buy the house outright), but the house thus obtained was largely independent of institutional control. In Iurii Trifonov’s novella The House on the Embankment (1976), for example, the house owned by a Moscow professor and his family in 1947 has a run-down appearance that would not be tolerated by any moderately conscientious cooperative administration: it is “disorderly, on the point of falling apart, with a rotting porch and an unfinished second floor”; but even so, this house, with its enormous plot (4,000 square meters), its fence, pine trees, and wild vines around the veranda, and its little kitchen garden, represents the “private property” that in Soviet society was as highly valued by individuals as it was publicly decried.43 One nonfictional owner of a spacious country property was the artist P. P. Konchalovskii, who bought a house with extensive gardens and outbuildings in 1929 and retained it until his death in 1956. All the while he conducted himself like a true gentleman farmer; the property “remained miraculously intact as a fragment of the life of the prerevolutionary estate.”44
Private dachas were not well documented and certainly did not receive much public attention, but surely they only benefited from this neglect. Owners were able to lie low and for the most part were left untroubled. Not only that, official silence left opportunities for manipulation of the regulations by sure-footed and well-connected citizens: privileged members of the system apparently were able to make use of state resources when they built their dachas and to enjoy a legitimacy derived from their association with the state, yet in reality to flout all planning regulations and to claim the dacha as private, not socialist or cooperative, property. The scope for such abuses seems to have increased significantly toward the end of the Soviet period (and, as we shall see, it reached its peak in the period of privatization of state assets in the early 1990s). The boundary between state and personal property remained conveniently blurred, and it is safe to assume that, as the Soviet period wore on, specially favored citizens and their families gained a surer sense of what they could get away with. A Politburo member observed in a discussion of elite privilege in 1983: “The size of dachas is not observed. There is no strict control. There are whole palaces built by certain academicians and figures in the arts in Nikolina Gora, all from materials obtained at state expense.”45
To join a dacha construction cooperative (DSK) was a more accessible but considerably more arduous way to ensure long-term ownership. Even if postwar cooperative members were allocated land on which to build, many found that they were on their own when it came to putting up a house. The grandfather of one memoirist, a highly placed worker in the then prestigious railway sector, was offered the opportunity to join a DSK in 1949. He considered that acquiring property of this kind was dangerous, but his misgivings were overcome by the cooperative form of the settlement and by his concern to improve his family’s living conditions. The land allocated to the prospective settlement was in a prestigious location, near the former Mamontov estate of Abramtsevo; but it was also densely wooded, and the dacha settlers had to clear the trees to make paths. For this project the necessary permission had to be obtained and foresters hired to fell the trees. After the cooperative members had joined forces to clear pathways and put up fences (in the process their treasurer disappeared with a large part of the money contributed), they were confronted with another enormous difficulty: how to obtain building materials. Even the simplest wooden boards could not be obtained through official channels—so dachniki here, as in so many other settlements, filched their wood from state building sites and hired a state-employed driver to transport it to their plot during his working hours. Even then, life was made difficult by fussy regulations passed on by the president of the cooperative from higher authority: dacha builders were, for example, required to plant sixty new trees on their plots to compensate for those that had been felled to clear the paths. Luckily, no serious effort was ever made to enforce such instructions.