A dacha at Abramtsevo, northeast of Moscow. This house was built in the early 1960s according to one of the standard designs of the time; the paneled facade especially is typical of Soviet dacha construction in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, however, the dacha has undergone changes that were prohibited in the Khrushchev era: a heating system has been installed, windows have been added, and an extension has been built.
Despite such potential hiccups, the general rules governing the new dacha settlements were clear enough. For a cooperative to be formed, a group of not fewer than ten people at a particular enterprise had to write to the administration; if sanctioned, the cooperative was then allocated land “for permanent use” (v bessrochnoe pol’zovanie). Its members were then required to put the building work out to contract (even if they themselves ended up taking part).61 Building was expected to be carried out to standard designs, though special dispensation for individual designs could be obtained. All buildings became “cooperative property”; that is, they could not be sold or transferred to organizations or to individuals, although they could, with the approval of a general meeting of the cooperative, be passed on to parents, children, or spouses, and they could without qualification be inherited. The amount of space allocated to a member of the cooperative depended on the dues paid and the size of the family; living space was never to exceed 60 square meters.62 In the Khrushchev era vigilance was heightened even with respect to state-run dachas. In 1958, for example, a set of charges were introduced for overhead and for depreciation of furniture and other household items in dachas owned by ministries and subordinate organizations. Prices were differentiated according to location and type of room.63 In 1961, moreover, the senior ranks of the army were deprived of their privileged access to plots for building individual dachas.64
Legislative measures were backed up with publicized acts of surveillance. Investigative journalists of the late 1950s and early 1960s were in the habit of conducting “raids” on institutions and enterprises in order to uncover malpractice in various areas of Soviet life, and dacha locations were among the targets of their crusading vigilance. In 1959, two reporters from the satirical magazine Krokodil paid a visit to a new garden plot settlement for workers in the central planning organization (Gosplan). They quickly found that things were not being done in accordance with the Gardener’s Handbook. Many plots were strewn with felled trees: the owners were clearly planning to convert their houses from the anonymous prefabricated design to a more prestigious log-cabin look. Worse still, a cistern for weed killer turned out to be a steam boiler to provide central heating for the dacha of the president of the gardening collective. The journalists concluded that under the cover of growing food, people were really busy putting up full-blown dachas.65 Numerous other exposés of the same period drew attention to discrepancies between people’s salaries and the luxurious residences they were having built.66 More generally, the dacha was treated with great suspicion because it gave free rein to people’s proprietary instincts; the definition of “personal property” implied by public discourse of the Khrushchev era seemed both to harden and to narrow.67 Building regulations might on occasion be strictly enforced: tales abounded of “commissions” arriving to remove terraces and pavilions. Fences around individual plots were strictly forbidden. And land was generally vulnerable to unheralded state incursions—when territory needed to be reclaimed for an institution, for example.68
“Lady goldfish, turn my dacha into a smashed-up washtub! Just for half an hour, until the inspectors have gone . . .”: a satirical cartoon alluding to a well-known Russian folktale (from Krokodil, no. 24 [1964])
The dacha also engaged Soviet anxieties about the operation of the market. Not for the first time in Russian history, peasants were the objects of especial disapproval (mixed with scorn) for obtaining rental income instead of living by the sweat of their brows.69 But all private dacha landlords, not just peasants, were regularly attacked in the press.70 Dacha “profiteering,” moreover, formed a convenient target for mainstream literary satirists. In one far from untypical story, an impractical young couple who have just inherited a crumbling dacha invite a relative to help repair it, but he has all too eager an eye for its commercial possibilities (he wants to keep a pig, he grows flowers for sale, he even lets out the house for a meeting of evangelical Christians).71 A more historically resonant treatment of the issue was The Twelfth Hour (1959), a play by the successful time-serving dramatist Aleksei Arbuzov, where the decline and fall of the nepmen is played out during a single evening at an opulent Pavlovsk dacha in 1928.72
The measures taken against the dacha market went much further than cultural disapprobation, however. In 1963 limits were imposed on the rent a private dacha owner could charge: no more that 3 rubles 60 kopecks per square meter in the Moscow and Leningrad regions.73 The well-known practice of diversion of state property to private building sites also received attention; the risk of “speculation” was (correctly) assessed as being particularly high given the large number of state construction projects under way at this time.74According to resolutions at the republic level in 1962, dachas built or acquired by “nonlabor income” were subject to confiscation. In one case of 1963, a couple bought two cars and a spacious dacha (of 80 square meters; the price they paid was 8,000 rubles), partially concealing these transactions by registering the dacha and one of the cars in the names of family members. When challenged in court to explain how they had obtained so much cash, they were unable to do so. The husband worked as an assistant in a textile shop; his wife did not work. The clear implication was that he had earned his surplus money through involvement in the black market. Lottery winnings, interest on savings accounts, gifts, and inheritance were among the few permitted sources of income besides basic wages. Even money raised by selling produce from a kitchen garden was illegal unless it could be proved that such produce was grown primarily with the individual family’s needs in mind.75