The public voice of the Khrushchev era was informed by an ethos of collectivist vigilance that was at times even more strident than that of the Stalin period.76 Newspapers laid the same emphasis on monitoring construction and on collective forms of leisure in the late 1950s as they had done in 1935. Measures to provide more hotels, pensions, and sanatoria were given much greater publicity than encouragement of individual construction. Reports on the dacha were incongruous in this discursive context: not only did the dacha prioritize the individual over the collective, it also presented people with second houses that were indistinguishable from private property. That this development presented ideological problems is shown by the legal debates on the principles of inheritance within a dacha cooperative. In the 1970s, as in the 1950s, it was often unclear whether priority should be given to blood relatives or to those who had “used” the dacha most.77
“Dacha for Нуrе”: a cartoon targeting the rapacious (and illiterate) dacha landlord (from Krokodil, no. 5 [1962])
It would be most accurate, however, to characterize the Khrushchev era as one of ambivalence; as a time when long-standing areas of tension in Soviet ideology and social policy were laid bare as never before. Published material on the dacha from the early 1960s betrays the confusion and inconsistency that was so characteristic of that period’s “austere consumerism.”78 On the one hand, individual dacha construction was deemed to be a good thing, as it helped to alleviate the housing shortage and raise the standard of living of Soviet people. On the other, it presented people with an opportunity to flaunt their influence and resources and indulge an unhealthy taste for comfortable living. This tug-of-war between promotion and proscription is amply reflected in Soviet journalism of the late 1950s and early 1960s. One 1959 issue of the prominent illustrated magazine Ogonek, for example, described in loving detail the dacha of a model worker at the Hammer and Sickle factory (acquired as a reward for thirty years’ unremitting toil at the factory bench); a few pages later it launched into an exposé of bureaucrats in the distribution system who had abused building regulations in order to build themselves luxurious residences.79 As usual, it was left to the vigilant and perceptive reader to deduce the limits of the legitimate in the spheres of consumption and ownership.
The Intelligentsia Subculture
Against this political backdrop the intelligentsia ethos of dacha life made a strong comeback: the Khrushchev-era quest for moral activism and a repurified socialism ensured that the “spiritual” functions of the country retreat tended to be valued over its material attributes. The de-Stalinization campaign initiated at the Second Congress of Soviet Writers in 1954 forced a reassessment of the privileges that members of the intelligentsia had received in exchange for their contribution to Stalin-era culture. A state-allocated dacha in the writer’s settlement at Peredelkino occasioned, in public at least, self-justification rather than self-congratulation. The wife of the writer Iurii Libedinskii recalled overhearing visitors to Peredelkino in the mid-1950s commenting enviously on the dacha residences they saw: “Look at what palaces they’ve been putting up! I was in Iasnaia Poliana [the ancestral estate of Leo Tolstoy] recently, the house there is a whole lot simpler. This lot live better than a count, but what are they up to as writers?”80 Libedinskaia, on seeing her husband’s pained expression, frog-marched these carping critics into her dacha and showed them the crowded interior: a mere three rooms for a large household of husband and wife, five children, a granny, and a nurse. As the coup de grâce, she directed the visitors’ attention to the writer’s desk, piled high with papers, folders, and books. Presented with such evidence of industry, dedication, and Bolshevik self-restraint, they withdrew in embarrassment.
But the change of emphasis in the dacha culture of the post-Stalin intelligentsia was not simply a self-protective response to the revelations of the de-Stalinizing 20th Party Congress. It conformed to a broader cultural movement whereby the intelligentsia became larger, more independent, and more vocal. And one of the best ways to find a voice was, as ever, to look to the past for a script: in this case, to the models of conduct provided by the nineteenth-century radical intelligentsia or the early Soviet “true Leninists.” Thus, for example, Lidiia Libedinskaia and her husband, spending the summer at a rented dacha in Kuntsevo in 1948, read Aleksandr Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts in the evenings and relived the spirited debates of the 1840s. In the 1950s and 1960s numerous other members of the cultural elite rediscovered and reaccentuated the forms of informal sociability that had been so culturally productive in the second half of the nineteenth century. In a gesture characteristic of the times, the “dacha” opened by the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts in 1884 as a summer base for landscape artists was used for similar purposes in the second half of the Soviet period.81 Increasingly the dacha came to be seen as a year-round retreat, not a temporary and luxurious amenity; in some peoples understanding, it had experienced a complete transformation from vacation cabin to homestead. Nikolai Zabolotskii, perhaps Russia’s most ecologically minded poet, is reported to have said in 1958: “At one time I couldn’t stand life out of town. I laughed when people started looking for dachas in the spring____But now, you see, I feel drawn to the land.”82 Dachas were now to be used, not merely to be enjoyed. Veniamin Kaverin, for example, a doyen of Soviet literature and long-standing Peredelkino resident, wrote disapprovingly of Konstantin Fedin’s big, empty, unlived-in residence, while he recalled with obvious admiration Pasternak’s potato patches.83 Valentin Kataev went so far as to work Peredelkino into a myth of national origins: “I sometimes think that it was precisely here that what we are accustomed to call Rus’ began. Even if that isn’t true, because Rus’ came from Kiev. But ‘my Rus’’ undoubtedly began here, in the forest outside Moscow.”84 For the post-Stalin intelligentsia more generally, the village house (derevenskii dom) became an approved alternative to a dacha in an institutionally sponsored settlement; as rural areas were gradually abandoned by the younger generation of the indigenous population, many such houses fell vacant in the 1960s and 1970s and were sold to educated urbanites. For their new owners, the remoteness and unkemptness of many of these “dachas” came merely as welcome confirmation of their cultural authenticity.
But the village model had already left its mark on the dacha settlements proper of the cultural elite. A new pattern of exurban life was established for several prominent members of the Moscow intelligentsia after the war, when they returned from evacuation or propaganda work and took up residence in Peredelkino. Some of the dachas were rebuilt or refitted specifically for year-round use in the late 1940s (although Peredelkino had not been occupied by the Germans, it had been left in a poor state by the Soviet military personnel who had been stationed there).85 The increase in the permanent population gave rise to new forms of sociability. Long-standing friendships remained important, to be sure, but the close-knit familiarity of the oldest residents was increasingly supplemented by other kinds of personal interaction. Informal home visits and shared strolls through the settlement gave opportunities for meetings that might cut across institutional affiliations, political allegiances, and artistic affinities.86 Perhaps the most striking exponent of the impromptu visit was Aleksandr Fadeev, who, troubled by a deeply compromised past as high literary functionary under Stalin, sought fitfully to find common ground with writers less morally vulnerable than he.87