Kandaurov only states brazenly values that all too many of the cooperative members share. In fact, dacha life is presented as providing a focus for the spiritual corruption of “mature” Soviet society. Not only have the residents of Burevestnik long since forgotten their cooperative roots, they are also unfailingly indolent. In The Old Man a good deal of tea is drunk and jam eaten, but we never hear of anyone digging a vegetable patch; significantly, the positive character Letunov spent very little time at the dacha in his youth and middle age. Trifonov, of course, is far from being an unprejudiced observer. He is creating his own myth of dacha existence as sinfully empty, idle, and mean-spirited. As in Gorky’s Dachniki, minor disputes thinly conceal more profound human failures.96
The Garden-Plot Dacha
Trifonov’s focus in The Old Man is one of the traditional dacha cooperatives that by the post-Stalin era were strongly associated with the material comfort, prosperity, and security of the families that lived in them. One of my informants recalled being embarrassed to tell her schoolmates in the 1950s that she spent the summer at a proper dacha, as this would have seemed suspiciously bourgeois; instead she took to saying that she went to visit her grandmother in the country (which was a wholly unremarkable pattern of life; in the eyes of her classmates, a couple of weeks at a resort would have been the most attractive and prestigious way to spend the summer). Cooperative housing was associated with privileged access to “collective” resources, material wealth (given the relatively substantial cash contributions required), and the sponsorship of an influential employer organization (locations allocated for cooperative dacha construction tended to be closer to the city and in more scenic spots).
But to join a dacha cooperative was possible only for a minority, and, especially in the Khrushchev period, it was not considered desirable to encourage such undertakings excessively, given the dacha’s unhealthy association with private property. The most acceptable way of reconciling the aspiration to acquire a plot of land with the ideological animus against individual property was to promote the garden-plot movement. Garden collectives formed steadily during the 1950s, and to an even greater extent than in the late 1940s they tended to consist of individual plots rather than large territories for collective use.97In the first half of the 1960s, the rate of increase slowed significantly and existing settlements were subjected to closer scrutiny. After Khrushchev’s removal, however, the garden association was revived once more. Encouraging signals were sent out to enterprises and 191 organizations, and the authorities were soon inundated with requests for land. In 1967, for example, the Ministry of Agriculture reported that 3,870 workplaces in Moscow city and oblast had applied for allocation of a total of 38,000 hectares for new garden associations; in Leningrad, data had been received for only eight districts out of sixteen, but there were already 834 institutional applications for a prospective membership of 53,000 workers and employees. By this time 1.5 million Soviet families were already engaged in collective gardening.98
Reports on the development of garden associations compiled by the trade union authorities were far from being exclusively self-congratulatory, however. Goings-on in garden settlements often gave the lie to their “collective” label, as the first action of most garden administrations was to break up the available land into individual plots. But the most serious criticisms, as in the early 1950s, concerned the right to build houses on individual plots. Small summer dwellings were commonly built without due architectural control and with black-market building materials. And yet by the second half of the 1960s, no one seriously attempted to outlaw individual summer dwellings of some kind in garden collectives; the most that was done was to insist that such dwellings be built according to approved standard (and cheap) designs, to “recommend” that enterprises build collective hostels for the gardeners among their workforce, and to advocate the cooperative form of organization above the “association” (tovarishchestvo)—as if that would make any real difference to the way garden settlements were run.99
The garden settlement was the major new form of exurban life in the postwar era. It was presented as a new form of “active leisure,” to be distinguished from the dacha by its more modest function of allotment gardening instead of extended summer habitation. Its legal status had the virtue of being tied to use of the plot, not to ownership of the house that stood on it.100 Unlike dacha cooperatives, whose members were instructed to contract out construction work, garden settlements positively required members to contribute their own labor to the construction of a house. Yet the garden plot was still to be distinguished from the allotment on several counts. First, the amount of land allocated, though not enormous, was greater. Second, the house built on a garden plot, though not large or well equipped, did more than provide shelter and a place to store tools; allotments, by contrast, were typically provided from wasteland on the outskirts of the city and did not bring with them the right to build. Third, garden settlements were located farther away from cities than allotments. Fourth, the garden plot, though oriented primarily toward kitchen gardening, could have decorative flowerbeds and front lawn.101
A standard design for a garden-plot house (from L. I. Kreindlin, Letnie sadovye domiki [Moscow, 1967])
A simple garden-plot house at Siniavino, one hundred kilometers east of St. Petersburg
Garden settlements came in two main varieties—the association (tovarishchestvo) and the cooperative. The only real difference between the two was that associations were created under the auspices of local trade union organizations, while cooperatives had a wider range of possible sponsor institutions. The method of land distribution, however, was generally the same in both cases: the local ispolkom would allocate land to a particular factory or institution, and the organization in question would distribute the land among its employees. Holders of garden plots were obliged to abide by the statutes of the cooperative. For an initial five-year period, members had to remain at the same enterprise (with certain commonsensical exceptions, notably retirement), but thereafter they received the plots for “permanent use.” This was effectively private property disguised and made palatable to Soviet ideology by a collective form, and my interview material strongly suggests that people regarded it as such.
The land allotted to garden settlements was generally inhospitable, consisting (especially in the Leningrad region) of marshy or densely wooded terrain. Giving up collective farm land for individual gardeners within an association was regarded as deeply suspect, even if land was unproductive and neglected in collective agricultural use. In the late 194 1960s, for example, local state organizations were proving so ready to distribute land for this purpose that they earned a public reproach from the RSFSR government.102