Such reproaches were more common and more forceful earlier in the decade, when the public hostility to private enrichment during the Khrushchev era was regularly extended to garden collectives. Local authorities were bombarded with instructions from on high. It would probably be futile to seek consistency or rationality in these multifarious interdictions, but local ispolkoms often took them seriously, either because they were too cowed to do otherwise or because they stood to gain something by asserting their power in this way (or, most likely, for a combination of these reasons). Some of my informants have made serious allegations of malpractice, asserting, for example, that ispolkoms harassed garden and dacha cooperatives with the intention of seizing plots that had fallen vacant. Such accounts fit very plausibly into the history of post-Stalin housing policy, which gave rise to periodic conflicts between the rival power bases of local government organizations (soviets) and workplaces (enterprises).
Whatever the mechanisms of the decision-making process, the overall effect was to make the life of the humble Soviet gardener more stressful. One such person was Grigorii Kravchenko, who acquired a plot in a garden cooperative at the least promising moment: in 1962, at the height of the campaign against individual property, a time when even very modest dwellings might be bulldozed if they infringed regulations. The statutes of Kravchenko’s cooperative stipulated that members should absolutely not build houses, however small, on their plots; but this condition was universally disregarded, and log shacks (typically 4 × 4m) quickly started to mushroom. What is more, the upper beams of such houses might intentionally be left to overhang the sides with a view to adding an extension at some later stage. In due course, the district authorities summoned the president of the trade union and the secretary of the Party bureau from the sponsoring organization and forcefully instructed them to bring the settlement into line. When the team of inspectors reached Kravchenko’s plot, he was ordered to dismantle his house in the two weeks that remained of his vacation. Kravchenko nodded obediently, but when the inspectors had departed did nothing to comply with their instructions. And it seemed the trouble had blown over, until the settlement received another inspection, this time by the district architect. This second official visitor was even more literal-minded in his implementation of policy, demanding that all individual plots be liquidated and all land be turned over for collective use: he adhered rigorously to the official vision of garden associations as collective farms for city dwellers. Kravchenko was able to avert disaster only by giving what was effectively a bribe: he offered a plot of land in the cooperative to the architect, who declined but mentioned an acquaintance who would be glad to have it. After that, Kravchenko and his fellow settlers heard nothing more from him.
Official strictures extended to many other activities at garden plots. One man in Kravchenko’s settlement took to breeding rabbits covertly (livestock of all kinds was at the time strictly forbidden), and then took the further bold step of acquiring a pig. But he was so apprehensive of denunciations by his neighbors and of punitive administrative intervention that the unfortunate animal was kept cooped up in a tiny shack and so never got any exercise or even saw the light of day. The pork fat produced after the pig was slaughtered was revolting: mainly liquid in texture, with bunched globules of fat.
Even after a plot had been obtained and unwelcome interference from the local authorities had ceased, building a house and cultivating a garden plot were fraught with difficulties. The first was making the territory fit for settlement: the land had to be drained, roads built, and trees planted—and all this at an inconveniently long distance from the city. In the early days of a garden collective, employees of the organization in question were commonly bussed out on weekends for days of “voluntary” labor so as to help carry out labor-intensive preliminary tasks.
When garden-plot holders began to cultivate their land, they commonly found essential seedlings and fertilizer hard to obtain by normal means. In Kravchenko’s words:
I remember how we got hold of manure for our first vegetable patches when there were still no houses or roads. There was a collective farm field next to us where a small herd of cows was led out to graze. Sometimes the herdsman led the cows right up close to us and they lay there and rested. You had to keep watch to see when the herd went away and the cowpats were left behind. You couldn’t afford to hang around, because by this time a few other manure lovers would always have turned up as well. And then we were off, a bucket and two plywood scoopers in our hands.
Even more persistence and ingenuity was required to build a house on a garden plot: this was often such an uncomfortably drawn-out process that people might remain without adequate shelter for two or three years. Over the summer, while toiling on their land, they could spend the night in a tent or in a house in a neighboring village; they might also put together a temporary hut (vremianka), but the only structure they were likely to have in the early stages was a flimsy lean-to encasing a short-drop toilet. This, according to one memoir account, was equivalent to marking out one’s possession of the plot, planting one’s flag on the territory.
Dacha construction was slowed most of all by the Soviet shortage economy. Even the simplest building materials were unavailable in state shops and so had to be obtained through unofficial channels. Constructing a dacha prompted Soviet people to engage in their full repertoire of blat practices—which, by the 1960s, seem to have been tied to ongoing social relations and circular networks to a much greater extent than in the 1930s, when the word blat had more disreputable overtones of corruption and criminality. The ubiquity of such practices, as well as their relative freedom from stigma, is suggested by a play set in the late 1970s or early 1980s in which three men join together to build a dacha. They draw up a list of costs totaling 15,846 rubles (an enormous sum, given that two of them earn less than 150 rubles a month). When they take stock of their blat resources, however, the estimate is whittled down to a third of that figure.103
A temporary hut (vremianka), made largely of old doors, at the Krasnitsy garden settlement, one hundred kilometers southeast of St Petersburg
Other ways of making progress with dacha construction did not depend to any great extent on the intricacies of the Soviet “economy of favors.” Members of Kravchenko’s settlement were typical in filching bricks from Moscow building sites or picking up choice bits of timber (doors were an especially prized find) after a row of old wooden houses on the city’s outskirts had been demolished. The materials thus obtained were then commonly transported to the dacha settlements by moonlighting state taxi drivers. In due course, a rumor spread through the settlement that inspectors were coming to demand invoices for building materials used in the construction of garden houses. (No one in the settlement could provide such documentation, of course, as they had all obtained their bricks, nails, and wood through unofficial channels.) Kravchenko did indeed receive such an inspection, but again thought quickly on his feet and claimed he had given money to the watchman to buy his materials; unfortunately, the watchman had since died. Anecdotal evidence of this kind is well corroborated by reports of official inspections, which suggest that infringements of the rules could be found wherever the authorities bothered to look. Yet even where “abuses” were exposed, retribution was by no means bound to follow: the restrictions were so unreasonable that even Soviet bureaucrats did not often insist on their precise observance. One string of reports from 1958 soberly listed the number of houses that had broken the rules in various settlements but also mentioned the achievements of these same garden collectives in making their territory fit for habitation and equipping it with various amenities. Only in one case was any indication given of what action might be taken to correct the failings identified.104