As we have seen, the discourse and practice of the 1930s left much more scope for consumption than for ownership. Most dachniki, for example, either rented a dacha on the private market or were allocated accommodations by their organization: in both cases, use of a dacha was markedly temporary and active engagement with it as a domestic environment was minimal. By the second half of the 1960s, if not earlier, Soviet citizens were able to feel a much greater sense of ownership, even if they usually achieved it under the cover of a cooperative or garden association. The history of the dacha in the postwar period points, in fact, to an important mechanism that Soviet citizens could use to acquire and transmit property rights. Soviet law had firmly established the principle that legitimacy of individual ownership of an object depended in large measure on the nature of its use. Every Soviet family had the right to living space, but to acquire and profit from living space that exceeded ones personal requirements was strictly forbidden. Dachas were a particularly gray area: as a second dwelling, they were by definition not “necessary” items in the strictest sense of that term, yet in practice dacha ownership was permitted, as summer houses were classified as an item of consumption; as a recreational facility, not a second home.129 So in the case of the dacha we see that consumption, besides being a source of difficulty for citizens whose wants were deemed to exceed their needs, might also be an effective guarantee of property rights in Soviet society.
The postwar period was associated with an important set of changes in people’s attitudes toward land, property, leisure, consumer culture, and, not least, domesticity; all these may be seen reflected in the garden-plot movement and its gradual convergence with the dacha proper. With the fall of the Soviet system this convergence became all but total; the dacha became even more of a mass phenomenon, but its social and cultural significance underwent a further shift in line with the traumatic uncertainty that so many Russians experienced in the 1990s.
1. J. Hessler, “A Postwar Perestroika? Towards a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR,” SR 57 (1998): 524.
2. See U.G. Cherniavskii, Voina i prodovol’stvie: Snabzhenie gorodskogo naseleniia v Velikuiu Otechestvennuiu Voinu (1941–1945 gg.) (Moscow, 1964), 130–50, and William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II (Cambridge, 1990), chap. 5. Cherniavskii (p. 142) relates that in 1942 almost a third of urban people had individual allotments or helped to cultivate collective allotments; in 1943 that figure rose to two-fifths; in 1944, to half.
3. A brief account of “food gardens” during the siege of Leningrad is given in Moskoff, Bread of Affliction, 201–3. The decision to grow vegetables in every available space within the city was taken in February 1942; by late summer of that year about 270,000 Leningraders were engaged in private vegetable gardening.
4. J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London, 1991), 83.
5. Moskva poslevoennaia, 1945–1947: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 2000), 384. For more on the desperate food shortages of the postwar years, see V. F. Zima, Golod v SSSR, 1946–1947 godov: Proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia (Moscow, 1996), and E. Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost’, 1945–1953 (Moscow, 2000), 69–78.
6. “Prakticheskie sovety ogorodnikam,” Ogonek, no. 20 (1948), 29. There are numerous similar examples in Ogonek and Rabotnitsa in the second half of the 1940s.
7. M. Basin and I. Shmelev, “V sadakh i ogorodakh odnogo zavoda,” Trud, 21 May 1949, 4.
8. See Hessler, “Postwar Perestroika?” Contrast the “liberalization” of 1946–48 with the crackdown on individual peasant plots in 1939–40: see Osokina, Ierarkhiia potrebleniia, 220. The size of peasants’ private plots (priusadebnye uchastki) had been an incredibly sensitive public issue in the first few years of collectivization, and in these debates we can see prefigured (albeit on a much larger and socially destructive scale) the arguments over legitimate use of a garden plot in the post-Stalin period. On peasant plots in the 1930s, see S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 134–36.
9. TsMAM, f. 718, op. 12, d. 37 (transcript of a meeting held to discuss the results of the allotment movement in the Moscow region, 12 Apr. 1949); the question of the danger to trees is raised on l. 24; the opportunity to sell surplus produce is mentioned as one of the benefits of allotment gardening by an exemplary ogorodnik and war invalid on l. 10.
10. Ibid., d. 231; GARF, f. R-5451, op. 30, dd. 269, 370.
11. A collection of these reports for 1951 can be found in GARF, f. R-5451, op. 30, d. 178.
12. See “O kollektivnom i individual’nom ogorodnichestve i sadovodstve rabochikh i sluzhashchikh” (24 Feb. 1949), in Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh aktov o zemle, 2d ed., expanded (Moscow, 1962), 99–100. There were still provisos, however: recipients of a plot of land had to work at their enterprise for five consecutive years before they gained the right to “permanent use” (bessrochnoe pol’zovanie).
13. TsMAM, f. 718, op. 12, d. 178, ll. 58–62.
14. TsMAM, f. 718, op. 12, d. 178. Factory representatives also complained that people who already had allotments were precluded from joining garden collectives: see GARF, f. R-5451, op. 30, d. 161, l. 26.
15. GARF, f. R-5451, op. 30, d. 282, l. 17. This file contains numerous similar protests, including several from garden collectives sponsored by Moscow enterprises.
16. Ibid., d. 161, ll. 24–25; d. 167.
17. Such unreferenced examples are drawn from my own archive of dacha memoirs: see the “Note on Sources.”
18. V. Ivanov, Sobrante sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow, 1973–78), 8:669. Another letter of similar content, written two weeks later, can be found in the memoirs of Ivanov’s widow: T. Ivanova, Moi sovremenniki, kakimi ia ikh znala: Ocherki (Moscow, 1984), 117.
19. N. Zabolotsky, The Life of Zabolotsky, ed. R.R. Milner-Gulland (Cardiff, 1994), 239.
20. See, e.g., Ivanova, Moi sovremenniki, 418.
21. See the Soviet decrees “O meropriiatiiakh po vosstanovleniiu individual’nogo zhilishchnogo fonda. . .” (29 May 1944) and “O prave grazhdan na pokupku i stroitel’stvo individual’nykh zhilykh domov” (26 Aug. 1948).
22. See, e.g., V.G. Kalish, “Kottedzhi dllia gorniakov,” Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo, no. 4 (1947), 24–25: this article announces a design competition in Tula for “cottages” of between four and six rooms. Designs for individual houses are mentioned briefly as a feature of Soviet architecture in the late 1940s in V. Papernyi, Kul’tura “dva” (1985; Moscow, 1996), 152.