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[SOVIET LEISURE TIME] Deshovoye dachnoye stroitel’stvo: S fotografiiami, risunkami i chertezhami [i.e. A Cheap Construction of Country Houses: With Photos, Drawings and Plans]

Plotnikov, B.S.

Moscow: Tsentrozhilsoiuz, 1930. Item #272

96 pp. 25,5x17,5 cm. Original illustrated wrappers. Tears of the spine, rubbed, owner’s signature on the title page. Otherwise good.

Very rare. One of 4000 copies.
A great evidence of an important Soviet (and Russian) phenomenon - dacha (i.e. country house). This is the first Soviet work on the construction of country houses and organization of garden cooperatives. This was a reaction to a series of government regulations and documents on development of countryside gardens around cities of the late 1920s. The book describes the foreign experience in the construction of country houses and explains the importance of garden cooperatives for Soviet people. The edition illustrated with photographs of houses and garden furniture (even a photograph of a German ‘family traveling by automobile with a tent, sleeping bags, folding table and stools, and a folding boat’), large number of plans. This edition was supposed to be used to build housed as it has detailed instructions.
Private dacha in the USSR was not only a place of rest and an opportunity to provide itself with fruit vegetables for a whole year. It was considered a sign of prosperity in the Soviet Union. They appeared in the early 1930s and were small boardwalk or plywood country houses designed for summer living. In the USSR, as in pre-revolutionary Russia, country houses were often erected in one season, although their architecture has changed significantly. Cottages of the Soviet era more like a comfortable one-story huts (sometimes made of bricks) with a small (closed or open) veranda, fruit trees and beds. But in the Soviet Union there was also a «dacha aristocracy». So, already in the 1930s, there were dacha-building cooperatives, that is, departmental settlements for scientists, doctors, writers, employees of various state institutions. Dacha construction was at first, as a rule, restrictive: land plots of no more than 8 acres allocated in the suburban zone, were intended only for vegetable gardens. Then on sites it was allowed to build sheds for tools, and later - small unheated houses: first with an area of 16 square meters, and then up to 25 square meters. The second floors were forbidden. There was no electricity, no running water. The dachas were lit with kerosene lamps, food was cooked on a kerosene, and water was extracted in the nearest pond. But it is nevertheless interesting how the Soviet state tried to provide the builders of communism with summer and weekend rest.

No copies found at Worldcat.

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