Dachas for Academicians: Practices of Distribution and Organization of Space, 1930–1980s

Abstract

In the article, by the history of dacha settlements of academicians, the evolution of the principles of organization of privileged dacha space in the USSR is characterized. The author examines the practices of distribution and organization of departmental dachas,attempts to fit their history into the focus of everyday collective and interpersonal interactions of scientists, broad social processesof intertwining elitists and egalitarian tendencies of the epoch under consideration. Obtaining “academic” dachas was closely related to the reputational component, social and professional recognition, and the administrative resource of a particular researcher. In this regard, the practiceof departmental suburban space consolidate the established hierarchyin the Soviet scientific community. The principle of complex development (concentration of construction in one place, in the format of a closedsettlement, with the presence of a settlement-orient infrastructure) resultedin corporate isolationof socio-professional groups (primarily the nobility). In the competition of several principles - open and closedtypecooperation, departmental and private economic structure, the right of use and the right of personal property - distinct features of Soviet society were manifested: limited resources, bureaucratization of the distribution system, instability of property rights, but formed a unique “informal” space of “old-timers” settlements. Theresearchis based on a wide range of unpublished sources (clerical work, documents of personal origin) from the funds of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.