Dacha Construction in the USSR in the 1930s on the Example of the "Town of Writers" in Peredelkino

Abstract

The article attempts to reconstruct the history of the appearance of one of the most famous dacha villages of the USSR of the 1930s - the "Town of Writers" in Peredelkino. The research is based on archival documents identified in the funds of the GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), and TSGAMO (Central State Archive of the Moscow Region). Special attention is paid in the article to the detailed reconstruction of events related to the development of project documentation and the construction progress of the "town", as well as the financing of all these works. In other words, those processes rarely come to the attention of specialists but are extremely important for studying the history of architecture, since they allow analyzing the object under study from a qualitatively different point of view. Scattered archival materials, many of which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, also allowed to establish the authorship of country houses, the architecture of which is still the "recognizable feature" of Peredelkino. Despite the rather specific nature of the documents that have come down to date related to the implementation of the idea of the "Writers' Town" (mainly the results of various construction inspections), the materials of the article provide a unique opportunity to understand several points: how the unusual dachas architecture in Peredelkino was born, why, despite the development of standard projects, there were initially no identical buildings in the "town", and what's role of the construction customers - Soviet writers - played in this. In addition, the article focuses on the topic of the relationship between the government and the creative intelligentsia, which is very important for understanding the era of the 1930s.