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– DACHA – with prisoners and the island’s monuments. The monastery that was located on the islands before they were turned into a camp had much harsher policies. It took advantage of the free labor to construct a dam. But the camp provided literacy education. Inmates are learning to read in their free time – the lettered cubes on the screen say ‘not slaves’. The films were a perfectly-orchestrated confusion. Linguistics helped, as the word ‘camp’ also means a collective organized holiday for children. Dmitrii Likhachev, a renowned historian of ancient Russian literature, was a prisoner at Solovki for four years in the early 1930s. He described the film as an absolute lie, noting that when he was free, he found himself in a different camp, of much bigger scale.3 In 1964, the communist-printed Pravda (Truth) cited Brezhnev’s words that ‘it [was] not secret to anyone that in the years of Stalin’s personality cult, housing construction was much neglected and the housing problem became quite acute.’ Stalin’s years were not only years of WWII destruction; the attention went to the construction of camps, a different type of living space in the Soviet Union. It was during these years that the camps formed an important part of the Soviet economy and slave labor was used for the most ambitious construction projects, administered by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The stunning 3 Documentary Dmitrii Likhachev: I Recall, 1988. 148
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– Dasha Shkurpela – disregard for the natural environment of many of these enterprises is notorious. The Decree on Construction of Summer Dwellings of 1958 sanctioned the building of summer cottages by Soviet citizens. These summerhouses, or dachas, though subject to many regulations and the constant need to lie to circumvent the system, were the least monitored spaces of Soviet life, allowing the illusion of privacy and, if not freedom, then some liberties. In her memoir, Galina: A Russian Story, Galina Vishnevskaya recalled: When Krushchev was in power, people were allowed the private use of small bits of land for growing fruit and vegetables. On those garden plots they were permitted to build little one-room shacks as shelter from the summer rains and to keep their gardening tools in. But the Soviet people, who had learned not to be choosy, live in the shacks during the summer months – whole families at a time – and remembered Tsar Nikita with gratitude. The rural dimension was re-admitted into the lives of the citizens. The summer plots helped address food shortages. The planned economy operated in another unseen space. Many citizens filled their leisure with labor of the most primitive kind – manually building summerhouses from found or stolen materials, in a way analogous to camp life, where extreme scarcity produced inventiveness that made one tremble. The 149

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– DACHA –

with prisoners and the island’s monuments. The monastery that was located on the islands before they were turned into a camp had much harsher policies. It took advantage of the free labor to construct a dam. But the camp provided literacy education. Inmates are learning to read in their free time – the lettered cubes on the screen say ‘not slaves’.

The films were a perfectly-orchestrated confusion. Linguistics helped, as the word ‘camp’ also means a collective organized holiday for children. Dmitrii Likhachev, a renowned historian of ancient Russian literature, was a prisoner at Solovki for four years in the early 1930s. He described the film as an absolute lie, noting that when he was free, he found himself in a different camp, of much bigger scale.3

In 1964, the communist-printed Pravda (Truth) cited Brezhnev’s words that ‘it [was] not secret to anyone that in the years of Stalin’s personality cult, housing construction was much neglected and the housing problem became quite acute.’

Stalin’s years were not only years of WWII destruction; the attention went to the construction of camps, a different type of living space in the Soviet Union. It was during these years that the camps formed an important part of the Soviet economy and slave labor was used for the most ambitious construction projects, administered by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The stunning

3 Documentary Dmitrii Likhachev: I Recall, 1988.

148

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