Summerfolk

Stringent official policies were to a large and increasing extent ineffectual, and therefore tended both to discredit themselves and to transfer the real elaboration of policy to the local level (where, as we have seen, considerable negotiation went on among individual dachniki, settlements, sponsor organizations, and agents of the state). They also strengthened the self-organizing resolve of dacha communities. One woman recounted how members of her garden cooperative (set up in 1957 and located fifty-five kilometers from Moscow) pooled their resources to buy essential building materials, then drew lots to determine who would get the best logs. Grigorii Kravchenko recalled that when someone applied to join the cooperative of which he was then brigade leader, the first question asked was: “What will you do for the cooperative?” New members were, in other words, expected to place their contacts or expertise at the disposal of the settlement as a whole. In return, they would benefit from everyone else’s know-how and access to particular goods and services.

Communal self-help practices, along with the shared difficulties they were designed to overcome, bound together garden settlements more effectively than any collectivist ideology and turned them into a new form of community with its own set of values and established models of behavior (not to say stereotypes). Dacha folk were acquiring a cultural prominence they had not enjoyed earlier in the Soviet period.

Dachas as a Sociocultural Phenomenon in the Late Soviet Period

By the 1970s, dachas had grudgingly been accepted in public discourse as a fact of life. Summer houses—both owned and rented—were a crucial part of the routine for millions of urban families. It was estimated that one-quarter of people in Moscow and Leningrad used dachas, and that in Leningrad oblast alone city dwellers paid out between 25 and 30 million rubles to private dacha landlords. A journalist who cited these figures concluded with a rhetorical flourish: “So what does all this mean—am I for dachas or against them? Well, this is one of those cases when you can’t say yes straight out, nor can you say no. I should rather give the reply that most people gave me: So what do you suggest instead of dachas?”105 This was a serious question for Soviet urban planners and regional geographers, especially after the introduction in the second half of the 1960s of the two-day weekend, which suddenly gave Soviet citizens significantly more leisure time.106

From the 1970s on, an important source of dachas for Moscow residents was rural houses bought or inherited from relatives: their acquisition was made possible by the increasing depopulation of certain rural sections of Moscow oblast (mainly those lying between the main railway lines and hence accessible only with some difficulty). One great advantage of the village house was that the attached land might be greater (up to 1,500 square meters, instead of the regulation 600 for garden associations). At the start of the 1980s, 15 percent of houses in rural areas of Moscow oblast were dachas belonging to inhabitants of Moscow and other cities. Urbanites who did not have a dacha of their own and could not afford to build one were catered to by a widespread (if semi-illicit) housing market that operated throughout the 1960s and 1970s: villagers would rent out their homes for the summer, without, of course, declaring this income to the Soviet tax collector. Muscovites who rented dachas in the 1960s and 1970s recall that such houses had to be booked as early as January or February, such was the demand. The accommodations varied enormously, from single rooms to whole houses, from the simplest of rural dwellings to dachas proper.107