Summerfolk

The Moscow region was far ahead of the rest of the country in respect to exurban life. By the 1960s, despite restrictive legislation, out-of-town summer dwellings had become a genuine institution for the capital city.108 Traffic between city and surrounding areas grew enormously: in 1935, half a million Muscovites might leave the city for the day on a weekend in summer; by 1967, this figure was pushing up toward 2.9 million. Of these people, approximately 450,000 were visiting their own dachas, while a further 400,000 were renting accommodations from the rural population.109 The garden-plot drive steadily gained momentum through the postwar decades. A study conducted in the 1970s found that garden settlements had developed intensively in the 1950s and 1960s along all the main railway lines out of Moscow (except the Iaroslavl’ line, which, as the first to be electrified, had been colonized by dacha settlers in the 1930s), and that garden cooperatives had now begun to spring up around smaller towns in Moscow oblast.110 By 1980 there were 1,897 garden associations and 210,000 plots of land in Moscow oblast; for dacha cooperatives the equivalent figures were 256 and 20,000.111 Regulations concerning the construction of summer dwellings and outbuildings had been significantly relaxed since the Khrushchev period.112 And the garden plot became still more dacha-like in 1981 with the introduction of legislation that gave the prime inheritance claim in garden cooperatives to blood relatives.113

By this time, too, the authentic dacha-plot dacha and the upstart garden-plot dacha had begun to merge in people’s understanding, even if the former retained a higher status. Many of my informants date a change in linguistic usage (“dacha” denoting both dacha proper and garden plot) to the 1960s, although it seems it became near-universal only in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The inclusion of garden-plot houses under the conceptual umbrella of “dacha” was suggestive of a new, more domestically minded attitude toward modest exurban landholdings; it implied a lifestyle as well as a commitment to toil in the vegetable patches. Dachas (of whichever type) were a rare opportunity for Soviet citizens to enjoy de facto private ownership of immovable property. The ability to overcome the problems thrown up by the shortage economy brought with it, moreover, a healthy rise in social status: the owner of a dacha was a person who “knew how to live.” The achievement of post-Stalin dachniki was all the greater given that in general they did not bring in workmen even for the more specialized jobs: the members of dacha and garden cooperatives tended to do all the building themselves. In fact, for two generations of Soviet men, the ability to construct and equip the family dacha was an important means of self-validation. It also enabled them to measure themselves against their peers: given that the size, shape, and design of the house were restricted by legislation, “good” dachas would be distinguished from “bad” dachas not by the number of floors or rooms but by how the windows had been fitted or the cement laid. One St. Petersburg man, born in 1933, recalled in the late 1990s the satisfaction he had gained from joining a garden cooperative relatively late in life (at the age of fifty):

A garden-plot house at Krasnitsy. This garden plot might be called exemplary: every inch of land is used, and the house, with its many extensions and refinements, testifies to the owner’s many years of devoted care and attention. Out of view is a second dwelling: a former vremianka that has grown into a well-equipped annex of the main house.

You go along, have a look, there are plenty of people you know in the cooperative, they’re building houses, so you go up to them, take a look, ask them about how they do things. It’s a real job building a dacha yourself, you lay the bricks, you mix the cement, you do the carpentry. Makes you both academician and hero, as they say. . . . It gives you a kind of moral satisfaction when you’re making something with your own hands.114

The positive self-image of many late Soviet dachniki is beyond question. As one of my informants proclaimed, after decades of experience: “The owner of a dacha stands out from those around him: he is practical, industrious, determined, and full of optimism in his anticipation of regular contact with nature.”