Summerfolk

Soviet dachniki had good reason to consider these risks worth running. Dacha settlements may not have been the only places where Soviet citizens could indulge their proprietary urges, but there such urges took unusually visible, tangible, and individualized form. The attendant opportunities for self-fulfillment are abundantly evident in another piece of dacha fiction in which the hero, deeply offended by his wife’s less than enthusiastic response to the house he has gone to enormous trouble to build, explains to himself the attraction it has for him. In contrast to the rented accommodations where he has spent his whole life up to now,

here he had built a dwelling himself, with his own hands, he’d poured his own soul into this house. And even if it wasn’t much to look at, even if it wasn’t a grand residence or a villa, it was at least his, every last log in it had been nurtured by him, every detail had been polished and warmed in his hands a hundred times over. And this house wasn’t official [kazennyi], nothing here was slapdash. The desire to have your own house, either held openly or kept to yourself, can probably be found in every person, and it is indestructible.123

Yet the same character who here so passionately defends the dignity of personal ownership is tormented just a few lines later by the various deceptions he has had to perpetrate in order to complete his house. He has committed theft of state property many times over, which makes him no different from millions of other Soviet citizens, but which he nonetheless finds deeply shameful to admit. Dachniki, as we see clearly in this story, were caught between their aspiration (by the 1970s generally regarded as legitimate) to build a house of their own and the wholly illegitimate means that were required if this aspiration was ever to be met.124

This is by no means to say that all late Soviet summerfolk were similarly motivated. Interviews and memoirs suggest that the new opportunities for dacha construction and ownership met a mixed reception from the Soviet population in the 1950s and 1960s, and that the most significant variable was age. People who were adults setting up a home or returning to domestic life immediately after the war eagerly seized on the plots of land they were offered. Their children, however, were much less enthusiastic: members of the ’60s generation took more interest in tourism than in settling down to develop their own landholding. In their eyes, to receive a plot of land in a garden collective implied not relaxed enjoyment of one’s property but rather lengthy weekly round trips to inconveniently located and inadequately provisioned settlements followed by hours of backbreaking toil. For them ownership implied not status and security but responsibility and hard work.

It is tempting to see in these generational differences mere confirmation of a common life-cycle pattern: a young person values diversity and novelty, but by the time old age arrives he or she will positively welcome being restricted to a narrower and more stable set of experiences. In the Soviet case, however, other social factors were at work. Older people on the whole enjoyed far fewer educational opportunities than their children and performed much more than their fair share of household tasks. They were also much more likely to have personal experience of village life, and hence often retained a set of peasant attitudes even after several decades in the urban workforce: a belief in the importance and the dignity of physical activity, a commitment to working the land, and a desire to acquire a landholding where that commitment could be pursued.