Summerfolk

Younger people were by no means certain to share these values, and they found a convenient bone of contention in the garden plot. The generation gap, accordingly, is one of the commonplaces of late Soviet dacha fiction. In one story, a thirty-year-old economist in Baku finds himself using up his spare time chasing up a mason to fix the roof of the dacha that his infirm mother is having built. Not until very recently, as she neared pensionable age, has his mother shown any inclination to work the soil, but now she is clinging stubbornly to the dacha idea—which in Azerbaijan takes the form of a cozy white house by the sea, surrounded by vines, with a veranda, a well, and a few chickens. Once the family has acquired a plot of land, however, they find that they do not really have time to build a house on it, especially given the difficulty of obtaining building materials and transporting them to the site. The son makes known his dissatisfaction with his mother’s “fanaticism,” but the story ends with a truce: she massages his overheated temples and he resolves to keep his misgivings to himself.125

Other stories show people of the war generation experiencing in late middle age a sudden conversion to the delights of fresh air and agricultural labor. In one typical narrative, a war veteran suddenly decides that he is neglecting his grandchildren’s future by not acquiring a gardening plot. Thanks to his iron willpower, the plot is soon cultivated and a house is built; further plans include verandas and a sauna. The younger members of the family, unwilling to continue contributing what they see as slave labor, are driven to such desperation that the veteran’s son-in-law secretly burns down the dacha, leaving the distraught old man to imagine he has started the fire by forgetting to turn off an electric burner.126 The value of the garden plot was called into question more openly, if less drastically, in the post-Soviet period, when many young people demonstratively rejected the “summer slavery” of dacha life, which they saw as mere “playing at being peasants.”127

The crucial role of older people in maintaining the dacha is a constant in Soviet dacha culture and is confirmed by memoirs and sociological research. Yet it would be no less accurate to reverse the terms and speak of the role of the dacha in smoothing people’s transition from active work life to retirement. This shift in status is problematic at the best of times, but in late twentieth-century Russia it had the potential to become traumatic, given the lack of adequate state provisions for the elderly. But in the late Soviet period it was not only pensioners who felt undervalued and underemployed: enormous sections of the population could expect little fulfillment and even less reward from their work. In the failure of the Soviet state to provide adequate incentives and suitably stimulating employment for its people, especially its white-collar workers, we find by no means the least important cause of the dacha’s enormous success in the latter decades of the Soviet period.

IN THE postwar era the dacha phenomenon found a much broader social constituency than it had enjoyed in the 1930s. By the late 1980s, millions of ordinary urban families were feeling the benefits of a modest second home. For them, as for many prewar dachniki, summer migration was a way of creating extra living space, of relieving the desperately cramped conditions in urban apartments. It is hardly by chance that the dacha boom came about in a period when many people’s aspiration to have a separate apartment for their nuclear family was frustrated by the enduring housing shortage. A typical pattern of life was for middle-aged parents to move out to the dacha for the summer, leaving their children free to enjoy the relatively unencumbered city apartment. Or if parents and children were still young, children might be farmed out to their grandparents for three months, leaving the parents free to continue their jobs in the city.