Summerfolk

But if the social composition of the dacha had undergone a transformation since the 1930s, so had its functions and meanings. The most obvious change was the increasingly important role of the garden plot in adding quantity and variety to the diet of postwar dachniki. For many families (especially those in small provincial cities), the dacha was a way of combating the shortages—of guaranteeing a supply of fruits and vegetables that were not always seen on open sale. In some localities in the 1960s and 1970s even potatoes were on occasion hard to get hold of in state shops. And the vegetables that could be bought were in general so unappetizing as to give the concept of “home-grown” produce a positive resonance that could never be matched in the West. This psychological reflex—to view the dacha as a survival strategy—was, as we shall see, greatly strengthened by the supply crises of the perestroika and post-Soviet periods. As Nancy Ries writes, “In Russian dacha did not signify a place of summer ’recreation’—at least for adults—so much as it did the headquarters of a family’s self-provisioning efforts, as well as the place for an indispensable annual recuperation of mind, body, and soul from the effects of the city.”128

Dachas in the 1930s were not wholly devoid of a subsistence function, but for the most part a clear distinction was maintained between “dacha” and “allotment” (ogorod). In the postwar era, however, an intermediate form of land use became ever more prominent: the garden plot (sadovodcheskii uchastok). To begin with, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, efforts were made to keep such plots entirely separate from the dacha concept—to forbid the construction of even the flimsiest shacks and to impose as far as possible collective forms of cultivation. But such a policy was woefully out of touch with the practical situation in the new garden settlements, where growers were expected to labor all day in barren fields without any kind of shelter; more important, it underestimated the ability of Soviet people to appropriate and manipulate official categories for their own ends. In time the garden plot took on characteristics of the summer retreat, becoming, in effect, the poor man’s dacha. Eventually this elevation in cultural status achieved linguistic recognition: many Soviet people started to call their summer shacks “dachas,” initially with perhaps a touch of self-deprecating irony, but with growing cultural assertiveness as the years passed.

And it is here that we find a further qualitative difference between the dachas of the 1930s and those of the 1980s. To be sure, dachas had enormous significance in alleviating some of the hardships faced by Soviet people even in the relatively prosperous major cities. But they also had positive value, as homes in their own right. The postwar era saw a broad change in the orientation of Soviet society as the rural migrants to the cities in the 1920s and 1930s settled more securely into urban life and brought up second and third generations. In the 1960s and 1970s their attention could for the first time wander from the urgent task of urban adaptation to the development of a more comfortable lifestyle. Yet would-be Soviet consumers were still starved of suitable goods, and here the mass dacha gained great appeal for its relative accessibility: to acquire a garden plot was not always a straightforward proposition, but still it was often easier than buying a car or a high-quality television set. Once established as a member of a garden collective, a Soviet family could make of its modest landholding whatever its resources and energy permitted. To an uninformed observer, perhaps, garden-plot dwellings differed little in their external aspect or in their use of space: houses were built to strict regulations (which, as we have seen, were not always so strictly enforced), and the same basic range of fruits and vegetables was found on most plots. Yet to build even a modest dwelling was an achievement in itself under the shortage economy; and the dacha interior was individualized and made domestic by the addition of furniture and other artifacts recycled from city apartments.