Summerfolk

When we arrive at the 1990s it seems right to inquire whether another such shift might have taken place. In the West, most large industrialized urban centers have entered—perhaps even passed through—a stage beyond urbanization and industrialization: with the improvement of transport connections, the general rise in living standards, and the activization of the land market, many people—often, but by no means always, the more prosperous sections of the urban population—choose to relocate to areas safe from urban encroachment and establish new settlements, new values, and new lifestyles. In Russia this shift never quite happened, despite the attempts made in the late imperial period to establish exurban settlements with a new sense of community. The failure of such initiatives was grossly overdetermined: the harsh climate made problematic the extension of settlement to a low-density periphery; transport provision was inadequate and expensive; urban administration remained extremely centralized; the social unrest that intensified from the 1890s on made life in underpoliced exurban settlements unattractive. As regards the Soviet period, we can point to a whole new set of factors that inhibited suburban development—above all, the powerful resistance of Soviet planners to do anything that might be construed as emulating the West. Soviet policies placed great emphasis on urbanization and on maintaining a greenbelt around cities within the framework of a “unified system of settlement.” The intended result was that there should be a sharp urban/rural divide, not a grubby fade-out of city sprawl into countryside. The internal arrangement of Soviet cities also disposed them to patterns of settlement quite distinct from the Western suburbanization model. Urban functions were to be widely dispersed throughout the city space; cities were to be zoned so as to rationalize the deployment and use of infrastructure; social segregation was thereby to be minimized. These measures, combined with the total rejection of market principles in land pricing, ensured that there was at best a very shallow density gradient from city center to periphery. The urban population itself had no interest in moving out of the city. Given the concentration of resources in the major cities and the overwhelming importance of an urban residence permit in ensuring access to goods and services, it would have been foolish to contemplate such a move. In short, just as in prerevolutionary times, the metropolis lorded it over the surrounding region.

Even so, by the 1980s there were signs that Soviet cities were entering a suburban phase. The efforts of Soviet planners were to little avail, given the activities of their comrades in the executive. The priority given to greenbelt conservation in the i960 General Plan of Moscow came to seem little more than lip service, given the land-grab policies perpetrated in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, it has convincingly been argued that the pressures on the swelling Moscow agglomeration in this period gave rise to a “socialist suburbanization” with three main distinguishing features.1 First, constant expansion of the city boundaries without any concomitant decentralization of administrative authority. Second, an expansion of Moscow’s outlying districts by large influxes of migrants from outside the urban agglomeration, not fueled by migration from the central districts of the city (as in the Anglo-American suburbanization of the postwar era). Third, the intensive development in Moscow’s hinterland of Soviet forms of garden and dacha settlement, which have no exact equivalent in the West.

The post-Soviet period has taken these processes a stage further, which raises a new set of questions. Given the liberalization of land policy in the 1990s, the Russian population’s acute concerns over subsistence, the continued overcrowding of the city, and the rise in the urban cost of living, have dacha and garden settlements fundamentally changed their character? Has suburbanization, with all it implies anthropologically as well as geographically,2 finally made significant inroads into Russia’s urban fabric?

Soviet Dachas in a Post-Soviet Context