Summerfolk

The momentum accelerated in 1989 and 1990, when plots of land were easier to obtain than ever before. In January 1991, moreover, Gorbachev issued a decree on land reform that argued the need to conduct an inventory of agricultural territories and reallocate the land that was used inefficiently to peasant households, agricultural cooperatives, personal holdings, and dacha construction.18 Research based on data collected in 1997 in four widely scattered urban locations (Samara, Kemerovo, Liubertsy, Syktyvkar) suggested that the median amount of time a household had been using the dacha was in the region of ten years. In other words, the dacha qua garden plot had historical roots (in the houses that people owned or inherited in the Brezhnev period) but still received a significant boost in the late 1980s and early 1990s.19

The Soviet government’s encouragement of smallholding and garden-plot cultivation had an explicit rationale: to boost production of basic foodstuffs in the face of an impending supply crisis. Annual yields from individual plots were monitored and received comment in central government resolutions.20 And problems, notably the reluctance of local soviets to allocate land for individual agriculture, were anxiously noted.21

The Moscow city administration, for example, was in 1990–91 keen to hand out less agriculturally productive land to garden cultivators, arguing that to do so would lessen the food crisis and reduce the pressure on housing in the capital. An RSFSR resolution of February 1991 noted that the supply situation in Moscow had deteriorated and set the target of providing not less than 300 square meters for each Moscow family in that year’s growing season (the land was to come from collective farms and to be concentrated along the main railway lines).22 The initiatives of the late 1980s had brought only partial success, given the red tape involved in the allocation of land.23 Near the major cities, where demand for land was at its most intense, there had developed “a battle for land between citizens desiring to obtain plots and the often reluctant local authorities, wishing to preserve the land for agriculture and other purposes.”24 At the beginning of 1991, more than one million people in Moscow were estimated to be on the waiting list for a plot of land. The oblast authorities, claimed the city administration, were frustrating the garden-plot initiative by agreeing to allocate only highly unproductive land belonging to state farms. Building materials were as difficult as ever to obtain; it was argued that construction needed to be reoriented from high-rises to small single-family homes. Land, however, was to remain cheap:

Why should people have to buy [plots of land]? I believe that people should receive land free of charge: if they love the land and are able to cultivate it, let them work away and take as much as they can cope with. Not 100 square meters but 1,200 or 1,500, or even 2,000 if someone wants to have a minifarm on their plot with poultry and livestock. On the same plot they can build their family a house with a cellar, a garage, and various outbuildings. There isn’t room for a family on 600 square meters.25

Although the speaker here—then president of the Moscow soviet—is presenting himself as a passionate advocate of progressive land reform, he uses a very traditional argument: economic value is less significant than use value. Research suggests that this attitude was shared by people who were unimpressed by receiving as private property land that they considered theirs anyway.26 That said, the new land legislation did advance the cause of Russian private ownership: right to use (pravo pol’zovaniia) was firmly replaced by lifelong ownership with right of inheritance (pozhiznennoe nasleduemoe vladenie).27 And the concerns of the city administration were addressed in one of the first presidential decrees of post-Soviet Russia, which set the target of 40,000 hectares to be provided for construction of individual houses in the Moscow region in the next ten years.28