Summerfolk

Millions of Soviet people, in Moscow and dozens of other cities, seized the opportunity to begin life as a garden-plot cultivator (sadovod). Here again, use of the land, not ownership, was the primary concern. As economic reform stumbled, Soviet citizens began to lose faith in the states ability to feed them, and so invested more time and energy in the productive function of their dachas. If garden cooperatives in the 1970s had tended to have a rather horticultural feel, by the late 1980s their inhabitants were taking a subsistence-oriented approach to cultivation of their land.29 In the 1980s and 1990s the term “dacha” underwent further expansion so as to connote the two very different functions—leisure and subsistence—that a plot of land in post-Soviet Russia might serve. In other words, the dacha continued to converge with the garden plot in people’s understanding; it was, in the words of one self-help book, a “minifarm.”30

Muscovites’ colonization of their oblast was remarkable. By 1995, garden associations numbered more than 7,000 in the region (the total number of plots was 1.5 million). And the average size of a holding had grown significantly, as the area of a new plot was often 1,000 square meters rather than the 600 that had been standard in Soviet times. In thirty-four of the thirty-nine districts (uezdy) the number of sadovody exceeded that of the local rural population. The “old” dachas were privatized (often with a reduction in the size of adjoining plots of land). The total number of urban families with some sort of second home in the Moscow oblast was around 1.65 million (75 percent were Muscovites; the rest were from smaller towns in the oblast).31 In St. Petersburg, it was estimated in 1997 that between 60 and 80 percent of families had some kind of landholding; the time spent there ranged from twenty-seven days annually to virtually the whole of the owners’ spare time.32 In Leningrad oblast in 1999, 2.5 million people went to the dacha every weekend; 500,000 lived at the dacha all through the summer.33 A 1993–94 survey conducted in seven Russian cities found that 24 percent of households owned a dacha (the proportion with some form of landholding would have been much greater). The garden-plot dacha was comfortably the most prevalent variety, forming just over half of the overall dacha population.34 The rural house, by contrast, had suffered a decline in popularity, as people aspired to build their own houses, both better equipped and more conveniently located.35 Overall, the number of owners of plots in the Russian Federation rose from 8.5 million at the start of land reform in 1991 to 15.1 million in 1997.36 In 1999 came the ultimate recognition of the centrality of the garden-plot dacha to the nation’s experience: a public holiday—Gardener’s Day (den’ sadovoda)—was instituted in its honor.37

Subsistence-oriented dacha life expanded most rapidly in the Moscow and Petersburg regions, but it was by no means limited to them. Towns and medium-sized cities had never had much need of the dacha concept or the out-of-town leisure it entailed. Most families had at least a small plot of land within easy reach of their apartment. But now even such modest plots were often reclassified as “dachas.”38 There was some regional variation in vocabulary: in the Urals, for example, a garden plot (with or without a house) tended to be called a sad (garden), while in the northwestern region of Russia it was likely to be referred to as a “dacha.”39 The word “dacha” seems to have made relatively few inroads into the Black Earth region and the south of Russia, where the urban populations ties to the land were rooted firmly in an alternative tradition. In the provincial city of Lipetsk, some 500 kilometers south of Moscow, local people commonly spoke of making trips not “to the dacha” (na dachu) but “to the garden” (na sad, instead of the neutral v sad), which suggests that they conceived of their plot of land neither as a dacha proper nor as a garden plot but as an independent agricultural landholding.

Post-Soviet Dachniki: Social Profile, Attitudes, Ways of Life