Summerfolk

In the mid-1990s the suburbanization of Moscow began to conform a little more closely to the Western model. Very little effort had been made in the first half of the decade to keep the greenbelt intact; even unspoiled park areas in the city’s closer environs had been given over by feckless or corrupt bureaucrats to development as garden or dacha settlements.46 In addition, the ever-expanding agglomeration seemed to be changing its character somewhat. For the first time ever, significant numbers of Muscovites started to exchange their centrally located apartments for small houses on the outskirts of the city. And even those who stayed put for the time being were more ready to contemplate such a move. The ambiguous status of many contemporary dacha settlements was confirmed by a survey conducted in the summer of 1997, which found that 40 percent of respondents regarded the dacha as “true country life,” 55 percent as “suburb” (prigorod), and 5 percent as a no-man’s-land.47

Housing construction in the private sector was encouraged by a presidential decree of 1992, and in 1993 the Moscow city administration announced a plan for the development of the suburban zone.48 Boris Yeltsin’s decree on land reform of October 1993 established a basis for a rudimentary land market. Restrictions and gray areas remained—it was specified, for example, that land use was not allowed to change after a transaction unless “special circumstances” obtained—but they affected the dacha market relatively little. Local authorities were concerned principally to prevent the sale of large chunks of agricultural land for nonagricultural purposes; small-scale transactions involving allotments and garden plots were unlikely to fall foul of the regulations (although they might still be bureaucratically complicated, especially where land hitherto owned “collectively”—notably in cooperatives—was at issue).49 Comparative analysis of the housing market in 1994 and 1996 revealed a great increase in the number of advertisements, a slight fall in prices, and a much greater differentiation of prices according to location and distance from Moscow (the most expensive regions were to the west of Moscow, in the directions of Minsk and Kiev). On the eve of the ruble’s devaluation in the summer of 1998, monthly rents in the Moscow region ranged from two hundred to several thousand dollars.50 But newspaper advertisements were only part of the story: in time-honored fashion, rental tended to be arranged by personal acquaintance or through fixers; real estate agents were reluctant to involve themselves in the short-term dacha market.51