Summerfolk

Most dachas, however, fell between the extremes of solid, centrally heated kottedzh and 1960s garden shack. In the Moscow and Petersburg regions in the mid-1990s just over half of dacha owners had built their country houses on their own or with a small amount of help from hired workers. And the proportion of do-it-yourself dacha builders in smaller cities was even greater (in Moscow and Petersburg the inheritance figures were substantially higher).54 Building work, as in the Soviet period, was generally extremely time-consuming and physically demanding; it often involved felling timber and slowly and painfully extracting tree stumps from the marshy or wooded land that was allotted to the new settlements. When family resources permitted, owners would try to profit from the relaxation of Soviet-era restrictions to build themselves a slightly more spacious house.55 But many people who did not have time to build their dacha in the last years of the Soviet era found that after price liberalization they simply could not afford to do so. For aspiring dacha owners in the 1990s, timing was crucial: the people most advantaged were those who had time to take out loans and lay in supplies of building materials before January 1992. For those who were unable to take such action, dacha construction often became a long and frustrating slog. Even a very simple dwelling might take ten or fifteen years to complete. Some partially built houses were simply abandoned, their owners having lost all hope of finishing the job: in a reference to the economic crisis and currency devaluation of late summer 1998, these were commonly known as “August [1998] dachas.”56

A house near the Zelenogradskaia stop on the Moscow-Iaroslavl’ line, between Pushkino and Abramtsevo. Although this dacha is located in a garden settlement, its large and well-maintained lawn bespeaks a rejection of the Soviet agricultural imperative and a turn toward Anglo-American civilization. Only the turret betrays the owner’s Russianness.

A dacha at Mozhaiskoe. Contemporary dachniki frequently invoke the English saying “My home is my castle.”

Locals dubbed this dacha at Zelenogradskaia “the crematorium.”

Post-Soviet dachas had a rather basic level of home comforts. Research carried out in the mid-1990s suggested that just over half of dachas were equipped with gas—generally a ring with a cylinder—but only 5 percent had plumbing.57 The average floor area of a garden-plot dacha was a modest 29 square meters.58 Nor was the level of amenities in the settlement as a whole any better—especially given the size of settlements, which might reach that of a small regional center. For the 200,000 people crammed into Mshinskaia (110 kilometers from St. Petersburg) there were only ten policemen and one first aid brigade, and the nearest shop was 4 kilometers away. The result of the population compression that had taken place over the last fifteen years was, in the assessment of one journalist, an enormous open-air communal apartment.59

Distances, too, had grown enormously. In the 1960s, the dacha belt rarely extended more than 60 kilometers from the city; in the 1990s, however, families commonly went to the very end of a suburban rail line (around 120 kilometers). And areas for settlement were not often within easy reach of the railway: they might easily be as much as forty minutes’ walk away. The rise in car ownership has also done much to enable city dwellers to colonize broad territories between the radial railway lines. In 1993–94, 50 percent of people in the Moscow region were commuting 75 kilometers or more to the dacha, which represented no small investment of time, especially if buses and suburban trains were the only available means of transport. Distances in the Petersburg region were somewhat shorter, in provincial cities shorter still.

A post-Soviet garden-plot house at Krasnitsy. In June 1999, when this picture was taken, the house had been under construction for ten years.

This dacha at Mel’nichii Ruchei is a not untypical post-Soviet architectural hodgepodge; the “Beware of the dog” sign is a further reminder of contemporary realities.