Summerfolk

This garden settlement (Zelenogradskaia) was established as a garden cooperative in 1987, though dacha construction did not get under way until two or three years later. Although members of the cooperative were given equal shares of land, ten years of mainly post-Soviet life have brought striking variation in the ways people use their plots.

The liberal land policy of 1990–92 had the great virtue of giving millions of Soviet citizens a plot of their own, but it also illustrated the problems associated with liberal property legislation in the absence of adequate means of enforcing property rights. Disputes between neighbors were frequently provoked by the unlawful seizure of land by one party.60 Since 1991 exurbanites have been plagued by burglars, just like earlier dachniki. A newspaper feature in 1992 told of residents who had taken the law into their own hands after discovering thieves on their land. While admitting that turning a rifle on someone for stealing a few cucumbers might be excessive, the article argued that such cases would continue to be common until state law enforcement was more adequate.61 In 1999, people with long memories of dacha life were asserting that such a crime wave had not been seen since the hungry year of 1948. Thieves would take anything, from televisions to bed linen, doors, and window surrounds; metal items were a particular favorite, as they could be handed in for money at recycling points.62

A further problem concerned not the enforcement of the right to property but the nature of this right. In December 1992 a federal law on housing specifically indicated that houses built on dacha and garden plots were to be covered by privatization legislation, but until new legislation in 1997 the procedure involved was not regularized, so that local authorities were free to impose their own bureaucratic procedures (with corresponding charges).63 The law on ownership was appallingly cumbersome; often it was impossible for people to sell a small plot without actually taking a loss on the transaction. And the legal distinctions between the various forms of gardening association—association (tovarishchestvo) cooperative, society (obshchestvo)—were not at all clear.64 One woman observed:

Our cooperative fell apart, of course, and it was only after it was gone that we understood that in some ways it had made life simpler. For example, passing on a dacha used to be a formality: all you had to do was write a letter to the administration: “I request that my share [pai] be transferred to my son/niece/aunt.” The meeting voted unanimously in favor and the aunt became a member of the cooperative—in other words, a dacha owner in disguise. Now you have to pay enormous inheritance taxes and people say it’s better to sell the dacha to your auntie—that way apparently the taxes are lower. It’s not clear who is supposed to repair the roads now—and there’s a pile of other little things that the cooperative administration used to deal with.

The government, for all that it had been quick (especially on the eve of elections) to promise special measures in support of garden associations,65 had been slow to make the necessary infrastructural provisions, to reduce the tax burden on growers, and to provide a stable legal framework for ownership.66

In short, Russia had a long way to go before it could create in dacha settlements the ”moral order” of the suburb identified by one urban anthropologist.67 “Moral minimalism”—that is, the avoidance of conflict and a reluctance to exercise social control against one’s neighbors—may be the foundation of the order that prevails in many of the suburbs now inhabited by more than half of the U.S. population, but Russian dacha communities function rather differently. The American developments are characterized by fluid social relations (not least because of the much greater social and geographical mobility of their residents) and low levels of social integration.