Summerfolk

But going to the dacha is also regarded as a pleasurable activity, largely because of the lack of alternative forms of entertainment: “What is there to do at home here? Sit in front of the TV, I suppose? There people chat with one another in the evening, they’ll get together in the house, maybe have a barbecue, they’ll have a drink before supper, then they have a chat.”71 Life out of town gives rise to forms of sociability that often blur into mutual aid and support. Russians on their garden plots affirm the importance of “friendship” as they would in their apartments, but here they do so with an anti-urban emphasis: members of dacha communities see themselves as more people-centered, more in touch with their feelings, and better able to enjoy themselves than pampered city folk. Favors are simpler and delivered more immediately than in urban blat relationships. Networks are less circular, in the sense that people may return a favor directly to the person who has done one for them (for example, in the exchange of surplus produce at the end of the dacha season). But perhaps more important than actual services rendered and received is the broader sense of a community united by common interests: advice on seedlings shared with strangers on the train ride back to the city fosters a belief in the garden plot as the main experience that post-Soviet citizens hold in common.

Although Russians’ feeling of belonging (for better or worse) to a large garden-plot community is strong, just as striking is the satisfaction they gain from their own landholding. As Nancy Ries comments, although subsistence gardening is a grind, “the pride with which people displayed their gardens, their colorful anthropomorphizing of the fruits of their labors, and their dedication to this lifestyle signaled the symbolic value and identity they derived from these practices.”72 Pride is also attached to the dacha residence itself and to the domestic environment associated with it. Despite restrictions on design, Soviet citizens were able to exercise far more choice in the internal arrangement of their dachas than in the layout of their urban apartments. Apartments were the outcome of a protracted and impersonal allocation process, while dachas were the result of one’s own labors. Unsurprisingly, Soviet people were far more positively disposed toward their dachas—which in many cases they or their parents had built themselves—than toward their apartments. Dachas, in short, were the closest many Soviet citizens came to a private home, and brought a genuine improvement in their quality of life.73

But, although the contemporary Russian garden settlement richly deserves further anthropological investigation as an important, apparently antimodern alternative civilization, it should perhaps occasion not cultural celebration but profound regret as a symbol of the poverty and powerlessness of the bulk of Russia’s population even in the relatively prosperous major cities. In the words of Simon Clarke: “The dacha makes no economic sense at all, providing the most meagre of returns for an enormous amount of toil, but it is much more than a means of supplementing the family diet or of saving a few rubles. It is both a real and a symbolic source of security in a world in which nothing beyond one’s immediate grasp is secure.”74

BACK IN 1991, Gavriil Popov had seen the garden plot as a means of achieving suburbanization. He anticipated that people would sell their apartments in the city once they had built their houses (a land bank would be able to advance them up to 60 percent of the price of their apartment while construction of the new house was in progress). In a further optimistic prognosis, he saw Russia emulating America’s suburbanization:

the country will be in transition from a state reminiscent of America in 1929 or 1930 to that of America in the postwar era, when a house in the suburbs became the basic modern form of life for a person working in the city. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what the forgotten classics of Marxism-Leninism were thinking of when they reckoned on the fusion of the city and the countryside. What we ended up with was not fusion but extreme separation.75