Summerfolk

In this settlement near Pavlovo, Leningrad oblast, can be seen some of the anomalies of the contemporary dacha. The attire and demeanor of the owners of this plot might seem to mark them out as typical ex-Soviet garden toilers, yet their house is immeasurably grander than anything conceivable in a Soviet garden settlement. (The size of the house turns out to have a simple explanation: the settlement was established under the auspices of a local brick factory, so good-quality building materials were both plentiful and cheap.) By the time this picture was taken (April 1999), the social composition of the settlement had diversified greatly since the early days, when all plots had been distributed to members of the factory’s workforce. Several of the original recipients had lacked the resources to finish building their houses, and so had sold their plots to New Russians. But the couple in the foreground had avoided such material difficulties and insisted that they would maintain this house as their dacha, though it would clearly serve very well as a permanent dwelling.

But, as we have seen, these “garden settlements” had very little in common with leafy suburbia in an American understanding. Far from liberating the Russian people from the yoke of socialism by fostering the values of individual initiative, civic association, and private property, the mass dacha of the 1990s may be seen to have had the opposite effect—of reinstituting reliance on cash-free mutual aid and primitive forms of subsistence farming. In support of this view we can cite an opinion just as forthright as Popov’s—that of Eduard Limonov, the eternal enfant terrible of contemporary Russian literature:

The dacha turns a Russian into an idiot, it takes away his strength, makes him impotent. Any connection with property tends to make people submissive, cowardly, dense, and greedy. And when millions of Russian people are attached to dacha plots and spend their time planting carrots, potatoes, onions, and so on, we can’t expect any changes in society.76

How are we to square two such radically opposed views? It is hard to disagree with Limonov that the survival strategies that millions of Russians are forced to adopt place severe limits on their political and economic activism. Yet, although Popov’s assessment seems far too sanguine, it does identify a widely felt householder impulse that Limonov, with his intransigent hostility to property, cannot appreciate.

Even so, it does seem possible to pull these two dacha pundits together and generate a number of paradoxical hybrid descriptions. Thus contemporary dacha settlements may be seen as a symptom of the provincialization of city life: in a reversal of modernizing trends, the inhabitants of major industrial centers are opting for the smallholding way of life that has for centuries prevailed in the Russian small town. Or alternatively, the dacha boom can be taken as evidence of the peasantization of Russia’s “middle class” (a thick stratum of society defined merely by the fact that it is likely neither to starve nor, by the standards that prevail west of Brest, to achieve a remotely acceptable level of prosperity). And finally, dacha sprawl is, to coin a phrase, a form of shanty exurbanization. That is to say, it is driven both by the urge to flee the expanding city and set up an independent community in a rural setting (the exurbanizing impulse) and by the imperative to provide for one’s basic needs in the absence of adequate legal protection and infrastructural provision (the shanty predicament).

The truth, however, is that no single description will capture the diversity of forms of settlement and habitation that go under the name of “dacha” in post-Soviet Russia; nor will it adequately encompass the range of motivations that propel dachniki out of town each summer weekend; nor, finally, can it serve as an accurate guide to the future. All of which suggests that the dacha will remain culturally as well as horticulturally productive for a while yet.

1. The idea of “socialist suburbanization” is borrowed from Iu. Simagin, “Ekonomiko-geograficheskie as-pekty suburbanizatsii v moskovskom stolichnom regione” (dissertation, Moscow, 1997).