Summerfolk

65. Note, e.g., the presidential decree “O gosudarstvennoi podderzhke sadovodov, ogorodnikov i vladel’tsev lichnykh podsobnykh khoziaistv” (7 June 1996), in Dachnoe khoziaistvo, 45.

66. An early discussion of the issues (which centers on the implications of the RSFSR Land Code for occupiers of garden plots) is to be found in “Nadezhnuiu zashchitu pravam sadovodov,” Dachniki: Vash dom, sad i ogorod, no. 11 (1991), 3.

67. M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York, 1988).

68. See the headline exhortation “Leto—eto otdykh, leto—eto trud,” Dachnaia gazeta (Stavropol’), no. 11 (1992), 1; and M. Nikolaeva, “Pervaia zapoved’—khranit’ i vozdelyvat’ sad,” Dachnyi sezon: Gazeta dlia ural’skikh sadovodov i ogorodnikov (Cheliabinsk), no. 9 (1998), 1.

69. This attitude is nicely captured by Nancy Ries, with specific reference to the Russian language: Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 30.

70. Irina Chekhovskikh, interview no. 5, p. 7 (see “Note on Sources”).

71. Ibid., interview no. 1, p. 6.

72. Ries, Russian Talk, 133–35. A more in-depth anthropological account of the post-Soviet dacha is R. Hervouet, “‘Etre à la datcha’: Eléments d’analyse issus d’une recherche exploratoire,” in Le Belarus: L’etat de l’exception, ed. F. Depelteau and A. Lacassagne (Sainte-Foy, Québec, forthcoming). This article draws attention to the subjective, as opposed to economic, motivations that underlie the dacha habit, and to the opportunities it brings for individual agency and self-affirmation. Thanks to Ronan Hervouet for letting me see his work in advance of publication.

73. These points are argued well in A. Vysokovskii, “Will Domesticity Return?” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. W. C. Brumfield and B. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993).

74. Clarke et al., “Russian Dacha.”

75. Gavriil Popov, interviewed in “Khod konem?” Dachniki: Vash dom, sad i ogorod, no. 1 (1991), 2.

76. “Limonov khochet razbit’ divan Oblomova,” Smena, 5 Dec. 1996.

Conclusion

As postcommunist Russia began to inventory the perquisites of the Soviet elite, the dacha emerged as one of the main accessories of the privileged class. There was no more high-profile commentary on this subject than Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun (1994). In its mise-en-scène this film is a Chekhovian ensemble piece: a family assembles at the dacha, but soon the air is thick with tension as long-standing animosities and disagreements are discharged into the atmosphere. Conflicts—along social, generational, and emotional fault lines—threaten vaguely but persistently to erupt into acrimoniousskandal.

But this is no cherry orchard. Rather, it is a dacha owned by a family from the old Moscow intelligentsia—the older generation remembers receiving here such illustrious guests as Boris Chaliapin and Sergei Rachmaninov—which has now been incorporated into a settlement for artists, writers, performers, and musicians (identified by the acronym KhLAM, which spells a Russian word meaning “junk”). The daughter of the family, Marusia, has married an Old Bolshevik and Civil War hero, Kotov, a rough-hewn national celebrity. This domestic milieu provides the setting for the entrance of Mitia, a former sweetheart of Marusia’s, who, after compromising himself by siding with the Whites, was lured into becoming a Bolshevik agent. Now, in 1936, he is working for the NKVD and, as is revealed in the dénouement, has been given the task of arresting Kotov, who is to fall victim to the next wave of the Terror.