Summerfolk

The most successful means of legitimization for dachniki was to stress the permanence of their dwelling and their serious, long-term commitment to it both as a home and as a landholding. In the nineteenth century, this commitment led some dachniki to adopt the model provided by the country estate; in the twentieth, especially since the war, the well-appointed peasant izba has also been the object of emulation. The occupier of such a dacha, in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth, thought of himself as a khoziain, as an owner whose legal right to his property were less significant than the moral right conferred by his gainful use of it. Like so much else in Russia, the dacha has been caught between Westernizing and self-Orientalizing discourses. In the process, over the last two hundred years it has tended to follow a curious cultural trajectory: on attaining prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, it was seen as imitating, for better or for worse (usually, of course, for worse), Western models of civilized and leisured exurban life; but by the late twentieth century, in many people’s understanding, it had come to be the repository of the national popular spirit (narodnost’). In this respect it can be seen as inheriting and then refashioning the cultural legacy of the elite country estate, whose aristocratic Westernism in the eighteenth century did not prevent it from later becoming the icon of a vanished national past. The usad’ba has long been championed as a crucible of Russian subjectivity and cultural activity; perhaps the time has come to recognize that for the last 150 years the dacha has played this role more intensively, extensively, and interestingly.

The history of the dacha can be seen as a whole not only in cultural terms but also in more tangible ways. Underlying the dacha form of settlement has been a set of broad geographical factors: countries with harsh winters and short, hot summers and plenty of space (such as Russia, Finland, and Canada) are more likely to opt for apartment living for eight or nine months of the year and log cabins for the remainder. And then there is the public-health aspect: urban Russians have mostly lived in crowded and unsanitary conditions, and an outlet into the greenbelt has commonly been considered essential to preserve mental and bodily well-being. The compromise solution of suburbanization has never been successful because of the prevailing politics of land sale and distribution and the retarded development of transport in Russian cities. Equally, we should recall the simple fact that Russia, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a country subjected to a high degree of political centralization whose elites and subelites had an overriding centripetal attraction to the metropolitan civilizations of St. Petersburg and (latterly) Moscow. Perhaps the greatest irony of Russia’s exurban history is that, at bottom, the dacha does not represent estrangement from the city (or even ambivalence toward it) but rather is a way for people to guarantee themselves a foothold in the metropolis; a means of saving the money, gathering the strength, or (more recently) growing the food to sustain their next prolonged encounter with the big city.