Summerfolk

Unsurprisingly, then, we can see a certain unity in the dacha’s social constituency since the early nineteenth century. Summer houses, both owned and (more commonly) rented, have tended to be the attribute of a section of Russian society that is not much talked about: urban nonproletarians. As this rather clumsy formulation suggests, there is no easy way of conceptually isolating this group. In Russia the conditions necessary for the creation of a “middle class”—and they are social, economic, and institutional as well as cultural—have never come together. One of the all too justified commonplaces of historical analysis has been that in Russia the urban middle strata remained disunited and lacking in self-consciousness. For the last century and a half the only thing they have shared, to my knowledge, is the exurban habit; if the tag “middle-class” refers to anyone in Russia, it is to the dachnik. Not that this observation can bring us much moral or intellectual succor. One could have no stronger confirmation of the enduring social weakness and political marginalization of this putative middle than the fact that so many of its members are called, every Friday night or Saturday morning, to don rubber boots and depart for their plot of land. In the modern dacha, if we care to look closely enough, we find much of what has made Russia in the last century so incredibly resilient and so disastrously dysfunctional. What it does not do, unfortunately, is suggest how the symbiotic relationship between these two characteristics can ever be broken.

1. A reference to Neokonchennaia p’esa dlia mekhanicheskogo pianino (1976), an earlier Mikhalkov film set at the dacha that was loosely based on works by Chekhov.

2. A. Arkhangel’skii, “Desnitsa i shuitsa N.S. Mikhalkova,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 3 (1995), 5

3. As Mikhalkov commented in an interview, “Burnt by the Sun is in many ways bound up with personal feelings, with the image of my home”: ibid., 10. He discusses his upbringing in an interview quoted extensively in his father’s memoirs: S. V. Mikhalkov, Ot i do. . . (Moscow, 1997), 387–94. For a critique of Mikhalkov’s easy equating of Chekhovian and Soviet intelligentsias, see, in the same issue of Iskusstvo kino, Iu. Bogomolov, “Kontsy v vodu—kompleksy naruzhu . . .”

4. See D. Birdwell-Pheasant and D. Lawrence-Zúñiga, eds., House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe(Oxford, 1999).

5. On the importance of recognizing local variations in the extent and nature of consumption, see C. Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” AHR 104 (1999), 1497–511.

6. My thanks to Liz Leach for this justifiably free version.

7. S. Marshak, “Dachnik-oblichitel’” (1958), Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow, 1968–72), 5:530.

Note on Sources

INTERVIEWS

My account of postwar dachas is informed by numerous informal ethnographic interviews, a few of which are mentioned in the text and notes. My other source of oral history is a set of ten in-depth interviews conducted by Irina Chekhovskikh in St. Petersburg and Novaia Ladoga as part of her now completed dissertation on post-Soviet survival strategies. Wherever her transcripts have been used, she is cited accordingly.

UNPUBLISHED MEMOIRS

In 1999 I ran “dacha biography competitions” in newspapers in Moscow and St. Petersburg (respectively, Vechernii klub and Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti). I invited readers to send in their reminiscences of exurban life and offered a cash prize as incentive. I collected twenty texts in this way and followed up the longer and more interesting entries in face-to-face interviews. I draw on these dacha memoirs in Chapters 6 and 7.

ARCHIVES

The main archival holdings consulted were:

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF)

f. R-5446 Sovet Ministrov SSSR

f. R-5451 Vsesoiuznyi tsentral’nyi sovet professional’nykh soiuzov

f. R-9542 Khoziaistvennoe upravlenie upravleniia delami Soveta Ministrov SSSR Leningradskii oblastnoi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv vg. Vyborge (LOGAV)

f. R-2907 Leningradskii okruzhnoi otdel mestnogo khoziaistva

f. R-2946 Otdel mestnogo khoziaistva pargolovskogo raiispolkoma

f. R-3731 Upravlenie stroitel’nogo kontrolia Lodeinopol’skogo okrispolkoma