Summerfolk

So far the picture painted of publicly expressed Russian attitudes toward the dacha over the last two centuries has been a dismal one. This is an important part of the story but by no means all of it. Dachas have brought enormous improvements in the standard of living of Russian urbanites and been valued accordingly. They have been treated as a legitimate material aspiration, as a link to a deeply rooted rural way of life, and as the embodiment of a virtuous domesticity. Like other forms of habitation in other cultures, they have often been tied to notions of cultural authenticity and given a national coloring. North Americans, for example, have calmed their social anxieties—provoked mainly by the suspicion that they are threatened by urban disorder—by finding a reassuring smalltown domesticity in the sprawling suburban zones around the major cities.4 The dacha has similarly been invested with positive features of the Russian self-image: easygoing sociability, open-ended and vodka-soaked hospitality, rejection or ignorance of superficial niceties, appetite for physical toil, intuitive feeling for the natural world, and emotional freedom. Despite regular harassment from central and local authorities, dachas not only survived the Soviet period but—eventually—thrived. In the postwar era they came to be highly valued for the connection they created to a rural way of life that many Soviet urbanites or their parents had only recently relinquished; more prosaically, they gave people a way of supplementing the meager provisions available through the state distribution system. The final years of the Soviet era, though they were times of scarcity and anxiety for the urban population, were also the dacha’s finest hour, as the out-of-town habit became truly a mass phenomenon. A survey of the early 1990s suggested that 60 percent of the inhabitants of major cities had access to plots (usually called “dachas”) where they grew their own vegetables.5

The concept of a second home out of town is by no means unique to Russia, but nowhere else has it been so deeply embedded in cultural memory and social practice. The dacha has been the Russian way of negotiating the stresses of urbanization and modernization, of creating a welcoming halfway house between metropolis and countryside. Elsewhere in Europe, to be sure, the stresses of modernization were hardly negligible, but in Russia they were extraordinarily acute, both before and (especially) after the Revolution. Although the laboring subordinate classes of Russia’s major cities have been subjected to far more than their fair share of poor housing, unsanitary conditions, and punitive administrative attention, white-collar folk have not escaped these blights either. They have been strikingly unable to create the kind of “middle-class” suburban enclaves to which their Western European counterparts were retreating from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Under these circumstances, the dacha became a refuge from urban squalor and a bridgehead of domesticity. Although, as is often remarked, there is no word in Russian for “privacy,” that does not mean that Russians have been uninterested in such a condition. Russian major cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were full of people living in overcrowded and uncomfortable conditions, constantly mindful of surveillance by their landlord, their neighbors, the local housing committee, or the NKVD, and with little long-term control over their domestic environment. Yet, even in the formal absence of private property, twentieth-century Russians were able to feel that they “owned” their dachas. So the dacha, we might posit, has provided a substitute home: a house occupied by a single family, an island of enclosure in a sea of exposure.