42. Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod,” 55.
43. Simagin, “Ekonomiko-geograficheskie aspekty,” chap. 2.
44. For a definition of the Soviet city as an “entirely separate category of urban settlement,” see R. A. French, “The Individuality of the Soviet City,” in The Sodalist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy, ed. French and F. E. I. Hamilton (Chichester, 1979), esp. 101–2. For a succinct “typology of socio-economic and environmental differentiation in the larger Soviet city,” see D. M. Smith, “The Socialist City,” in Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies, ed. G. Andrusz, M. Harloe, and I. Szelenyi (Oxford, 1996), esp. 82–84.
45. On the steady erosion of the greenbelt in the 1970s and 1980s, see Colton, Moscow, 468–85.
46. For an early example, see A. Neverov, “Chem pakhnet na Medvezh’ikh ozerakh?” Moskovskii komsomolets, 15 Sept. 1990, 2. For an inside account of the boom in the dacha plot market, I am indebted to an unpublished memoir by Vadim Kulinchenko, who between 1988 and 1991 served on the ispolkom of a settlement in an area that was especially attractive to the unofficial property developers of late Soviet Russia. According to Kulinchenko, in these years the dacha “was a matter not of relaxation in the country but purely of property. The local authorities were showered with blows from everyone up to the very highest levels of state power . . . , and in the localities people buckled.”
47. I am grateful to Rachael Mann for showing me her B.A. dissertation, “Moscow’s Suburbia or Exurbia?” (University of Glasgow, 1998), where these results are laid out. My own interviews and questionnaire results suggest a similarly mixed picture.
48. See J. Bater, Russia and the Post-Soviet Scene: A Geographical Perspective (London, 1996), 150–51.
49. See Wegren, Agriculture and the State, esp. 163–64.
50. O. Kostiukova, “Dachi sovetskikh pisatelei po-prezhnemu v tsene,” Segodnia, 8 June 1998.
51. D. Zhelobanov and A. Grigor’ev, “Dachniki i dachevladel’tsy ishchut drug druga bez posrednikov,” Delovoi Peterburg, 26 May 1999.
52. The statistical comparison is made in Struyk and Angelici, “Russian Dacha Phenomenon,” 247.
53. A. Aleksandrova, “Novoe dachnoe myshlenie,” Obshchaia gazeta, 31 July 6 Aug. 1997. Note also glossy lifestyle magazines such as Dom & dacha (put out by the Burda publishing house from 1995), and the dacha furniture advertised at <http://www.dos.ic.sci-nnov.ru/gorodez/english/str31.htm>. The commitment of New Russians to what they probably thought of as a manorial way of life at the dacha is suggested by their common insistence on wood-fired heating rather than the much more low-maintenance gas (thanks to Judith Pallot for this observation).
54. Struyk and Angelici, “Russian Dacha Phenomenon,” 243.
55. In 1999, for example, dacha designs were displayed at an exhibition in Saratov (a selection of the designs were posted at <http://www.expo.saratov.ru/rism>).
56. On abandoned plots in Leningrad oblast, see R. Maidachenko, “Est’ svobodnye uchastki,” SPb ved, 27 Apr. 1999.
57. Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod,” 75–76.
58. Struyk and Angelici, “Russian Dacha Phenomenon,” 240.
59. Nikiforova, “Mesto pod solntsem,” 2.
60. “Iuridicheskaia konsul’tatsiia,” Dachnyi kaleidoskop, no. 7–8 (1992), 1.
61. “Voina na ogorodakh,” Dachnyi kaleidoskop, no. 9–10 (1992), 1.
62. Vera Popova, “Zona vne zakona,” Chas u dachi, no. 2, supplement to Peterburgskii chas pik, 6 May 1999.
63. “Ob osnovakh federal’noi zhilishchnoi sfery” (24 Dec. 1992), sec. 2, art. 9, in Dachnoe khoziaistvo, 80; N. Kalinin, “Dacha dolzhna byt’ ‘V zakone,’” Trud, 11 Nov. 1997.
64. A. Litvinov, “Kommunalki na bolote,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 8 Aug. 1997, 8.
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.