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.
The film was deservedly admired for its fine acting and high production values. But, like so much of Mikhalkov’s work, it aims for rather more than that, implying nothing less than an interpretation of modern Russian history and society. The broad-shouldered, potent, heroic, nationally rooted, ultimately martyred man of the people (Kotov) stands in opposition to the opportunist, cowardly, villainous, slightly built, childless cosmopoli-tan intelligent (Mitia). Kotov’s manly qualities are in further contrast to the almost painfully Chekhovian family into which he has entered by marriage. His in-laws are as cultured, sociable, high-strung, and charmingly set in their ways as any Gaev or Astrov viewed with the softening hindsight of revolution and state terrorism. As one critic noted, “It’s as if the old dacha folk of Burnt by the Sun are the heroes of Mechanical Piano1 who’ve grown older and survived to the 30s.”2
The case of Burnt by the Sun provides a fitting epilogue for this book, and not just in the sense that it offers a post-Soviet perspective on the dacha phenomenon. Rather more significantly, it illustrates the ease with which the dacha, over the past two centuries of its history, has been overlaid with social and cultural mythmaking. Mikhalkov could be accused of employing a kind of artistic sleight of hand in his portrayal of 1930s exurbia. For, as he himself has admitted, the dacha lifestyle depicted in his film is drawn from his recollections of a childhood spent in the milieu of the Soviet cultural elite. It does not necessarily have much to do with the ways of the prerevolutionary artistic intelligentsia.3 Here, as in many other texts mentioned in this book, the single image of the dacha is made to bear a considerable cultural burden—in this case, to elide disjoined social and cultural worlds and to evoke a transhistorical Russianness that was in Mikhalkov’s view severely damaged but not destroyed by the evil furies of the early Soviet period. The evil is conveniently externalized and objectified in the demonic Mitia, while Russianness resides in the unchanging rhythms of exurban life.
But the fact that Mikhalkov was tempted to make two such radically different eras coalesce, besides leading us to question the director’s personal motives and wider ideological purposes, illustrates a complementary point that is also central to this book: much as we may want to drag the dacha out of the cultural responses it elicits, in practice it always remains mired in them. And this in turn suggests a large potential difficulty: how are we to disentangle social and cultural history? Or, to put it still more simply, how can we know things reliably about the history of a phenomenon such as the dacha?
To these questions I can offer two broad answers. The first is practicaclass="underline" the only way to begin to bridge the gap between social and cultural approaches is to consult as wide a range of sources as possible. One of the advantages of studying an everyday phenomenon is that it leaves traces—small, perhaps, but discernible—in many places. The second answer is theoreticaclass="underline" there is in fact often no need to disentangle social and cultural history. Cultural meanings do not float in some asocial stratosphere but are themselves tied to and articulated in social relations and practices. In no field of social history would this insight seem to have more obvious relevance than in the study of people’s dwellings and habitats.Housing is so closely tied to people’s identities and to their place in the community that it would be deeply unsatisfactory to make a study of bricks and mortar without inquiring as to people’s subjective understanding of their dwellings. Many anthropologists have recognized the significance of the dwelling unit by making the household, rather than the family, the starting point for their work.4 In this light, the pronounced subjectivity of many of the sources cited in this book should be seen not as a problem but as a small contribution toward a solution.
Yet this approach poses problems for inquiry into the historical long term; it is unclear, for example, how it accounts for and analyzes change over time. One consequence of the mixing of social and cultural history is the difficulty of establishing chronological cut-off points. Any history that is at least as much cultural as it is social will tend to undermine clear-cut periodizations, to subvert simplistic notions of historical causality, to stress continuity over rupture, and to divert attention from a historiography fixated on certain key dates and schematic arguments associated with them. In Russian history, of course, the biggest landmark is 1917, and the most schematic arguments concern the nature of the Soviet system.
All this is not to belittle the enormity of the Bolshevik coup as a factor in Russia’s subsequent history or even to assert that it is not a watershed of some kind in the history of the dacha. In one sense, the October Revolution divides the present study neatly into two: it brought into being a society in which large and increasing numbers of urban office workers grew food on allotments or dacha plots; before 1917, by contrast, they did so only rarely. The extent of food gardening varied greatly through the Soviet period, and until the 1960s the plots of land where vegetables were grown were not generally called dachas; yet the Soviet takeover fundamentally rerouted Russian exurbia/suburbia toward the function of subsistence. In the 1980s and 1990s the dacha fused in many people’s minds with the allotment shack.
Nor is 1917 the only date that can be used to punctuate a history of the dacha. My chapter titles imply and my argument in many places makes explicit that this history can meaningfully be divided into successive phases, even if they invariably overlap and remain blurred around the edges.
But it is equally possible to identify aspects of the dacha’s history that are common to several epochs; to show that cultural meanings and social practices could straddle historical divides, even if people and buildings very often did not. Most obviously, for the last two hundred years the dacha has been easy prey for stereotypes that have been largely negative and have many common features. Reasons are not hard to find: Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be called a consumer society only with qualifications immeasurably greater than are necessary in the case of Western Europe, and so the discursive space available for leisure and its appurtenances was much smaller than in England or France.5 And the dacha’s public image was always colored by Russian social cir-cumstances. The tendency to see dachas as emblematic of shallowness and vanity, of rootlessness and mercantilism, has been remarkably enduring ever since summer houses were identified as an essentially Petersburg phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. The dacha was easily accommodated in an emerging bipolar typology that contrasted the cold bureaucratic granite of the new capital with the warm familial earthiness of the old. In time this contrast weakened, as Moscow acquired a prominent dacha tradition of its own, but it set the tone for much subsequent commentary on exurbia. The drafty hut made out of “barge timber,” first exposed by Petersburg journalists in the 1840s, was a regular fallback for their later colleagues.