Stringent official policies were to a large and increasing extent ineffectual, and therefore tended both to discredit themselves and to transfer the real elaboration of policy to the local level (where, as we have seen, considerable negotiation went on among individual dachniki, settlements, sponsor organizations, and agents of the state). They also strengthened the self-organizing resolve of dacha communities. One woman recounted how members of her garden cooperative (set up in 1957 and located fifty-five kilometers from Moscow) pooled their resources to buy essential building materials, then drew lots to determine who would get the best logs. Grigorii Kravchenko recalled that when someone applied to join the cooperative of which he was then brigade leader, the first question asked was: “What will you do for the cooperative?” New members were, in other words, expected to place their contacts or expertise at the disposal of the settlement as a whole. In return, they would benefit from everyone else’s know-how and access to particular goods and services.
Communal self-help practices, along with the shared difficulties they were designed to overcome, bound together garden settlements more effectively than any collectivist ideology and turned them into a new form of community with its own set of values and established models of behavior (not to say stereotypes). Dacha folk were acquiring a cultural prominence they had not enjoyed earlier in the Soviet period.
Dachas as a Sociocultural Phenomenon in the Late Soviet Period
By the 1970s, dachas had grudgingly been accepted in public discourse as a fact of life. Summer houses—both owned and rented—were a crucial part of the routine for millions of urban families. It was estimated that one-quarter of people in Moscow and Leningrad used dachas, and that in Leningrad oblast alone city dwellers paid out between 25 and 30 million rubles to private dacha landlords. A journalist who cited these figures concluded with a rhetorical flourish: “So what does all this mean—am I for dachas or against them? Well, this is one of those cases when you can’t say yes straight out, nor can you say no. I should rather give the reply that most people gave me: So what do you suggest instead of dachas?”105 This was a serious question for Soviet urban planners and regional geographers, especially after the introduction in the second half of the 1960s of the two-day weekend, which suddenly gave Soviet citizens significantly more leisure time.106
From the 1970s on, an important source of dachas for Moscow residents was rural houses bought or inherited from relatives: their acquisition was made possible by the increasing depopulation of certain rural sections of Moscow oblast (mainly those lying between the main railway lines and hence accessible only with some difficulty). One great advantage of the village house was that the attached land might be greater (up to 1,500 square meters, instead of the regulation 600 for garden associations). At the start of the 1980s, 15 percent of houses in rural areas of Moscow oblast were dachas belonging to inhabitants of Moscow and other cities. Urbanites who did not have a dacha of their own and could not afford to build one were catered to by a widespread (if semi-illicit) housing market that operated throughout the 1960s and 1970s: villagers would rent out their homes for the summer, without, of course, declaring this income to the Soviet tax collector. Muscovites who rented dachas in the 1960s and 1970s recall that such houses had to be booked as early as January or February, such was the demand. The accommodations varied enormously, from single rooms to whole houses, from the simplest of rural dwellings to dachas proper.107
The Moscow region was far ahead of the rest of the country in respect to exurban life. By the 1960s, despite restrictive legislation, out-of-town summer dwellings had become a genuine institution for the capital city.108 Traffic between city and surrounding areas grew enormously: in 1935, half a million Muscovites might leave the city for the day on a weekend in summer; by 1967, this figure was pushing up toward 2.9 million. Of these people, approximately 450,000 were visiting their own dachas, while a further 400,000 were renting accommodations from the rural population.109 The garden-plot drive steadily gained momentum through the postwar decades. A study conducted in the 1970s found that garden settlements had developed intensively in the 1950s and 1960s along all the main railway lines out of Moscow (except the Iaroslavl’ line, which, as the first to be electrified, had been colonized by dacha settlers in the 1930s), and that garden cooperatives had now begun to spring up around smaller towns in Moscow oblast.110 By 1980 there were 1,897 garden associations and 210,000 plots of land in Moscow oblast; for dacha cooperatives the equivalent figures were 256 and 20,000.111 Regulations concerning the construction of summer dwellings and outbuildings had been significantly relaxed since the Khrushchev period.112 And the garden plot became still more dacha-like in 1981 with the introduction of legislation that gave the prime inheritance claim in garden cooperatives to blood relatives.113
By this time, too, the authentic dacha-plot dacha and the upstart garden-plot dacha had begun to merge in people’s understanding, even if the former retained a higher status. Many of my informants date a change in linguistic usage (“dacha” denoting both dacha proper and garden plot) to the 1960s, although it seems it became near-universal only in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The inclusion of garden-plot houses under the conceptual umbrella of “dacha” was suggestive of a new, more domestically minded attitude toward modest exurban landholdings; it implied a lifestyle as well as a commitment to toil in the vegetable patches. Dachas (of whichever type) were a rare opportunity for Soviet citizens to enjoy de facto private ownership of immovable property. The ability to overcome the problems thrown up by the shortage economy brought with it, moreover, a healthy rise in social status: the owner of a dacha was a person who “knew how to live.” The achievement of post-Stalin dachniki was all the greater given that in general they did not bring in workmen even for the more specialized jobs: the members of dacha and garden cooperatives tended to do all the building themselves. In fact, for two generations of Soviet men, the ability to construct and equip the family dacha was an important means of self-validation. It also enabled them to measure themselves against their peers: given that the size, shape, and design of the house were restricted by legislation, “good” dachas would be distinguished from “bad” dachas not by the number of floors or rooms but by how the windows had been fitted or the cement laid. One St. Petersburg man, born in 1933, recalled in the late 1990s the satisfaction he had gained from joining a garden cooperative relatively late in life (at the age of fifty):