112. A. Denisov, “Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo,” Ekonomika sel’skogo khoziaistva, no. 4 (1978), 125. According to this article, garden plot occupiers in the RSFSR were allowed to build summer houses with solid-fuel heating of between 12 and 25 square meters in “useful area” with a terrace of up to 10 square meters; the outbuilding could be up to 15 square meters, and rabbits and chickens could be kept there. This does not mean, of course, that official attitudes were by any means laissez-faire in the 1970s. There was still the occasional sally against garden settlements as hotbeds of private property and the unofficial economy. But it is perhaps significant that a crude example of this genre (K. Kozhevnikova, “Sad za gorodom,” LG, 10 Nov. 1976, 11) met a response from more than 150 irritated readers, some of whose letters were published the following year (ibid., 26 Jan. 1977, 11).
113. Iaroshenko, “Spory o chlenstve v sadovodcheskikh tovarishchestvakh.”
114. Irina Chekhovskikh, interview no. 4 (see “Note on Sources”). The involvement of men in home repairs and in cultivation of the “personal subsidiary farming plot” was noted by Soviet sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s: see L. Gordon and E. Klopov, Man after Work (Moscow, 1975), 91.
115. V. Zikunov, “Kondratova dacha,” in his Rodinskie kolodtsy: Rasskazy (Krasnoiarsk, 1990), 41, 44
116. Ibid., 42.
117. These quotations are taken from another piece of standard-issue late Soviet fiction: T. Nikolaeva, “Prodaetsia dacha,” in her Na malen’koi stantsii: Povesti i rasskazy (Gor’kii, 1987), 114 and 94, respectively.
118. Examples include G. Popov, “Dacha” (1965), in his Gusi-lebedi: Rasskazy (Minsk, 1968), and A. Chernousov, “Vtoroi dom,” Nash sovremennik, no. 1 (1983), 3–97.
119. On the counterposing of dachniki and permanent residents, see V. Lukashevich, “Zimniaia dacha” (1964), in his Doroga cherez zarosli: Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow, 1972); Chernousov, “Vtoroi dom”; N. Kozhevnikova, “Dacha: Povest’,” Oktiabr’, no. 12 (1983); G. Shergova, “Zakolochennye dachi,” Novyi mir, no. 3 (1978), 73–133; Trifonov, “Starik”; V. Nasushchenko, “Dachnik Iakovlev,” in his Belyi svet: Rasskazy (Leningrad, 1988). Chernousov, Kozhevnikova, and Trifonov wind up their stories by announcing the imminent demolition of the dacha settlement in question.
120. O. Pavlovskii, “Srochno prodaetsia dacha,” in his Srochno prodaetsia dacha: Povesti (Kaliningrad, 1989), 7.
121. Ibid., 25.
122. Ibid., 63.
123. Chernousov, “Vtoroi dom,” 90.
124. Two contrasting treatments of the theme are I. Davydov, “Dacha v Malakhovke,” in his Devushka moego druga (Saratov, 1965), where the urge for dacha property is seen as wholly destructive and debasing, and Lukashevich, “Zimniaia dacha,” where it is treated with considerably more sympathy.
125. R. Ibragimbekov, “Dacha,” in his Dacha: Rasskazy (Moscow, 1988).
126. V. Grechnev, “Dacha,” in his Sueta suet (Moscow, 1994).
127. These quotations are taken from the St. Petersburg student newspaper Gaudeamus, 9 May 1999.
128. Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 133.
129. William Butler accords special prominence to the dacha in the discussion of personal ownership in his Soviet Law, 2d ed. (London, 1988), 185.
7
Post-Soviet Suburbanization?
Dacha Settlements in Contemporary Russia
In the history of the modern dacha and its social catchment area there have been several important shifts: from the court society of the Peterhof Road to a more widely dispersed and more city-oriented aristocratic elite; from this aristocratic elite to the larger constituency of urban middling people; the emergence of a mass dacha market in the later nineteenth century; the sudden and drastic reclassification and reallocation of the dacha stock under the Soviets; the convergence of the dacha-plot dacha and the garden-plot dacha in the postwar era.
When we arrive at the 1990s it seems right to inquire whether another such shift might have taken place. In the West, most large industrialized urban centers have entered—perhaps even passed through—a stage beyond urbanization and industrialization: with the improvement of transport connections, the general rise in living standards, and the activization of the land market, many people—often, but by no means always, the more prosperous sections of the urban population—choose to relocate to areas safe from urban encroachment and establish new settlements, new values, and new lifestyles. In Russia this shift never quite happened, despite the attempts made in the late imperial period to establish exurban settlements with a new sense of community. The failure of such initiatives was grossly overdetermined: the harsh climate made problematic the extension of settlement to a low-density periphery; transport provision was inadequate and expensive; urban administration remained extremely centralized; the social unrest that intensified from the 1890s on made life in underpoliced exurban settlements unattractive. As regards the Soviet period, we can point to a whole new set of factors that inhibited suburban development—above all, the powerful resistance of Soviet planners to do anything that might be construed as emulating the West. Soviet policies placed great emphasis on urbanization and on maintaining a greenbelt around cities within the framework of a “unified system of settlement.” The intended result was that there should be a sharp urban/rural divide, not a grubby fade-out of city sprawl into countryside. The internal arrangement of Soviet cities also disposed them to patterns of settlement quite distinct from the Western suburbanization model. Urban functions were to be widely dispersed throughout the city space; cities were to be zoned so as to rationalize the deployment and use of infrastructure; social segregation was thereby to be minimized. These measures, combined with the total rejection of market principles in land pricing, ensured that there was at best a very shallow density gradient from city center to periphery. The urban population itself had no interest in moving out of the city. Given the concentration of resources in the major cities and the overwhelming importance of an urban residence permit in ensuring access to goods and services, it would have been foolish to contemplate such a move. In short, just as in prerevolutionary times, the metropolis lorded it over the surrounding region.
Even so, by the 1980s there were signs that Soviet cities were entering a suburban phase. The efforts of Soviet planners were to little avail, given the activities of their comrades in the executive. The priority given to greenbelt conservation in the i960 General Plan of Moscow came to seem little more than lip service, given the land-grab policies perpetrated in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, it has convincingly been argued that the pressures on the swelling Moscow agglomeration in this period gave rise to a “socialist suburbanization” with three main distinguishing features.1 First, constant expansion of the city boundaries without any concomitant decentralization of administrative authority. Second, an expansion of Moscow’s outlying districts by large influxes of migrants from outside the urban agglomeration, not fueled by migration from the central districts of the city (as in the Anglo-American suburbanization of the postwar era). Third, the intensive development in Moscow’s hinterland of Soviet forms of garden and dacha settlement, which have no exact equivalent in the West.