The post-Soviet period has taken these processes a stage further, which raises a new set of questions. Given the liberalization of land policy in the 1990s, the Russian population’s acute concerns over subsistence, the continued overcrowding of the city, and the rise in the urban cost of living, have dacha and garden settlements fundamentally changed their character? Has suburbanization, with all it implies anthropologically as well as geographically,2 finally made significant inroads into Russia’s urban fabric?
Soviet Dachas in a Post-Soviet Context
By the 1970s, as we have seen, the word “dacha” covered a wide range of dwellings that varied greatly in function, appearance, and status. Four main types can be identified. First came the “departmental” dacha (kazennaia dacha), which was owned directly by a Party-state organization and was accessible only to those who occupied some position in that organization. Second was the Soviet-era “dacha-plot dacha,” almost invariably built under the auspices of an organization, and very commonly under the umbrella of a cooperative. Third was the modest dwelling built on a plot of land in one of the many garden cooperatives or associations set up since the war. Fourth was the privately owned dacha, which was either inherited or built at a time and in a place where land was available for such individual undertakings, or else bought ready-made (most commonly in a depopulated and underresourced rural area).
Although state-owned dachas varied enormously in their size and level of amenities, they still included a pool of spacious and well-equipped accommodations for government employees. In a Politburo discussion of July 1983, Iurii Andropov, the disciplinarian general secretary of the time, alleged that many of his colleagues in government were “overgrowing with dachas”: comrades in positions of responsibility were having spacious country retreats built for themselves, at the same time providing choice plots of land for their relatives. Speaking about the “leading workers in the Central Committee and government,” the up-and-coming Mikhail Gorbachev commented that “everyone is speculating with dachas, throughout the country. There are a whole lot of disgraceful phenomena in evidence.” He recommended that the Party control committee investigate such cases, but Andropov, although resistant to the bluster of other Politburo members, held back from this extreme measure.3 Figures that came to light a few years later, near the end of Gorbachev’s own period in high office, revealed the extent of official dacha holdings and the potential for abuse. In 1990 the Council of Ministers (the Soviet ministerial apparat) had at its disposal 1,014 dachas and two vacation complexes that in total comprised 55,000 square meters of living space; the annual subsidy was over 1 million rubles.4 At the end of its existence, in 1991, the Party’s Central Committee had dacha accommodations for 1,800 families in the Moscow region.5 The crusading newspaper Argumenty i fakty revealed in the same year that a group of “inspectors,” made up mostly of Soviet generals (numbering fifty-seven at the beginning of 1991) who had retired or been removed from their former posts, had a range of privileges—including access to the 142 dachas held by the Ministry of Defense—completely out of proportion to the scope of their present activities. Not only that, the “inspectors” had been actively abusing their privileges, in some cases unlawfully privatizing or selling off furniture held at state-owned dachas.6
Despite the populist campaign waged against elite privilege in 1990–91, the new political establishment in many cases simply took over the existing dacha accommodations. This was the case both at the apex of the political pyramid—Yeltsin and his changing cast of associates found themselves cozy retreats in Barvikha, Kuntsevo, and other resorts preferred by high Soviet cadres—and lower down. Statements of property and income made in January 1997 by administrators at the province (krai) level included spacious state-owned dachas of up to 600 square meters. Governor Evgenii Nazdratenko of the Far East, for example, with a (declared) annual income of $12,000, had a state-owned dacha of 257 square meters.7 Private dachas owned by government figures might attain truly palatial dimensions (as much as 1,000 square meters). These, we must assume, constituted former state property that officeholders had either appropriated or built with their dubious side earnings. For example, the chief of the Federal Treasury’s office in the same debt-ridden Far East province (Primorskii krai) was able to build himself a mansion outside Vladivostok that was valued at $645,000.8 The taking over of elite dachas by their occupants was quite common practice—although (or more likely because) it was not specifically covered by privatization legislation.9
Largely because of the lack of clarity and the ineffectiveness of property law, some former state-sponsored dacha settlements acquired a complex and disputed status in the 1990s. One example is the writers’ settlement at Peredelkino, run by the state-sponsored funding organization for literature, Litfond, from the late 1930s. On the collapse of the Soviet system, Litfond lost its subsidies and felt the pinch of market reforms. Legally, it did not even own the land on which the Peredelkino dachas stood. All it could do was rent out the existing accommodations. The central vacation home, the “House of Creativity,” accordingly became a modest hotel where rooms could be rented for as little as $10 a night. But even this sum fell outside the price range of most post-Soviet writers. Residents apprehensively discussed privatization of the dacha stock in the settlement as a whole, as private ownership was sure to change the character of the place irrevocably—to lead to the displacement of writers by newly moneyed families or representatives of the nonliterary elite. Peredelkino was among the most desirable locations for such people, as it combined ease of access to the city, excellent ecological conditions, and prestige. Even in the absence of a thoroughgoing privatization program, it had been infiltrated by the post-Soviet military and governmental establishment and by the despised nuvorishi. The most striking new mansion there belonged to Zurab Tsereteli, effectively the court architect of the Yeltsin regime. Good contacts in high places were sufficient to obtain permission to build new residences even in heritage zones such as this. Peredelkino’s vulnerability to the private building boom was accentuated by its uneasy administrative status: the settlement itself was located within municipal territory, but the adjoining lands were subject to oblast authority, and here new construction proceeded without adequate planning controls.10