In the mid-1990s the suburbanization of Moscow began to conform a little more closely to the Western model. Very little effort had been made in the first half of the decade to keep the greenbelt intact; even unspoiled park areas in the city’s closer environs had been given over by feckless or corrupt bureaucrats to development as garden or dacha settlements.46 In addition, the ever-expanding agglomeration seemed to be changing its character somewhat. For the first time ever, significant numbers of Muscovites started to exchange their centrally located apartments for small houses on the outskirts of the city. And even those who stayed put for the time being were more ready to contemplate such a move. The ambiguous status of many contemporary dacha settlements was confirmed by a survey conducted in the summer of 1997, which found that 40 percent of respondents regarded the dacha as “true country life,” 55 percent as “suburb” (prigorod), and 5 percent as a no-man’s-land.47
Housing construction in the private sector was encouraged by a presidential decree of 1992, and in 1993 the Moscow city administration announced a plan for the development of the suburban zone.48 Boris Yeltsin’s decree on land reform of October 1993 established a basis for a rudimentary land market. Restrictions and gray areas remained—it was specified, for example, that land use was not allowed to change after a transaction unless “special circumstances” obtained—but they affected the dacha market relatively little. Local authorities were concerned principally to prevent the sale of large chunks of agricultural land for nonagricultural purposes; small-scale transactions involving allotments and garden plots were unlikely to fall foul of the regulations (although they might still be bureaucratically complicated, especially where land hitherto owned “collectively”—notably in cooperatives—was at issue).49 Comparative analysis of the housing market in 1994 and 1996 revealed a great increase in the number of advertisements, a slight fall in prices, and a much greater differentiation of prices according to location and distance from Moscow (the most expensive regions were to the west of Moscow, in the directions of Minsk and Kiev). On the eve of the ruble’s devaluation in the summer of 1998, monthly rents in the Moscow region ranged from two hundred to several thousand dollars.50 But newspaper advertisements were only part of the story: in time-honored fashion, rental tended to be arranged by personal acquaintance or through fixers; real estate agents were reluctant to involve themselves in the short-term dacha market.51
Alongside traditional summer-only dachas there appeared a new type of year-round out-of-town house that was often called a kottedzh to emphasize its Western pedigree. The size and degree of comfort of such dwellings varied enormously. Many of them, contrary to general perceptions, were extremely modest, lacking such basic amenities as electricity and standing on the same 600-square-meter plots that held the dachas built by individual families in the 1950s and 1960s. They differed only in that they were normally made of brick rather than wood, had two stories, and had slightly more room inside (the average size of a winterized dacha, according to the fullest survey of the mid-1990s, was 44.6 square meters, as opposed to just over 30 square meters for summer-only constructions).52 At the other end of the market were the “New Russian” mansions beloved of glossy magazines. Many of these houses were hidden behind lofty fences in locations favored by the Soviet elite; but the more elaborate of them might also stand, incongruously, in old settlements alongside wooden shacks rather than in new ghettos for the superrich. Various attempts have been made to account for the apparent indifference to visible disparities of this kind: some say the owners of spacious villas want to display their wealth as publicly as possible; others assert that their choice of location is dictated by the impossibility of obtaining planning permission to build elsewhere. The second explanation is, to my mind, improbable: inasmuch as many New Russian houses in preexisting settlements themselves infringe multiple planning regulations, it appears that buying off the regional authorities is not so very difficult. Perhaps the reason is simply that New Russians are in a desperate hurry to convert their wealth into immovable property.
This incursion of new money certainly changed the atmosphere of many settlements. It had the effect of quickly redistributing land, as long-standing residents of prestigious settlements such as Peredelkino found new neighbors in unwelcome proximity. Often the new houses were built on formerly sacrosanct wooded land or green fields that had been signed away at a stroke of the bureaucrat’s pen, but in some cases large Soviet-era plots were subdivided and portions sold off by owners impoverished by the collapse of the old regime and devoid of any better source of income. The arrival of New Russian kottedzhi also brought a reassertion of the dacha’s leisure and ornamental functions. Gardening firms, for example, noted an increase in orders for junipers and cypresses, plants that were hardly suited to the harsh Russian climate but were nonetheless symbolic of a new lifestyle.53
A New Russian dacha at Mozhaiskoe, southwest of St. Petersburg. The architectural pretensions of this house are undermined by its grubby surroundings. This is hardly a scenic spot, nor is it secluded: the dacha stands in full view of the local train stop.
Most dachas, however, fell between the extremes of solid, centrally heated kottedzh and 1960s garden shack. In the Moscow and Petersburg regions in the mid-1990s just over half of dacha owners had built their country houses on their own or with a small amount of help from hired workers. And the proportion of do-it-yourself dacha builders in smaller cities was even greater (in Moscow and Petersburg the inheritance figures were substantially higher).54 Building work, as in the Soviet period, was generally extremely time-consuming and physically demanding; it often involved felling timber and slowly and painfully extracting tree stumps from the marshy or wooded land that was allotted to the new settlements. When family resources permitted, owners would try to profit from the relaxation of Soviet-era restrictions to build themselves a slightly more spacious house.55 But many people who did not have time to build their dacha in the last years of the Soviet era found that after price liberalization they simply could not afford to do so. For aspiring dacha owners in the 1990s, timing was cruciaclass="underline" the people most advantaged were those who had time to take out loans and lay in supplies of building materials before January 1992. For those who were unable to take such action, dacha construction often became a long and frustrating slog. Even a very simple dwelling might take ten or fifteen years to complete. Some partially built houses were simply abandoned, their owners having lost all hope of finishing the job: in a reference to the economic crisis and currency devaluation of late summer 1998, these were commonly known as “August [1998] dachas.”56