A house near the Zelenogradskaia stop on the Moscow-Iaroslavl’ line, between Pushkino and Abramtsevo. Although this dacha is located in a garden settlement, its large and well-maintained lawn bespeaks a rejection of the Soviet agricultural imperative and a turn toward Anglo-American civilization. Only the turret betrays the owner’s Russianness.
A dacha at Mozhaiskoe. Contemporary dachniki frequently invoke the English saying “My home is my castle.”
Locals dubbed this dacha at Zelenogradskaia “the crematorium.”
Post-Soviet dachas had a rather basic level of home comforts. Research carried out in the mid-1990s suggested that just over half of dachas were equipped with gas—generally a ring with a cylinder—but only 5 percent had plumbing.57 The average floor area of a garden-plot dacha was a modest 29 square meters.58 Nor was the level of amenities in the settlement as a whole any better—especially given the size of settlements, which might reach that of a small regional center. For the 200,000 people crammed into Mshinskaia (110 kilometers from St. Petersburg) there were only ten policemen and one first aid brigade, and the nearest shop was 4 kilometers away. The result of the population compression that had taken place over the last fifteen years was, in the assessment of one journalist, an enormous open-air communal apartment.59
Distances, too, had grown enormously. In the 1960s, the dacha belt rarely extended more than 60 kilometers from the city; in the 1990s, however, families commonly went to the very end of a suburban rail line (around 120 kilometers). And areas for settlement were not often within easy reach of the railway: they might easily be as much as forty minutes’ walk away. The rise in car ownership has also done much to enable city dwellers to colonize broad territories between the radial railway lines. In 1993–94, 50 percent of people in the Moscow region were commuting 75 kilometers or more to the dacha, which represented no small investment of time, especially if buses and suburban trains were the only available means of transport. Distances in the Petersburg region were somewhat shorter, in provincial cities shorter still.
A post-Soviet garden-plot house at Krasnitsy. In June 1999, when this picture was taken, the house had been under construction for ten years.
This dacha at Mel’nichii Ruchei is a not untypical post-Soviet architectural hodgepodge; the “Beware of the dog” sign is a further reminder of contemporary realities.
This garden settlement (Zelenogradskaia) was established as a garden cooperative in 1987, though dacha construction did not get under way until two or three years later. Although members of the cooperative were given equal shares of land, ten years of mainly post-Soviet life have brought striking variation in the ways people use their plots.
The liberal land policy of 1990–92 had the great virtue of giving millions of Soviet citizens a plot of their own, but it also illustrated the problems associated with liberal property legislation in the absence of adequate means of enforcing property rights. Disputes between neighbors were frequently provoked by the unlawful seizure of land by one party.60 Since 1991 exurbanites have been plagued by burglars, just like earlier dachniki. A newspaper feature in 1992 told of residents who had taken the law into their own hands after discovering thieves on their land. While admitting that turning a rifle on someone for stealing a few cucumbers might be excessive, the article argued that such cases would continue to be common until state law enforcement was more adequate.61 In 1999, people with long memories of dacha life were asserting that such a crime wave had not been seen since the hungry year of 1948. Thieves would take anything, from televisions to bed linen, doors, and window surrounds; metal items were a particular favorite, as they could be handed in for money at recycling points.62
A further problem concerned not the enforcement of the right to property but the nature of this right. In December 1992 a federal law on housing specifically indicated that houses built on dacha and garden plots were to be covered by privatization legislation, but until new legislation in 1997 the procedure involved was not regularized, so that local authorities were free to impose their own bureaucratic procedures (with corresponding charges).63 The law on ownership was appallingly cumbersome; often it was impossible for people to sell a small plot without actually taking a loss on the transaction. And the legal distinctions between the various forms of gardening association—association (tovarishchestvo) cooperative, society (obshchestvo)—were not at all clear.64 One woman observed:
Our cooperative fell apart, of course, and it was only after it was gone that we understood that in some ways it had made life simpler. For example, passing on a dacha used to be a formality: all you had to do was write a letter to the administration: “I request that my share [pai] be transferred to my son/niece/aunt.” The meeting voted unanimously in favor and the aunt became a member of the cooperative—in other words, a dacha owner in disguise. Now you have to pay enormous inheritance taxes and people say it’s better to sell the dacha to your auntie—that way apparently the taxes are lower. It’s not clear who is supposed to repair the roads now—and there’s a pile of other little things that the cooperative administration used to deal with.
The government, for all that it had been quick (especially on the eve of elections) to promise special measures in support of garden associations,65 had been slow to make the necessary infrastructural provisions, to reduce the tax burden on growers, and to provide a stable legal framework for ownership.66
In short, Russia had a long way to go before it could create in dacha settlements the ”moral order” of the suburb identified by one urban anthropologist.67 “Moral minimalism”—that is, the avoidance of conflict and a reluctance to exercise social control against one’s neighbors—may be the foundation of the order that prevails in many of the suburbs now inhabited by more than half of the U.S. population, but Russian dacha communities function rather differently. The American developments are characterized by fluid social relations (not least because of the much greater social and geographical mobility of their residents) and low levels of social integration.