Although Russians did not have the luxury of social indifference and the corresponding strategies of conflict avoidance, it could hardly be said that post-Soviet dacha settlements lacked a moral order of any kind. Geographical mobility was much more limited than in the United States, and for this reason Russians were drawn into long-term close-quarters relations with their dacha neighbors. Russians were denied the privacy afforded by the suburban crabgrass frontier; building and maintaining a dacha was, on the contrary, a very public (and generally prolonged) affair that drew people willy-nilly into new social networks. The result was that Soviet traditions of mutual aid in defiance of public administration and systems of distribution—the proverbial blat—lived on, even under newly monetarized post-Soviet conditions.
Similarly, a number of Soviet/Russian social identities persisted in adapted or attenuated form. The dacha (read: garden plot) explosion became truly a movement, with its own public profile, set of values, and subcultures; besides numerous publications, it had its own TV program, titled 600 Square Meters. Physical toil was the moral centerpiece of all this publicity. The emphasis was placed on “healthy peasant physical labor,” on the virtues of “cultivating one’s own garden” and thereby achieving a self-sufficiency rooted in the soil and invulnerable to political or social upheaval.68 One of my informants expressed a complementary but much less sympathetic view by as she reflected on the Russians’ apparent magnetic attraction to the soil in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods:
Of course people are drawn to the soil. Of course there is something of a hobby and something of an adventure about it. But. . . ?! The best answer to this question I heard from my father-in-law. He made out that everyone wants to show their neighbors how well they can work. In other words, it’s “Labor is a matter of honor, glory, valor, and heroism” all over again. But [you might think that] at the factory there is ample opportunity for this kind of activity! And everyone sees how everyone else works. But it turns out that this is something quite different. No one envies someone who fulfills or overfiilfills the production plan. But a good harvest of cherries, for example, can make your neighbor burst with envy. It’s not even material envy, but [a sense of] their own imperfection.
Whatever role we ascribe to Soviet conditioning in the behavior of contemporary dachniki, they certainly seem to derive a positive self-image from purposeful and productive cultivation of their garden plots. In Russians’ pronouncements on their dachas one can often sense an undercurrent of national identification, a worldview expressed approximately by the phrase “We may be poor, but. . .”69 The dacha is presented as something quintessentially Russian, less luxurious and spacious than the vacation homes of Americans or Western Europeans but more authentically rural and representative of Russians’ inborn bond with the soil and appetite for hard physical work. At the same time, the dacha is conceived of as meeting a universal human impulse to flee the city and work the land. Here the West may figure in people’s discourse as supporting comparative materiaclass="underline"
Let’s take a look at a country like England that is conservative, traditional, but conservative in the good sense. And what do we see? What did all political figures dream of, take Churchill, take who you like. What did they dream of doing when they got to have a rest, I mean when they retired? And what about our beloved Sherlock Holmes, what did he end up doing at the end of his life? They all dreamed of one and the same thing: to grow roses on their own plot of land.70
The dacha thus offers the opportunity for rest as opposed to mere lounging about (rasslabukha) or, more precisely, for “active leisure” (aktivnyi otdykh): judging by the frequency of its occurrence in my interviews, this term, born of the Soviet sociology of leisure, seems to have put down roots in the collective mentality.
But going to the dacha is also regarded as a pleasurable activity, largely because of the lack of alternative forms of entertainment: “What is there to do at home here? Sit in front of the TV, I suppose? There people chat with one another in the evening, they’ll get together in the house, maybe have a barbecue, they’ll have a drink before supper, then they have a chat.”71 Life out of town gives rise to forms of sociability that often blur into mutual aid and support. Russians on their garden plots affirm the importance of “friendship” as they would in their apartments, but here they do so with an anti-urban emphasis: members of dacha communities see themselves as more people-centered, more in touch with their feelings, and better able to enjoy themselves than pampered city folk. Favors are simpler and delivered more immediately than in urban blat relationships. Networks are less circular, in the sense that people may return a favor directly to the person who has done one for them (for example, in the exchange of surplus produce at the end of the dacha season). But perhaps more important than actual services rendered and received is the broader sense of a community united by common interests: advice on seedlings shared with strangers on the train ride back to the city fosters a belief in the garden plot as the main experience that post-Soviet citizens hold in common.
Although Russians’ feeling of belonging (for better or worse) to a large garden-plot community is strong, just as striking is the satisfaction they gain from their own landholding. As Nancy Ries comments, although subsistence gardening is a grind, “the pride with which people displayed their gardens, their colorful anthropomorphizing of the fruits of their labors, and their dedication to this lifestyle signaled the symbolic value and identity they derived from these practices.”72 Pride is also attached to the dacha residence itself and to the domestic environment associated with it. Despite restrictions on design, Soviet citizens were able to exercise far more choice in the internal arrangement of their dachas than in the layout of their urban apartments. Apartments were the outcome of a protracted and impersonal allocation process, while dachas were the result of one’s own labors. Unsurprisingly, Soviet people were far more positively disposed toward their dachas—which in many cases they or their parents had built themselves—than toward their apartments. Dachas, in short, were the closest many Soviet citizens came to a private home, and brought a genuine improvement in their quality of life.73
But, although the contemporary Russian garden settlement richly deserves further anthropological investigation as an important, apparently antimodern alternative civilization, it should perhaps occasion not cultural celebration but profound regret as a symbol of the poverty and powerlessness of the bulk of Russia’s population even in the relatively prosperous major cities. In the words of Simon Clarke: “The dacha makes no economic sense at all, providing the most meagre of returns for an enormous amount of toil, but it is much more than a means of supplementing the family diet or of saving a few rubles. It is both a real and a symbolic source of security in a world in which nothing beyond one’s immediate grasp is secure.”74