Summerfolk полностью

Perhaps the most disastrous result of the collision between old social practices and new ideological goals and institutional structures was that it left people quite unsure of what the rules of social life were. Here the dacha sheds light on Soviet society for one other reason: it was a product and a symbol of hierarchical networks that were vulnerable. In the 1930s it reclaimed something of its medieval and Petrine meanings: a piece of property that was bestowed at the discretion of the leader and could just as easily be taken away. Now, however, the role of leader was taken by Soviet ideology, a notoriously fluid mélange of beliefs, programs, and practical policies that in turn was interpreted and administered by an equally fluid body of state officials. The dacha, then, can serve as a specific example of the mingling of modernization and traditionalism that has plausibly been seen as characteristic of the Soviet and other communist systems: it was valued as a symbol of material progress and for its association with “civilized” values (specifically, those of the officially approved Russian intellectual tradition); but it also reflected the particularistic and personalistic realities of Soviet society. On the one hand, the Soviet dacha gestured toward the older meaning of the term—a plot of land handed out entirely at the discretion of state authorities—yet it was also bound up with markedly modern phenomena: the bureaucratization of the distribution system, the emphasis placed on leisure as an attribute of the Soviet way of life, and an emerging (if tortuous) discourse on property rights.

But the balance between the modernizing impulses of the Soviet regime and other social inputs was never fixed. As we survey the later Soviet period, it becomes clear that traditional practices (that is, practices deriving their strength from patterns of behavior more long-standing or deep-seated than the socially transformative Soviet project) should be seen not as a dead weight of passive resistance to state violence but rather as a dynamic set of responses that were, in the long run, transformative in their own right. As we survey developments of the later Soviet period, we will find new forms of social relationship (including a new kind of blat), a new intelligentsia, new attitudes toward property, and a new form of dacha that hybridized the country retreat of the Soviet leisure class with the humble allotment.

1. See Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946). Timasheff’s sociological approach has an important cultural-historical analogue in Vladimir Papernyi’s Kul’tura “dva” (1985; Moscow, 1996), which, to state crudely a rich argument, reveals a shift from a dynamic, decentered, avant-garde “Culture One” (which pervaded the public discourse of the 1920s) to a static, monumentalist “Culture Two” (which increasingly took over in the 1930s and 1940s).

2. For more on this kind of argument, see D. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke, 2000).

3. See K. Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,” Soviet Studies 35 (1983), and T. Martin, “Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. S. Fitzpatrick (London, 2000). For a thought-provoking comparative case, see A.G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1986).

4. See H.F. Jahn, “The Housing Revolution in Petrograd, 1917–1920,” JfGOE 38 (1990), and N.B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg, 1999), 178–84.

5. M. Ignatiefff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), 25 and 28. Another young witness recalled that the Revolution had brought Udel’naia (a dacha location significantly closer to Petrograd) only relatively slight changes: policemen were no longer in evidence and passers-by wore red ribbons. See L. I. Petrusheva, ed., Deti russkoi emigratsii (Moscow, 1997), 484.