Summerfolk полностью

The history of the dacha from the 1940s to perestroika is in large part a story of continuing growth: from being very much a minority privilege on the eve of the war, summer houses had become commonplace by the mid-1980s in most of Russia’s major cities. But even a cursory comparison of dachas in 1940 and 1990 reveals to what extent the concept had been reshaped by four decades of relatively stable Soviet life. In the former case, we can still speak of a summer retreat intended primarily for leisure; in the latter, primarily of an ersatz homestead for underprovisioned urbanites. It was thus not only the social constituency of the dacha that had expanded but also its semantic field. When we speak of the postwar era it becomes impossible to keep the story of the dacha separate from that of the garden plot. So one narrative that instantly springs to mind—that of a consumer boom making second homes ever more accessible to urban Russians—needs to be qualified by an awareness of the pronounced social and political pressures that directed the dacha’s development and by a careful consideration of the postwar dynamic between the main perceived attributes of the dacha: recreation, consumption, ownership, domesticity, and, not least, subsistence.

The War and Its Aftermath

In the history of the dacha, the Great Patriotic War stands out as a chronological marker more significant than the death of Stalin. It was during the years 1941–45 that millions of Soviet people took part in an exurbanizing movement that prepared the ground (literally) for the “mass” dacha of the later Soviet period. They had little choice in the matter: facing starvation, city dwellers all over the country were forced to seize any available land to engage in subsistence agriculture. In Julie Hessler’s apt phrase, Soviet society in those years was characterized by a “survivalist ethic” that legitimated grassroots initiatives even without explicit official authorization.1

Not that such authorization was necessarily withheld. Very early in the war the Soviet government signaled its readiness to shift responsibility for food production and distribution from centralized planning to Party-state organizations at the local level. “Subsidiary farms” (podsobnye khoziaistva) attached to enterprises and institutions received active encouragement: the area sown in them rose from 1.4 million hectares before the war to 5 million by its end. The allotment movement, which had received much public attention as early as the 1930s, was boosted by Pravda articles and a joint Party-state resolution in March and April 1942; by the spring of 1943 trade unions and city soviets were taking a leading role in the distribution of land to workers.2 Action was especially strong and decisive in the major cities, which stood to suffer even more than the rest of the country from the breakdown of the supply system. Even Leningrad’s Summer Garden, laid out under Peter the Great, was dug up as potato patches.3 The various forms of noncollectivized growing had a real effect on people’s chances of survival. Official rations, often set near starvation level, were supplemented by produce from collective farm markets (though prices here were well beyond most people’s means), subsidiary farms, and individual plots. In 1944, for example, over 12 percent of the average daily calorie intake was provided by food grown on private allotments.4 The scale of the wartime allotment movement is reflected in the lengthy entry under “Gardening” (sadovodstvo) in a late volume (published 1944) of the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. It is given statistical expression in the second edition: according to the entry “Allotment Gardening [ogorodnichestvo] by Workers and Employees,” 5 million Soviet people were working the land in this way in 1942, but by 1945 that figure had risen to 18.5 million. This powerful trend continued through the hungry postwar years, when millions of people used allotments on the outskirts of the major cities, often to meet immediate subsistence needs. In April 1946, for example, the Moscow soviet proclaimed a total of 1.2 million allotment growers in the city: “tens of thousands” of Muscovites were producing enough to “guarantee their whole year’s supply of potatoes and vegetables.”5