Improbable as it might seem, points of connection can be found. The survival of the dacha calls into question the notion of the Revolution as a clean break in the social and cultural history of the major cities. The dacha is hardly the only thing that survived, of course: ostensibly improbable continuities have been traced in other areas of early Soviet life ever since Nicholas S. Timasheff, in a pioneering work of 1946, coined the term “Great Retreat” for the partial abandonment of radical social policies and values by the elite of the 1930s.1 In the light of the cogent arguments made by Timasheff and others, the dacha might well be seen as just one of several prerevolutionary cultural status symbols that were appropriated by a new Soviet “middle class.”
Even if we find signs of the past in Stalin-era culture, however, we are still left with important questions unanswered. For example: What were the causes of the Great Retreat—social or political expediency, the self-interest of an elite, or some more complex set of historical factors? How did it fit in with other aspects of Soviet life that, far from suggesting a retreat from revolutionary aspirations, remained aggressively radical and transformative? There is a need, in other words, to test the Timasheff paradigm against detailed social history: to show how the interaction of continuity and change took place in practice, how it informed social practice and affected people’s lives.
These tasks can usefully be related to an enduring historical debate that investigates the balance between “traditional” and “modernizing” principles in the working of the emerging Soviet system: the Great Retreat, so one argument runs, took place in a society that was very self-consciously entering a form of modernity, and it is this assertively modern orientation of Soviet society, not its traditional or conservative aspects, that needs to be emphasized.2 Another approach directs attention elsewhere: to the ways in which modernizing structures, policies, and intentions led to “neotraditional” results.3 One example is the Soviet bureaucracy, which, though designed to strengthen the centralized state and inculcate impersonal standardized practice, may actually have forced people into greater reliance on more “traditional” forms of behavior, ranging from unofficial networking to the cultivation of allotments for subsistence.
To seek out traditional and modern elements in Soviet society, then, is a worthwhile project but on its own it is inadequate. The next step is to examine their interaction over time, and we can best do so microcosmically—by fixing our attention on limited objects of study, such as the dacha. As well as bringing us face to face with the charged issue of periodization in Soviet history, the dacha can thus also provide insights into the workings of early Soviet urban society.
Exurbia in Revolution and Civil War
The revolutions of 1917 brought a rapid depopulation of the dacha areas surrounding the major cities. Just as in 1905, when popular unrest in the outlying areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg had scared away some dachniki for years, people were unwilling to expose themselves to the risk of revolutionary violence and in many cases simply left their property behind. Other dachas fell vacant not because they had been abandoned but because their owners had been called away—to the front, to the city, on business, or to relatives in other regions.
