Soviet-era dacha in Resheti, near Ekaterinburg
I have just dusted down a talk that I gave some years ago about Russian dachas. I have been asked to give it again in early December. The lecture traces the history of this aspect of Russian life from its start in the 18h Century to the recent past.
In his excellent book, Summerfolk, a History of the Dacha (2003. Ithaca and London), Stephen Lovell describes the Russian dacha as ‘not a place but a way of life’, representing as it does a place of recreation where Russians have, since the mid eighteenth century, escaping the busy pressures of the cities.
In the immediate post-revolutionary period, Dacha ownership came under serious threat. The notion of holiday homes for the better off was condemned by the intellectual avante guard, for whom ‘the dacha was synonymous with the social and cultural arrière’ (Lovell p. 134). Indeed, in those early years many dachas were confiscated not only for ideological reasons but to alleviate the chronic housing shortage that existed at the time.
Despite everything, however, the private dacha survived, and in the 1920s came to be tolerated. Some town dwellers moved to their dachas permanently and others were able to retain them by appealing to friends in high places. In addition, the peasants resumed the pre-revolutionary practice of renting out their homes during the summer period to those escaping the cities.
At the end of the twenties the campaign against so called ‘former people’ resulted in the confiscation of some dachas, but this period of repression did not last long. The original notion of a dacha as something ‘given’ by the state revived, and workers were encouraged to aspire to own a dacha as a reward for their hard work. Co-operatives were set up, and books of architectural plans featuring proletarian dacha were published. Self-build schemes were encouraged, and it was mandated that new dachas should be simple in appearance and not resemble town houses, or pre-revolutionary bourgeoise structures.
The concept of official dacha settlements came into being: holiday homes, approved by the authorities, aimed at accommodating specific groups of privileged people, such as artists, factory workers and party members. One of the earliest of these was the Polotsov Mansion, an early 20th century building that was converted to a house of rest for workers and opened by Vladimir Lenin in the 1920s. The poet Boris Pasternak had a dacha at the famous artists’ colony of Peredelniko outside Moscow. He spent a good deal of time here, seeking to escape the terrible living accommodation available in the city rather than to avoid official attention as is sometimes thought. In fact, the eyes of the government were firmly focused on the colony, and indeed both Boris Pilnyak and Itsak Babel were arrested there during the Terror. Chukovsky, the children’s author, described it as ‘Entrapping writers within a cocoon of comfort, surrounding them with a network of spies’ (quoted in The Zhivago Affair. Peter Finn and Petra Couvé, 2014 London, p. 4.).
When it came to holiday homes for the highest echelons of the Party different rules applied. Lenin enjoyed the luxurious surroundings of a former noble estate near Domodedovo, where he kept his Silver Ghost Rolls Royce. Stalin had several dachas in the Moscow region. Other party members enjoyed similar privileges, while they remained in favour. Their story is a long one, and must therefore form the subject of another post.