Dacha Life

The word dacha comes from the Russian verb “to give” (davat), and when it first entered the language, which seems to have happened in the Petrine era, it referred to land that the tsar “gave” (daval) to his associates. Usually such dachas were estates on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, but they could also be large parcels of forest that the recipient could harvest and sell. Whatever the case may have been, dachas were the domain of wealthy people with ties to the court. Nobody else had anything of the sort.

City folk have always enjoyed retreating into nature, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only those with the means and not tied down to a job could do so. In summer, the privileged few would travel to their suburban estates and live there for a few months before returning to Moscow or Petersburg. You could only manage that if you had a lot of free time and the necessary wagons and carriages to transport yourself and whatever would be needed for your stay. Your serfs would get your summer residence ready for you – cleaning, heating, fixing – and you would arrive at your cozy home away from home ready to enjoy “fresh air.”

The idea of “fresh air” was not an empty cliché. The larger cities grew, the harder it was to breathe there. Nineteenth-century Russian literature is full of references to the stench of Petersburg, especially in summer. Imagine a huge city with no indoor plumbing, with some sort of privy by every building, with thousands of woodstoves, and with streets full of various conveyances drawn by horses that left their calling cards all over the roadway. Who wouldn’t want to escape! Alas, a large proportion of those not mired in poverty were nevertheless stuck in town, chained to their desks, their shops, or their factories.

Then came the railroad. This innovation was far from universally welcomed: there were fears that trains would lead cows to produce less milk, that smoke from the engines would pollute the air, and – oh, horrors! – that the lower classes would gain the ability to travel.

Soon enough, people became accustomed to train travel, and by the 1860s renting a dacha came within reach of non-aristocrats and non-millionaires, who could now spend time in “fresh air” while maintaining the ability to return relatively quickly to town when they needed to. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin was far from rich, but he and other characters in The Idiot rented dachas in Pavlovsk, a scenic community about 20 miles outside St. Petersburg and home to the royal getaway, Pavlovsk Palace. Pavlovsk was probably the most famous dacha community of that era, and one of the first. It offered a retreat for government officials and merchants, writers and various other educated non-nobles. In Pavlovsk, you could take pastoral walks, or visit the Pavlovsk Vauxhall – a pavilion named after London’s pleasure gardens and the origin of the Russian word for train station: vokzal. There, you could enjoy open-air concerts. The Vauxhall was the terminus of the empire’s first train line.

Dacha living became a bright spot in Russian life. Of course, for the ancient nobility with its grand estates, the appearance of vacationers of more modest means was far from welcome. In The Cherry Orchard, when Lopakhin tries to convince Ranevskaya that her estate could be saved if they divided its huge cherry orchard into plots to be rented to dachniks, she looks at him as if he’s gone mad. How could anyone sacrifice these serene landscapes, these quiet alleys, offering sublime solitude, a place for contemplative walks or to sit in a gazebo with an uplifting book? Is an estate worth saving at the price of acquiring neighbors who might raise their voices in revelry, crowd the lake with their rowboats, and frolic wherever they please, as if they owned the place?

Whatever Ranevskaya may have thought of that prospect, economic forces took their toll, and the estate was sold at auction. The cherry orchard was cut down, and soon countless newcomers were able to enjoy the wondrous landscapes.

Some dachas were farther afield, on the Gulf of Finland, or in remote corners of the empire. For example, the painter Ilya Repin and the writer Kornei Chukovsky lived in what was then Finland, in the renowned Kuokkala (since renamed Repino), and the poet Maximilian Voloshin lived in Crimea, in Koktebel.

The storms of revolution and civil war thundered in, and at first the very concept of the dacha was rejected as a vestige of “bourgeois” society, but by the thirties, dachas made their way back into Soviet life. Of course, the Soviet Union also had an elite of its own, and at first, like in the eighteenth century, dacha living was its exclusive domain. “Old Bolsheviks,” writers, and architects each had their own dacha communities. Then came “state dachas” (gosdachi), cottages where apparatchiks deemed to have performed exceptional services to the state could relax with their families.

Even in the dachas of these “elites,” the conditions were fairly primitive. For a long time, until the sixties or seventies, dachniks heated with woodstoves and cooked with kerosene. Still, being at the dacha was a treat – it was a place where you could get away from the troublesome neighbors in your communal apartment or just from a cramped city apartment, a place where you could plant flowers or cultivate a vegetable garden. And those not lucky enough to own their own dacha could at least rent a room or two from the more fortunate.

A true explosion in dacha ownership came in 1960, when the ability to buy a dacha was gained by a much larger swath of society. You no longer had to be an academician or one of the original Bolsheviks. Now, side-by-side with communities of large, older dachas, with their spacious cottages and room for a whole orchard, a new kind of dacha  appeared. These vacation homes could more appropriately be called dachkas (the -ka ending denoting diminutive size). The plots were just six sotkas, in other words 600 square meters – barely enough room for a tiny garden plot and a postage-stamp-sized house, in intimate proximity to the neighbors. But just as the post-Stalinist construction boom of cramped, concrete slab Khrushchevka apartment buildings helped millions escape the torment of communal living, so too these six sotkas became a place where people could get away from it all to relax and to plant a few rows of potatoes (which was a significant help for many) or raspberry bushes. It was a patch of land you could call your own, however small.

Recent decades have seen a reappearance of “aristocratic dachas.” These houses are winterized and have central heating, so their owners can enjoy them year round, and they are furnished with showers and the internet – not really a dacha in the traditional sense of the word, more like a twenty-first-century version of the gentry estate of yore. To the west of Moscow, the privileged populate elite dacha communities hidden behind huge walls, where they inhabit elegant mansions, sometimes with one house for the owners and another for the servants and bodyguards.

Be that as it may, come Friday, or especially a holiday, some set out in their Mercedes for their palatial dachas, while others race to catch an electrichka commuter train to get to their six sotkas. The grill is lit for shashlik, the banya is fired up, and the music plays. A dacha, large or small, can be a place of repose, or of digging in the dirt. It can be a place to find solitude, or to gather with friends and family. In all cases, a dacha is the Russian’s best remedy for the dreariness of workaday life.