Text and photos by Tatyana Sikorskaya Translation by Kat Tancock Originally published in Takie Dela
Even if you’ve never had one. Even if you’re adamant about having nothing to do with those who, every May, tenderly embracing boxes of seedlings, travel to the other end of the Earth to swing a spade in exchange for radiculitis, a sunburnt nose and bug bites – you’re still from there. The dacha is a part of nearly every Russian childhood. Almost every Russian has a dacha history within them.
In many countries, people own second homes in rural areas. But a dacha is nothing like a country home or summer cottage in the south of Britain or on the Italian coast.
At the dacha, there’s always something not quite right: a rickety greenhouse, cracks in the porch, a contrary neighbor, buckets with no bottoms or clothespins holding up the curtains.
No other country has as deep-rooted a culture of owning a plot of land outside the city that, if needed, can become both a place to live and a source of food.
Only here has this strange, labor-intensive yet beloved way of achieving a sense of calm become a near-universal part of life. Here, everything is intertwined, personal and historical memory: the echo of lost ancestral land and private plots of peasant huts, the escape from censorship and surveillance in Soviet times, the salvation from postwar and perestroika-era hunger, the relaxation through hard work, the politics and economics, the roots and shoots.
The grocery truck comes on Fridays. It’s early morning and birds are chirping. The day promises to be hot, which means lots of laps back and forth across the pond. But first the beetles: Colorado potato beetles, half a jar full. I’m lugging smoked cheese in one hand and a can of milk in the other, my knees are covered in ointment, my sun hat’s slipped down over my eyes. But the first order of business is to make myself some sandwiches. My body feels so light I want to skip, but I’m afraid of spilling the milk. Summer has drawn me into its forceful embrace.
The dacha is a part of my childhood, my eternity, the center of my mental map. A home where sunlight rests in patches on heat-drenched floorboards, lace curtains sway in the breeze and apple trees peek in through the windows. It’s my unconscious mind, where time stands still and my grandparents are alive, in a haze of lilacs by the gate, squinting at the sun. Grandma raises her hand and makes the sign of the cross over me, for a safe trip. Well, maybe the lilacs have finished blooming and the peonies are taking center stage, or maybe the irises, or maybe the sweet williams. But Grandma – she’s here, in her spot. Her safe-travels blessings have permanently linked her to that gate.
We have a little yellow house with peeling paint, built from whatever was at hand, with a rubberized roof, two rooms, a porch, a stove and a storage closet. And every little corner of it is a part of me – the water in the well, showers from a sun-warmed barrel. In the attic, tomatoes ripen alongside stacks of Tramvay and Rovesnik, magazines for children and teenagers where I first read limericks interspersed with articles and learned of the death of Kurt Cobain. My daughter’s childhood drawings hang on the walls, above a rickety sideboard holding Aunt Galya’s tea service and a sunken sofa of which only the arms are original. These items have lost their utilitarian purpose and become a repository of memory.
Every winter takes a toll on the dacha: either the foundation cracks, or the pipes burst, or part of the stove collapses. Our home is begging for help but is still standing – it will never surrender. And it continues to support us. Long ago it was transformed from a summer house hammered together from a bunch of panels into a place of strength, a place where several generations of my family have lived, labored, found joy, mourned, pickled cucumbers, debated whether to plant potatoes, blown on saucers of tea, sung along to the guitar, and laughed so hard that the neighbors came to check whether we were crying or cackling. It became our family nest. The place that nourishes us.
Meanwhile, outside the dacha, time races onward. The neighbors have stopped coming by when they hear voices, and you can’t just swing open someone’s gate and pop in. We’ve been surrounded by three-meter-high fences, security cameras, and guards. Houses as big as a school, pools the size of a potato field. It’s as if everything around us has become a monument to success. Success in terms of your zucchini harvest doesn’t count. The ritual of trading seedlings, fruit and seeds is becoming a thing of the past. How well we survive winter no longer depends on how much pickling and preserving we’ve managed to do.
This settlement of 20 homes never used to be on maps; now it’s in every GPS system, proudly proclaimed as a cottage community with its own access gate, shops, church and playgrounds. Instead of an entire world of adventures, it offers gated security. Instead of babushki on benches, we have a monitored surveillance system. One day this new community will swallow me up along with my dacha, along with everything that makes me, me. But in the meantime, every May I’ll continue to patch up the sides of the stove and keep my camera at the ready.
This dacha has known five generations of our family. My parents were given the land right after the war, in the late 1940s. Land was being allocated at that time to people working at scientific research facilities, in their case the Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry. Scientists were given 1,500 square meters each [a little over one-third of an acre], but since my mother had won the Stalin Prize, she got 2,500.
I clearly remember my first trip to Domodedovo late in the fall of 1948, when I was eight. My parents and their colleagues went to mark out their lots and took their children with them. The land turned out to be a recently harvested potato field; it was muddy and damp. The first snow fell. My grandfather tried to start a fire from the leftover potato tops, to warm me and my sister up. That day they just marked the property lines. They didn’t start making the place habitable until spring.
A temporary shelter appeared first, then house-building got underway, and they immediately started an orchard. They planted everything: apples, pears, plums, sour cherries, apricots. This brought my father so much joy. Some of those apple trees are still alive to this day – they’re more than 70 years old.
Almost all the trees on the property have a story. Three apple trees – a Melba, a Shtrepel and an Antonovka – were planted to honor the birth of a son. My daughter planted the sweet cherry tree. My son-in-law brought the alycha, the cherry plum, from the South – in the spring the blossoms look like a Japanese cherry. One apple tree basically grew on its own, from a seed from a discarded core. And they planted serviceberry (aka juneberry) along the south fence. There were so many of them that the neighbors recall to this day how several generations of local children grew up on those berries.
That land was a true lifeline in the years after the war. The garden fed us: we grew everything we could and put great care into preserving it. The root cellar held carrots, beets, and turnips in sand, potatoes in boxes and, of course, jars. In some places the harvest was modest – trenches were still there from the war years. People would fill them in, but the land would sink back down.
There was no electricity. Light came from kerosene lamps, we cooked on kerosene stoves, brought in water from a well. To water the garden, we dragged buckets from the creek – it was closer, but still far. All year round, we rushed to spend every free moment at the dacha. Compared with six people crowded into two rooms of a communal apartment, it meant space and freedom.
In the summer, we went to the Rozhaika River to swim – it might have been small, but it was still a river. No one had inflatable rings except for the children of drivers, who came into possession of inner tubes, which seemed like the height of luxury. My sister and I would bring a pillowcase, soak it, blow into it and tie it up. That sort of improvised pillow would float in the water for some time.
In the ’70s, the house burned down – a short circuit. No one from the family was at the dacha. We needed permission to replace it, which we managed to get only thanks to influential connections. We rebuilt on the old foundation and added an open porch, and it became our favorite spot right away. That took 10 years.
And then everything came back to life again. Children came, then grandchildren. Everyone spent the summer here, but we came in winter too. While the fire was getting going, you‘d shovel snow and warm up. By then it was already cozy inside, and the potatoes would be boiling.
Once I came in the fall for some reason with my granddaughter Olya. Someone had pulled down the fence by the gate just for kicks, and the two of us spent the entire weekend fixing it. The neighbors helped with boards. We were so tired. And on the way home on the commuter train we played a guessing game. I picked hammer and my granddaughter, nail. We laughed and decided to stop playing. The new fence stood for a long time after.
The dacha appeared in the late 1930s – the father of my future husband traded a room in a communal apartment for half a house with 1,500 square meters of land in the village of Zagoryanka. At that time, it was a typical workers’ settlement, built by some government department for its employees. I myself first set eyes on the dacha in the late ’90s, when Andrei Petrovich and I were planning to get married. It was a late marriage – he was 52 and I was 46 – and I already had two daughters and a granddaughter from my previous marriage. And that granddaughter, Sasha, she was six then, after her first visit to the dacha, started bugging me to marry “Uncle Petrovich.”
Well why wouldn’t I bug Grandma about it? I remember our first trip to the dacha and how they made up a bed for me on the stove – I lazed about in the warmth, flipping through books, and the adults brought me food. How blissful is that?!
Grandma had a friend, a neighbor across the street, who had a big carpet in her attic. We called it Persian even though it was a regular Soviet rug, quite moth-eaten. At some point it became the center of our entire dacha life. We would spread it out on the grass, decorate it with tea lights and nasturtium petals and have a feast – some would sit, some lie down. Papa sang and played guitar. And in the darkness, from the window on the second floor, the candles on the rug looked like a sky full of stars.
Papa had an amazing aluminum boat, lightweight and practical. When you folded it up, it turned into a little triangle on wheels, just like a suitcase. One time he set off for the lake to catch some rotan – they’re the kind of fish that people just feed to their cats. But on the way he found a spot where mushrooms were growing. And they were porcini! And a lot of them! Papa got excited, dragged his boat into the forest and started picking the mushrooms and filling the boat up with them. But there was just one wheel, and, of course, it couldn’t take the weight and fell off. And later the boat got stolen.
So many of our things at the dacha have a history. There’s a lampshade on the porch made from the drafts of Grandpa’s dissertation. And in the room my son now stays in there’s a typewriter that my great-grandmother – his great-great-grandmother – wrote her dissertation on.
We even have a family joke about my “dowry.” Our relatives acquired a cooperative apartment with bathroom fixtures they wanted to get rid of – they thought they were hideous. And Grandpa Andrei Petrovich took them to the dacha saying they’d come in handy for Sashenka when she grew up. So this bright blue trio – a toilet, a tank and a sink – have been kept in a closet for years. Every now and then someone opens it, says, “oh, Sasha’s dowry,” and closes it back up. Now Stalin’s collected works is gathering dust in there too.
Our dacha isn’t just a place of strength, it’s also a magnet for everyone who’s been here even once. For many years now, once the season starts our friends ask, “So, can we come to your dacha? When?” And people who come for the first time are always thrilled. Without exception. It was like that with Grandma’s friends, with my parents’ friends, and now with mine too. Everyone who’s been even once can never again forget this place.
Mama always complains, “How can that be? We don’t have a toilet, we’ve got a hole in the ground!” And Grandma supports her: “It’s so inconvenient!” But everyone who visits has such a great time that these “inconveniences” don’t bother them.
In the mid ’60s, my grandfather received a 600-square-meter allotment – but really 200, because he had two daughters and needed to provide for both of them.
He was a shepherd, an orphan from Altay who came to Moscow on foot because he had relatives here. He took on any work he could find and, in the end, became a highly qualified machinist, the real proletarian elite.
He built two houses, taught his daughters to work the land, and was happy once he was able to come back to it. He had a flower business until he was quite old: he grew gladioli, sold them at the market himself, and earned a decent living. He always used his earnings to buy treats for us, his grandchildren.
Mama raised me and my brother on her own – how she managed it on a teacher’s salary I can’t even imagine. But the dacha helped. Just about everything grew here: berries, zucchini, beans, tomatoes, leafy greens and herbs, so many herbs. We ate everything up without any thought of preserving it.
I remember in seventh or eighth grade my older brother stayed in Moscow for the weekend and so did all my friends – they hung out with girls, tried vodka. And I went off glumly to the dacha to help our mother – I couldn’t refuse her.
Now I’m very grateful to my entire family – Grandpa, Mama, my aunt – for instilling a love for the land in me. I adore planting things. I go crazy when everything flowers. I understand the meaning of existence, life and death, as I watch the seasons change, as I see the signs not through a window but right under my feet and over my head.
This is a place where I have been happy to spend time with people, and where I’m happy now, being rescued by the dacha from the outside world. A dog and a cat have adopted me, and it’s like we’re all in the womb of childhood, in the belly of a whale – stars, animals, darkness, tea under the larch tree. And my deceased loved ones are closer to me here than in a church or a cemetery.
And yes, I do get extremely excited when the tomatoes grow.
My grandfather was given our dacha by the Ministry of Defense in 1956, when he retired with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. The rules were strict in those days: how big a house you could build, how many fruit trees and berry bushes you could plant. And so their family – at first four, but then later seven – were crammed together in a tiny little house.
We have a bit of a family legend about the house, that Grandpa hid a gun somewhere in the walls when it was being built but didn’t tell anyone where or why. And so we live with this little secret, with an invisible gun in the walls. I get a kick out of thinking that there might be something else besides the gun: maybe a treasure, or a family archive. And one day our descendant will happen upon it.
In the first years after I took full ownership of the dacha, I discovered all sorts of stashed-away messages from my childhood self – in storage bins in the attic or in the wood pile. You can’t imagine how much pleasure you can get from the cheap green plastic pig you played with when you were three when you find it in a dark and dusty corner of the attic under straw, decaying newspaper clippings, and other rubbish. And an Indian! And a red-and-yellow glass vase! And Tatiana, Elizabeth, Consuelo and Violetta – the dolls you sewed when you were 12!
My first memory about myself is connected to the dacha. Grandpa had hung a swing on a birch tree – just a basic one with thin rope and a wooden seat, for a little kid. He and Grandma were swinging me back and forth and I soared up between the trunks and suddenly saw sparkly little sun people. So tiny, like little sparks. They were sitting in the treetops and glowing. And I remember that feeling very well: not fear, but some kind of quiet delight.
It’s my first vivid memory. And I think it imprinted somehow onto how I perceived life at the dacha overall.
As if I’ve always known since that moment: in this place, fairy tales can come true.
One more memory: Mama’s birthday. My future husband and I arrived with our friend and were dancing on the porch to music from a tape player. Mama was dancing with us, the floorboards were creaking, and the whole house shook. And then the guys snored like crazy – I shushed them all night then went off in a snit to sleep in the car. And Mama was lying there barely holding in laughter, as she admitted the next morning.
Sometimes I feel like all of that hasn’t gone anywhere. It continues to exist somewhere. And here, at the dacha, that ever-present “past” is close by.
I’d like to put a tent over the dacha, to make it my country. With Maurice Carême poems and Bulat Okudzhava records, with Grandpa’s postcards and Mama’s Crimean roses. And with the smell of dust in the attic and the little flags that appear after our birthdays – and hang like that for years after.
And I’ll sit in our little old house at the table by the window, and the ancient gas meter will crackle, and the lace curtain that’s been hanging since time immemorial will softly flutter in the wind. And all of this will bring me comfort.
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