Taking the Whole Family to the Dacha: Did Soviets Really Just Go for a Summer Holiday?
In Russian, summer is also known as “dacha season”. Maxim Gorky wrote a short play that was translated into Chinese as *The Summer Visitors*; its original Russian title, *Dachniki*, is more literally rendered as “Dacha Dwellers”—in 1995, the same story was adapted into a film titled *Summer People*.
The dacha is inextricably linked to memories of summer.
*Dacha* is a transliteration referring to a country house or summer villa on the outskirts. Historical research suggests the term first appeared in early 18th-century Tsarist Russia, initially denoting plots of land granted by the Tsar to nobility on the outskirts of St Petersburg (the root of *dacha* derives from the verb ‘to give’). Yet it only truly entered everyday usage—and became synonymous with summer itself—after the Second World War, when the Soviet state used administrative decrees to allocate suburban plots to ordinary working-class families, enabling everyday people to have their own dachas. Throughout the more than forty years of chronic shortages that followed the war in the Soviet Union, it was the produce grown on dacha plots that filled the tables of virtually every Soviet household.
As a result, life and labour at the dacha became a shared memory across generations.
I. From Aristocratic Estates to Ordinary People’s Summer Houses
In eighteenth-century Russia, the journey between Moscow and St Petersburg was arduous and costly, rendering frequent travel between the two cities impractical. To maintain the new capital’s prosperity, Peter the Great required his courtiers to take up residence in St Petersburg rather than merely visiting, and allotted them plots of land in the surrounding countryside. This marks the earliest origin of the term ‘dacha’, and the primary source of its meaning as a ‘temporary residence on the urban fringe’. What differed most sharply from today’s commonplace version, however, is that these early dachas often spanned hundreds, even thousands, of hectares—they were genuine country estates and villas.
In the decades that followed, the concept of the dacha gradually expanded, and roughly a century later settled firmly as a country cottage for city dwellers to spend their summers. The old capital of Moscow embraced this idea even more readily than the aristocracy of St Petersburg. During the nineteenth century, Moscow entered its earliest phase of urban modernisation: single-storey private homes with courtyards were demolished en masse, replaced by multi-storey rental buildings let out to strangers. Such city living was far from comfortable, and the discomfort was particularly acute in summer. Historical accounts and paintings suggest that Moscow, if not entirely devoid of trees, at least possessed remarkably few of them. The city was dusty, and summer temperatures only intensified the stifling heat. The countryside therefore came to be seen as a healthier alternative, and the dacha’s popularity became an unstoppable trend.
Not everyone possessed the means to own and maintain a country villa used solely for the summer. For peasants of the Tsarist era, however, renting out their homes to city dwellers quickly became a lucrative enterprise. At the same time, the nobility’s summer country life provided the backdrop and inspiration for a wealth of artistic works, evolving into a distinctly Russian cultural phenomenon: you will encounter the dacha time and again in the pages of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Indeed, Tolstoy’s two masterpieces, *War and Peace* and *Anna Karenina*, were both penned at his family’s renowned country estate in the Tula province.
Nevertheless, the dacha remained an indulgence exclusive to the upper-middle classes, as reflected in its footprint: until the 1917 Revolution, a dacha in the Russian imagination still entailed at least several hectares of land. On the other hand, cultivating crops had absolutely no place in the dacha lifestyle of the time; tending ornamental gardens was considered a fashionable pursuit, while reading, boating, conversing, and playing musical instruments were far more common.
Such leisurely pursuits were soon brought to an abrupt end. The outbreak of the First World War swiftly precipitated the Russian Revolution, and the newly formed Soviet government immediately nationalised the holiday villas surrounding major cities.
In the 1930s, the Soviet government began attempting to revive the tradition of summering at dachas through administrative allocation, assigning rural summer residences to families within the party and state apparatus. Yet inevitably, while senior leaders enjoyed lavish holiday villas, ordinary party members often found themselves in the awkward situation of multiple families being assigned to a single dacha.
Concurrently, the Soviet Union was rapidly driving urbanisation by decree—vast numbers of peasants were transformed into industrial workers. Yet amidst food shortages, these rural migrants to the city had not forgotten their farming skills. The land attached to dacha building cooperatives—principally under the jurisdiction of various ministries, state organs, and local governments—became their primary recourse for improving their living standards.
In February 1949, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a resolution on “Collective and Personal Horticulture for Workers and Employees”, marking the beginning of the dacha’s integration into the lives of all Soviet citizens. In the following years, a series of resolutions were issued, and the Soviet government began allocating suburban plots to citizens. The prevailing view holds that the direct catalyst for this policy was the post-war food shortage in the USSR. Although, under the Soviet ideology of abolishing private ownership, these plots could nominally only be accessed through “collective farms”, in practice, they functioned unequivocally as private family property, with all produce retained without any secondary redistribution.
During the “Thaw” under Khrushchev, the allocation and construction of dachas were vigorously promoted, as they were seen to directly alleviate food shortages. Brezhnev inherited this same policy, and lifted the previous ban on constructing houses on dacha plots. In 1966, administrative regulations governing dachas were further refined; by this point, the dacha had become emblematic of typical Soviet modest living: plots were capped at 600 square metres, and no structures exceeding 25 square metres—including greenhouses—were permitted.
By the late 1980s, restrictions were further relaxed, permitting the construction of multi-storey homes on private plots. This marked the peak of the Soviet-style dacha’s development, yet also its twilight years. By June 1986, over 6.6 million working people held plots covering 426,000 hectares, with more than 20 million people spending their summers at dachas annually. Following the dissolution of the USSR, land sales became legal and suburban property values skyrocketed; gentrification even encroached upon these outlying rural areas. Many sold or transferred their original dacha plots, while others embraced rural life with renewed enthusiasm. A 2011 survey indicated that roughly 48% of urban residents in Russia still owned a dacha.
II. Vegetables, Potatoes, and Jam: Typical Dacha Life
The first obstacle faced by all was transport. Dachas were scattered throughout the countryside and deep into the forests. Given that families had to transport farming tools and daily necessities to their dacha, and later haul the harvest and all that equipment back to the city, the journey was inevitably gruelling. Road conditions were invariably poor, and trains typically only reached a station a considerable distance away. The remainder of the trip had to be covered on foot, with everyone carrying heavy loads; it was by no means rare for entire families to trek several, or even a dozen, kilometres.
Then came the day-to-day struggle of navigating life under strict administrative bans. Dachas had no running water or electricity, and heating installations were prohibited; residents had to draw water from nearby streams or wells. Building regulations limited structures to a single storey, so people constructed steeply pitched roofs to effectively create a second-floor attic space. Over time, the authorities simply turned a blind eye to this workaround, provided it stayed within certain bounds. Even so, living conditions remained extremely basic, with it being common to find three generations of a family huddled together in cramped quarters. Every household ferried discarded furniture from their city homes to the dacha, along with anything else they could lay their hands on.
Let us not forget that, under the pressure of chronic food shortages, people also had to use those four or five summer months at the dacha to produce enough food to see their families through the long winter. What awaited them was not leisurely holiday relaxation, but a tightly packed schedule of work.
The strict limit of 600 square metres of land made any attempt at mechanisation impossible. In the Soviet Union, where even basic building materials were in constant short supply, an individual’s hope of finding mechanical equipment for a smallholding was nothing short of a fantasy.
All agricultural work therefore had to be done by the hands of the family alone. In a society that encouraged, even worshipped, labour, such heavy toil was regarded as a badge of honour, rather than a problem in need of solving. One Soviet-era joke captured the irony perfectly: “From morning till night, people toiled on their six-sotka plots, resting hard and without a care.”①
Incidentally, because the allocated land was designated for “cultivation”, leaving it fallow or converting it to other uses was also illegal.
Crop planting focused mainly on potatoes and vegetables: the former served as the staple food, while the latter were almost impossible to find in state shops, making the dacha the only reliable source. Another popular pursuit was growing fruit trees. At certain periods, this bordered on illegality; at others, it was simply ignored. Consequently, almost every Soviet housewife gained considerable experience in boiling jams and preserving them in recycled glass jars. United by shared seasonal rhythms and common goals, neighbours maintained close ties, swapping seeds, seedlings, cultivation tips, and cooking recipes. Numerous accounts note that there were no fences or hedges between plots in those days—partly because they were unnecessary, and partly because materials for building them were simply unavailable.
Yet, as with everything in the Soviet era, the dacha was not quite as straightforward or idyllic as it appeared. For all its homogenising effect and its role in fostering remarkably close community bonds, the reality was far more complex. Not all allocated plots were suited to farming; in fact, the Soviet government gave little thought to land quality when handing them out. Rocky, marshy, or barren patches were common. The best-located, most fertile plots invariably went to party officials and managers. Within the same work unit, friction over securing a slightly better dacha plot was inevitable.
While everyone needed to buy food, dedicating all one’s time to agriculture and trying to sell the surplus to make a living was strictly forbidden—another distinctly Soviet contradiction. The criminal code contained provisions against “parasitism” and “illegal business”. Any full-time engagement in farming with the intent to sell one’s produce was classified as “business activity”, requiring a licence and subject to exorbitant taxes. Moreover, such behaviour carried serious political risk. Under frequently shifting policy lines, it could easily be swept up as a target during political campaigns.
Even so, the dacha remained one of the three pillars of the Soviet dream of a good life: “flat, car, dacha”. For nearly forty years, from 1949 until the end of the 1980s, it provided almost everything needed to sustain life: potatoes, vegetables, and jams, alongside the joy of the harvest and a quiet hope for the future.
III. A Fading Symbol of the Past
With the pressing need for home-grown food now a thing of the past, today’s dachas are steadily reverting to their original identity as summer retreats. More owners are planting ornamental garden displays, and others are making use of the rural setting to build leisure amenities such as Russian banyas. Naturally, this serves merely as an affordable substitute for more costly forms of holidaying.
As a legacy of another era, the dacha also faces mounting challenges. Most plots allocated during the Soviet period remained unregistered following the Union’s collapse. In 2018, the Russian State Duma passed legislation intended to streamline the registration process and encourage residents to formalise their suburban land titles. Instead, because registration triggered property tax liabilities, it inadvertently fuelled a surge in dacha sales.
According to 2019 figures, the proportion of urban residents who still own a dacha has dropped to 42%. Other surveys suggest that those who continue to live in them, whether year-round or seasonally, account for less than a third of respondents.
Against a backdrop of such rapid societal change, the dacha is increasingly becoming a preserved cultural artifact, more commonly found in books and cinema than in everyday life.
Last spring, a friend of mine fled to his dacha in Moscow’s far suburbs for over two months, disregarding the unsuitable weather, to lose himself in the works of Dostoevsky and Blok. By 2022, the property was fully connected to electricity and water, and equipped with basic heating. Yet, as far as I know, throughout those seventy-plus days, he made no effort to tend the patch of earth outside his door.
For him, the dacha no longer signifies a holiday retreat or agricultural labour. It has become a temporary sanctuary for escaping the pressures of modern life, aligning perfectly with its etymological root as a ‘temporary abode’.
Note: ① The term historically referred to six sotkas. A sotka is one-hundredth of a hectare, meaning the standard dacha plot measures 600 square metres.
Editor: Wang Hao