Dragging the Whole Family to the Dacha — You Think the Soviets Were Just Here for the Summer?
In Russian, summer is also known as “dacha season”. Gorky wrote a short play, translated into Chinese as Summer Refugees; its original Russian title, Dachniki, more closely translates as “Dacha People”. In 1995, the same story was adapted into a film titled The Summer People.
The dacha is inseparable from memories of summer.
“Dacha” is a transliteration referring to a country villa in the countryside. It is believed to have first appeared in early eighteenth-century Tsarist Russia, where it originally denoted land on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg granted by the Tsar to the nobility (the root of “dacha” derives from the verb “to give”). But the word truly entered everyday usage — indeed, became synonymous with summer itself — only after the Second World War, when the Soviet government distributed suburban plots to ordinary workers’ families by administrative decree, allowing ordinary people to have their own dacha. During more than four decades of post-war material shortages across the Soviet Union, it was the produce of dacha land that put food on the table of almost every Soviet household.
Life and labour on the dacha thus became a shared memory of generations.
I. From the Aristocrat’s Estate to the Commoner’s Summer House
In eighteenth-century Russia, the journey from Moscow to Saint Petersburg was arduous and expensive, and frequent travel between the two cities was impractical. To sustain Saint Petersburg’s prosperity, Peter I required his courtiers to settle there permanently rather than stay temporarily, and for this purpose distributed land around Saint Petersburg among them. This is the earliest origin of the word “dacha” and the primary source of its meaning as a “temporary residence on the outskirts of a city” — but what set it most apart from the mass version known today was that the “dachas” of those days often spanned hundreds or even thousands of hectares, true estates and villas.
In the years that followed, the concept of the “dacha” gradually broadened and, roughly a century later, settled into its meaning as a country house for urban residents to spend the summer in. The old capital, Moscow, embraced this concept even more readily than the noble-inhabited Saint Petersburg. Nineteenth-century Moscow entered the earliest phase of urban modernisation: single-storey private houses with courtyards were demolished in large numbers, replaced by multi-storey “income houses” let to newcomers from all quarters. Such urban living was far from comfortable, and in summer the discomfort became particularly acute — some historical records and paintings indicate that the Moscow of those days, if not entirely devoid of trees, had them in numbers so small as to count them rare. The city was dusty, summer heat intensified the sweltering air, and the countryside was therefore regarded as a healthier alternative; the vogue for dachas became unstoppable.
Not everyone could afford to own and maintain a country house used solely for the summer. For peasants in Tsarist Russia, letting their homes to town-dwellers became a lucrative business. At the same time, the aristocratic practice of summering in the country became the setting and inspiration for a wealth of artistic creation, to the point of forming a cultural phenomenon uniquely Russian in character: in the stories of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, you will encounter the dacha time and again. Tolstoy’s two masterworks, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, were both written at his family’s celebrated country estate in Tula Oblast.
Even so, the dacha remained a privilege of the upper and middle classes, as its sheer land area made plain: until the 1917 Revolution, what Russians understood by “dacha” still meant at least several hectares of land. On the other hand, dacha life in those days emphatically did not include farming. Tending ornamental gardens was the fashion, and more common still were reading, boating, conversation, and playing musical instruments.
This idyll was soon brought to an end. The outbreak of the First World War rapidly detonated the Russian Revolution, and the nascent Soviet government immediately nationalised the holiday villas around major cities.
In the 1930s, the Soviet government began trying to revive the tradition of summering at the dacha through administrative allocation, distributing country retreats to families within the party and state apparatus. But inevitably, while senior leaders enjoyed grand holiday villas, ordinary party members often faced the awkward situation of several families being allocated to the same dacha.
Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was pushing rapid urbanisation by administrative decree — large numbers of peasants were converted into industrial workers — yet amid the food shortages, these newly urbanised peasants had not forgotten their farming skills. The land attached to the dacha building cooperatives, which in principle belonged to the various ministries, agencies, and local governments, became their first choice for improving their living conditions.
In February 1949, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union adopted the Resolution “On Collective and Individual Gardening for Workers and Employees”, which marked the beginning of the dacha’s entry into the lives of all Soviet citizens. Over the following years, further resolutions were issued and the Soviet government began distributing plots on the outskirts of cities. The prevailing view is that the immediate cause of this decision was the food shortages plaguing the post-war Soviet Union; and although, under the Soviet ideology of abolishing private ownership, these lands nominally still had to be joined to a kolkhoz to be obtained, in practice they were unquestionably the private property of individual families, with their produce subject to no redistribution.
During the “Thaw” under Khrushchev’s leadership, dacha allocation and construction were vigorously promoted, and credited with directly alleviating the food crisis. The same policies were continued by Brezhnev, and the earlier ban on building houses on dacha plots was lifted. In 1966, the administrative regulations governing dachas were further refined; by this time the dacha had become an emblem of typical Soviet-style simplicity: its plot was not to exceed 600 square metres, and no structure exceeding 25 square metres, including greenhouses, was permitted.
By the late 1980s, further restrictions were lifted, and it became permissible to build multi-storey houses on one’s own plot. This was the prosperous period of the Soviet dacha’s development, but also its final chapter. In June 1986, more than 6.6 million workers owned 426,000 hectares of land, and the number of people spending the summer at their dacha exceeded 20 million a year. Afterwards, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, buying and selling land became possible, suburban land prices soared, and gentrification even reached these rural outskirts. Many sold or transferred their original dacha plots, but others threw themselves into rural life with even greater enthusiasm. A 2011 survey indicated that Russian citizens still owning a dacha accounted for approximately 48% of the urban population.
II. Vegetables, Potatoes and Jam: Typical Dacha Life
The first problem facing everyone was transport. Dachas were always scattered in rural areas, sometimes deep in the forest. Considering that many families needed to haul farming tools and everyday essentials out to the dacha, and then bring the harvest and all that gear back to the city, the journey was inevitably grueling: road conditions were always dreadful, and the train typically only reached a point still some distance from one’s dacha. The rest of the way had to be covered on foot, laden with everything; it was far from uncommon for an entire family to hike several kilometres — sometimes over ten.
Then came daily life itself, riddled with problems under the strict administrative ban. The dacha had no mains water or electricity, and heating installations were forbidden; water had to be drawn from a nearby stream or well. Because of the building restrictions, the cottage was limited to a single storey, so people built pitched roofs and improvised a second floor as a loft beneath them — and the ban soon became a matter of turning a blind eye, within limits. Even so, living conditions remained rudimentary, and it was common to see three generations crammed together in disarray. Every family hauled out their old furniture from the city flat — and whatever else they could lay their hands on.
Nor should one forget: under the pressure of food shortages, families had to produce, within four or five summer months, enough food to sustain the whole household through a long winter. What awaited them was not a leisurely holiday but a tight schedule of labour.
The 600-square-metre plot limit made any attempt at mechanisation impossible; and in the Soviet Union, even building materials were perpetually in short supply, so for an individual to find mechanised tools for small-scale farming was a pipe dream.
All the farm work therefore had to be done by hand, by the family itself. In a state that encouraged — even worshipped — labour, such heavy toil was regarded as a source of pride, and certainly nothing in need of improvement. One Soviet-era joke went: “From morning to night, people rest on their six sotkas — strenuously and without a care.”①
Incidentally, because the land was allocated for the purpose of “cultivation”, leaving it fallow or repurposing it for anything else was also illegal.
The main crops were potatoes and vegetables: the former a staple, the latter almost impossible to buy in shops, so the dacha’s produce was the only source of supply. Fruit trees were another popular addition — at certain periods a borderline illegal activity, at others simply overlooked — and the result was that virtually every Soviet housewife had a wealth of experience in cooking jam and preserving it in old jars. Under a shared timetable and a shared purpose, exchanges between neighbours were remarkably close: people traded seeds, seedlings, growing tips, and recipes. Many sources note that there were no fences or hedges between plots — partly because none were needed, and partly because materials for building them simply could not be found.
And yet, as with everything in the Soviet era, the dacha — seemingly homogenised, and a nursery for the closest of neighbourly bonds — was not quite so simple or ideal. Not every allocated plot was suitable for cultivation; in fact, the Soviet government gave no thought to the matter when distributing dachas to residents. Hilly ground, wetlands, and poor soil were all too common, while the best-located, most arable plots invariably went to the bosses. Friction over who got a slightly better dacha plot within the same workplace was unavoidable.
Everyone needed to buy food, yet devoting oneself entirely to agriculture and selling one’s surplus produce for a living was not permitted either — another quintessentially Soviet contradiction. The criminal code contained provisions on “parasitism” and “illegal private enterprise”; any full-time commitment to farming with the aim of selling one’s produce was defined as “commercial activity”, requiring a licence and heavy taxation. Moreover, such conduct was politically hazardous: under ever-shifting policy lines, it could easily become the target of a political campaign.
And yet the dacha still featured among the three emblems of the Soviet-style good life: “Apartment, car, dacha”. For nearly forty years, from 1949 to the late 1980s, it provided practically everything needed to sustain a life: potatoes, vegetables, jam — and the joy of the harvest, and hope for the future.
III. A Fading Symbol of Days Past
With the urgency of feeding a family long gone, today’s dacha is increasingly returning to its original face as a summer holiday retreat: ever more people plant ornamental flowers rather than food, and some have turned their rural space into holiday amenities, such as a banya. Of course, this is merely a budget version of an expensive holiday.
The dacha as a legacy of the old days also faces mounting challenges: most of the dacha plots allocated during the Soviet era were never formally registered after the USSR dissolved. In 2018, the State Duma passed a law intended to simplify registration procedures and encourage residents to formally register their suburban land — but because registration triggered property tax, it instead sparked a rush to sell dachas.
Statistics from 2019 showed the proportion of urban residents still owning a dacha had fallen to 42%. Other surveys suggested that fewer than a third of those surveyed chose to live at a dacha, whether permanently or seasonally.
Under such dramatic shifts in circumstance, the dacha is solidifying into a cultural landscape preserved in books and films.
Last spring, when the season was hardly suited to it, a friend of mine fled to his family’s dacha on the far outskirts of Moscow and stayed for over two months, reading Dostoevsky and Blok. By 2022, his family’s dacha had mains water and electricity, and basic heating. But as far as I know, during those seventy-odd days, he never paid a moment’s attention to the plot in front of the cottage.
For him, the dacha had nothing to do with a holiday or farm work any more. It was a temporary refuge for when reality needed to be escaped — true to its very original meaning, a “temporary residence”.
Note: ① “Six sotkas” originally referred to 6 сотка. A sotka means one hundredth of a hectare; six sotkas is therefore the 600 square metres of a dacha plot.
Editor: Wang Hao