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Contesting Capitalism at the Post-Soviet Dacha: The Meaning of Food Cultivation for Urban Russians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jane Zavisca
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Abstract

Nearly half of urban Russian households grow food on their dacha plots. This study investigates the meaning of this activity for both those who embrace it and those who reject it. Existing scholarship frames the post-Soviet dacha as a survival strategy and debates its efficiency. Ethnographic evidence reveals that the dacha provides not simply a source of food but a discursive arena for debating the rationality and morality of the transition to a market economy. Due to their rich history, dachas may be interpreted as sites of production or of consumption, as economic necessities or status signifiers. This ambiguity makes dachas particularly salient in disputes over the proper relationship between economic power and social esteem in the shifting stratification order.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 4: Tourism and Travel in Russia and the Soviet Union , Winter 2003 , pp. 786 - 810
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

I would especially like to thank the editors and anonymous referees at Slavic Review, as well as Victoria Bonnell, Michael Burawoy, and Jennifer Utrata for their careful readings and constructive criticisms of earlier drafts. Elzbieta Benson, Neil Fligstein, Jeffrey Sallaz, Cinzia Solari, Edward Walker, Suzanne Wertheim, and Dolores Zavisca also provided helpful feedback. The research for this article was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant SES-0101249; a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant; a Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program Title 8 Dissertation Writing Fellowship; the Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, the Institute for International Studies, and the Graduate Division of the University of California at Berkeley.

1 The Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) Wave 10 indicates that 47 percent of urban households grew some food in 2001.

2 Although transformation better describes what is actually happening in Russian society, I use the term transition to describe a contested discourse concerning what should be happening.

3 Or 30 sotok (100 square meters), in Russian parlance. Typical plots range from 4 to 6 sotok, which is equivalent to 4,300 to 6,450 square feet, or .10 to .15 acres.

4 I have provided the month and year for direct quotes from a tape-recorded interview transcript (my translation). For conversations reconstructed from my field notes, the month and year are preceded by an F.

5 Examples include: Shlapentokh, Vladimir, “Early Feudalism: The Best Parallel for Contemporary Russia,“ Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 3 (1996): 407 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Humphrey, Caroline, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, 2002), 179 Google Scholar; Bank, World, Transition: The First Ten Years: Analysis and Lessons for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Washington, D.C., 2002)Google Scholar, xiv.

6 Respectively: Burawoy, Michael et al., “Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia,” Ethnography 1, no. 1 (2000): 46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ellman, Michael, “The Russian Economy under El'tsin,” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 8 (2000): 14–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, Richard and Tikhomirov, Yevgeniy, “Who Grows Food in Russia and Eastern Europe?” Post-Soviet Geography 34 (1993): 114 Google Scholar.

7 Rose and Tikhomirov, “Who Grows Food in Russia and Eastern Europe?” 124; Vagin, Vladimir, “Neformal'naia ekonomika i ‘sovokopnoe zhil'e’ gorozhan Rossii,” in Shanin, Teodor, ed., Neformal'naia ekonomika: Rossiia i mir (Moscow, 1999), 160 Google Scholar; Burawoy, Michael, “Transition without Transformation: Russia's Involutionary Road to Capitalism,“ East European Politics and Societies 15 (2001): 281 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Rose and Tikhomirov, “Who Grows Food in Russia and Eastern Europe?“; Harm Tho Seeth et al., “Russian Poverty: Muddling through Transition with Garden Plots,” World Development^ (1998).

9 Clarke, Simon, MakingEnds Meet in Contemporary Russia: Secondary Employment, Subsidiary Agriculture and Social Networks (Northampton, Mass., 2002)Google Scholar.

10 Seeth et al. presume that plot use is a function of a subsistence-based cost-benefit analysis, not leisure. Seeth et al., “Russian Poverty,” 162. Rose and Tikhomirov argue that food growing is driven by need rather than preference, because most who have access to land use it to grow food; they do not investigate the determinants of having land, however. Rose and Tikhomirov, “Who Grows Food in Russia and Eastern Europe?” 118, 125. While Clarke acknowledges that the dacha's significance is not simply economic, he does not systematically consider its broader meaning, and he is led to the insurance hypothesis by a desire to avoid concluding that Russians are economically irrational. Clarke, MakingEnds Meet in Contemporary Russia, 151, 154, 160-61, 168, and 169.

11 Clarke, MakingEnds Meet in Contemporary Russia, 169. Clarke's findings show that economic utility inadequately explains dacha use, but his data do not support such a sweeping dismissal of the dacha's economic significance. Although returns for the average dacha user are low, variance is high, indicating a sizeable minority for whom the dacha is an important resource. Furthermore, while the poorest (lowest income decile) may be the least likely to use a dacha, this does not mean that dacha users are well off, because the majority of Russians are poor.

12 On Hungary, see Czegledy, Andre, “Urban Peasants in a Post-Socialist World: Small-Scale Agriculturalists in Hungary,” in Leonard, Pamela and Kaneff, Deema, eds., Post-Socialist Peasant ? Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Former Soviet Union (New York, 2002), 214–17Google Scholar. On Bulgaria, see Deema Kaneff, “Work, Identity and Rural-Urban Relations,” in Leonard and Kaneff, eds., Post-Socialist Peasant? 189-90. On Russia, see Louise Perrotta, “Rural Identities in Transition: Partible Persons and Partial Peasants in Post-Soviet Russia,” in Leonard and Kaneff, eds., Post-Socialist Peasant? 130-31, and Ries, Nancy, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, 1997), 133 Google Scholar.

13 For example, Perrotta claims that land giveaways for dacha cultivation have been universally welcomed, the only exceptions being the “New Russian” business elite. Perrotta, “Rural Identities,” 130. In contrast, Caroline Humphrey writes that dachas divide families and communities in Russia, although she does not detail the discursive elements in these disputes. Humphrey, “Subsistence Farming and the Peasantry as an Idea in Contemporary Russia,” in Leonard and Kaneff, eds., Post-Socialist Peasant? 152. A fascinating case study of the status distinctions signaled by discourses embracing or rejecting market trade of homegrown produce in Bulgaria is provided in Kaneff, Deema, “The Shame and Pride of Market Activity: Morality, Identity and Trading in Postsocialist Rural Bulgaria,” in Mandel, Ruth and Humphrey, Caroline, eds., Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar.

14 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviexus and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York, 1980), 93–94 Google Scholar, 131-33.

15 For an introduction to Bourdieu's ideas, see Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loic, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar. Here I draw particularly on the work of Eyal, Gil, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis, 2003)Google Scholar. In his insightful synthesis of Foucault and Bourdieu, Eyal proposes that discourse as a mode of conflict is most salient to struggles within the “new class“ (intellectuals and technocrats), because the power of the new class derives from its (competing) claims to know how society should be governed. As my ethnographic evidence shows, knowledge discourses on questions of morality, rationality, and governance are employed in power struggles even at lowlier positions in the social structure, particularly where cultural capital is at stake.

16 See Eyal, Gil, Szelényi, Iván, and Townsley, Eleanor, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London, 1998)Google Scholar, for a sophisticated application of Bourdieu's framework to postsocialist societies. Although Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley contend that cultural capital dominates economic capital in east central Europe, they concede that this may not apply to Russia (166-67). In any case, economic capital has gained importance across the former Soviet domain (33).

17 See Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar.

18 Sites visited include: six Soviet-era garden cooperative dachas; six modest dachas constructed since 1991 (three with summer homes and three without); two elite dachas; three recendy constructed “cottages” of wealthy families; four older private homes in the city; and five country homes that serve as dachas. I sought variations in land use, as well as in the age, gender, and living standards of the primary users.

19 Since this article focuses on discourses, ethnographic data is emphasized. Interested readers can contact me to obtain statistical analyses of patterns of use and attitudes toward dachas. All statistics on Kaluga are taken from this survey, unless otherwise indicated.

20 Land use is more salient in Russia dian formal ownership, particularly in Kaluga where many people have access to land through rural relatives.

21 Dacha generally refers to summer garden and leisure spaces. Dacha also has the more specific meaning of a summerhouse, usually without heat. A country house is typically designed for year-round living.

22 Rates of dacha use are rumored to be much higher in St. Petersburg than Moscow, but the number of St. Petersburg households in the RLMS is too small to provide reliable estimates.

23 Based on whether the gross value of food produced exceeded 300 rubles per capita per month in 2001.

24 Humphrey, “Subsistence Farming,” 151.

25 This section draws heavily on two superb social histories: Naomi Galtz, “Space and the Everyday: An Historical Sociology of the Moscow Dacha” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000), and Lovell, Stephen, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (Ithaca, 2003)Google Scholar.

26 Galtz, “Space and the Everyday,” 195; see also Lovell, Stephen, “Between Arcadia and Suburbia: Dachas in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 66–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Lovell, Stephen, “The Making of the Stalin-Era Dacha,“ Journal of Modern History 74, no. 2 (June 2002): 267 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Galtz, “Space and the Everyday,” 236-40; Lovell, Summerfolk, 130.

29 Lovell, Summerfolk, 163-67.

30 Ibid., 191.

31 Resolution of the Soviet Ministers from 4/12/65, as cited in Galtz, “Space and the Everyday,” 285.

32 Galtz, “Space and the Everyday,” 285-93, 322-34; Lovell, Summerfolk, 191-97.

33 Galtz, “Space and the Everyday,” 294, 308.

34 Ibid., 279-80.

35 Lovell, Summerfolk, 213-16.

36 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 54–55 Google Scholar.

37 Multivariate statistical analysis confirms that wealth, incorporated cultural capital, and precapitalist attitudes are all positively associated with viewing dachas as leisure rather than work. These variables are stronger predictors of attitudes toward dachas than actual patterns of use. Details are available from the author.

38 In “Urban Peasants,” Czegledy notes a similar discourse among urban garden “hobbyists” in Hungary who claim that homegrown produce is more natural, familiar, and socially suitable, as opposed to store-bought food, which is utilitarian, alien, and asocial.

39 Lovell, Summetfolk, 204-6.

40 Galtz also notices a strong sense of ownership of labor in her interviews. Galtz, “Space and the Everyday,” 319.

41 Continued ambivalence toward those engaged in trade is widely reported in the post-Soviet ethnographic literature. For examples, see the essays by Farideh Heyat, “Women and the Culture of Entrepreneurship in Soviet and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan,“ Kaneff, “The Shame and Pride of Market Activity,” and Julian Watts, “Heritage and Enterprise Culture in Archangel, Northern Russia,” all in Mandel and Humphrey, eds., Markets and Moralities.

42 Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life, 199.

43 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957), 46 Google Scholar.

44 Melissa Caldwell, “Where There Is No Hunger: Food, Time, and Community in Moscow” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999), 33; Shevchenko, Olga, “'In Case of Fire Emergency': Consumption, Security and the Meaning of Durables in a Transforming Society,“ Journal of Consumer Culture 2, no. 2 (2002): 166 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.