RE: An old thread.
The Sunday Gazette Mail (Charleston, West Virginia) August 25, 2002 Dacha gardens fill gap in Russian economy By Mark McDonald Knight Ridder Newspapers
STAVROPOL, Russia - Her eyes blaze blue, her soul burns communist-red, and her fingernails are black from the dirt in her garden.
Maria Naumenko has planted a vegetable garden every summer for the past 50 years, although it's anything but a hobby or a diversion for the 79-year-old widow. Her monthly pension is $ 50, and like tens of millions of Russians, she depends on the produce she gets from the garden at her dacha, or country house. She needs the Baby's Fist strawberries and the Bull's Heart tomatoes, the walnuts and the apples, the potatoes, melons, garlic and beets.
More than a decade after the fall of communism, dacha gardens and private plots are so pervasive and so intensively worked that they account for 95 percent of all the potatoes grown in Russia, plus about 85 percent of all the vegetables.
"I don't even know how much a tomato in a shop costs anymore," says Naumenko, who worked 40 years as a psychiatric nurse and longs for the days of Lenin, Stalin and the old guard of the Communist Party. Her husband, a chauffeur for former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, died 20 years ago.
"I haven't bought a tomato in years. I can't afford them. The price of food now! For me, going to the market is like going to a museum. I can only stand there looking."
Sept. 1 marks the traditional end of the summer dacha season in Russia, and Naumenko's next two weeks will be busy with picking and pickling, canning and freezing and putting up. After that, throughout her little dacha community along Molotov Lane, there will be celebration bonfires and the usual closing-up chores at the dachas.
The dacha (pronounced DAH-chuh) exerts an almost religious hold over most Russians. It is a ritual of every summer, a sanctuary from the rush and pollution of the city, and weekending at the dacha returns many urban Russians, quite literally, to their agrarian roots. On summer weekends, most major cities, particularly Moscow, are nearly deserted. Everyone, it seems, is na dache - at the dacha.
"The dacha is an extremely important part of my life," says Dimitri Rylko, 45, an agricultural consultant who works in Moscow. "I really need to dig, plant and water. I really need to get those vegetables from the ground."
A dacha can be anything from a one-room shed with no plumbing to a newly built, fully winterized villa. Having a dacha is neither elitist nor extravagant, and most Russians, regardless of their economic status, have access to some kind of dacha, whether through family or friends.
The average Russian wage is just $ 134 a month, and with more than 40 million Russians living below the poverty line, many still need the food that dacha gardens provide.
"I couldn't live without it," says Naumenko. "As it is, I don't buy clothes. I work like a slave at my dacha. In my retirement I wanted to rest or travel. But I never rest, and the only traveling I do is to my dacha - on the bus."
In the Soviet era, workers usually secured the rights to a dacha from their factories, trade unions or work collectives. The standard plot was about twice the size of a tennis court. As a hedge against the routine shortages in Soviet agricultural production, workers were required to plant their gardens with carrots, cabbages, onions, potatoes and beets. These items became known as the five "political vegetables," and potatoes were called "the second bread."
Fifty years ago, Naumenko and her husband received a double-sized dacha plot because he had been seriously wounded in World War II. The garden, now green and lush, was nothing but a bare patch back then. They eventually scavenged enough materials to build a two-room cottage - no water, toilet or electricity.
These days, the roof leaks, the plaster is cracked, and there's still no power or plumbing. But on a recent morning the garden and orchard were in full roar, and on the floor of the cottage, Naumenko was drying dozens of marigold blossoms on sheets of the newspaper Pravda.
"When these are mixed with vodka," she says, eyes twinkling as she chewed one of the flowers, "they're good for throat problems."
Andrey Sebrant, a computer expert with Lycos in Moscow, doesn't much care for the work that his family's dacha garden requires, chores he refers to as "those agricultural procedures." But his wife and daughter love the dirty work, as does his father-in-law, a renowned theoretical physicist, who can't seem to get enough of digging, planting and puttering.
"It makes perfect sense for him," says Sebrant, whose dacha is 20 miles east of Moscow. "It's nice for him to do something completely different from his normal work."
And Sebrant says there is a larger, more profound concept at work here, the notion of dacha as a community.
"My wife, from the very first summer of her life, she has spent it at the dacha. She knows virtually everyone out there, 60 or 80 families.
"Dacha is one of the most stable communities we have in Russia, and it's important psychologically for people to feel that stability. Compared to most other things, dacha hasn't changed very much at all."
But many dacha communities are changing. Vandalism is epidemic now, including arson, and a growing number of homeless Russians have taken to squatting in remote, unoccupied dachas during the winter.
Theft of fruits and vegetables - unthinkable in Soviet times - is another new problem, and some communities are hiring night watchmen to stand guard over the onions, beets and potatoes.
At one dacha community in the eastern city of Khabarovsk, the guards whip the offenders they catch and then make them stand naked in the gardens while the dacha owners walk by spitting on them.
Thieves recently stole 80 bulbs of garlic from Naumenko's dacha and broke some of her windows. (She had no money for the repairs, so she paid off the carpenter with several bottles of wine she made from old plum preserves and apple jelly.) One neighbor had her entire potato crop stolen. The thieves, working by moonlight, stole the spuds right out of the ground.
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