La Dacha Vita

When a Muscovite out for a Sunday afternoon drive in the family Zhiguli comes to a thickly wooded area about 20 miles southwest of Moscow, he had better resist the temptation to park his car and stroll among the pines and birches. Just to remind him, a NO STOPPING line is painted along the side of the road, TRANSIT ONLY signs prohibit him from pausing in villages along the way, and NO ENTRY notices block all side streets. There is also a forbidding 10-ft. green wooden fence, set back from the road and stretching for miles. If, despite these warnings, he should pull off the shoulder even for a moment, armed guards are likely to materialize out of the woods or roar up in yellow patrol cars and hustle him on his way.

Soviet officials would prefer inquisitive foreigners to believe that the elaborate privacy is for the benefit of disabled war veterans and aged proletarians in nearby rest homes and hospitals. In fact, as every Muscovite knows, the fence hides a cluster of sumptuous villas belonging to the Kremlin elite. They are the most luxurious examples of the dacha (country house), a cherished retreat for every Russian lucky enough to have one, and a coveted status symbol for those who do not. There are approximately 40,000 dachas within a 30-mile radius of Moscow alone, including elegant mansions of the country's leaders, comfortable cottages for favored bureaucrats and humble izbas, or huts, often without plumbing or electricity, for less exalted citizens.

The government dachas near the village of Uspenskoye are the Soviet Union's answer to Britain's Checquers or the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David. On a summer weekend, virtually the entire Communist Party and state hierarchy speeds in convoys of limousines under police escort to an exclusive park full of country houses.

Not all of the Kremlin leaders have their dachas within the same compound. The most prominent dachnik, Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, has a weekend getaway spot near Barvikha, where he entertained Richard Nixon during the Moscow summit meetings. Former President Anastas Mikoyan has retired to Zubalovo, an estate surrounding a manor house decorated with marble statues, tapestries and stained glass. In czarist times it belonged to an oil millionaire; Joseph Stalin later expropriated the estate and included one of its mansions among his nine dachas around Moscow and in his native Georgia.

The dacha belt south of Moscow is segmented by profession and prestige. The picturesque village of Peredelkino, 15 miles from the capital, has been a writers' colony since the '30s and is now the dacha land of the officially approved intelligentsia, including Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who lives in a wood-paneled, two-story country house decorated with antique Russian Orthodox icons and abstract modern paintings.

A member of the Soviet establishment who falls from favor usually loses his dacha. When a top Moscow scientist recently applied for permission to emigrate to Israel, his country house was the first privilege to be taken away from him. These days dacha watchers are wondering if Pyotr Shelest, recently deposed as first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, will be able to hang on to his spacious villa and mile-long private beach on the Black Sea coast.

Though only a limited number of Russians have dachas of their own, hundreds of thousands have access to some kind of rural retreat. "Every summer Friday afternoon half of Moscow seems to leave the city," reports TIME'S John Shaw. "Even a quarter-acre of Mother Russia's soil gives them a place to escape to from the aggravations of communal urban life. Tens of millions of country-born Russians have been converted into citydwellers by industrialization in a generation or less. Many of them remain country folk at heart. To ordinary Russians, the extravagant, arbitrary privileges of their leaders, most powerfully symbolized by the secluded, luxurious villas of officialdom, will matter little so long as they too have a chance for a humbler version of the same pleasures."

A Russian family can rent a two-bedroom dacha for the equivalent of about $100 a month. Holiday accommodation is also available through dacha cooperatives, run by most government ministries and academic institutions for their more senior employees. A member pays a token lease for a bit of rural land on which he can build a private dacha for an average of about $2,000. The tracts are usually about 25 acres subdivided into fifty half-acre plots. There are hundreds of such cooperatives around Moscow.

Private Faith. In the summer-lush countryside, the Soviet citizen can raise vegetables, stroll through the pine woods--and enjoy an extra measure of privacy unavailable in his city apartment. Even the KGB (secret police) pays little attention to what the citizen does on weekends in the country. Prudent during the week, he may read proscribed books once he is secluded in his dacha. Among typical articles of private faith furnishing many dachas are Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, an LP of Hair, a photograph of Pasternak, and a bronze cross.

Summer is also the time of the dachniye muzhya, or dacha husbands, whose families are away in the country, leaving them to cook for themselves in the city Monday through Friday and commute to the dacha on weekends, carrying supplies--a situation familiar to many urban American husbands. The role of dachas in Russian life is by no means new to the Soviet era. Anton Chekhov wrote a short story about a dachny muzh who made the best of his citybound work week by taking a mistress in the summer while his wife was at the dacha.

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