Dacha is a name for summer home or garden house in Russia and the CIS countries where people spend their summer holidays and grow fruit and vegetables for their own use. Dachas of the middle class sometimes has separate banyas attached to the house. The house is usually wooden or rarely brick and nearly always hand-built. In archaic Russian, the word 'dacha' used to mean 'something given' as 'dachas' were estates given to loyal vassals by the Tsar . The common term for a dacha farmer is 'dachnik' The word sotka is commonly used to express the size of a lot on which dacha is built.
Dachas began to appear after World War II . The reasons for their appearance were on one side the desire of city people, all living in blocks of flats, to spend some time close to nature, and on the other side the need to grow vegetables. Such a need was caused by food shortages experienced due to Soviet agricultural policy.
In the very beginning, dachas owned by common people were practically illegal. However, since there was no actual law limiting the existence of them, more people started to build them. In most instances they were built on unused plots of land near the owner's city. As time passed the number of dachniks had grown geometrically and they had been officially legalized. Legalization brought local government representatives in the form of so-called "Gardeners' Societies" together with electricity and water conduits for irrigation .
In Soviet times prominent officials or cultural figures were granted rights to use state-owned vacation houses as part of their compensation package, though this right was revoked when the official was dismissed or went out of favor.
To this day, May Day holidays remain a feature of Russian life allowing urban residents, even of the largest cities, a long weekend to plant potatoes. There are no suitable state holidays to be used for the potato harvest, thus it is usually accomplished very quickly during a usual weekend. Some companies, especially the municipal ones, used to give their staff an extra weekend day specifically for that purpose.
The dacha plots (usually not more than 600 sq. m. ) are too small to grow the needed amount of vegetables, thus sometimes they are also grown on separate dedicated plots of ground. In Soviet times and sometimes now, such dedicated plots of ground often were made of the unused sections of agricultural fields owned by collective farms .
The annual process of potato harvesting (and sometimes planting) is a significant (though rather dislikable) event in life of Russians. It is commonly called "to go for potatoes". In Soviet times, visiting a private field plot had been called "to go to the fields"
Though dacha farming is absolutely not obligatory, most Russians still prefer to grow vegetables themselves because of the excessive use of agrochemicals and low quality of the vegetables sold through markets and stores. The only acceptable alternative to such Post-Soviet form of farming is acquiring vegetables on numerous Russian bazaars called " rynoks " where the products being sold are grown either by rural farmers or by other dacha farmers.
The most common means of transportation for low- and middle-class people to get to their dachas, besides cars, are electric trains, colloquially called " elektrichka " . During summer, and especially the planting and the harvest seasons, elektrichkas are often so filled with dachniks that it becomes hard to breathe inside the cars and even the cars' sliding doors can hardly be closed.
Early in the Soviet times the state-owned vacation houses allotted for government members were called " gosdachas " ("state dacha"). Closer to the present, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was for years as good as extraterritorial and unattainable for the authorities because he stayed at the dachas of writer Korney Chukovsky in Peredelkino and the world famous cello player and conductor Mstislav Rastropovich. In modern Russia , President 's Administration continue to own numerous estates throughout the country that are leased, often on non-market terms, to government officials.
In modern times, the rise of a new class in the Russian society, the 'new Russians', has seen the concept of dacha morphed into an elaborate display of social status, wealth and power.
Many of Russia's oligarchs and successful entrepreneurs , athletes , pop musicians and mafia bosses now choose dacha as their primary residence, such as Rublevka. With construction costs often reaching into the millions of US dollars , the dachas of the country's elite bear no resemblance to Soviet -era small garden houses . Comparable in size and décor to mansions and palaces, they usually have eclectic style and feature numerous luxury items such as marble statues, fountains, exotic plants and sporting facilities, which include indoor swimming pools, multiple tennis courts, and stables for race horses. A few estates even have privately owned small forests and lakes surrounded by solid fences equipped with barbed wire , surveillance cameras , and motion detectors and are protected by heavily armed guards.
