A Socialist Dacha? The Order of Discourse on Amateur Gardening among Urban Residents and Its Dynamic in the Late Soviet Era

Abstract

Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s method, this article attempts to reconstruct the late-Soviet discourse on amateur urban gardening. The aim is to address the question about the place of the Soviet “mass dacha” (garden plot) in late Soviet ideology, as well as the question whether its widespread proliferation in the postwar period led to the emergence of a Western-style consumer society in the USSR. I identify five discourses that coexisted across various media and genres (ideological, hygienic, peasant, that of labor-creativity, and that of autonomy), and I point to a paradox: the official discursive space of cinema was characterized by criticism of garden plots and dachas for their “bourgeois” values of idle leisure, while in the more private spaces of local newspapers, specialized publications, and presumably private conversations, the garden plot was widely understood as a site for self-development through creative labor. Surprisingly, the garden plot was never officially recognized as a proper Soviet dacha understood in ideologically correct terms of productive labor, but vast numbers of Soviet amateur gardeners thought of it precisely as such, not as a place for idle leisure and status-conscious consumption. The garden plot brought Soviet people a special kind of pleasure from creative labor, possible only within the socialist project of modernity.