Creeping Private Enterprise

In Soviet Russia, the commuter is called a dachnik. In Chekhov's day he was strictly a summer bird, flitting back and forth to a rustic cottage in the city's fringing forests. In modern, jampacked Moscow, he is more and more a year-rounder, living in the country because he has no place else to live, and commuting, like the U.S. suburbanite (see BUSINESS), by train--the 8:02 elektrichka.

He not only wins the bread but brings it home. Even if there is a store near by, his wife firmly believes that food brought from town is better and fresher. Every night after work the "dacha husband" (as Chekhov called him) goes shopping, list in hand, and patiently queueing. Then, laden like a pack mule, he must wedge his way into a crowded train. His worst problem: kerosene, still the main cooking fuel in outlying places. The railroad bars it as dangerous, and if the dacha husband is caught carrying it, he will be put off the train and fined. He must therefore have a container sufficiently camouflaged to look like a food parcel.

When at last he staggers in through his front door and deposits his load, the dachnik, instead of relaxing in an easy chair, must swing an ax or carry water: most dachas are heated with wood stoves, and the plumbing is openly arrived at.

Communist Castles. Rugged as this daily grind is, more and more Muscovites are turning into dachniks. Private frame dwellings (individually owned, but on land leased from the state) arise in numbers almost as great as the grey blocks of new city apartments that grow in melancholy monotony in Moscow's residential districts. Letting or subletting dachas is one of the few flourishing forms of private enterprise left in Russia. Last week the Moscow press charged that a food-store manager had unlawfully bought a twelve-room, seven-porch dacha in a scientists' colony, added two more dachas inside his high walls ("almost a feudal castle, lacking only the moat and drawbridge"), hired a caretaker couple full time, and made thousands of rubles by renting out porches, rooms and cottages to dachniks at excessive prices. A dacha need not be grand: a peasant's hut qualifies as a dacha when one room or a veranda is rented to a summer tourist.

In the grimmer '30s, dachas were for exclusive colonies of the favored elite--commissars, scientists, writers, composers. But now the government complains of creeping free enterprise, and accuses crooked officials of ignoring zoning regulations to help "speculators" turn Moscow's green environs into building lots.

Behind Fences. Recently, the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossia accused three Moscow housing-administration officials of unlawfully putting up their own dachas on reserved grounds, and complained that "at a time when our country is striding confidently toward Communism, it is strange to see such castlelike dachas rising behind heavy fences." Khrushchev lives in a dacha of Czarist proportions, but for others he favors "setting up hotels and boarding houses for workers in the loveliest places around Moscow." Sovietskaya Rossia went further, demanded a ban on any new dacha building within a 30-mile radius of the Kremlin to "assure healthy rest places for the broadest masses."

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