It's a cryogenically cold night, and I'm nearly finished
writing a major story. Suddenly the lights dim with an ominous
buzz. The alarm on my computer's backup battery screeches. Then,
with barely time to click "save," the screen flickers out. No
point in switching it on again till morning. Another night of
work succumbs to Russia's mercurial maze of electric lines.
Welcome to suburbia, Russia's chaotic new frontier, where
local infrastructure is often just a suggestion, the simplest
home construction can take years, and the roads are clotted with
traffic. Several years ago our family decided to move to Nov
permanently from smog-choked Moscow - only six miles but a
universe away from this forested dacha village of 250
households. Despite some anxious adventures, we haven't
regretted it for a moment.
Thousands of Muscovites are making the same, once-forbidden,
leap from cramped city flats to the open country. They are
throwing up an astonishing variety of new housing at a rate
unseen since, perhaps, America's mass migration to suburbia in
the 1950s. So far it's only an option for Moscow's well-heeled
residents, who can afford the huge hassles involved. But polls
suggest that millions more would follow if only they could.
"People dream of a family home on an individual plot of land,
in a nonurban setting, with fresh air," says Gerald Gaige, a
real estate consultant with Ernst & Young in Moscow. "Now those
choices are opening up for those who can afford it, and it's
developing fast."
For us it was the preternatural quiet, the soaring pines, and
what appeared to be a convenient commute into Moscow. We'd long
been using my wife's family's little wooden cottage in Nov, a
dacha settlement near the agricultural village of Razdori on the
Uspenskoye Highway. It was the traditional summer getaway, a
brief escape to a pre-Soviet rural existence, and, the place to
put down a vegetable garden to supplement the family diet.
In the late '90s, we made the move almost imperceptibly,
extending the summer weekends at the dacha before reluctantly
trundling up cats and kids for the return to our cramped Moscow
apartment. About five years ago we began building a two-story
brick-and-stucco house, which now towers over our wooden dacha
like a steamship tied up next to a rowboat. That would have been
illegal in Soviet days, when dachas were limited to a couple of
rooms, and any attempt to live permanently in the country could
lead to confiscation of a family's city apartment.
We'd imagined enjoying the old dacha life year-round. But
many of our neighbors had similar ideas. Inexorably, a
paved-over urban look is creeping in, complete with traffic,
construction cranes, and even the occasional whiff of smog.
Nov has lately burgeoned with new homes in a wild variety of
sizes and styles, planted among the modest old dachas. One
neighbor, Galina, is a pensioner whose tiny wooden dacha seems
preserved in formaldehyde. At this time of year, it is
surrounded by rows of cabbages, tomatoes, cucumbers, beets, and
potatoes, which she tends tirelessly. More typical nowadays is
Andrei, a Moscow businessman, who was recently overheard
bragging of spending $30,000 to landscape the grounds of his
new, three-story brick home.
A few superwealthy "New Russians" have bought up blocks of
territory from older residents. Our tiny village now boasts two
enormous, walled villas, whose anonymous owners come and go in
convoys of armored limousines.
"We don't have much sense of community here anymore," says
Adrian Rudomino, a former Soviet official who has summered in
Nov since 1926 and is writing a history of the district. "The
old dachniks [dacha residents] are hostile to the rich
newcomers, who return the unfriendliness."
All along the Uspenskoye Highway, gated communities for
Russia's oil-lubricated new rich have sprouted on open farmland.
Due to soaring land prices, even the wealthy are compelled to
live cheek-by-jowl in their fortified communities of garish
homes - neo-Georgian mansions, French chateaux, and
Dracula-style castles. But for them, the suburban option is
still preferable to buying real estate in downtown Moscow, where
a small one-bedroom apartment costs about $500,000.
|
EXODUS:
New money is
eroding the traditional dacha lifestyle,
a legacy of the Soviet era, in which
people used the rough-hewn retreats to
grow foodstuffs.
VLADIMIR ZININ |
For Russia's struggling middle class, the best hope for
acquiring a suburban home may be to build upon an existing
dacha, as we have. Some 4 million Muscovites - almost half the
population - possess some sort of rural land plot within 125
miles of the city. That's a legacy of Soviet times, when
allotments were doled out to people through their workplaces,
mainly to give them somewhere to grow foodstuffs.
A new land code passed in 2002, permitting people to register
their plots as property for the first time, while the
post-Soviet explosion in car ownership has made the countryside
far more accessible. But the dream of turning the dacha into a
family home remains remote. "A lot of the elements are in place
for a suburban housing boom, but development is haphazard," says
Mr. Gaige. "Vital infrastructure is not getting built because
large providers do not have money to do it."
We were fortunate to own a dacha in a fairly developed area
outside Moscow, with preexisting water, gas, and electricity
lines. Still, the strains are mounting. In winter, voltage often
plummets. In the summer, water shortages silence taps. The
commute along the two-lane highway into Moscow, normally 30
minutes, now takes two to three hours.
Local officials offer little help. They rarely enforce
building codes or zoning regulations, but demand extensive
paperwork for everything from a telephone hookup to a new fence.
My wife, Masha, who has borne the brunt of relations with the
bureaucracy, has grown philosophical about it. "They change
requirements constantly, so you have to bring new papers and pay
the fees over again," she says. "But there's nothing you can't
get done eventually."
The key obstacle for us and others has been the absence of
affordable financing. Despite owning a valuable piece of land,
we can't get a reasonable credit package. We've had to save
money to launch each new phase of construction. We're in sight
of the end now, but it's been five years. "Mortgages are still
way too expensive, and conditions too onerous, to be attractive
to the majority," says Olga Vendina, an expert at the Institute
of Geography in Moscow. "It's changing, but only slowly."
After a wave of burglaries last winter, the resi- dents of
Nov voted to enclose the village and limit public access. Each
family agreed to pay about $12 a month toward the cost of
security guards, posted at the town's newly beefed-up entrance.
And that, more than anything, defines Nov's evolution from a
sleepy dacha settlement to a suburban "gated community."