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Homestead.org in the Former Soviet Union continued, page 3

I recall on my first trip here, I was spending some time with Elena, a young woman from Kazakstan that my translator had introduced me to.  (It seems to me as if 80 or 90% of all Russian women share about five surnames, Elena, Tanya, Olga, Ekatrina or Oxsana.  Of these, probably a third are Elena, which is pronounced with a very pretty roll to the tongue: El-yen-ah.)

Elena spoke a little English, and we could have enough conversation to think we understood each other, which was far from the truth, and the numerous misunderstandings that resulted doomed any likelihood of a relationship ever developing.  (Either that or we were just plainly incompatible.  Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.)

Anyway, that was when I learned that you don’t tell an Eastern European girl that you have a place in the country back home.  Because even though “Gone with the Wind” is a very popular book here, when you tell a woman about your country place, she doesn’t think of Tara, but of what they call “the villages”, which isn’t a terribly attractive image for most of them. 

Anyway, Elena was telling me that she spent a day every week on her mother’s dacha. 

Not wanting to be confused with some clueless, soul-less city dweller, I started talking about how much I enjoyed living in the country; the clean air, the sunshine, blah, blah, blah…  She looked at me as if I might have just stepped off a UFO and hissed, “I HATE the dacha”.  To her it the dacha meant no more than sweating a lot pulling weeds and digging potatoes.

Probably most city-dwelling Russians and Belarusians, which is to say nearly all of them, have a dacha outside of town.  You may recall that when the Soviet Union started to break apart, it was all over the western news that Communist hardliners had arrested Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa at their dacha.  I think this may be the first time that many Americans had ever heard the word.  That may have been misleading.  If you’re part of the ruling class, a dacha is more what we’d call a summer cottage, or mansion for that matter.

To the common man here, the dacha is a plot of land that the government gives him on which he can raise his own food.  I don’t think it’s an inaccurate to say that they “give” the land because even though the government can take it back anytime they want, and citizens have to pay a tax on it, that’s not really so different from land ownership in the US, which is subject to imminent domain and taxation.  In fact, I learned that, since the Belarusian government is much less experienced and efficient than our good old IRS when it comes to juicing the populace for cash, a citizen can go years, decades, maybe a lifetime, without ever paying the taxes, and they’ll probably never catch on. 

Based on that, the dacha is about as close to free land as you’ll find anywhere in the world.

7:20 in the morning certainly isn’t early for us back home where our drinking is pretty much limited to two glasses of red wine in the early evening, but it is kinda early here where we’re meeting lots of O.’s old friends and relatives every night.  Despite this, we managed to get down to the bus stop outside the apartment in time to catch the last possible bus.  It was the last possible one because we were running short of time, not because there wouldn’t be any more busses.  There’s a bus coming along about every thirty seconds and even if you take the wrong, one you’ll wind up where you’re going pretty soon, if not on time.

When we got to the voxzaal, or train station, O.’s cousin Tatiana or Tanya and her husband, Anatoly, or Tolya, were waiting for us.  Tolya had a look on his face as if he were thinking we were always late to everything and after he and I shook hands - which males who know each other do here virtually every time they meet under any circumstances - the first thing he said was something to the effect that it certainly was a pain-in-the-ass that I hadn’t learned to speak Russian yet. 

This I got from O.’s translation, of course, so I don’t know if by “yet” he meant since she and I have been married, or since last week when we had dinner at their house, but he didn’t seem to be completely serious, or at least not completely disgusted, so I dismissed it.

Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, like Tolya, do not waste time with lots of formality or etiquette.  In fact, most of the shopkeepers and clerks are downright surly.  If you’ve ever criticized American merchants for their plastic smiles and insincere “have-a-nice-day” drivel, you need to spend a while here. Relations among family and friends are a different story, but in a business context, these people make New Yorkers seem warm and outgoing.

I’d asked O. if she could arrange a country trip for me and since Tanya and Tolya spend about every Saturday at their dacha, they were quite happy to have us come along, promising a “Shashlick” which translates to either “barbecue” or “shish-kabob”, or perhaps both or something else.

Tanya and Tolya live in an apartment like virtually everyone else, and like most people, don’t own a car.  It’s interesting, I think, to note that they don’t have any particular desire for one either.  You see plenty of cars on the streets here, but for the average guy, they appear to be about as much of a nuisance as a convenience. 

For example, most car owners have to take the bus every morning to get to the place where they have a little tin-box garage rented, they drive their car from there and then bring it back at the end of the day, then take the bus back home.  Belarus is about as committed to public transport as America is to private cars.  Tolya said a car to drive to the dacha would be worthless because it would cost less to just buy vegetables in the bazaar, so why go to the dacha at all?  I thought about myself just before I came here, driving the big diesel truck into town several times for minor items because the Mazda was in the shop.  It didn’t make me feel either rich or smart.  Homesteaders would really get off on Belarusian transportation.

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