Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 by Stephen LovellReview by: Thomas NewlinSlavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 647-648Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1520371 .

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Book Reviews Book Reviews

viding useful data on the economic situation in this region. The contributors' general ad- vice is that Central Asia should take a leaf out of the book of the export-promoters in East Asia and opt for an export-growth model, but for specific recommendations, the discus- sion falls back on the one commodity readily exportable from this region: hydrocarbons. Yet the main lesson of the East Asian take-off was surely that export-growth models tend to work in the absence of such easily exportable commodities as oil. Moreover, the East Asian take-off depended to a large degree on industrial and manufacturing exports and not on the export of such primary commodities as oil and natural gas. So, this section of the book is good on data and a bit abstract in terms of its analysis. Pity that Rumer was un- able to round the volume out with a concluding chapter, which would have allowed for a brief assessment of the relationship between political stability and economic development.

Apart from this small omission, this book provides a rich tapestry of views and analy- ses of a region set to become as significant in the twenty-first century as it was in the nine- teenth, when empires were made or broken in the Great Game. It remains to be seen whether Central Asia will again become the rock on which the ships of the Pacific and Eu- ropean powers run aground. Driven by geopolitics, the ships are sailing; the message of this book for the great powers is they should not do so unless they have already dug a navi- gable canal through which to retreat.

ANOUSHIRAVAN EHTESHAMI

University of Durham, United Kingdom

Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000. By Stephen Lovell. Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 2003. xvii, 260 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Pho- tographs. Maps. $29.95, hard bound.

Back in the spring, I set Summerfolk aside on my shelf: here was a book I definitely wanted to save for summer reading. With its evocative title and very handsome appearance (an al- luringly leafy dustjacket featuring a full-color photo of a grove of birch trees; plentiful and crisply reproduced black-and-white visuals; and real footnotes instead of endnotes), it seemed like the perfect choice for a Slavicist on vacation who was looking for something vaguely escapist yet professionally respectable (since you never know who you might run into at the beach-or the dacha).

Summerfolk is an excellent and highly useful book. It is not, however, ideal hammock material; in fact working through it turned out at times to be, well, work. A more careful look at the footnotes would have tipped me off right away that I was dealing with a piece of hard-core scholarship and that there would be nothing sentimental, dreamy, or coffee- table-ish at all about Stephen Lovell's approach. Impeccably thorough, densely detailed, and carefully argued, his book is based on a prodigious amount of research and draws on a breathtaking array of sources: Lovell has scoured archives, read voraciously in memoirs and literary works, slogged through scores of popular periodicals (including the ad sec- tions), combed over various legal statutes, mastered a large body of secondary literature, screened films and tracked down pertinent websites, conducted oral interviews, and even (quite ingeniously) run "dacha biography contests" in several Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers. There were occasional moments, I will admit, when I felt that the sheer abun- dance of information overburdened rather than advanced the argument, and I found my- self wishing that Lovell would pile up slightly less evidence and engage instead in longer, "thicker," and more imaginative readings of some of his particularly representative andjuicy examples. I suppose that this is the new-historicist side of me (or the hammock-dwelling reader of Russian novels who prefers a slower, more reflective pace) balking somewhat at what is essentially a rigorously applied old-historicist approach. But this in any case is a mi- nor (and perhaps idiosyncratic) reservation. Summerfolk is without question an impressive achievement: Lovell has produced the first truly comprehensive social and cultural history of the dacha in any language.

The book covers a great deal of ground, with Lovell guiding us expertly through the stages of the dacha's evolution over almost three centuries. He devotes roughly equal time

viding useful data on the economic situation in this region. The contributors' general ad- vice is that Central Asia should take a leaf out of the book of the export-promoters in East Asia and opt for an export-growth model, but for specific recommendations, the discus- sion falls back on the one commodity readily exportable from this region: hydrocarbons. Yet the main lesson of the East Asian take-off was surely that export-growth models tend to work in the absence of such easily exportable commodities as oil. Moreover, the East Asian take-off depended to a large degree on industrial and manufacturing exports and not on the export of such primary commodities as oil and natural gas. So, this section of the book is good on data and a bit abstract in terms of its analysis. Pity that Rumer was un- able to round the volume out with a concluding chapter, which would have allowed for a brief assessment of the relationship between political stability and economic development.

Apart from this small omission, this book provides a rich tapestry of views and analy- ses of a region set to become as significant in the twenty-first century as it was in the nine- teenth, when empires were made or broken in the Great Game. It remains to be seen whether Central Asia will again become the rock on which the ships of the Pacific and Eu- ropean powers run aground. Driven by geopolitics, the ships are sailing; the message of this book for the great powers is they should not do so unless they have already dug a navi- gable canal through which to retreat.

ANOUSHIRAVAN EHTESHAMI

University of Durham, United Kingdom

Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000. By Stephen Lovell. Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 2003. xvii, 260 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Pho- tographs. Maps. $29.95, hard bound.

Back in the spring, I set Summerfolk aside on my shelf: here was a book I definitely wanted to save for summer reading. With its evocative title and very handsome appearance (an al- luringly leafy dustjacket featuring a full-color photo of a grove of birch trees; plentiful and crisply reproduced black-and-white visuals; and real footnotes instead of endnotes), it seemed like the perfect choice for a Slavicist on vacation who was looking for something vaguely escapist yet professionally respectable (since you never know who you might run into at the beach-or the dacha).

Summerfolk is an excellent and highly useful book. It is not, however, ideal hammock material; in fact working through it turned out at times to be, well, work. A more careful look at the footnotes would have tipped me off right away that I was dealing with a piece of hard-core scholarship and that there would be nothing sentimental, dreamy, or coffee- table-ish at all about Stephen Lovell's approach. Impeccably thorough, densely detailed, and carefully argued, his book is based on a prodigious amount of research and draws on a breathtaking array of sources: Lovell has scoured archives, read voraciously in memoirs and literary works, slogged through scores of popular periodicals (including the ad sec- tions), combed over various legal statutes, mastered a large body of secondary literature, screened films and tracked down pertinent websites, conducted oral interviews, and even (quite ingeniously) run "dacha biography contests" in several Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers. There were occasional moments, I will admit, when I felt that the sheer abun- dance of information overburdened rather than advanced the argument, and I found my- self wishing that Lovell would pile up slightly less evidence and engage instead in longer, "thicker," and more imaginative readings of some of his particularly representative andjuicy examples. I suppose that this is the new-historicist side of me (or the hammock-dwelling reader of Russian novels who prefers a slower, more reflective pace) balking somewhat at what is essentially a rigorously applied old-historicist approach. But this in any case is a mi- nor (and perhaps idiosyncratic) reservation. Summerfolk is without question an impressive achievement: Lovell has produced the first truly comprehensive social and cultural history of the dacha in any language.

The book covers a great deal of ground, with Lovell guiding us expertly through the stages of the dacha's evolution over almost three centuries. He devotes roughly equal time

647 647

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648 Slavic Review

to the pre- and postrevolutionary periods, with a final chapter on contemporary (post- Soviet) developments. He starts out with the "prehistory" of the dacha under Peter the Great, who set off Russia's own distinct version of suburbanization by parceling out plots of land along the Peterhof Road to various grandees. He then takes us through the nomi- nally more democratic nineteenth century, when the dacha increasingly became the pur- view of an emergent but still very amorphously defined "middle class"; the dacha "boom" at century's end was accompanied by a growing sense of squeamishness about the ques- tionable "bourgeois" values that the dacha and its inhabitants embodied. During the So- viet period (and especially after World War II) dacha settlements continued to multiply around Moscow and St. Petersburg; as its social base broadened, the dacha took on many different forms (and acquired quite different meanings) for its various constituents. Pre- dictably, the tension between the dachas of the "haves" (various elites: primarily political, sometimes intellectual) and the have-nots (most other urban residents, for whom a dacha often meant no more than a half-built shack and a small subsistence-garden plot) became increasingly pronounced. And yet the dacha seems to have remained a common point of reference for urban Russians, a well of shared emotional experience, despite the evident diversity of the actual experiences.

Lovell aims throughout his book to juggle and balance (but not necessarily separate) social and cultural history. Or, to put it a little differently, he is interested on the one hand in the reality (often humdrum enough) of the dacha, which he richly documents with a multitude of facts and figures about the changing social composition of dachniki, evolving architectural styles, legal decrees, and so on, and on the other hand in the myth of the da- cha: that is, the important but often elusive (and less easily measured) place of the dacha in the Russian imagination. One of the surprises of the book is the consistent ambivalence with which Russians have viewed this familiar (and, one would assume, cherished) institu- tion. The dacha, it turns out, is continually contested territory, a problematic and distinctly un-idyllic middle landscape where many of Russia's key anxieties (about labor versus leisure, private versus common property, the old versus the new, the city versus the coun- try, civilization versus nature) have been somewhat uneasily "worked" and "played" out over the last several centuries. At the very end of his book Lovell makes the provocative claim that over the past one hundred and fifty years the dacha has been a more impor- tant-and more interesting-"crucible of Russian subjectivity and cultural activity" (236) than the Russian estate (usad'ba). Regardless of whether or not you agree with him (and I think he may well be right), his book successfully shows that the dacha is a significant, fas- cinating, and particularly illuminating prism through which to look at Russian history.

THOMAS NEWLIN Oberlin College

Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000. By Brian D. Taylor. Cam- bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xvi, 355 pp. Notes. Index. Figures. Ta- bles, $75.00, hard bound. $25.00, paper.

Brian Taylor studies the role the Russian army has played in domestic political struggles and why. In doing so he tests current theory on military intervention against the Russian experience. The four major determinants of the potential for military intervention he uses are organizational structure, organizational culture, corporate interest, and domestic structure. A cohesive organizational structure would inhibit a coup, as would an apolitical organizational culture, but lack of cohesion and a politicized officer corps would make a coup more likely. A military whose corporate interests were threatened would be more likely to revolt than not, and the military would be more likely to revolt against a weak civil- ian government than a strong one. He focuses solely on sovereign power issues and cate- gorizes military behavior in this arena as arbitration, intervention, or nonintervention. Taylor stresses the importance of nonintervention as an object of study, especially in cases where indicators would suggest likely military intervention.

648 Slavic Review

to the pre- and postrevolutionary periods, with a final chapter on contemporary (post- Soviet) developments. He starts out with the "prehistory" of the dacha under Peter the Great, who set off Russia's own distinct version of suburbanization by parceling out plots of land along the Peterhof Road to various grandees. He then takes us through the nomi- nally more democratic nineteenth century, when the dacha increasingly became the pur- view of an emergent but still very amorphously defined "middle class"; the dacha "boom" at century's end was accompanied by a growing sense of squeamishness about the ques- tionable "bourgeois" values that the dacha and its inhabitants embodied. During the So- viet period (and especially after World War II) dacha settlements continued to multiply around Moscow and St. Petersburg; as its social base broadened, the dacha took on many different forms (and acquired quite different meanings) for its various constituents. Pre- dictably, the tension between the dachas of the "haves" (various elites: primarily political, sometimes intellectual) and the have-nots (most other urban residents, for whom a dacha often meant no more than a half-built shack and a small subsistence-garden plot) became increasingly pronounced. And yet the dacha seems to have remained a common point of reference for urban Russians, a well of shared emotional experience, despite the evident diversity of the actual experiences.

Lovell aims throughout his book to juggle and balance (but not necessarily separate) social and cultural history. Or, to put it a little differently, he is interested on the one hand in the reality (often humdrum enough) of the dacha, which he richly documents with a multitude of facts and figures about the changing social composition of dachniki, evolving architectural styles, legal decrees, and so on, and on the other hand in the myth of the da- cha: that is, the important but often elusive (and less easily measured) place of the dacha in the Russian imagination. One of the surprises of the book is the consistent ambivalence with which Russians have viewed this familiar (and, one would assume, cherished) institu- tion. The dacha, it turns out, is continually contested territory, a problematic and distinctly un-idyllic middle landscape where many of Russia's key anxieties (about labor versus leisure, private versus common property, the old versus the new, the city versus the coun- try, civilization versus nature) have been somewhat uneasily "worked" and "played" out over the last several centuries. At the very end of his book Lovell makes the provocative claim that over the past one hundred and fifty years the dacha has been a more impor- tant-and more interesting-"crucible of Russian subjectivity and cultural activity" (236) than the Russian estate (usad'ba). Regardless of whether or not you agree with him (and I think he may well be right), his book successfully shows that the dacha is a significant, fas- cinating, and particularly illuminating prism through which to look at Russian history.

THOMAS NEWLIN Oberlin College

Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000. By Brian D. Taylor. Cam- bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xvi, 355 pp. Notes. Index. Figures. Ta- bles, $75.00, hard bound. $25.00, paper.

Brian Taylor studies the role the Russian army has played in domestic political struggles and why. In doing so he tests current theory on military intervention against the Russian experience. The four major determinants of the potential for military intervention he uses are organizational structure, organizational culture, corporate interest, and domestic structure. A cohesive organizational structure would inhibit a coup, as would an apolitical organizational culture, but lack of cohesion and a politicized officer corps would make a coup more likely. A military whose corporate interests were threatened would be more likely to revolt than not, and the military would be more likely to revolt against a weak civil- ian government than a strong one. He focuses solely on sovereign power issues and cate- gorizes military behavior in this arena as arbitration, intervention, or nonintervention. Taylor stresses the importance of nonintervention as an object of study, especially in cases where indicators would suggest likely military intervention.

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 11:14:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions