Abstract
In Russia, urban gardening is a large-scale phenomenon. The garden is a multifunctional space that combines the functions of food production and holidays. This is a sector of the family and non-professional economy. Allotment gardens, allotment vegetable gardens, and dacha allotments hold an important place. We find people of all ages and social categories there.
The attachment to the garden is understandable for many thanks to a cultural heritage associating working the soil with culture, beauty, and building the good life. This perception has been transmitted in various ways, including through classic literature, which was and remains one of the bases for education in Russia.
The current gardening practices of Russian city-dwellers are a palimpsest in the sense that the policy following the October Revolution 1917 sought to wipe out the past and build a new world. However, traces of the long history continue to underlie current forms. Representations inherited from the votchina, pomestie, usadba, imenie, and dacha have been perpetuated. Likewise, the decades from 1920 to 1940 have left their imprint, related to the experiences of Garden Cities, socialist ideals, shortages and famines, and the desire for greater freedom.
“Palimpsest” is a word of Greek origin that means “rubbed smooth again”. The palimpsest is a manuscript written on previously-used parchment that had been rubbed to remove the prior writing so it could be used again. By extension, the word means a project carried out on the destruction of an earlier building, which keeps traces of its history. The term is used in the study of cities, architecture, and landscapes.
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Notes
- 1.
A reference to a line in “The Internationale”: “Of the past let us make a clean slate”.
- 2.
Data from 1980 to 2008 were collected and processed by the same or similar methods. Since 2006, they reflect the results of the 2006 agricultural census. Data come from surveys with members of allotment gardens (comprising gardens, vegetable gardens, and dachas) by the method of selective statistical observation. A selective sample of plots was created by systematic random sampling. The selection is based on a list of plots excluding those that were abandoned or never put in use. The respondent is the owner or user. In Federal Service of State Statistics of the Russian Federation, 2008.
- 3.
It counted this year in its periphery (the region called Leningrad) 600,000 garden plots, 120,000 vegetable garden plots, and 180,000 plots in tracts.
- 4.
Survey conducted in April 2007 by the Russian Centre for Public Opinion (interviews of 1,500 people in 100 cities). The exact result of the survey is 41 % for the 100 cities concerned, and 46 % for Moscow. Source: Izvectia.ru.
- 5.
This is particularly the Federal Law No. 112 of 7 July 2003 entitled “On Garden Tracts”; Federal Law No. 172 of 21 December 2004 entitled "On the transfer of land or plots of land from one category to another"; Federal Law No. 191 of 29 December 2004 entitled “On the application of the town planning code of the Russian Federation”; and Federal Law No. 66 of 15 April 1998 “On non-commercial unions of citizens for gardens, vegetable gardens, or dachas”.
- 6.
See the report of the State Land Registry Committee of 1 January 2008.
- 7.
Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer. Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language, A to D. Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (1886–1962) was a German linguist born in Russia, having received all his education there, including his studies under the direction of Baudouin de Courtenay, an eminent Slavist. He worked at the University of Saratov until the socialist revolution. His Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language remains today the most developed and most reliable.
- 8.
Places of rest, recreation, and restoration of health.
- 9.
This imenie was acquired in 1763 by Sergei Feodorovich Volkonskiy, Tolstoy’s great-great-grandfather. Tolstoy’s ancestry on the maternal side goes back to Prince Yaroslav the Wise (978–1054). According to testimonies of the fourteenth century, the Volkonskiy family is a princely family of Russian nobility. It derives its name from the river Volkona in the Tula and Kaluga oblasts. This river runs through areas that belong to them. To protect against nomadic invasions, the Principality of Moscow had built a line of defence (military posts and wooden fences) that crossed the Volkonskiy family’s fields. Among these were military leaders (voevóda) protecting the passage between the Moscow area and the outside. The government guaranteed their rights to their areas in exchange for their contribution to the defence of Moscow. Later, with the strengthening of the State, the defensive line lost its role, and the domains became ordinary pomesties. Source: Н.Н. Гусев. Лев Николаевич Толстой. Материалы к биографии с 1828 по 1855 год. Издательство Академии наук СССР. Институт мировой литературы им. А.М. Горького. Москва 1954, с. 28, 35, 234.
- 10.
Vasmer, p. 359 От отéц.
- 11.
By a 1714 decree, Peter the Great combined the votchina and pomestie into a single form of land ownership that could be transmitted by inheritance. This decree ended the process of fragmentation of land at each inheritance, attributing land to the eldest son.
- 12.
Op. cit. p. 526 “от др.-русск. помђстье ‘имение, полученное за заслуги’.”
- 13.
The Gardening Messenger (Вестник садоводства), magazine of the Society, founded in the late 1860s.
- 14.
Peter (Piotr) Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a geographer, explorer, zoologist, anthropologist, geologist and communist theorist. He drew particularly from French theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on anarchy (anarchy or self-government) and Alexander Herzen, known as the father of Russian socialism, and as an inspirer of the political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Lived near London from 1886.
- 15.
John Ruskin appears to have approached the concept of garden cities with his descriptions of integration of city and countryside.
- 16.
During his lectures for the Socialist League, William Morris developed the concept of a “decent environment”, which included, in his view, “sufficient space, healthy, clean and well-built housing, an abundant garden space, conservation of the natural landscape, without pollution or garbage.”
- 17.
Raymond Unwin, the architect of the first garden city, joined the Socialist League in 1880 and was a close collaborator of Morris.
- 18.
Robert Fishman. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier. MIT Press, 1999 (first edition, 1977). 332 p.
- 19.
A brief history of the first 100 years of the TCPA and the ideas on which it was founded is given in Denis Hardy, TCPA 1889–1999. London, TCPA, June 1999, 26 p.
- 20.
Mike Devereux. “The Garden City Model across the World”. In Garden Cities, an Ideal to be Pursued, op. cit., pp. 10–13.
- 21.
Experience reported by Michael Bulgakov in a book entitled Garden Cities for Workers, 1913.
- 22.
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, supreme head of the political police from 25 September 1936 to 24 November 1938, was the main orchestrator of the great purges. He was later discarded and then shot to death. He was replaced by Lavrentiy Beria.
- 23.
NKVD (НКВД), the Russian abbreviation: Народный комиссариат внутренних дел, Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, “People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.” The political police was created in 1934 by the absorption of the GPU before being dissolved and absorbed by the MVF from 1946 turned into the KGB in 1954.
- 24.
Source: TV series (Russia 2002); “Culture” Channel (ten films).
Directed by Sergei Satirenko. Screenplay by Lev Shilov.
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Boukharaeva, L., Marloie, M. (2015). The Palimpsest of Urban Gardening in Russia. In: Family Urban Agriculture in Russia. Urban Agriculture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11614-3_2
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