The Dacha Theory of History

My humble contribution to Russian and world political thought is what I call the "dacha theory" of history. The gist of the theory is that fighting over dachas among the ruling elite has been a major driving force behind the social development of the country in recent times.

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The Prosecutor General's Office announced last week that it had opened an investigation into Mikhail Kasyanov's acquisition of a government-owned dacha shortly before he was fired as prime minister in early 2004. The "Kasyanov affair" provides additional empirical evidence to back up my theory, and makes possible a number of predictions.

But let's start with a little history. Back in 1990-91, Soviet government ministers, their deputies and the heads of the central directorates -- especially in the defense sector -- began to privatize government dachas in huge numbers. The privatization boom demonstrated that the country's rulers had tacitly accepted defeat at the hands of the "democrats" and were prepared to exchange their enormous political power for a suitable retirement package. This package took the form of dachas -- rather shabby ones by today's standards.

The "democrats" who rode to power on the promise to get rid of benefits and privileges did not understand the historical significance of dacha privatization, however, and early in summer 1991, a legislative commission exposed the practice in a special report. Even those who didn't believe that a coup was possible realized that things would now take a turn for the worse. The nomenklatura might have been prepared to surrender the Soviet state without a fight, but not their dachas. The attempted putsch of August 1991 was not far off.

Dachas also played a major role in the conflict between then-President Boris Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet. The "democratic" press regularly featured photographs and television footage of the dachas -- on large parcels of land behind 2-meter-high fences -- belonging to lawmakers and their backers as proof of the Supreme Soviet's "red-brown" leanings. Media outlets controlled by the lawmakers just as frequently ran shots of "democratic" dachas to show that the Yeltsin regime was an occupation force.

The subject of dachas returned to prominence during the information wars of 1997-98, which developed into a battle over who would succeed Yeltsin. The sight of television pitbull Sergei Dorenko armed with a microphone outside the walls of a Spanish dacha community belonging to Media-MOST executives was perceived as Boris Berezovsky's unequivoval declaration of war against Vladimir Gusinsky.

During the 1999 election campaign, the television station ORT, which was pitted against Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, sent reporters up in helicopters to file scathing reports about the mayor's luxurious dachas. NTV, which supported Luzhkov, hit back with aerial footage of a castle in France that ostensibly belonged to Yeltsin's daughter.

With President Vladimir Putin installed in the Kremlin, dachas were no longer front-page news. Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Federal Service for the Inspection of Natural Resources Use, made sure they remained in the news, but not in a political context. His efforts became a metaphor for the new era, an attempt to rectify crimes committed in the days when relevant laws simply didn't exist, or contradicted one another, or were broken on direct orders from the top.

With the Kasyanov affair, dachas have once more emerged at the center of a political battle. Mark my words: Major upheavals are on the way. My theory contains another rule: The Soviet Union collapsed, a new Constitution replaced the old, political parties have come and gone and television companies have changed hands because of dachas, yet I don't know of a single case in which the losers lost their dachas. It will be interesting to see what happens this time around, when prime real estate in the Troitse-Lykovo gated community is at stake.

Alexei Pankin is opinion page editor at Izvestia.