The Dacha Is Russia's Summer Cure For Urban Life
The dacha — a Russian summer home that can be anything from a shack to an oligarch's faux chateau — is both an escape from the city and a state of mind that permeates the country's life and culture.
YAROSLAVL REGION, Russia — My mother-in-law, Tatyana, surveys her half acre of paradise. It's located at the end of an overgrown path, a few miles down a dirt road off the main highway to Moscow. The property consists of a three-room cottage with no running water, a vegetable garden and a trim lawn bordered by lilacs, firs and pines.
Tatyana and her late husband built the dacha, or summer house, in 1992, the year after the Soviet Union collapsed. She remembers arriving in a truck that dropped off their furniture in front of the little two-story
