The rabbit eaters

Soviet cities grew a thickening green belt of allotment gardens around them in the same decades that Americans spent millions cultivating turf grass. Cold War-era Western observers classified dachas run by garden cooperatives as primitive spaces slated to disappear in large part because they lacked urban infrastructure such as sewers, water, electricity, garbage collection, and had few roads nearby or paved surfaces. Gardeners rode buses and trains, then walked or biked to their plots. Footpaths connected garden to garden. Gardeners drew water from wells or gathered it in rain barrels. They relieved themselves in outhouses, sprinkling sawdust or peat on top to dampen the smell. They gathered sticks and logs to burn in Finnish stoves. As more families built tiny houses on two-tenths of an acre, density increased.

Without sanitary infrastructure, dacha communities could have turned into urban ghettos teaming with bacterial pathogens, with gullies washing earth into waterways and mounting piles of garbage attracting rodents. In other spheres of the economy, Soviets were horrible stewards. They had trouble delivering food to markets, so produce piled up and perished. They struggled with quality control and supply chains, so mountains of printed material, parts, tools and construction materials were left out to rot or rust. Radiation, heavy metals, chemical toxins and nitrates poisoned the earth, water, air and food. But in the dacha universe, a very different picture took shape. Building codes and regulations directed gardeners in constructing low-tech sanitation facilities. Plans instructed how to build compost bins and dry toilets lined with clay and rocks to filter pathogens. Regulations mandated that a diverse mix of perennial plants, which hold down earth, absorb water, sequester carbon, and feed birds and bees, surrounded every plot. Codes dictated that cottages could not be located near bodies of water and could be no larger than 270 square feet, about the size of today’s tiny houses. These regulations are now seen as best practices for green architecture. If a Soviet garden collective were a contemporary suburban development, the planners would win awards for sustainability.

Soviet Estonia’s self-reliance

Most people constructed their garden cottages by hand, but building materials were hard to come by. When windstorms blew and took out swaths of forest, Soviets had the right to harvest the windfall for lumber. Gardeners used other waste too – a regular feature of the Soviet economy. They scavenged unused building material from construction sites and made deals with friends who had access to excess goods. Speaking of these exchanges between friends, Estonian dacha owner Mart Pungo told me, ‘You wouldn’t pay a person with money. That could get you arrested. You just gave them a bottle of vodka! If they got caught sharing socialist wealth, they weren’t a criminal, just a drunk.’^⁠

Little went to waste. Dacha builders scavenged around dumps, riverbanks and urban edges giving a second life to discarded material. They saw themselves as cleaning up the city, sanitizing the urban ecosystem. Pungo, who managed a restaurant, made use of non-returnable bottles that piled up in the alley. He took them home to build the exterior walls of his dacha (think stained glass) and a vaulted greenhouse of bottles. In the city of Narva in eastern Estonia, Pungo’s naive architecture is so loved that tour buses regularly stop to see his creations.

Plants were also creatively sourced. As no garden store existed in Paide, central Estonia, gardeners took cuttings of apple and plum trees and berry cultivars from a nearby collective farm and an abandoned manor house. They grafted branches of trees known to produce good fruit onto hardy tree stock. Tiiu Saarist’s parents traded seeds with other gardeners in their collective. The results of this sharing economy is still visible today. Most garden beds have a similar retinue of vegetation – fiery-orange calendula, creeping pink and red roses, squat marigolds, spiky crowns of dill, green carrot fronds, red beet stalks, and delicate white potato blossoms. These same plants repeat from dacha to dacha across garden cooperatives.

While gardeners had access to chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides from local farms, most gardeners surveyed by a team of sociologists reported that they tried not to use chemical treatments.1 ‘If a cabbage leaf is bitten by an insect, it does not matter because this insect is useful for the balance of nature. … So I do not spray my plot,’ a woman in Russia told the pollsters. An Estonian gardener said, ‘If I use chemicals, then it is not food anymore.’

Tuuli Reinso explained to me, ‘I was taught to observe the plants, what they do, what they need. Rhubarb thrives next to the well. It needs a lot of water. Leafy greens are resilient and can grow in windy spots. Cucumbers are more sensitive.’ The small scale of gardens and diverse inter-planting made managing pests an easier task than keeping monocultural crops susceptible to disease healthy. The thrift, self-reliance and material autonomy of dacha gardeners show a care and sustainability rarely associated with Soviet history.

Small-scale abundance

Tiiu said that once their garden got going in Paide, her family did not go to the store for food. They consumed fresh produce, growing what was missing in Soviet shops. They processed beetroots into sugar. Rowan berries went into bread as a substitute for raisins that were hard to find. They had chickens for eggs and meat, and hundreds of rapidly reproducing rabbits for meat and fur. Tiiu grimaced: ‘I can’t eat rabbit meat now. I had so much of it.’

As the number of Paide garden collectives multiplied from the first dozen to over a thousand allotments, residents grew more food than they could eat in a year. They gave sacks of potatoes, beets and cucumbers to family members. They traded tomatoes that poured out of the plastic-walled greenhouses. Still, they had too much produce. Tiiu’s parents took their extra vegetables, eggs and rabbit fur to the town hall. Municipal authorities bought it and sold it through local shops, but soon the garden bounty overflowed the few stores in the small town. City leaders then began to sell gardeners’ produce to other towns. They made the most lucrative deal with traders in Leningrad, exchanging produce for sought-after canning supplies, fabric and rare translations of foreign novels. In the swap of carrots for Camus, gardens enriched consumer and cultural life.

Paide is typical of small-town USSR. By the end of the 1950s, about one-third of all agricultural production in the Soviet Union came from private agriculture.2 Surveys show that an urban garden produced at least 440 pounds of fruits and berries and 550 pounds of vegetables – enough to supply a family of four with produce for a year.3

While small-holding plots were extremely productive, Soviet industrial agriculture continued to wither. In the early 1970s, Soviet planners noticed a deficit between the agricultural targets of collective farms and actual production. In 1977, the crisis in Soviet agriculture grew desperate. The productivity of agriculture remained flat while investments in farming grew.4 Faced with food shortages, Soviet leaders again passed new laws allocating yet more public land to private gardens, providing loans for dacha construction and planting. The share of Soviet agricultural goods that came from private small holders increased further.

In 1981, when a new popular magazine Priusadebnoe khoziaistvo (Kitchen Garden) hit the newsstands, Premier Leonid Brezhnev used the country’s biggest political event, the Congress of the Communist Party, to underline the importance of tiny gardens on every urban horizon:

Experience shows that such holdings can be an important additional source in the supply of meat, milk and other produce. Individually owned vegetable and fruit gardens, poultry and cattle are part of our common wealth.5

By that time, half of all Soviet households – 46.6 million families – were members of a garden collective.6 Three-quarters of them were in cities. And far more people joined a garden collective than the Communist Party. Garden associations were the most enduring, popular movement in Soviet history.

Cultural and biological mixers

Gardens were popular for several reasons beyond food provisioning. During summer school vacations, city children went to their grandparents at the dacha where they benefited from clean air, safe space to play and fresh food. Pensioners made extra income selling garden produce. When Soviets needed a pile of cash to pay for a car or apartment, they turned not to doctors or professionals in the family but to unemployed grandmothers who had built up healthy bank accounts selling one bunch of parsley at a time.

Gardens also helped Soviets find their place in a large and repressive empire. People moved around a lot in the USSR, uprooted for job assignments, service in the military, or because of arrest and deportation. Anu Printsman’s parents, who came from southern Estonia, moved to Kohtla Järve, a grim mining town in eastern Estonia where her father mined oil shale, a low-grade coal. Her mother, a chemist, had a job at a chemical plant that combined oil shale and nitrogen to produce ammonia fertilizer for industrial agriculture. Long trails of black smog flowed from the plant’s smokestacks, under which Anu’s family had an allotment garden located over a shuttered mine. Sandwiched between fossil fuels in the sky and those underground, they gardened.

Anu’s relatives carried seedlings north on their visits to Kohtla Järve. They used cultivars to stitch together seams of the uprooted family. Anu listed the plants: ‘We have a good gooseberry that originates from mom’s birthplace. Our apple trees were grafted from grandmother’s garden. Tomatoes we named after my dad’s mother.’

While Estonians could draw on extended families and childhood friends to fill the gaps in patchy Soviet provision, migrants to Estonia from Russia like Svetlana Trofima had to make do on their own. Svetlana grew close to her neighbours in her garden collective near the Tallinn airport instead. They kept an eye on each other’s children. Neighbours chatted over the hedge, shared harvests and pitched in to help with construction projects.

Svetlana’s neighbours often spoke about the desire to ‘have their hands in the ground’. The best ‘sweet’ soils, they said, are dark in color, easily worked, alive with insects and worms. In contrast to farmers who use large machines, gardeners work with their bare hands. Digging in vegetable and flower beds, small-scale growers exchange microbes with their soils. Giving away home-grown food, gardeners also shared their microbiome among friends. Soviet migrants used such biological exchanges to help adapt to their new place. Soviet science emphasized nurture over nature, environmental influences over genetics. Recent insights in microbiology and epigenetics justify this focus.7 Garden collectives served as both cultural and biological mixers.

Food crises during Soviet collapse

Home has many connotations. For many people living in the late 1980s, home meant crisis and the collapse of the Soviet economy and state. In 1987, with food in shops growing increasingly scarce, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, turned to gardens as had other Soviet leaders before him. He encouraged citizens to feed themselves. His administration passed regulations making it easier to acquire an allotment. Garden collectives spread across hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland that had been abandoned by struggling collective farms.

In the late 1980s, state enterprises and institutes ran out of money to pay employees. Instead, of wages, employees would get an occasional food package or goods made in the factory that employees could then exchange. This barter system was cumbersome. I lived in Moscow during this grim time. In 1990, prices, which had long been stable, climbed by 200% and kept going. A person’s lifetime savings could dry up in one trip to the market. My landlady told me food was so expensive that she lost weight, showing me before and after photographs. She was a relentlessly positive person who had preened a bit in the latter photo: ‘It was better. We didn’t need to eat all those sausages,’ she said.

But things got worse. In 1992, after the Soviet Union dissolved, food grew even more scarce and inflation spiraled out of control. As the days darkened in autumn, Muscovites recalled the mass famines their parents and grandparents had endured in the first decades of the communist state, stashing sacks of potatoes and beets under their beds.

In response, millions more Soviets picked up spades. In the early 1990s, Zinaida Vasilyeva’s grandfather, who had advanced in his life from a village boy to a military engineer and international consultant, was forced to go back to his birthplace to ask for a garden plot. He and his wife, also a villager, had loved to spend their holidays not at a dacha digging but under a parasol on the beach in Crimea. For him, returning to the village to work the soil was a humiliating reversal of his social mobility. Even though the village was in the Russian Northwest in a ‘zone of risky agriculture’, the allotment grew to great importance by supplying the extended family with hardy vegetables and, in clement years, strawberries and tomatoes.

In Tallinn, factory managers, unable to pay their workers, raced to create new massive garden complexes to accommodate employees who needed to provide for themselves. Employees of the Dvigatel metal factory expanded the gardens located on public land near the airport. Workers at a chemical plant plotted out another massive garden association north of the city of Maardu in the municipality of Tallinn.

The appearance of these new garden collectives reflected the disintegration of the state and economy. Architects no longer designed cottages, and city officials no longer approved plans and enforced rules. People built whatever they could with whatever they could find. Unlike sleek Scandinavian designs, late Soviet dacha houses were like depression-era huts east of the river in Washington DC, patched together with found materials. Worried about rising crime rates, gardeners constructed tall fences and invested in watchdogs, chains and locks.

Digging for subsistence and self-esteem

A sense of shame ran deep in Soviet culture. As foreign media appeared on TV screens, Soviets learned that they did not measure up to the gleaming, technicolor standard of life in the West.

At a time when most people of wage-earning age were out of work or in voluntary jobs, gardens became a crucial source of income and self-esteem. In 1990’s independent Ukraine, Olena Palko’s father suffered from conflict at work that made his job unbearable. He took to drinking. Her mother convinced her husband to quit his job. They would find some other way. At that time, the government was giving away collective farmland to anyone who wanted it and Olena’s parents acquired a quarter-acre plot just outside their small city Shepitivka in western Ukraine.

Olena’s father immediately threw himself into gardening. He planted long rows of vegetables and set down an orchard. He read gardening magazines and visited agricultural exhibitions. He carried out experiments with new seeds and varieties that he ordered by post. The whole family was expected to pitch in on her father’s plot. All weekend and after school, Olena, her parents and grandparents would be in the garden bent over rows. To pass the time while working, Olena’s grandmother would recount her favorite novels.

Resources were scarce. As transportation, they had just two bicycles for five people. The bikes were used to cart water from the well to the field. Her parents balanced sacks of potatoes on them to carry them home. Nearly all their food came from the plot: ‘We bought oil, flour, salt and sometimes meat, that’s it. The rest  came from our garden. We had little else. If we had lots of courgettes, that’s what we ate. If the cabbages didn’t thrive, we didn’t have cabbage.’ Nothing went to waste. They spent days pickling and canning.

Olena remembers the humiliating job of selling produce from a box at the local market and bus stop: ‘We only got pennies for our berries and greens. Nothing. But we were so poor, we needed whatever we could get.’ For Olena, the garden was a symbol of their poverty and desperation, but everyone else in town was doing the same.

In Tallinn in 1991, when Svetlana Trofima lost her job at the nuclear parts division of the Dvigatel metal factory, her family also resorted to self-sufficiency; independent Estonia had no nuclear weapons and no plans for them.

My husband and I both worked there. Suddenly we were out of work. No money coming in at all. That is when the garden saved us. We had two boys to feed. We grew everything we could: potatoes, onions, greens, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers; we had fruit, blackcurrants, redcurrants, aronia and raspberries. I sold garden produce from the sidewalk. I wasn’t too proud to do that. We needed the cash of course.

Svetlana counted up on her hand the years that her family relied on her garden to scrape by. She ran out of fingers. For a full dozen years, the former nuclear technician dug for subsistence.

It was hard to think of Svetlana and teenage Olena standing in a grey drizzle over small boxes of spindly parsley, dill and onions. How many women like that did I walk past during my passage through cities of the post-Soviet Union? They would be there late in the evenings and early mornings, in the rain or snow. Perched in front of subway entrances, they served as sentries to the post-Soviet collapse.

Across the former USSR, the number of garden collectives nearly doubled in the 1990s from 13 million in Russia alone to 22 million.8 In the same decade, production in the highly subsidized industrial agriculture sector dropped by almost 50%.9 Large state-run enterprises farmed 100 million hectares, but by 1999, they produced less than all the family plots in the country did on a total of 10 million hectares.10 A Lithuanian tractor driver remarked on the great difference in productivity between farm and garden: ‘Everything grew by itself! … I swear I grew ten times more cabbages on my tiny lot without any technology than the state farm ever did using all those chemicals.’

As Soviet industrial agriculture failed, urban gardeners with hessian sacks on commuter trains displaced farmers mounting tractor combines. The food grown by engineers, diplomats, professors, janitors and assembly-line workers made a critical difference in preventing the feared post-Soviet famine. Gardeners’ share of agricultural production doubled in the 1990s from 26% to 52%.11 By 1996, small-holder gardeners, who only occupied 1.5 percent of arable land, grew 91.9% of Russia’s potatoes, a key staple.12 Western economists wrote up a prescription for ‘shock therapy’ to stimulate a transition from Soviet socialism to market capitalism, but the remedy failed to supply enough food for 287 million citizens. Instead, the grey area of garden collectives, neither socialist nor capitalist, put food on people’s tables.

Countering intensive Soviet farming

One of the most commercially successful state farms in Soviet Estonia was located on the suburban edge of Tallinn. The Pirita Sovkhoz was a long indoor street connecting several acres of parking-lot-sized greenhouses, each of which cultivated a different hothouse flower. Heating pipes ran through the glass ceilings and heavy cast-iron potting tables gridded the floor. The complex was massive. An employee could walk indoors for the length of five-and-a-half football fields before reaching the farm’s club and bar. The lights of this crystal palace burned all night, illuminating the high cliffs above the Baltic Sea like a Broadway marque. The greenhouse complex had its own gas-heating plant to keep the flowers warm in the winter. A pond fed the boiler and provided water for irrigation. The Pirita Flower Farm burned the vegetal past to fulfill a desire for exotic, botanical treasures that, thanks to fossil fuels, could grow anywhere, at any time, in any climate.

The carbon sent into the atmosphere from the farm floated upward to mingle with the carbon released from coal furnaces in Karl Marx’s time, when he famously penned ‘all that is solid melts into the air’, describing his daily swim through the carbon-packed smog of nineteenth-century London. Two centuries of carbon released into the atmosphere works like the one-time glass panes at the Pirita flower farm, snaring gases and heat, turning the planet into a greenhouse much larger than any Soviet mega-project.

Today only a few sections of the Pirita greenhouse are still in operation. The farm was privatized years ago. Several employees purchased individual greenhouses and kept growing, but most of the flower complex slowly sank earthward to rest in beds of shattered glass. I visited the farm with Linda Kaljundi, a friend, and when we came across an elderly couple, former employees of the state farm, Linda interpreted for me. Their hothouse was crawling with grape, cucumber, squash and tomato vines. They were busy but paused to talk. The farmer showed me an oil shale by-product, a thick black tar that she mixed with water and sprayed on grapes to kill a mildew fungus spreading over the leaves. She explained that in Soviet times, they fought blight and insects in the hothouse monocrop environment with a full arsenal of pesticides. They applied poisons, she said, without respirators or protective clothing. Several of her co-workers tasked with spraying got cancer and died at age 30 or so. She attributed their deaths to the toxins.

Hothouse flowers were grown with chemical nitrates, heated with petroleum products and defended against pests with chemical by-products of the petroleum industry. Combustion engines drove the blooms around the USSR to flower shops, hospital kiosks and sanatoria. Once purchased, the bouquets travelled from hand to hand and into oncology wards where patients received them. The flowers and cancer patients shared a common feature. The petroleum products saturating the vascular structure of the blooms also circulated in the bodies of patients treated with chemotherapy. Both the flowers and the patients were a product of petro-modernity.

But that was just one part of a larger story. Down the street, Pirita farm workers lived in free-standing houses with large yards where after hours they farmed in a different way. They built their own, much smaller greenhouses warmed passively by the sun. Around their houses spread garden beds with the usual mix of fruit trees and bushes. At the flower farm, Pirita farmers mined top soils of nutrients. At home, they built soil from the ground up. In their free time, hothouse farmers became gardeners. As they walked home from their day jobs, they shifted from petro-modernity to retro-modernity.

What does retro-modernity look like? Soviet gardeners closed the cycles of extraction that impoverished soils and led to repression and mass famines in Tsarist Russia and Stalinist USSR. Post-war Soviet law and cultural institutions helped shape garden communities. While American officials passed hundreds of city ordinances to grow turf grass, Soviet regulations supported garden collectives and protected waterways, soil and public health. The state invested billions into land grants, education and botanical services. State-sponsored TV programmes, magazines, books and courses showed gardeners how to make compost, when to plant and harvest, how to preserve, how to prune fruit trees and deal with pests. State-owned nurseries developed seeds and seedlings of hardy varieties expressly for dacha farmers.

Green credentials

Around the world, small-scale farmers produce an estimated third of the world’s food.13 Most often these farmers are envisioned as Global South citizens, yet countries of the former socialist block have the highest numbers of small landholders in the world. Soviet kitchen gardens were one of the most economically successful and sustainable production sites in the Soviet polity. The Soviet gardener’s state built a whole apparatus directed at what became the world’s largest urban farming endeavour.

Unfortunately, Soviet laws and the commons that protected gardens departed on the same train that replaced the socialist state. Bulldozers razed many thousands of gardens that were built chaotically towards the end of the Soviet Union, such as those near Tallinn airport. The gardeners, mostly Russian-speakers who did not have Estonian citizenship, did not dare to raise their voices in protest.

When I asked Svetlana several years after her garden community had been razed, what it had meant to her, she just blinked, holding back tears. She later told me how when her dacha plot was destroyed, she cried and cried for months: ‘It was painful, painful! For years I grieved that loss.’

In Estonia, new laws in the 2000s enabled people to privatize the public land under their dachas. In desirable areas, people have built larger houses and supplanted potatoes and berry bushes with turf grass and trampolines. Steadily the grand garden collectives surrounding Estonian towns and cities have been transformed into suburbs and exurbs.

As the dacha green belt dissolves, Estonians drive more than all other Europeans to reach new dacha suburbs. The country relies on low-grade coal for energy and imports more food than ever before. As a consequence, greenhouse gas emissions in Estonia are among the highest in the European Union. In 2023, Tallinn won the title of European Green Capital. Unfortunately, that award came a few decades too late.

This article is an edited version of a chapter from Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The past, present and future of the self-provisioning city, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2026. The text also appeared in Vikerkaar 3/2026 in Estonian.