Sharashkin, Leonid. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of

trend in the number of households planting potatoes from the mid-1990s to 2003, and
interpreted it as a sign of gardens’ declining subsistence role. However, the “subsistence”
function of gardening cannot be reduced to a single crop (potatoes). Besides, if gardening is
viewed as an agroforestry practice, the gradual decline in the number of households planting
potatoes is actually predictable and explainable by the fact that as the perennial plants
(e.g., fruit trees and shrubs) planted in the ’80s and ’90s (when the majority of garden-plots
were acquired) grow and start to bear fruit, the relative significance of annual crops decreases.
Thus, far from being converted from self-provisioning to leisure uses, the gardens
continue to fulfill their subsistence role with a new (and ever-evolving) mix of crops.
Labor: participation in gardening
According to official statistics (Goskomstat 2004), in 2003, 34.8 million families (66% of
all households in the country) owned a gardening plot (subsidiary plot, allotment, garden,
or dacha) which could be used for growing crops and/or raising animals. This figure decreased
to 33.3 million in 2005. This figure does not include people who do not own, but
use their relatives’ or friends’ dacha or whose summer residence is not officially recognized
as a “dacha” (e.g., urban owners of a village house). Table 8 presents the number of households
that owned agricultural land plots from 1992 to 2005.
The statistics in Table 8 are based on ownership of a plot, and thus offer only an approximation
of the actual number of plots used for food production, and the number of
households engaged therein. Until the 2006 Census of Agriculture was conducted, there
were no national-level statistics on the proportion of the plots that were actually used in
production. So, the above statistics include plots that are abandoned or used only for recreation,
as well as plots that are used by more than one household.
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