A ‘dacha’ is a country house, made of wood, used by Soviet citizens to escape the rigors of the city for rural idyll. Widespread in the countries of the former USSR, this important cultural and architectural form has been largely ignored academically. In Dacha Fyodor Savintsev documents this particularly Russian phenomenon, his photographs constitute a unique record of a rapidly vanishing fairytale wooden world.

The word ‘dacha’ has been used to describe constructions ranging from grand imperial villas