"Find and kill Makarov at his safe house in the Caucasus Mountains."
— Mission description, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
The Dacha
The dacha — Russian: дача, from the verb давать, to give — is one of the most specifically Russian domestic institutions, with no precise equivalent in Western culture. Originally the word referred to land granted by the Tsar to nobles; in the Soviet period it was extended to plots allocated by local authorities to ordinary citizens for gardening and the growing of vegetables, and the small structures built on these plots gradually evolved into seasonal retreats: simple, usually unheated wooden houses outside the city, used in summer for gardening, gathering, and the kind of unhurried domestic life that the urban apartment did not permit. A quarter of Russian families living in large cities had access to a dacha by the early 1990s. The institution cuts across class lines far more than its cultural image suggests: the dacha of a factory worker, a small wooden structure with a vegetable bed and an outhouse, and the dacha of a senior party official, a large property on a guarded compound outside Moscow, share a name and a general logic while differing in almost every other respect.
It is the upper extreme — the powerful man's country retreat, the secluded property outside the urban grid, bristling with security and used for business no less than rest — that appears most recognizably in Western video games. The ordinary dacha, the democratic Soviet institution of the kitchen garden and the birch tree, is largely absent from the medium's major productions. What Western game design reaches for is the logic of seclusion and private property: the idea that the Russian criminal or political figure has somewhere outside the city to which he can retreat, where normal surveillance does not reach, where he can be found only if someone already knows where to look. Russian developers working from lived experience produce something else entirely — the wooden house, the field, the neighbor at the door — which is, in formal terms, far closer to the real thing.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater — The Svyatogornyj Dacha and the Krasnogorje Shelter
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Konami, 2004) is remarkable among major titles for containing a location explicitly identified by the game's own fiction as a dacha. In the Svyatogornyj region of the fictional Tselinoyarsk jungle — a dense forested area south of the Krasnogorje mountain range — there is a cabin in the eastern section of the map. If the player approaches the cabin and radios EVA, she explains that it was originally a dacha belonging to a high-ranking Russian official, and was later repurposed as a relay station. The space retains the structure of what it was: an isolated wooden property in forested terrain, outside any military perimeter, associated with the private use of a powerful man. That the game names it as a dacha, and provides this history in an optional radio call, places it in a different category from the unnamed estates and compounds that other titles deploy without reflection.
The cabin at Krasnogorje Mountaintop, where Naked Snake meets EVA in one of the game's pivotal cutscenes, belongs to a different register. This structure — a small shelter or ruined outbuilding near the summit overlooking Groznyj Grad — functions primarily as a clandestine meeting point, not a domestic retreat. It is here that EVA gives Snake the key to the underground tunnel leading to the fortress, and where the player witnesses, through a sniper scope, Volgin's execution of Aleksandr Granin and the meeting between Volgin, Ocelot, and The Boss. The shelter has the atmosphere of an improvised refuge in a militarized landscape: a place to stop, not a place to live. The game's actual named dacha, by contrast, sits in the jungle below, half-forgotten, officially reassigned but still carrying the shape of what private retreat looks like in the Soviet interior.
Taken together, these two spaces illustrate the range of what a dacha can be in the Russian imagination: the powerful official's forest retreat, and the temporary refuge in the wilderness — one a relic of pre-Soviet privilege converted into military infrastructure, the other an improvised shelter in a militarized mountain. That a Japanese studio working in 1964 Soviet material thought to include and name one of these as a dacha is the most significant acknowledgment of the institution in games before the indie titles of the following decades.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — Loose Ends
The clearest example of the dacha-as-safehouse trope in Western action games is the mission Loose Ends in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward, 2009). The game describes the location as "an estate at the Georgian-Russian Border in the Caucasus Mountains" — suspected safehouse of the ultranationalist Vladimir Makarov. The game never uses the word dacha, but the location embodies the concept exactly: a secluded lakeside property in forested mountain terrain, with a main house, a boathouse on the water, and outbuildings, accessible only through defended forest approaches. The estate is private, rural, and positioned precisely at the ambiguous Georgian-Russian border — outside normal jurisdiction, difficult to find, easier to defend.
The mission sends Ghost and Roach with a Task Force 141 strike team through the forest approaches — where Makarov's forces have pre-laid bouncing-betty mines that kill most of the team on contact — into the estate itself, where the objectives are to breach and clear the main house, extract data from Makarov's computer network, and hold the position under sustained counterattack while the transfer completes. The property is used militarily throughout: its rooms become defensive positions, its boathouse a secondary objective, its forest perimeter a kill zone. By the time Ghost and Roach reach the extraction point, Makarov is long gone — and General Shepherd, arriving to collect the DSM, shoots both of them. The estate is the scene of the mission's most famous betrayal.
What makes the Loose Ends location function as a dacha in everything but name is its position in Makarov's operational architecture. He does not conduct his business from an urban headquarters or a military installation; he retreats to a lakeside property in the mountains, outside the city, accessible through forest, adjacent to water. This is the logic of the private retreat applied to criminal-political power: the man who cannot afford to be found in ordinary public space keeps a place where the rules of ordinary surveillance do not apply.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and Red Alert 3 — Civilian Terrain
The Red Alert series (Westwood Studios / EA Los Angeles, 2000–2008) approaches Russian domestic architecture not through narrative but through environmental decoration. In Red Alert 2 (2000) and its expansion Yuri's Revenge (2001), maps set in Soviet-aligned or Russian territory use a temperate terrain tileset that includes small wooden civilian structures — low, gabled, wood-framed buildings of the kind found throughout rural Russia and distinguishable from the brick and concrete of the game's American urban maps. These structures appear as neutral civilian buildings across the landscape: objects to garrison, to ignore, or to flatten, depending on tactical need. They are not scripted, not narrated, and carry no specific identity; they are simply present, as part of the visual grammar the game uses to signal that the player is somewhere rural and Soviet.
Red Alert 3 (EA Los Angeles, 2008) continues this practice in its Soviet campaign missions set in Russian territory — Vorkuta, Stalingrad, Odessa — where the surrounding civilian landscape again includes small wooden structures consistent with the rural Russian building tradition. As with the earlier games, these buildings are unaddressed by the narrative: they exist to populate the world visually, not to comment on it. Their inclusion is nonetheless notable in this Archive because they constitute, in aggregate, the most widely distributed representation of ordinary Russian rural architecture in the strategy genre — present in the backgrounds of thousands of matches played since 2000, recognized by players as signifying Russia without anyone having to say so.
The wooden houses of the Red Alert terrain tilesets are not dachas in any specific sense — they may as readily represent izbas or any other category of rural Russian dwelling. But they belong to the same built environment that the dacha inhabits, and their mass deployment as background decoration across two decades of strategy games has made the silhouette of the small Russian wooden house one of the most pervasive visual signals of Soviet geography in the medium.
The Russian Indie Tradition: DACHA and ШХД: ЛЕТО
DACHA (2024), a small independent title on Steam, is the only game in this Archive whose title is the institution itself, and one of only two titles to depict the dacha as what it actually is for the overwhelming majority of Russians who have access to one. The player tends a vegetable garden, picks apples, cooks kebabs over a fire, makes compote, and sits among birch trees while time passes slowly. There is no criminal organization, no safehouse function, no tactical assault across a defended perimeter. The game's Steam description specifically invokes childhood memory, the smell of herbs, the wind in the birches, and a way of life in which simple domestic tasks are the content rather than the cover. It received mostly positive reviews and has attracted a small audience drawn to its unhurried fidelity to a real Russian domestic institution.
ШХД: ЛЕТО (It's Summer, 2021), developed by Russian poet and multimedia artist Ilya Mazo with Grun Studio, occupies the same territory from a more oblique angle. The game — whose title translates the colloquial Russian abbreviation ШХД (shkhodit, to wander or drift) into the season — is explicitly set at a dacha during a childhood afternoon nap. It has no goal and no endgame: the player is eight years old, the vinyl record has stopped and is crackling, sunlight fills the room, and there is nowhere to be. The Steam page describes its genres as "sandbox," "babushka," and "midday nap." The game grew from Mazo's childhood memories of summer holidays at the family dacha, and follows his earlier ШХД: ЗИМА (It's Winter, 2019), which applied the same minimalist, haiku-derived approach to a Russian commuter town in winter. Both are part of multimedia projects that include short films, music, and poetry, and both situate the game firmly inside the texture of Russian domestic life as experienced from the inside.
These two titles are worth noting in this Archive precisely because they are exceptional. The dacha as kitchen garden, as summer retreat, as the place where three generations gather around a table outside and eat what they grew — this version of the institution does not otherwise appear as the central subject of any major interactive work. Neither DACHA nor ШХД: ЛЕТО emerged from a major studio or an established genre; both are indie titles made by developers clearly familiar with the thing they are depicting, aimed at an audience for whom the depiction is recognizable rather than exotic.
No, I'm Not a Human — The Protagonist's House and the Neighbor's House (2025)
No, I'm Not a Human (Trioskaz, 2025) is set in post-Soviet Russia, in a small settlement likely modelled on the town of Sebezh in Pskov Oblast — the developers, working from personal experience, used what appears to be the view from Zamkovaya Gora as the game's geographical reference point. The setting is a solar catastrophe that has rendered daytime lethal, confining all human activity to darkness and forcing the population into a nocturnal life of sealed windows and locked doors. The player character occupies a small wooden country house; visible from the bedroom window across a narrow dirt path is the neighbor's house, a similarly modest two-storey wooden structure with side outbuildings and an animal coop, backing onto a forested and slightly hilly area.
Neither structure is called a dacha in the game. Both are simply houses — the kind of small, wooden, isolated country dwellings that characterize the post-Soviet Russian countryside and that share the dacha's essential physical logic: low, wooden, surrounded by land, separated from neighbors by open space, located at a distance from any urban center. The Neighbor himself is a local man who lives with his wife and daughter and functions as the tutorial character, giving the player information and two cases of beer on the first night. His death later in the game — his house is burned by Visitors — is one of the most affecting events in the narrative precisely because the structure of familiar ordinary domestic life has been established so carefully before it is destroyed.
What makes No, I'm Not a Human significant for this Archive is not that it depicts dachas explicitly, but that it depicts the physical and social environment of the Russian countryside from the inside — by Russian developers, for an audience that recognizes what they are looking at. The wooden houses, the dirt paths, the fenced plots, the neighbor who walks over at night to share information and a drink: this is the texture of a Russian summer settlement, the material world in which the dacha exists as a type, rendered with the fidelity of personal memory rather than the shorthand of foreign convention.
What the Trope Excludes
The gap between what the dacha is in Russian life and what it becomes in Western game design is almost total. In Russian culture, the dacha is a fundamentally democratic and ordinary institution: the Soviet state allocated plots to citizens precisely to give the urban population access to land, to supplement food supplies, and to provide a form of rest outside the city. The dacha of the ordinary Russian family — two rooms, a vegetable bed, no central heating, a train journey from Moscow — has almost no presence in Western interactive media. What appears instead is always the extreme: the estate, the compound, the lakeside property in defended terrain that a villain retreats to when he needs to disappear.
The dacha's democratic origins are invisible in the Western tradition; only its potential as a place of power and concealment is legible to the major studio. The Russian developers working from personal memory — Trioskaz in No, I'm Not a Human, Mazo and Grun Studio in ШХД: ЛЕТО, the makers of DACHA — depict a different reality: the neighbor across the path, the vegetable plot, the crackling vinyl record, the wooden walls that summer makes habitable. The gap between these two representations is not a gap in imaginative capacity; it is a gap in whose imagination is doing the representing.
Notable Appearances
| Title | Property | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004) | Svyatogornyj East cabin, Tselinoyarsk jungle — explicitly named as a former dacha in EVA's radio dialogue | Former high-ranking official's country retreat, repurposed as a GRU relay station; the only major game to use the word dacha in its own fiction |
| Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) | Makarov's estate, Georgian-Russian border, Caucasus Mountains — mission "Loose Ends" | Safehouse and operational retreat; dacha logic without the name: lakeside, forested, secluded, defended; site of Ghost and Roach's deaths and Shepherd's betrayal |
| Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) and Red Alert 3 (2008) | Rural civilian terrain structures across Soviet-aligned and Russian maps | Anonymous background decoration; small wooden buildings consistent with Russian rural architecture, present in the visual grammar of Soviet geography without narrative identity |
| ШХД: ЛЕТО / It's Summer (2021) | A dacha interior and garden, unspecified Russian countryside — childhood afternoon | The institution as lived experience: sandbox, midday nap, crackling vinyl, birch light; by Russian developer Ilya Mazo and Grun Studio from childhood memory; no goal, no endgame — the first game in the Archive to locate the dacha explicitly in the democratic, ordinary register of Russian summer life |
| DACHA (2024) | Rural summer cottage, unspecified Russian countryside | The institution depicted honestly: vegetable garden, orchard, kebabs, birch trees, slow domestic time — the only title in the Archive to make the dacha its subject by name |
| No, I'm Not a Human (2025) | Protagonist's country house and neighbor's house, post-Soviet Russian rural settlement, likely based on Sebezh, Pskov Oblast | Small wooden Russian country houses used as domestic shelter during a solar apocalypse; the neighbor's house is the site of the game's most affecting loss; by Russian developers from personal memory, depicting the texture of Russian countryside life from the inside |
Conclusion
The dacha appears in games through three distinct mechanisms. In the major Western action tradition — Modern Warfare 2 — it functions as a site of concealed power: the secluded property where the villain retreats, where the domestic surface covers operational reality, where the hero must go to finish the job. In Metal Gear Solid 3, it is named and historicized: a former official's retreat, repurposed, carrying the logic of privilege-as-seclusion into a covert military context. In Russian-made productions — No, I'm Not a Human, ШХД: ЛЕТО, DACHA — it is simply the place where ordinary people live their ordinary lives outside the city, recognizable and specific, not exoticized and not weaponized.
The split is not accidental. It reflects exactly whose experience is being drawn on. A Japanese studio in 2004, working with enough care to name a location correctly, gets the word into the dialogue. A California studio in 2009, designing a villain's lair, finds the right landscape — lake, forest, mountain — without the vocabulary. A Russian artist in 2021, working from childhood, builds the crackling record and the sunlit room and calls them a genre. A Russian indie team in 2025, working from memory, builds the neighbor's house across the path and the dirt track between them. The institution is the same in all cases; the representation of it discloses who is looking.