Winged Dacha

or, how a farmer came to own an airplane

“Not long ago, I gave my

wife an airplane.”  These words, spoken casually to friends by Anatoly Bryazgin, your average Ryazan resident, were understandably met with a shrug, as if to say, “What kind of stupid joke is Anatoly Ivanych telling now?!” This is understandable. Bryazgin is certainly not rich. In fact, he dresses like a pauper, rides to his dacha on a bicycle and won’t waste a single “old kopek” to mend anything. And now suddenly he owns an airplane?!

And yet, it is all true. Anatoly Ivanovich, who receives a paltry wage (only 300 rubles a month, i.e., $11), recently became the proud owner of an An-2 airplane.

It seems that, for the past few years, business has not been good at the Ryazansky Air Company, where Bryazgin works as an air dispatcher. Fuel price increases depressed air travel and local government officials did not step in to subsidize the little air fleet. The company began to rack up IOUs to employees for unpaid wages and, when these reached a critical mass, they decided on a radical course of action: they proposed that all those who wished to be paid could receive an old airplane in lieu of three months’ pay. Some employees mocked the proposal, “Where are you going to fly to?” some pilots groused. “To America?!”

Yet other, more enterprising employees saw opportunity in the “winged paychecks,” realizing they could likely resell the planes. Most of the employees who accepted this offer quickly sold their “annushkas” (a popular nickname for the An-2) to local airfields.

But dispatcher Bryazgin decided not to sell his unusual paycheck. Instead, he opted to park the plane on his private plot—the infamous six sotki. or 1.5 acres allotted for dachas and family gardens. For so many years, a “roof” for his land was beyond his means. This one came with wings!

“I left the plane on the truck in the garden area,” Anatoly Ivanovich recalled, “with the lock hung on the door. Then, the next morning I presented my wife with the key to the lock and said, ‘Here, my sweet! I give you the key to the airplane!’”

At first his wife didn’t understand, asking, “What kind of an airplane?! What are you talking about, Tolya?” But when she saw the plane, she began to glow and exclaimed, “Finally! We will have a dacha...”

Unfortunately, the wings had to be amputated and, even so, the plane fit on Bryazgin’s six sotki only with difficulty. Yet the family is quite happy with their winged dacha. It is quite valuable, of course. First of all, it was almost free. Second, it has a certain architectural originality amidst the typical cooperative dacha ensemble. Much bigger than a typical tiny shed, it offers the Bryazgins a place to store their tools and also take cover from rain and early snows.

A winged dacha does have one serious drawback, however. It attracts too much attention from undesirables—-more than once thieves have broken into the plane-dacha hoping to find precious metals. Vladimir Pleshakov, an engineer who bought an Annushka from a pilot who received it for wages, once caught a thief who had broken into his plane and was readying to cut it up into pieces to sell.

The An-2 first took to the skies in 1947. Originally dubbed the “kolkhoznik” (collective farmer) because it was designed for agricultural uses, it quickly earned a place in aviation history as an indomitable workhorse. For many far-flung regions of the Russian North, it was a lifeline to civilization. After the plane had been in service for just 15 years, one Western observer called it an “absolutely unique “ plane that “must be regarded as one of the world’s truly great biplanes.” Indeed, less than 10 years ago, over 2500 An-2s were still in service. And some of the planes adopted as dachas by the Ryazan workers have quite an illustrious history: in Soviet times, the chairman of the Ryazan Obkom Communist Party flew in one of the planes, while a conference of high profile Party nomenklatura flew on board another.

It all makes for one of those hilarious ironies of history. These tough little biplanes, which once carted Communist Party officials around western Russia, have come down to earth, reborn as a mini worker’s paradise of the post-communist era.   RL

— Dmitry Barinov