THE FIRST half of May is one long public holiday in Russia. Hardly have the speeches ended and the hangovers worn off after May Day than the parades start for victory day on May 9th, the commemoration of the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany.
This May with presidential elections only weeks away, the candidates have tried to exploit the scenes of labour and remembrance for their own purposes. Both Boris Yeltsin and his communist opponent, Gennady Zyuganov, used the first of May, still marked as international labour day, to compete for the votes of workers. On May 9th, Mr Zyuganov led a rally in Moscow while the incumbent Kremlin leader travelled to Volgograd the site of the battle of Stalingrad, to woo voters old enough to remember the Great Patriotic War.
But there is another May tradition perhaps dearer to the hearts of Russians. Were it to have a place in the calendar, it might be called Potato Day, for it is when city dwellers taking advantage of the time off work, go out to their dachas (country cottages) for the first time since the melting of the snow to plant potatoes which will be vital to their survival next winter.
On the evening of May 8th as the red lamps came on at the Poklonnaya Gora War Memorial to give the impression the fountains were spewing blood, little Lada cars packed with eager families, their roof racks groaning with sacks of seed potatoes, were streaming past creating huge traffic jams on the road to Minsk. Their occupants had one aim - to reach their dachas as soon as possible, put politics behind them and get digging.
"We always go to the dacha to plant potatoes at the beginning of May," said Mira Nikolyevna, a retired cello teacher, who was leaving for her wooden cottage by a lake in the Valdai region of northern Russia. "It's so wonderful to be outside among the young green leaves after the long winter. Let Yeltsin and Zyuganov mark their political holiday. We have work to do.
The idea of country cottages may sound grand to western people but almost all Russians, even the working classes, have dachas. They can be elegant wooden mansions, but often they are little more than huts with a plot of land attached. Since the former Soviet Union has a limited number of hotels, and bed and breakfast is an alien concept, Russians tend not to travel within their own country but go year after year to their dachas for summer holidays.
Hard work is more a feature of dacha life than relaxation, however. True, Mr Yeltsin's market reforms have put a wide range of products on shop shelves, but, for many Russians, they are still prohibitively expensive. To a large extent, what people manage to grow at their dachas is what they will have to eat for the coming year and the potato is central to the national diet.
It was not always so. Peter the Great, struck by what he had seen in Holland, forced the potato on the reluctant Russian people, who would have preferred to go on eating porridge as they had done for centuries. At first, Russian peasants did not realise that, with the potato, you eat the bit that grows under ground. They are the flowers and were, understandably, unimpressed.
Now, however, the potato is offered at virtually every meal. Russians boast that they have 100 ways of preparing potatoes from frying and boiling them to dicing them for Russian salad and turning them into pancakes.
While they are planting their potatoes, Russians also gather different wild plants and eat them straight from the ground, something which shocks westerners used to supermarket packaging. As with mushroom picking, however, they usually know what they are doing and pick only edible grasses. "The grasses make up for all the vitamins we have been missing in the winter," said Mira Nikolayevnn.
Planting and picking, the Russians are truly at peace with themselves. But even out at the dacha, it is impossible to escape from politics.
Mr Yeltsin, who delayed land reform throughout his presidency, recently decreed that land could be bought and sold, a move which his critics dismissed as an election stunt. The communists say only the collective system can protect country people from land speculators. Liberal economists have warned the communists might try to confiscate now privatised property, including dachas, if they get back to power.
On their return to town, the gardeners will find the election campaign hotting up. The war in Chechnya and hardship caused by economic reform will be big issues. But for the gardeners, so will the future of the Russian potato patch.