Even the “religious” plots in Russia are not safe from the vicious.

Most anyone who has spent any time in Russia or read much about what the citizenry does with its time and money is familiar with the “dacha.”

It is a small plot of land on which many people live part-time in self-built dwellings and try to “farm” by raising produce that is the core of their diets.

The dacha has been a part of Russian life for many years. Sadly, our deteriorating social climate is doing great harm to well-meaning people who deserve better. Who ever dreamed of vandalism and theft in the dacha realm?

Mark McDonald of Knight Ridder Newspapers uses Maria Naumenko in the Russian town of Stavropol as an example. She has planted a vegetable garden every summer for the past 50 years, a necessity rather than a hobby for the 79-year-old widow. Her monthly pension is $50 and like tens of millions of Russians she depends on the produce she gets from the garden at her dacha, or country house.

More than a decade after the fall of communism, dacha gardens and private plots are so intensively worked that they account for 95 percent of all the potatoes grown in Russia and about 85 percent of the vegetables.

“I don’t even know how much a tomato costs,” says Naumenko. She worked 40 years as a psychiatric nurse and wishes the old law and order Communist Party was back in power. Her husband, a chauffeur for former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, died 20 years ago.

McDonald points out that the dacha has an almost religious hold over Russians. It can be anything from a one-room shed with no plumbing to a newly built, fully winterized villa. Most Russians have access to one.

The average Russian wage is $134 a month. With more than 40 million Russians living below the poverty line, many must have the produce from the dachas.

In the Soviet era, workers often got rights to a dacha from their factories, trade unions or work collectives. The standard plot was about the size of two tennis courts. Workers once were required by the government to plant their gardens with carrots, cabbages, onions, potatoes and beets, which became known as the five “political vegetables.” It often helped the government hedge on poor crop production and fed millions.

Enter the modern age with its cruel and needless activities by outlaws. Time was when problems were few. No longer.

There is a growing trend of vandalism and theft of crops and belongings that never occurred before. Some dacha areas have had to hire security people and yet they still suffer arson, damage, have homeless people desecrating their places and, just as sad, lose much of their produce to thieves. The punishment can be harsh. At one dacha community, the guards whip the offenders they catch and make them stand naked in the gardens while the dacha owners walk by spitting on them.

Life has been tough enough for most Russians and people in the former Soviet Union without this kind of misery for something so vital as the simple dacha. No matter how decent and honorable a public movement might be, and how vital it can become, somebody always finds a way to befoul the nest.