Dacha Settlements in Contemporary Russia

Conclusion

Note on Sources

Bibliography

LG

Literaturnaia gazeta

The dacha, now largely synonymous with life in a private sphere free from public surveillance, was in its medieval origins the result of a gift bestowed publicly. Derived from the verb “to give,” the word “dacha” was present in Old Russian from the eleventh century, but by the seventeenth century it tended to denote specifically land given out to servitors by the state. It became a key concept in land surveys conducted from the time of Ivan the Terrible on; during the General Survey that was carried out from early in the reign of Catherine II right up to Emancipation, the dacha was the main legal and administrative form for the allocation of property rights.1 This brief overview attests both to a long-term semantic transition and to a tension persistent in Russian history and rather significant for an analysis of the modern dacha; namely, the problematic relationship between the role of informal arrangements (the dacha received as a mark of grace and favor) and the public imperative to institute formalized legal relations (the dacha as a piece of property guaranteed by rights).

This tension was exacerbated—some would say created—by the Petrine era, a period that, among many other things, brought into being a new kind of dacha. Peter the Great, like the rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had plenty of land available for distribution; but, unlike his predecessors, he was particularly eager to hand out dachas in order to accelerate the development of a modern urban space—St. Petersburg, his new city on the Gulf of Finland. Thus, for example, city-center plots between the Fontanka River and the tree-lined Sadovaia Street were doled out to the families of courtiers in the 1710s—but on strict condition that these families actually built on them and saw to their upkeep. As one historian has it:

After you had received a plot of land for nothing, it was impossible just to offer your thanks and relax—Peter the Great might accidentally pay you a visit in his chariot to see how the recipient of his gift was getting on in his new place, and if the Emperor found that diligence had been lacking, justice and punishment were summary: Peter the Great was never parted from his cudgel.2

But Peter and his eighteenth-century successors were also able to offer land in locations that lay well outside the city’s boundaries. Here dachas began to be developed as suburban residences designed primarily for leisure. The first such instance came in 1710, when Peter, as a response to his successful campaign against the Swedes, started to hand out plots of land on the route running between St. Petersburg and his new palace at Peterhof. Terraces were built, trees were planted, and the shore was banked up so as to give protection against flooding. The dimensions of the plots were regular—100 sazhens wide by 1,000 deep; they were thus laid out like the keys of a giant piano pressed up against the south shore of the Gulf of Finland.3

The Dacha as Court Residence

Peter conceived of the Peterhof Road as a single architectural ensemble modeled on the route from Paris to Versailles. Residents were, for example, required to take good care of their property and strictly forbidden to chop down trees along the road: the more land owned and the wealthier the owner, the greater were Peter’s architectural expectations of the residence erected on a dacha plot.4 Subsequent eighteenth-century rulers took further measures to smarten the road up and improve its infrastructure. A decree of 23 August 1739 allocated funds for setting up milestones. In the mid-1750s paving of the road was undertaken, and in 1769 owners of dachas were made responsible for its maintenance (although in practice the money continued to be drawn from state revenues). In the early 1770s birch trees were planted along the road at public expense.5 In 1777 came a proposal for rebuilding a substantial portion of the route. Throughout the eighteenth century, special measures were taken to ensure that public order was maintained for the entire length of the road. In April 1748, for example, the chief of police received instructions to conduct a thorough inspection in advance of the imperial party so as to avoid “disorders”; taverns were to be removed from the roadside.6

The desired result of these measures was to create a row of imposing residences with elaborate and extensive gardens stretching all the way to the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. As early as 1736, Peder von Haven, arriving in St. Petersburg as secretary and preacher for a Norwegian sailor, commented on the row of “extremely fine out-of-town households” that he saw as he was driven into the city along the Peterhof Road.7 Eyewitness accounts of the Peterhof Road, like those of St. Petersburg itself, were not uniformly enthusiastic in its early days,8 but by the mid-eighteenth century they were consistently rapturous. Particular attention was lavished on the gardens of the princes Naryshkin, which were left open to the public.9 The positive assessments lasted well into the nineteenth century. A visitor of 1805 admired the view on heading out of Strel’na toward St. Petersburg: “As a parting gift my eyes were taken up by an unbroken chain of picturesque dachas—each one finer than the last—right up to the barrier at the entrance to St. Petersburg.”10 Fifteen years later, the author of an early guidebook found that the view from Strel’na had lost none of its charm: “From here a splendid mounded road leads to the magnificent dachas of the grandees and the wealthy.”11

The prime function of these dachas was public sociability: their owners were able to receive a stream of visitors from foreign delegations, prominent noble families, and of course the imperial court. In July 1772, for example, Prince L. A. Naryshkin laid on a lavish set of entertainments at his dacha eleven versts along the Peterhof Road. The guests started assembling at three o’clock and were able to amuse themselves by wandering through the gardens with their intriguing patterns of streams and paths. At seven o’clock the empress arrived and a “Temple of Victory” (in honor of the recent victory over the Turks and Tatars) was spectacularly unveiled. The entertainment was completed with fireworks and a masked ball.12 Five years later the Swiss scholar Jean Bernoulli called in at the Naryshkin dacha and commented especially on the tasteful English-style design of the gardens; he also noted with interest that the property was opened to the public twice a week.13 Count Stroganov, similarly, liked to entertain in the grand style: his generous hospitality cost him 500 rubles each Sunday as he threw open his dacha for music, dancing, and refreshments.14

The Naryshkin and Stroganov dachas in several ways conformed to the pattern of life often held to be characteristic of the elite country estate in the same period: display was valued over substance, short-term ostentatious hospitality over longer-term comfort. But this assessment needs to be qualified on two counts. First, the way of life on the Peterhof Road and at the country estate was not simply fixated on public spectacle. The Catherinian period was to a significant extent constructed by the new empress and her ideologues as a reaction against the artifice, luxury, and corruption of the reign of Elizabeth (1741–1762) and as a return to the austerity of Peter I’s time. The turn away from showy festivity and toward the “English” virtues of practicality and emotional depth found expression in the taste for Romantic garden designs; it also led to a change of culture at the country estate, where far niente went out of fashion, the simple country life (or its appearance) came to be more highly valued, and greater emphasis was laid on purposeful and reflective pursuits—notably reading.15 Life out of the city was, moreover, associated with a rejection of the status distinctions that underpinned social contacts in the city and at court. This relaxation of social rules prefigured an important and enduring cultural stereotype that would be articulated more forcefully in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: exurbia was seen as a uniquely “democratic” site for social interaction. As the poet and state servant Gavriil Derzhavin observed of parties de plaisir he attended in the 1770s:

Leaving behind in the city

All that our minds does trouble,

In simple cordial fresh air

Do we spend our time.

. . .

We resolved among friends

To preserve the laws of equality;

To abandon the conceits

Of wealth, power, and rank.

Оставя беспокойство в граде

И все, смущает что умы,

В простой приятельской прохладе

Свое проводим время мы.

[. . .]

Мы положили меж друзь��ми

Законы равенства хранить;

Богатством, властью и чинами

Себя отнюдь не возносить.16

Second, the social and economic functions of the dacha in eighteenth-century Russia were quite distinct from those of the country estate. A residence on the Peterhof Road enabled people to have a break from the city without taking themselves too far afield. It allowed a lifestyle of short, habitual holidays instead of a single annual absence of several months at a far-flung country estate. The emergence of a modern (that is, post-Petrine) dacha depended on an administrative order that required regular and reasonably continuous attendance in the office or at the court by a class of state functionaries and noblemen. Its prime function was to enable prominent families to maintain contact with the grandees on whose favor their advancement depended, to safeguard their position in Petersburg’s peculiarly patrimonial bureaucracy. This point was understood perfectly by F. F. Vigel’, a memoirist unusually well placed to observe the overlapping worlds of aristocracy and elite civil service. In 1800 Vigel’ was driven out to the residence of Count F. V. Rostopchin to request in person an appointment in the prestigious Board of Foreign Affairs. Not yet fourteen years of age, Vigel’ was traveling along the Peterhof Road for the first time, and he marveled at the chain of splendid dachas that extended “almost uninterruptedly” on both sides for twenty-six versts. This was, he commented, the only place around Petersburg where “rich folk of all estates [vsekh soslovii]” could spend their summers; people of lesser means could not afford such a luxury. His remarks confirm the Peterhof Road as a place for the social elite; equally, however, they suggest that membership in this elite was determined not simply by aristocratic lineage but also by money and by position in state service. As an older man, Vigel’ was less admiring of the dacha habits of St. Petersburg’s mandarins, who, in his opinion, had abandoned the expansive ways of the country estate and opted instead for cramped and undignified suburban dwellings in their overriding anxiety to maintain proximity to the court. Their houses were, from this point of view, more reminiscent of servants’ quarters than of truly aristocratic residences.17

This somewhat jaundiced view of the Petersburg dacha and the implied unfavorable comparison with the more autonomous estate culture of the Moscow aristocracy would become a mainstay of later social commentaries. Such typological distinctions between Russia’s two major cities do, however, tend to obliterate historical nuances. Even in the eighteenth century, the social function and composition of the Peterhof Road was far from static. In the early days, its orientation toward the Peterhof palace was indeed at least as important as, if not more important than, its proximity to the city. But this initial stage of the modern dacha s history came to a symbolic end with the completion of the Winter Palace by Bartolomeo Rastrelli in 1768, after which the imperial household relocated to Petersburg. In actual settlement patterns, understandably enough, there was no such clear break; the palaces retained their social prominence and the more adjacent outskirts of the city were only gradually made fit for dacha colonization. Even so, one can observe a shift in elite residency toward the “East End” of the Peterhof Road in the second half of the eighteenth century.18

This spatial reorientation was accompanied by changes in social composition. In 1762 the first section of the road toward Peterhof—between the Fontanka and a substantial dacha named Krasnyi Kabachok—was subdivided into smaller plots and handed out to new owners. Krasnyi Kabachok had been given by Peter I to a translator named Semen Ivanov with full rights of inheritance (though without the right to sell the land), but when Ivanov died in 1748 his family was approached by the chief of police, Vasilii Saltykov, who had designs on this potentially profitable stretch of land. Under huge pressure, the family gave in to his demands and sold their estate for a mere 600 rubles. But Ivanovs sister appealed to Empress Elizabeth, who promptly canceled the contract of sale and allowed the Ivanovs to sell the property to whomever they pleased. Ivanovs sister soon took advantage of this ruling and cashed in her assets, and Krasnyi Kabachok changed hands several times over the following decades.19

The case of Krasnyi Kabachok is symptomatic of a liberalization of the property market on the Peterhof Road. As one observer noted in 1829, a change of ownership took place at the turn of the eighteenth century: “enormous seigneurial castles were replaced by the pleasant-looking cottages of the merchantry, or had entered the hands of this estate."20The diversification of the property market is reflected in the St. Petersburg court newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, which from the late 1760s ran advertisements for dachas along the Peterhof Road. In February 1769, for example, P. B. Sheremetev put up for sale several plots of land, including “a seafront property twelve versts from Petersburg, comprising a seigneurial residence [gospodskie khoromy] on a stone foundation, fully equipped and furnished, with two outbuildings, servants’ quarters, kitchen and cellar, stable and farmyard, a planned garden, orangeries with trees and greenhouses, three ponds with fish of various kinds, among them a fair amount of carp; on the territory of the dacha [v dachakh] there is a good supply of wood and hay.”21

The “Out-of-Town” House and the Environs of St. Petersburg

In the first half of Catherine’s reign, the meaning of “dacha” as “plot of land” was clearly still primary. The word could, moreover, be used interchangeably with myza or (less frequently) dvor, both of which suggest more a farmstead than a primarily residential property. While these miniature estates would generally have a main house solidly built on a stone foundation, they also had space for extensive domestic agriculture (livestock, orchards, kitchen garden, even, in some cases, greenhouses). In the 1780s, although dachas were still thought of as plots of land rather than as homes, we begin to find evidence of a more rapid turnover of owners and a wider range of locations (including the Vyborg Side, the Neva islands, and the Tsarskoe Selo Road). In addition, there were signs of increased commercial exploitation of dacha plots as owners began to rent out smaller houses: “At the dacha of the privy councilor, senator, and knight Mikhailo Fedorovich Soimonov, near Ekaterinhof, two houses are available for rent complete with stables, outbuildings for carriages, and icehouses.”22 At the beginning of the nineteenth century a new concept begins to emerge: that of the out-of-town house (zagorodnyi dom) or house for summer entertainment (dom dlia letnego uveseleniia), both of which typically came with less land and fewer amenities. lust occasionally, individual rooms were made available for rent. For the first time, the house and associated lifestyle were becoming more important than the land on which the house stood.23 It is in the last two decades of the eighteenth century that we can trace the origins of a new kind of entertainment culture: the focus was slightly less on lavish parties thrown for court society or on elaborate fêtes champêtres than on fluid and decentered forms of social interaction. This was, in other words, the beginning of a shift from the aristocratic gulian’e (fête) to the progulka (promenade) in a small group of family or friends, from the individually owned landscaped garden as a site for collective entertainment to the more public venues of park, embankment, and pleasure garden (uveselitel’nyi sad).24

A corresponding change can be observed in visual representations of the city and its outskirts. Early paintings of St. Petersburg offer “elemental” views, which typically exaggerate the width of the Neva, emphasize the river’s importance by crowding it with ships, and provide a few grand facades on the embankments as the only evidence of lasting human intervention in the landscape. Over time, as the city territory was more densely settled and the natural elements were seen to have been tamed, came a shift to representations that emphasized rather the city’s more “civilized” aspect, its straight lines, open spaces, and imposing grandeur. Later still, in the first part of the nineteenth century, norms changed again as artists began to abandon the distant, all-encompassing, admiring perspective on the city and instead to adopt a more intimate and “enclosed” viewpoint.25. These long-term aesthetic trends had direct implications for the way artists depicted the city’s outskirts. A bleak view reminiscent of the earlier eighteenth century is the Swedish artist Benjamin Paterssen’s View of the Outskirts of Petersburg by the Porcelain Factory (1793). Paterssen was a prolific painter of the city’s central areas, such as the Admiralty and Senate Square, but in this work he shows a flat and empty rural scene with carriages heading both toward and away from the city and a peasant woman and child wandering along the side of the roadway; the left side of the painting is dominated by a river, here associated not with the granite grandeur of the city but with the Finnish fishermen who are often counterposed to it in the Petersburg myth.

But Paterssen himself was at the forefront of a new trend that emerged at the turn of the century: suddenly artists were not so reluctant to present views of suburban life or to draw such a sharp distinction between city and noncity scenes. The first examples of the genre were paintings of aristocratic suburban residences such as the Stroganov dacha, painted by Andrei Voronikhin in 1797 and by Paterssen in 1804. These paintings were, however, in the same distanced style as the austere early representations of St. Petersburg’s central squares and embankments. More striking were depictions whose foregrounds were filled with scenes of suburban life. Paterssen’s View of Novaia Derevnia (1801), for example, has some people strolling along the embankment of Kamennyi Island in small family groups. But, although this is a location detached from the city, formality has not been abandoned. Families are dressed smartly, as for a stately promenade; although some people are clearly in gentle motion, they are depicted as static, without individualizing gestures that might hint at a narrative; and two uniformed figures on horseback hover at the entrance to a neatly tree-lined avenue. Moreover, the location, though certainly not urban, is hardly secluded and private: as these well-to-do families stroll, they are approached by peddlers, and on the opposite bank of the Neva they are faced by the densely settled Novaia Derevnia, by all appearances a well-appointed suburb. By 1804, in his picture of the Kamennyi Island Palace from Aptekarskii Island, Paterssen was taking a significantly different approach. The palace is in this case merely a pretext: it is, admittedly, located in the center of the picture, but in the distance, almost on the horizon. The foreground is dominated by a scene of domestic activity on the near shore. Here there are four groups of figures and two distinct narratives. A woman greets or takes leave of a uniformed man at the steps to her family’s residence; and a cabriolet sets off, pursued by a dog and watched by a woman with three children. Both the woman and her children are dressed informally; and the unconstrained domesticity of the scene is emphasized by the uncluttered view of the opposite bank, by the sparse and unsculpted arboreal backdrop, and by the indistinct boundary between road and grass verge.26

В. Paterssen, View of Novaia Derevnia from Kamennyi Island (1801). Courtesy of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (171 c.229).

B. Paterssen, The Kamennyi Island Palace As Seen from Aptekarskii Island (1804). Courtesy of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (171 c.229).

The point of this excursus into the visual arts is not only to show how the outskirts of St. Petersburg were acquiring independent aesthetic and cultural value but also to suggest the increasing diversity and vitality of dacha life in this period. The dacha seems to have become a fixture on the social scene in the early part of the nineteenth century, when renting a summer house became a universal aspiration for well-to-do sections of Petersburg society. In 1802 F. F. Vigel’ was struck by a transformation that had taken place since his first visit: arriving in September, he was surprised to find the city “empty,” as people had not yet returned from their summer houses. During the two years he had been away from Petersburg, he surmised, the dacha habit had “already spread to all classes.” Even if some allowances need to be made for Vigel’’s youthful impressionability, his observation is strengthened by further details of the time. The early years of the reign of Alexander I brought a construction boom in Petersburg and its environs; land was drained, trees were felled, and dachas went up steadily.27 In the early nineteenth century, moreover, dachas were advertised more widely and with greater attention paid to their commercial possibilities. Take the following notice from 1820, which is revealing of the contemporary craze for horticulture:

An orangery 60 sazhens long with fruit trees, for example peaches, apricots, and plums . . . , next to it four sections with their own hothouse, which has vines, a barn for cherries of 20 sazhens, in it up to 150 trees in tubs, a kitchen garden 65 sazhens long, 12 sazhens wide, in it up to 20 rows of Spanish strawberries, red currant, black currant, white and pink currants, various kinds of gooseberry, and in addition, in various sections and the greenhouse, up to 200 pots of roses and up to 2,000 pots of other flowers, and also ten of the best kinds of hothouses for watermelons and melons.28

By the turn of the eighteenth century, the dacha market was not at all restricted to the routes linking the city and the palaces at Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, and the more recently built Pavlovsk. It now notably included the various islands in the Neva. In the first years of St. Petersburg’s existence, these islands were handed out to Peter’s relatives and favorites. Thereafter, during the eighteenth century, they changed hands quite frequently as their owners were disgraced and dispossessed or decided to cash in the gift they had received. Prince Aleksandr Menshikov was the first owner of Krestovskii Island; after his disgrace, the island was given to Count Minikh by Empress Anna Ioannovna in 1731. Then, after Minikh’s involvement in a palace plot of 1742, the island passed to the Razumovskii family. The Razumovskiis then became property entrepreneurs, renting out houses on the island to civil servants. In 1804 P.K. Razumovskii sold the island to Prince A.M. Belosel’skii-Belozerskii, who quickly took an even more entrepreneurial approach by increasing the number of plots.29 An unflattering description of dacha life on the island was given by Iu. Arnol’d, who spent a summer there as an adolescent in 1827. To the east, he recalled, there were thirty-three peasant households, to the west no more than six or seven; amenities were limited to a tavern, an inn, and a small trader’s stall; the island was cross-cut by only two roads. The peasant houses were rented out to “gentlemen”:

It was left to the tenants to concern themselves with making these dwellings more or less habitable and if possible comfortable. For this reason the “dachas” were usually rented for about five years. Our “dacha” . . . consisted of a house with six rooms, a mezzanine of three little rooms, and various outbuildings in a closed yard. At the front, facing the street, was a little patch of garden, and behind the yard an enormous expanse of communal meadow.30

The first references to dachas on Petrovskii Island came in the early 1790s. The island was given over to the Free Economic Society for agricultural purposes;31 but these activities were abandoned after the disastrous flood of 1824. Instead, houses were built for rent, bringing in 3,950 rubles in the first year. After that, plots were let out for tenants to build their own houses; these buildings then became the property of the society. In 1841 the island was transferred to the future Alexander II. Dacha owners suffered a period of uncertainty as to whether their contracts with the society would remain in force, but after some discussion they were given assurances that they would retain rights to their houses. Aptekarskii Island, home of the first botanical garden in Russia, was kept under close imperial supervision until 1799, when private construction was first allowed there. When more intensive settlement did occur, it took place quite haphazardly, with winding streets and dead ends, and Aptekarskii gained a reputation as the most unplanned of the islands.32

The most splendid of the islands in the Neva delta was no doubt Kamennyi. Its early owners were G.I. Golovkin (the first Russian chancellor), his son A.G. Golovkin, and, from 1746, A. I. Bestuzheva-Riumina, wife of the then chancellor. Her husband was arrested and disgraced in 1758; he was rehabilitated at the beginning of Catherine II’s reign and in 1765 sold the island to the empress, who presented it as a gift to her son Paul, the future emperor. Dacha construction began in the late 1780s, and on a rather more secure basis than earlier in the island’s history: Catherine’s charter of 1785 had given nobles reason to hope that in future their property would not be subject to sudden confiscation. Paul allotted the first plots on Kamennyi to favored courtiers, thus establishing the island as the main site for official residences outside the suburban palaces. Here is a description of one of the early buildings, advertised for rent in 1789: “A rebuilt wooden manorial house, unfurnished, with two outbuildings, one of which has a bathhouse and large servants’ quarters, the other has a kitchen, inside the yard there is a stable with six stalls, a cellar with an icebox and several storerooms, behind the yard [there is] forest and land tilled for a kitchen garden.”33 Residences and gardens on Kamennyi were, it seems, kept in impeccable condition, as befitted a place where members of the imperial family were liable to take strolls. In 1818 a visitor to the dacha of a senior civil servant observed that “everything about it was irreproachably clean and neat, every tree was nurtured like a rare tropical plant”; guests were forbidden to drive their carriages up to the entrance of the house for fear of disrupting this exemplary orderliness.34

By 1800, seventeen plots had been handed out on the eastern part of the island. Alexander I tried to keep strict control over new building: inns, shops, and coffeehouses were strictly forbidden, and the building of private dachas was kept to a minimum. But there was still considerable turnover of ownership, as in the Dolivo-Dobrovol’skii dacha, subsequently famous for the two summers that Aleksandr Pushkin spent there (in 1834 and 1836). The plot was originally given by Alexander I to a Naryshkin; it was then sold first to another old noble family, the Pleshcheevs, then (in 1816) to a petit bourgeois (meshchanin) named Kamenshchikov, from whom the plot was confiscated for debts in 1820. Then, in 1821, it passed briefly into the hands of a merchant before being sold to a woman named Dolivo-Dobrovol’skaia, wife of a high-ranking civil servant. The house where Pushkin lived was built between 1822 and 1830.35 Contemporaries all agreed that it was not cheap; the writer’s wife leased it after the money had arrived for the first issue of Sovremennik (The Contemporary), the journal that Pushkin hoped would rescue him from his straitened financial circumstances. The handful of memoirs that have come down to us paint a picture of domestic contentment and informality in his household. A summer on the island presented ample opportunities for socializing. Quite apart from the neighbors on the island, the opposite bank of the Neva (Novaia Derevnia) was well populated; among its residents were the members of the Guards Regiment to which Pushkin’s later antagonist, Georges d’Anthès, belonged.36

Pushkin, the best-known dacha resident of the period, was already a habitué of the islands. In the summer of 1830 he spent a lot of time with his friend Anton Del’vig, who had rented a dacha near Krestovskii Island. Del’vig’s younger cousin (subsequently state inspector of private railways) recalled how the two of them went around Krestovskii noisily engaging the attention of passers-by in a way they had clearly done since their schooldays; for Pushkin, this was the last opportunity to enjoy the bachelor lifestyle.37 Then and subsequently, Krestovskii had a reputation for strolling crowds, mildly unruly behavior, and a low level of actual residency. As a married man Pushkin spent a couple of summers at Chernaia Rechka (near the Stroganov gardens, on the north side of the island), later infamous as the location for his fatal duel. His landlord on both occasions was F. I. Miller, head butler under two tsars and one of the first dacha entrepreneurs. These were no mere vacation cottages: in a letter to her daughter in Warsaw, Pushkin’s mother reported that her son’s dacha had “over fifteen rooms.”38

Pushkin left an insight into this socially exclusive dacha world in his fragment “The Guests Were Assembling at the Dacha” (1828). Here we discover that the dachas on the islands were so close to the city center that people could go there not just for a day or two but for part of a day, or even for part of an evening. In this unfinished story the guests have come straight from the theater and plunge immediately into drawing room conversation. The tone is free and easy, even facetious, but high society norms still obtain: the prolonged tête-è-tête of a married woman with an admirer on the balcony is noted by everyone and marked down against her. The dacha offers the opportunity for private communication in a very public setting—with all the risks it entails. In a word, this dacha is an exurban salon and the story is a society tale. If the setting may be said to give this highly conventional genre its own particular coloring, it is perhaps in a certain ease of narrative style. The fact that all the guests have come from a distance and crossed the urban/suburban divide divests them of their social biography; the dacha is a location where characters can be brought together and left to interact without too much scene-setting. It is significant that Pushkin’s unfinished story is supposed precisely for this reason to have caught Lev Tolstoy’s eye as he was mulling over his own tale of adultery, Anna Karenina, four decades later.39

The connection of these early suburban residences to the values of urban high society was emphasized by their design. Most owners took the Italian villa as their model.40 The simple, heavy, “laconic” architectural style typical of the Alexandrine period was particularly prevalent on Kamennyi Island, as in the dacha of Prince Ol’denburg: “The round hall under the cupola is wonderfully fine: modest and solemn at the same time. This is precisely that ‘wealthy simplicity’ which was so well understood by artists of the first half of the nineteenth century; this is the ideal of a suburban house combining country-style coziness with refined luxury.”41

And suburban was what these residences were becoming in the 1820s. Their closer relationship with the city was signposted by a law of 1833 that extended the jurisdiction of the St. Petersburg police to dacha areas from the Okhta to the Vyborg Side. But, although residents of such areas now had the assistance of the city authorities in maintaining “safety” and “decency,” they retained a freedom in their use of space and architectural design that was denied to inhabitants of more densely settled parts of the city.42

As the mention of locations such as the Vyborg Side suggests, in the early nineteenth century there were other sites for dacha life besides court residences and island villas. To judge by advertisements of the time, several other areas had houses for sale and summer rental. Many of them were located in the northern part of the city, on the Petersburg Side or even farther afield. There was plenty of room for people to have spacious residences only a short carriage ride from the center; St. Petersburg still appeared bucolic to travelers who approached it in the 1800s.43 Most dachas for rent came with outbuildings, kitchen garden, and furniture, and they commonly offered accommodation of ten rooms or so. Houses were made available for rental not only by grandees, prosperous merchants, or prominent civil servants but also by humbler folk. Peasants on Krestovskii Island, as we have seen, were letting out houses for the summer from the late eighteenth century, and villages on or near the Peterhof Road were similarly full of cheap rental opportunities for summering Petersburgers in the early nineteenth century.44

Among the earliest dacha landlords from a humble milieu were the German “colonists.” German immigration to the St. Petersburg region dates back to the early years of the reign of Catherine II. Foreigners were attracted by a set of extremely favorable conditions, including freedom of confession, free lodging for six months on arrival, land grants, exemption from taxes, and start-up loans. The first German settlers duly arrived in St. Petersburg via Lübeck in 1762 and 1763; their first colony was named Novaia Saratovka and had an initial population of sixty families, each with thirty-five desiatinas of land. The next wave of settlement came in the 1800s, when a colony was established at Strel’na, on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland. In 1808 Alexander I made up to 20,000 desiatinas available for further German settlement in the region. In 1809, one hundred more German families moved from Poland to a new colony near Oranienbaum. This settlement was soon disbanded and the German peasants were resettled because the land proved unsuitable for agriculture, but the other colonies remained. The colonists at Strel’na, for example, paid quitrent (obrok) to the landowner; they did not have the right of private ownership, but neither were they constrained by the commune traditional in Russian peasant villages. They were able to make a living from the land under conditions much more favorable than those enjoyed by the majority of the population of the Russian Empire. And thanks to the surplus income they generated, the relative economic independence they enjoyed, and the favorable and expanding property market that obtained in the Petersburg region, many of them were able to build and rent out summer houses and to buy more land. The number of such settlements continued to increase in the second half of the century, and locations such as Strel’na and Novaia Derevnia had the reputation of being overwhelmingly German in their population.45

It is in the early nineteenth century also that we find the origins of another extremely enduring model of dacha life. In the 1810s, A. N. Olenin, president of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts and director of the public library, brought together many of the leading literary and artistic figures of his day at his residence, Priiutino, located seventeen versts from St. Petersburg, beyond the Okhta, in the direction of Lake Ladoga. Although in certain respects this property was a landed estate by virtue of its rural location and its relative detachment from the city and from other centers of social activity, visitors commonly referred to it as a dacha. Its function was not agricultural production but rather the encouragement of convivial and predominantly intellectual relations within a particular circle. Priiutino was the setting for a succession of prolonged house parties, and certain habitués—such as the poet and translator N. I. Gnedich and the celebrated poet and fable writer I. A. Krylov—were practically in permanent residence in the summer.46 Olenin had built several smaller houses on the grounds of his own residence specifically in order to accommodate such long-term guests. And the guests kept on coming: one visitor recalled that even the seventeen cows at the dacha struggled to produce enough cream for all the writers and artists summering at Priiutino. The social responsibilities of guests were strikingly limited: a bell summoned them several times a day to meals, but otherwise they were free to amuse themselves.47

Olenin’s literary acquaintances were not slow to express their gratitude for this relaxed hospitality, especially given that Priiutino was easily accommodated within their early-Romantic worldview. In 1820, Gnedich dedicated to Olenin’s wife a poem in which, playing lightly on the dacha’s name (priiut means “shelter"), he spoke of the dacha as a blessed refuge from the noise and vanity of the city, as a place to flee life’s “turbulence” and seek spiritual repose.48 Konstantin Batiushkov, similarly, referred to Priiutino as a “refuge for kind souls” and a setting for “rustic festivities.”49 Olenin’s country retreat may therefore be seen as setting up a powerful legitimizing model for dacha life: far from being a site for empty-headed entertainments, the dacha was a place for spiritual recuperation from the rigors of city life, informal and friendly social interaction, and intense intellectual and artistic creativity.50

Moscow

So far the discussion has been focused on one city and its environs. It is true that Petersburg was in the vanguard of the early history of the dacha, because the urban/suburban divide opened up more suddenly and decisively there than elsewhere in Russia, and because of the concentration of imperial institutions and resulting opportunities for careers. The entertainment culture of the Moscow nobility was, moreover, structured rather differently from that of St. Petersburg. The city was ringed by aristocratic palaces, which were major social centers in their own right and for the time being obviated any need to create new entertainment-oriented suburban settlements.51 A survey of advertisements for property in and around Moscow in the 1800s reveals that dachas, in the sense that is relevant here, are simply not mentioned. The nearest equivalent is the comfortable town house with spacious gardens but minimal landholdings (khoziaistvo).52 Even in the 1830s the word “dacha” was used less often in Moscow than in Petersburg, and the distinction between a dacha or zagorodnyi dom and a “town estate” or gorodskaia usad’ba was much less clear-cut. Take the following advertisement: “On the Serpukhov Road, at the fifth verst from Moscow, in the village of Verkhnie Koshly for summer rent: two houses together or separately with all amenities, with furniture or without, completely dry, built in a pleasant location from which the whole of Moscow can be seen; on the dacha itself [i.e., the plot of land] there is a small stream.”53

In the early nineteenth century, however, Moscow gained ground on Petersburg. Turgenev’s First Love (1860), for example, is set in 1833 in a dacha opposite Neskuchnoe at the Kaluga gates, at the same time Pushkin was occupying his fifteen rooms at Chernaia Rechka, yet it reveals a quite different model of dacha life. The colonnaded main house is occupied by the family of the narrator, Vladimir, who is sixteen at the time of the events described. It is flanked by two other buildings: one has been converted into a small wallpaper factory, while the other is rented out to summer guests. The tenant who arrives to spend the summer in this unprepossessing outbuilding is a pretentious “princess” whose first concern is to ask the narrators parents to pull strings on her behalf to resolve a legal difficulty in which she has found herself entangled. Vladimir’s mother is dismayed by the “vulgarity” of her neighbor, but she cannot avoid having something to do with her; Vladimir, by contrast, is much taken with the neighbors daughter, Zina. What he fails to see is that his father is himself conducting an affair with Zina. First Love is of interest as a unique experiment in the dacha genre by a writer associated primarily with the country estate. The suburban setting seems to bring with it a change in psychological dynamics: the characters are thrown together more randomly than they would be at the country estate, and the revelation of the father’s infidelity, though not surprising to the reader, is more shocking than anything in Turgenev’s measured and evenly paced longer works. In a pattern quite characteristic of Russian literary representations in the later nineteenth century, the dacha is shown as a place that undermines traditional forms of social intercourse: first, by bringing together a larger and more socially diverse set of characters; second, by allowing this expanded cast greater freedom of action (notably, the freedom to transgress marital boundaries).54

Besides making a valuable contribution to the emerging poetics of the dacha, First Love indicates that the subdivision of estates into dachas for rent was under way in the Moscow region in the 1830s.55 In this period the most significant new factor in dacha development, and one common to Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the sale of substantial 25 areas of land just outside the city limits as dacha plots. In the St. Petersburg area, for instance, land belonging to the Forestry Institute (Lesnoi Institut) was initially sold off as eighteen plots in 1832; the demand was so great that more were made available two years later.56 In Moscow the main example in this period was Petrovskii Park, an area totaling seventeen desiatinas located between the city gates and the Petrovskii Palace, in the direction of Tver’. The first aristocratic dachas there dated back to the late eighteenth century, but they were all destroyed during the Napoleonic invasion. Later, in the 1830s, the park was revived as an up-market summer residential area: peasants were bought out from the surrounding land and building plots were handed out to elite nobles. There were to be no inns or similar watering holes, as the “purpose of building these dachas [was] respectability of aspect and conduct [blagovidnost’ i prilichie].” Mikhail Zagoskin, director of the Moscow theaters in the 1830s, had a dacha of the requisite decorous appearance. “The balconies and squares were bedecked in flowers; wire gates, topped by a fragrant flowerpot or convolvulus, were surrounded by small gardens.”57 Purchasers of plots in Petrovskii Park were to have their house designs approved by the Building Commission, and if they failed to build within three years, their plot would be resold at public auction. Against those restrictions, they received ten years’ relief from taxes and loans of up to 5,000 rubles from the commission.58 Observers were quick to sense that these developments had brought about a change in the leisure habits of Moscow’s social elite: in the opinion of the memoirist M. A. Dmitriev (1796–1866), for example, the picnics and parties de plaisir favored by some aristocratic families became much less common in the 1830s, as Petrovskii Park offered them a more permanent base for exurban recreation and invited new forms of sociability.59 In the 1840s the park remained a place for the summer residences of the Moscow aristocracy and a venue for refined entertainments such as costume balls.60

BY THE mid-1830s we can see much of the dacha’s subsequent nineteenth-century history in embryo. The period from 1780 to 1820 weakened the hold of the aristocracy and the court elite over the semirural retreats around St. Petersburg and brought Petersburg society closer to what might be called a “modern” leisure culture. That is, the arena for unofficial social interaction became polarized between, on the one hand, a small circle of family and intimates and, on the other, the anonymity of public spectacle. Attempts to combine the two spheres of public and private entertainment—as had occurred, for example, in the grand festivities at the Naryshkin dacha on the Peterhof Road—were made less frequently.

But this early stage in the dacha’s history also has the virtue of illustrating the limitations of such ideal-typical accounts; it already points to a diversification not only of the social composition of the dacha public but also of the available models for dacha life. On the one hand, we have the dacha as an appurtenance of political influence, as a place where personal and official forms of social interaction are intertwined. The role of patronage in European political life of this period was doubtless enormous, yet Russia has often been seen as an extreme case: as representing an unattractive hybrid of indiscriminately applied forms of Western civility with none too deeply concealed systems of patrimonial power. This is what Martha Wilmot, a guest at numerous aristocratic dachas in the 1800s, was alluding to when she pointed to the “mixture of familiarity and pride” in the people she encountered; and her sister Catherine, somewhat older and a more penetrating observer, described Russia as “a superstructure from France—the Monkey rampant on the Bear’s back” and as a “clumsy romping ignorant girl” with a “Parisian cap on her head.”61 The court dacha, as a place explicitly orientated toward informal socializing but at the same time embedded in networks of political and social influence, may seem to embody the contradictions identified by the Wilmots. The same point emerges, though in a much more positive light, from the memoirs of V. A. Sollogub. Famous as a conceited fop who almost fought a duel with Pushkin, Sollogub was born in 1813 into a family from the old Lithuanian nobility that had by the early nineteenth century bonded closely with the Russian aristocratic elite. His grandfather had married a Naryshkin, and in the 1820s he spent several summers in Pavlovsk in dachas rented from the Naryshkins and the Volkonskiis. Exhibiting a trait common to almost all dacha memoirists, Sollogub looked back on this time with immense fondness: “Life seemed to be a fragment of past times and past ways living out its days, a vanishing idyll of a patriarchal life that was disappearing forever.”62

Despite the regretfully retrospective tone of Sollogub’s description, the association of the dacha with “patriarchal” values would resurface later in the century, as would the idea of the dacha as a focus for superficial status consciousness. Yet even in the period he was writing about, as we have seen, several other models of dacha life were available. The Olenin estate at Priiutino can be seen as laying the foundations for an enduring intelligentsia tradition of conversation and creative work at the country retreat; the German colonists and other dacha owners and landlords of modest means were the pioneers of the low-rent summer vacation.

But what makes the phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fundamentally different from what followed, what makes them part of the prehistory of the dacha as opposed to its main narrative, is the fact that they did not occasion the same self-consciousness as their later developments. The meaning of the word “dacha” had not settled down sufficiently; and it had not settled down because it was not yet important enough to people to distinguish between dachas and other forms of residence. To use or own a dacha did not yet make one a dachnik. All this would soon change radically, as we shall see, in line with the development of Russian urban society and culture in the 1830s and 1840s.

The year 1837 provides a convenient starting point for the next phase in the history of the dacha. The chronological marker is, for once, provided not by the death of Pushkin but rather by the completion of Russia’s first railway— line from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk. This technological advance had immense practical and symbolic value. The formerly exclusive enclaves of the out-of-town imperial palaces and their adjoining settlements were now made accessible—at least in principle—to a much more broadly construed urban society. Not that the train was the only way to escape the metropolis. The development of the city outskirts as a recreational zone had already been encouraged by the creation of a public transport system. In 1832 came the first coach routes from the city to outlying areas (Krestovskii Island and Novaia Derevnia).1 An eyewitness account of St. Petersburg in 1838 noted no fewer than twenty forms of horse-drawn transport.2 In the late 1850s coaches with room for sixteen passengers were running to the factories on the outskirts of the city and to northerly outskirts such as Lesnoi Institut (the Forestry Institute), Kolomiagi, and Pargolovo; during the day they departed every thirty minutes or so on the more popular routes.3 Moscow’s first suburban railway line came in 1862 (the Northern line, to Sergiev Posad, built largely to profit from the traffic in pilgrims to the monastery located in that town). In the mid-nineteenth century the development of railways was still much slower in the Russian Empire than in Western Europe; as of 1866, there were only a handful of lines under one hundred kilometers in length. Yet these routes (from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Oranienbaum, and Krasnoe Selo, and from Moscow to Sergiev Posad) brought a range of out-of-town locations unprecedentedly close to city dwellers.4

In the middle third of the nineteenth century, then, the conditions were right for the dacha to expand its social constituency and to raise its public profile. The synchronized expeditions that occurred on public holidays or at the start of the “summer season” gave life in the city a different rhythm and held out to city dwellers the promise of relaxation, enjoyment, and increased physical and mental well-being. Out-of-town living captured the imagination of urban people, who found in the dacha an enticing middle ground between the unhygienic and increasingly disenchanting city and the high society of the suburban palaces and estates.

The “House out of Town” Reconceived

In that same year of 1837, Faddei Bulgarin, a journalist sensitively attuned to changing Petersburg habits, noted the arrival of the dacha as a broad social phenomenon.5 In his own youth, Bulgarin recalled, to have a dacha was to be rich: “There were people who acquired rank, who gained wealth, yet did not want to live at dachas so as not to arouse talk, slander, or envy.” Now, however, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and tradesmen could all afford summer holidays out of the city. Bulgarin even felt justified in speaking of a “second city” that had come into being: “summertime Petersburg.”6

Although Bulgarin may well have exaggerated slightly the extent of this new social trend (in order, as was his wont, to emphasize the advanced nature of Russian society under autocracy), his assessment of the situation is corroborated by other witnesses of the same period (as we shall see). But perhaps more interesting are the ways Bulgarin found to analyze and evaluate the dacha phenomenon. He noted particularly the emergence of the house out of town (zagorodnyi dom) as a positive cultural development inconceivable in a country ruled by brute force, where people had to shut themselves up in castles and fortresses for protection. Villas, he proclaimed, were a sign of cultural stability and prosperity; here he invoked the example of ancient Rome, a parallel that had enormous resonance for people of a generation that derived much of its inspiration from classical models.7 Dachas, moreover, had more immediate benefits: they improved the health of the population, they created extra space in the cities in the summer, and, by expanding the service industry, they helped to create jobs.

This broadly positive account did not, however, come without certain reservations. Although dachas were intended to improve the health of their residents, they were often damp and cramped. They might have strengthened the economy by improving employment prospects, but they had also stoked inflation, as tradesmen were driven to raise prices in order to fund their own forays out of town. Dachas could, moreover, be seen to undermine the economy by taking people away from their work for two months at the very least. Worse still, the lifestyle adopted by most people at the dacha—consisting mainly of sleeping and talking—was bound to engender lassitude.

Bulgarin was here setting a trend for subsequent decades: a survey of dacha life served as a springboard for far-reaching social commentary, and especially for speculation on the size and the nature of Russia’s “middle class.” Nor was his ambivalence anything remarkable: it was shared by many people writing both in his time and later. A like-minded view was expressed by Nestor Kukol’nik, a literary figure similarly tainted in the eyes of posterity by his easy acquiescence in political conservatism. In another article of 1837, Kukol’nik chose to see the dacha as evidence of the emergence of a middle class with the surplus wealth and leisure necessary to cultivate its own taste. Like Bulgarin, he cited classical models in support of the dacha, using “dacha” and “villa” as synonyms. Even so, the arrival of a middle class occasioned some regret for the decline of the grand suburban residences and spectacular entertainments of the great aristocratic families. “Simplicity is a pleasant thing, but there are places where it brings persistent tedium or melancholy upon the reflective spirit,” Kukol’nik concluded.8

By the middle of the 1840s, however, such doubts were beginning to appear futile. To comment on the convoys of dachniki quitting the city each year at the beginning of June was fast becoming a commonplace, and the appeal of a summer in the country was held to be universally acknowledged.9 The trend was sufficiently marked for an authoritative St. Petersburg guidebook to reflect in 1851 on an important shift in the meaning of the word “dacha”: “Petersburg dachas have lost their original meaning of ‘a place out of town given into ownership by the government or bought by a particular person,’ and the name dacha is now frequently given to a peasant house rented by a city dweller for the summer months.”10 Rental opportunities of various kinds were widely publicized. Although newspapers continued, as in the 1820s, to contain advertisements for substantial dacha residences, typically with ten or twenty rooms (sometimes nearer thirty), several outbuildings, and ample stable space, they also offered more modest accommodations: a four-room peasant home, for example, or the top floor of a baker’s house in a village a few versts north of St. Petersburg.11

Dachas were of interest to urban people not only as an amenity but also as a new type of dwelling that offered its owner space, freedom, and much richer possibilities for selfexpression than a city residence could afford. Architectural pattern books offered advice on how to make full use of this potential. The out-of-town houses described in P. Furmann’s Encyclopedia of the Russian Owner-Architect in Town and Country (1842) were solidly built and fully equipped for comfortable family life. They tended to have a study, a nursery, separate rooms for dining and entertaining, bedrooms, and further refinements such as boudoirs and “relaxation rooms.” Servants might be accommodated in small rooms inside the main house or in outbuildings. Attention was expected to be paid to the house’s external aspect; it was particularly important that there should be a clean and uncluttered approach for visiting carriages. This was sometimes called the “clean yard”; a grubbier one might be found to the rear of the house with perhaps an outhoused kitchen, a chicken coop, and a vegetable garden. The values of comfort and refinement were promoted in designs for wallpaper, furniture, gates, and railings. For the garden, neoclassical statues and faux-rustic garden furniture were recommended.12

Besides offering practical advice on design and issuing the common instruction not to build on low-lying, marshy ground, Furmann had interesting comments to make on style. On a trip around the provinces, he recalled, he had been shocked by the ugliness and tastelessness of many large houses that he encountered. He now sought to resist this trend by placing emphasis on simple, mainly classical architectural solutions. He also had kind words for the style rustic: a cottage-like dwelling was especially pleasing to the eye tucked away in parkland, and was highly suitable for putting up guests. The straightforwardness of its outward appearance did not, moreover, imply a spartan interior; the comforts concealed by the rustic exterior might “satisfy all a pampered sybarite’s demands for refined luxury.”13

Furmann’s work was one of several publications of the time that gave coverage to a new kind of summer residence quite distinct from the manor house and the town house. This kind of dwelling, generally known as “dacha,” “house out of town,” or “country cottage” (sel’skii domik, to be distinguished from the less diminutive and more manorial sel’skii dom), came in two main types: the neoclassicism of solid, symmetrical, and often colonnaded residences and the countrified aspect of more modest and less symmetrical houses that often evoked the English cottage. Where it differed most strikingly from its architectural forebears was in the scope it offered for the whimsical and the exotic.

In this last respect, the dacha was in the aesthetic vanguard of its time. The 1830s were a decade when eclecticism, far from being a dirty word, was taken up enthusiastically by numerous commentators on architecture and the other arts. Civilization, it was widely believed, had entered a third, Romantic phase, following its “Eastern” and “Greek” eras. The normative boundaries of art were pushed back in several spheres, and the history of culture was raided for inspiration in creating novelty. Hence, for example, the “discovery” of the Middle Ages, the Gothic revival, and the commitment to stylistic experimentation. Romanticism was a disposition rather than a fixed style; or alternatively, it was, in the words of Wladimir Weidlé, “the loss of style.”14 Nowhere did architectural innovations achieve more striking results than in prime dacha territories such as Kamennyi Island, where a whole range of new constructions went up in the late 1830s: Gothic mansions, white Dutch cottages with green shutters, Neapolitan glass galleries, Greek columns, Russian izbas, and Chinese pagodas.15

A neoclassical dacha design from the 1840s (from P. Furmann, Entsiklopediia russkogo gorodskogo i sel’skogo khoziaina-arkhitektora [St.Petersburg, 1842])

A dacha “in the Gothic style” (from P. Furmann, Entsiklopediia russkogo gorodskogo i sel’skogo khoziaina-arkhitektora [St.Petersburg, 1842])

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of Russian Romanticism is not the range of its eclecticism or the ambition of its stylistic experimentation but rather the speed with which the styles it borrowed became dehistoricized and entered the mainstream. In large measure, as with Romanticism in other cultures, this process of cultural adoption and adaptation was bound up with the search for a national art; a search that was pursued with all the more urgency in Russia for that country’s comparatively late arrival on the European cultural scene. Thus, for example, the Gothic style in architecture was quickly reappropriated as an emblem of Russian antiquity and its nouveauté accordingly forgotten. No less important, the new aesthetics of Romanticism had an impact in more everyday areas of life too. House designs, both interior and exterior, bespoke a closer and more 35 individual engagement with the home environment. In the 1830s and 1840s, for the first time, symmetry might be sacrificed in the interests of functionality, and the enfilade principle hitherto dominant weakened slightly in designs of country residences. In town houses it remained largely unchallenged, but the number of people who could afford to own and maintain such houses in the center of the city was shrinking. Here we find an important determinant of the dacha’s social prominence in nineteenth-century Russia: as apartment living became the norm for more and more urban people of all social groups (and this change was felt especially acutely by the nobility), an out-of-town residence took on added significance as a center for the extended household and as a focus of domestic and proprietary instincts.16

A dacha with a minaret “in the Mauritanian style” (from P. Furmann, Entsiklopediia russkogo gorodskogo i se’skogo khoziaina-arkhitektora [St.Petersburg, 1842])

The tone had been set by the imperial Kottedzh (Cottage), designed by Adam Menelaws for Nicholas I and built at Peterhof from 1826 to 1829. In its basic composition and in the early stages of its construction this residence was classically symmetrical, but in its finished form no two sides of the house were identical in facade, its aspect was lent visual interest by contrasts in tone and perspective, and its interior was rather reminiscent of a rich bourgeois Western European household. In its execution the Kottedzh had become acutely Gothicized. And the architectural ensemble of which it formed part contributed to a new domesticized mythology of power whereby the tsar was brought down to human dimensions and emphasis was placed on his family life.17

The values embodied by the Peterhof Kottedzh—domesticity, family life, home comfort, individuality—duly filtered down to less exalted dacha dwellers. As Furmann asserted, the Gothic style, with its invigorating “imprint of poetry,” had come down to the modern age in a “pure” and “regular” form; the designs of well-known architects such as Aleksandr Briullov and Andrei Shtakenshneider had shown that it was fully compatible with the values of a civilized and no longer feudal culture.18 Other residents of Peterhof shared these convictions and followed their tsar’s lead—especially after 1832, when they gained full rights to the land on which houses stood (until then the land had been owned by the court, which retained the right to reclaim plots and remove buildings without compensation).19 As early as 1837, Kukol’nik observed that the taste for grandiloquent architectural gestures was passing, to be replaced by a tasteful eclecticism; in his opinion, Peterhof now equaled Versailles in beauty while avoiding its cultural pretensions.20 Peterhof’s domesticated Gothic was later recalled by one tenant of the 1860s, who remembered his father renting “a small cottage in the Gothic style with a high pointed roof and lancet windows; in front of the dacha there was a small patch of garden, in the middle of which stood an ancient maple tree whose branches stretched in through the windows of a rather high mezzanine.”21

The style of dacha life cultivated in mid-century at Peterhof emerges in greater detail from the papers of one particularly well placed landlord, Aleksandr Pavlovich Kozhevnikov (1807–1875). In 1843, Kozhevnikov became the councilor of the Peterhof palace administration; his duties included supervision of Peterhof hereditary lands (votchiny) and of the towns affairs more generally. While in the job, he set about acquiring dachas of his own for rental, later complaining that his official salary was too low to cover his expenses. One of these houses, a stone residence facing the sea, with twenty-four rooms, brought in 1,200 rubles a year fully furnished. Kozhevnikov also owned two other stone houses of thirteen rooms and two wooden houses of nine and seven rooms. He catered to tenants with high expectations. In 1848, for example, one of his houses was rented by A. F. L’vov, director of the court choir. In a letter to his landlord, L’vov mentioned several pieces of furniture and other household items that he was having sent to supplement the furnishings provided (these included carpets and a bronze clock); he also requested that the gardener make fresh flowers available and hinted that Kozhevnikov should help to get the interior in order.22 For L’vov, as for other residents of upmarket settlements such as Peterhof, the dacha, despite its distance from the metropolis, was synonymous with cultivated domesticity.

The Dacha and the Natural World

The mid-century model of the dacha implied not only a new, more attentive and imaginative attitude to domestic space but also a different quality of engagement with the wider environment. The architectural recommendations were joined and amplified by public discussion of leisure and its relation to the natural world. Furmann’s encyclopedia was in step with the times when it defined “dacha” as “a house out of town where city dwellers repair for the summer period in order to have a rest well away from the dust, noise, and bustle of the city and to enjoy the fresh delights of the fields and woods.”23 This was a rationale for the dacha that would be heard with ever greater frequency over the next few decades: human beings, born as part of the natural world, must not allow themselves to overexercise their rational, intellectual faculties, and must take time to enjoy—even if only intermittently—the rural “good life.” A dacha, then, not only made people cultivated and contentedly domestic, it also made them physically and morally robust.

The desirability of summer recreation out of the city was further emphasized by the prominence given to Russian sea resorts. Once again a precedent was set by Nicholas I, who was the first tsar to acquire a permanent residence in the Crimea, and whose public association with the Peterhof ensemble and consequent proximity to the sea fed the image of him as a Romantic individual as well as a good family man.24 The tsar’s efforts at selffashioning were complemented and amplified by the first serious reports on Russian sea resorts. Spa towns—the aristocratic resorts of the Caucasus and the provincial mineral source in Lipetsk—first emerged in the early nineteenth century, at a time when “taking the waters” was becoming one of the most fashionable pastimes of the European aristocracy. The 1830s were associated with the rise of a more northern set of locations that catered more to an urban elite than to a landed gentry. Here again Faddei Bulgarin was a herald of social change. The sea baths at Helsingfors (Helsinki), he proudly declared, were “without any exaggeration one of the best institutions of their kind not only in Russia but in the whole of Europe.”25

According to another contemporary, visitors were divided into three main categories: those taking the waters (both marine and mineral), those coming to Helsingfors out of curiosity, and younger people who were attracted by the social scene (especially the wellattended balls). At any one time more than 300 people would be taking cures, but the main building of the mineral waters complex was equipped for a rather broader public: it had a large hall (in which there was often dancing in the evenings), a billiards room, and a restaurant. For the summering Petersburger Helsingfors had the advantage of being clean, law-abiding, and cheap. New accommodation was created as the leisure industry grew, so that visitors no longer had to settle for a guesthouse: “The space separating the building of the [mineral] waters from the bathing booths is now beginning to fill up with dachas, and we can expect to see soon a continuous chain of pretty cottages that will replace the present view of the cliffs.”26 Certain resorts were by now so well established that their medical functions were taking second place to their social amenities. One Petersburg civil servant hoped to spend the summer of 1834 in Revel’ (now Tallinn) recuperating with his wife, who had just given birth. What he found on arrival was a microcosm of well-to-do Petersburg society; as a result, he felt unable to shed urban formalities and to take full advantage of the setting, which he admitted was splendid.27

In general, however, medical and social attractions seem to have been considered not contradictory but complementary. The vacation habits of the Russian leisure class in this period fitted a pattern identified by Dominic Lieven in his study of the nineteenth-century European aristocracy: small-town spas came to be regarded as an agreeable hybrid of the high society of the capitals and the quieter lifestyle of the country estate.28 The rise of the spa town brought with it an emphasis on a different range of pastimes: a vacation by the sea was expected not merely to replicate the entertainments afforded by the salon and the ball but also to provide opportunities for mental repose, healthy physical exertion, and untroubled and “democratic” socializing. Bulgarin made a point of praising, besides the health-giving properties of the local water, the hospitality of the Finns and the openness of Finnish high society. Another observer concurred, noting that “in Helsingfors all ages and classes of people can find themselves the appropriate entertainments and spend the summer as they please, without constraint, enjoying complete freedom in all places and at all times.”29 Similar benefits—hygiene, public order, relaxed entertainment, and healthy lifestyle—were promised in Revel’.30 In July 1829 the young Nikolai Gogol, at the end of his tether after a few months in St.Petersburg, took a trip to Lübeck, where he was favorably impressed by the neat and well-appointed dacha hamlets outside the town: “The cottages spread out beyond the town are planted and entwined with trees, bushes, and flowers; they are delightful and very similar to Petersburg dachas.”31

Gogol was doubtless extreme in the violence of his rejection of St.Petersburg, but he was by no means exceptional in taking a dislike to the place. In the 1830s and 1840s attitudes toward the city became more self-conscious and, in general, more hostile; attention was increasingly drawn to its “contradictions.”32 Petersburg became an unwholesome and treacherous place, and trips to the dacha were regarded as an essential outlet. In other words, the dacha gained definition as a space with a set of values not only different from but also opposed to those of the city. In the summer Petersburg was left for unstable dreamers such as the narrator of Fedor Dostoevsky’s White Nights (1848), who spends much of the opening pages of that work conveying his obsessive sense of abandonment as his not even nodding acquaintances from Nevskii Prospekt all depart for their dachas; with similar dismay he observes the long procession of carts piled high with furniture and household items and the fleets of boats similarly loaded up crossing the river to Chernaia Rechka or one or other of the Neva islands.

This annual exodus was motivated in part by very real health concerns. Petersburgers in the middle of the nineteenth century lived in fear of periodic devastating outbreaks of disease. The worst came in 1848, when the city lost over 12,000 people to cholera, and memoirists recalled anxiously sitting out the summer and waiting for the epidemic to abate. One man took refuge in a well-to-do location north of the city, but even here, he remembered, “terror reigned everywhere during the entire summer. There were almost no deaths in the dachas near Lesnoy Korpus, but nevertheless, everyone was distraught and tense.”33 Even when the city in summer was not life-threatening, it was likely to be repellent. The combination of inadequate sanitation and hot weather brought a pervasive stench to the streets of St. Petersburg, and urbanites ran the further risk of being doused in paint and sand or struck down by falling wooden beams as they walked along: the summer months were the main time for construction and renovation work in residential buildings.34

Practical considerations of this kind soon received cultural elaboration and amplification. For those people with the time and money to spend prolonged periods out of the city, the dacha began to reinvent itself as a place not for idle and ostentatious entertainment but for healthful recreation, purposeful leisure, and virtuous family life. These were the main priorities emphasized in advice, liberally dispensed from the 1840s onward, on the conduct of life out of town. Dacha dwellers were urged not to try to haul all their belongings to the dacha, but rather to create a more straightforward lifestyle over the summer months, rising early and taking frequent invigorating walks, avoiding excessive mental activity, greasy and rich food, and mid-afternoon snoozes.35 The most important considerations were “trees, a bit of water, and, above all, that you shouldn’t have to put on airs, that you can leave the house in your smoking jacket, with a pipe in your mouth, without making yourself, or anyone else, blush.”36 The virtues of simplicity and practicality were similarly projected by architects’ designs of the period, several of which take the English or the Swiss country cottage as their model.37 Practice did not necessarily follow prescription, of course. It seems that advice to choose a not excessively damp site and an appropriate set of building materials was not always heeded. In any case, the design recommendations of the time left much room for misapprehensions. One man’s tasteful Gothic was another’s vulgarity; Peterhof-style eclecticism, if it fell into the wrong hands, was apt to seem impractical and pretentious. As one thoroughly typical retrospective account had it, many of the new Petersburg dachas were

just houses of cards, not at all adapted to the climate, with Mauritanian and other adornments on the outer facade, but without the least conveniences inside, with verandas and belvederes but without stoves, with various means of defense against the sun, which so rarely shows its face in Petersburg, but without the slightest defense against the cold, strong wind that blew right through all our dachas for the whole of our so-called summer.38

Even so, the morally fibrous qualities of the dacha did enter the public consciousness in mid-century. They find an unlikely literary beneficiary in Il’ia Il’ich Oblomov, the eponymous hero of Ivan Goncharov’s novel (first published in 1858). Oblomov has gone down in Russian culture as the epitome of apathy. In part 1 of the novel he never quite manages to get out of bed; and then, at the beginning of Part 2, despite the vigorous pressure applied by his indefatigable German acquaintance Stolz, he shows no real signs of taking leave of his dream world and putting his affairs in order. A trip abroad, for which he makes the practical arrangements, is postponed indefinitely after he wakes up one morning with a swollen lip. But then, in one of the more astonishing spatial shifts in Russian literature, Oblomov does change both his location and his lifestyle:

He gets up at seven, reads, takes books to a certain place. He does not look sleepy, tired, or bored. There is even a touch of color in his face and a sparkle in his eyes—something like courage, or at any rate self-confidence. He never wears his dressing-gown. . . .

He reads a book or writes dressed in an ordinary coat, a light kerchief around his neck, his shirt collar shows over his tie and is white as snow. He goes out in an excellently made frock coat and an elegant hat. He looks cheerful. He hums to himself. What is the matter?

Now he is sitting at the window of his dacha (he is staying at a dacha a few miles from the town), a bunch of flowers lying by him. He is quickly finishing writing something, glancing continually over the top of the bushes at the path, and again writing hurriedly.39

Goncharov here reverts to the style of present-tense reverie that he used earlier for Oblomov’s dream of his ancestral estate, Oblomovka. And that points to an essential similarity between the two locations: the hero’s move to the dacha is an attempt to abandon the bad habits of the city and create a rural idyll such as he remembers from his childhood (but without exposing himself to the unpleasant realities of grown-up life in the country). The difference is that the dacha is an open and uncluttered space, and one that receives remarkably little comment in its own right. The other three main locations in the novel (Oblomov’s city-center flat on Gorokhovaia Street, Oblomovka, and the remote suburb of the Vyborg Side) are described in much greater detail and with much stronger value judgments.

This very lack of specificity in the account of Oblomov’s summer outside Petersburg suggests that the dacha had acquired its own way of life, its own ideology; that it had become a space more than a place. And this is undeniably an important stage in the development of any cultural space: the moment when it floats away from a set of physical coordinates and comes to be associated with its own set of practices and values. But these were by no means the only possible practices and values. Many people required more excitement and social stimulation than did Goncharov’s placid hero, and in the middle of the nineteenth century institutions were appearing that could provide them.

A New Entertainment Culture

The inhabitants of St.Petersburg and Moscow in the first half of the nineteenth century included a significant and increasing number of modestly prosperous people who lacked a substantial independent income, an illustrious family name, and the extensive social networks invariably associated with these benefits, but who had the time and education to feel deprived of them. They had no ready-made entrée into polite society, and their means and housing conditions did not allow them to entertain on any great scale and thereby project their own social profile. They could hardly be satisfied with an entertainment culture that until the 1830s remained polarized between two extremes: on the one hand, the privately organized and funded recreations of the elite nobility; on the other hand, the maximally inclusive urban popular festivities (gulian’ia). Aristocratic pastimes were inaccessible for want of both money and social prestige, while gulian’ia were unattractive, as they afforded little opportunity for the sustained and autonomous socializing craved by most “middle estates.”40

In the space between these two extremes emerged a new urban entertainment culture, many of whose prime venues were to be found on the outskirts of the city and within easy reach of several dacha settlements. Severnaia pchela (The Northern Bee), an authoritative chronicler of the Petersburg social scene, reflected in 1850 on the recent arrival in Russia of a new concept: the “summer season.” In the old days, it observed, people had mainly occupied themselves with “going on secluded family walks, receiving guests from town, or visiting dacha neighbors,” and the only available public entertainment was the music on Krestovskii Island. Now, however, the immediate environs of St. Petersburg had become much livelier, and dacha locations were yielding many paying customers for the new amusements available.41

The best-known place of entertainment was the garden of the Artificial Mineral Waters, formerly part of the Stroganov lands at Novaia Derevnia. Far from simply performing a medical function, this institution soon became a major gathering place for wellheeled Petersburgers after it became independent and acquired charitable status in 1833.42Its character changed even more radically in 1848, when it was taken over by the energetic entrepreneur Johann Isler and turned into a commercial proposition. Taking advantage of the panic resulting from the cholera epidemic, Isler drew people in by stressing the health benefits of taking the waters, while at the same time laying on an impressive range of attractions: ample and high-quality refreshments, a choir of Moscow gypsies, military bands, fireworks, acrobatic displays, comedy actors, and themed balls.43 Contemporary reports emphasized that the Artificial Mineral Waters required no elaborate dress or code of conduct—a significant departure from earlier upper-class amusements.44 Isler’s institution thus provided a model for a new kind of urban entertainment that was not directed at any one section of society but rather appealed to various cultural groups. It brought together the salon and the show booth and thus interwove elite and popular tastes.45

The gardens of the opulent dachas on the Neva—notably those belonging to the Stroganovs and the Kushelev-Bezborodkos—to some extent followed suit: as before, they were open to the public, but now they operated on a more commercial footing. In the early 1830s, for example, the Kushelev-Bezborodkos decided to develop a part of their Poliustrovo estate as a dacha zone: twenty plots were offered for sale in 1833, and in the 1840s four-room apartments were available for summer rental by those who wished to take advantage of the local mineral source.46 Yet this was clearly not the only reason to spend the summer at one of the resorts north of the Neva: reports on these locations combined an emphasis on their health benefits with an account of the entertainments they offered (dancing, music, perambulations, open-air games).47 As the memoirs of one resident, the artist P.P.Sokolov, make clear, Poliustrovo was valued by summer visitors for making available a range of refined and enjoyable pastimes: for bringing a mixed bunch of middling urbanites into civilized proximity with the world of the aristocracy without obliging them to conform to its habits and values.48

For several years in the 1830s and 1840s, places of public entertainment performed two rather ambiguously distinguished functions: they continued their traditions of entertainment for a homogeneous social group while at the same time opening themselves up to a broader public. Compare, for example, the above accounts of Isler’s Mineral Waters with a roughly contemporaneous report that is more careful and staid in its description of the entertainments available:

A gulian’e at the Stroganov gardens (from Russkii illiustrirovannyi al’manakh [St. Petersburg, 1858]). Courtesy of Helsinki Slavonic Library.

The events and balls that have for several years consecutively taken place at the mineral waters establishment near Novaia Derevnia have, according to the wishes of many persons, been arranged for this summer as well. They may be attended by nobles, military and state civil servants, honored citizens, merchants, scholars, and artists.49

As this quotation suggests, St. Petersburg’s dacha locations and places of entertainment had their own social geography. Somewhat above the middle of the range was Isler’s establishment, which, even after it became less explicitly exclusive, still had a socially restricted clientele, given the expense of a season ticket (15 silver rubles for a family in the late 1840s). As earlier in the century, an extremely broad section of urban society was encountered at popular festivities (gulian’ia) such as May Day at Ekaterinhof or the equivalent celebration at Sokol’niki in Moscow, which traditionally signaled the start of the summer season.50

Other venues were known to attract more specific sections of the urban population. Krestovskii Island, in the words of one memoirist, “was frequented above all by merchants, low-ranking civil servants, and all kinds of middling Petersburg people.”51 The son of a prosperous merchant family recalled his family taking regular after-dinner strolls there and drinking tea sold by an enterprising meshchanin who had set up a stall with a samovar. Marquees with music and dancing were set up at the end of the island, facing Elagin. A less well-off visitor to the islands was Nikolai Gogol, who during his brief career in the St. Petersburg civil service (1830–31)took frequent walks there in the late evening.52Moscow, too, was developing a suburban entertainment culture whose appeal extended far beyond the traditional social elite. For the son of a well-to-do merchant family in the 1840s, summer could be an endless round of visits, promenades, and balls:

I’m dazed, I’m in the devil knows what kind of state of mind, my head is full of hot, burning kisses! The older folk want me to get down to serious matters!!. . . They don’t understand what’s happening to me!. . . Pokrovskoe keeps getting visited by musicians from Petrovskii Park, and not one band, but two.53

The impact of public entertainments on dacha life are most strikingly illustrated by the case of Pavlovsk, a location that epitomized upmarket hauteur in the early nineteenth century and to a large extent retained this aura until the early twentieth.54 Built for the son of Catherine the Great who later became Paul I, the palace with its surrounding territory became the domain of Paul’s widow, Mariia Fedorovna, after his assassination in 1801. The select clans who were permitted to live at Pavlovsk had the opportunity to walk freely in the palace gardens and to observe the imperial family’s everyday habits at close quarters. Somewhat later, in the 1820s, many residents still had personal connections with the palace, and their households commonly adopted a style of open-house hospitality that implied membership in a close-knit community of social equals.55 Even in the 1840s, little seemed to have changed:

The Grand Prince, who owned Pavlovsk in those days, personally crossed off the names of dubious dacha ladies who wanted to move to Pavlovsk for the summer; every day he was handed a list of persons who wanted to rent a dacha in the spring. . . .

Not much of an audience came from the city on weekdays, so that all the regular attendees at concerts knew each other by face and by name.56

Old-style aristocratic sociability was, however, by now under threat in Pavlovsk. In 1837 the character of the settlement had begun to change with the opening of the Tsarskoe Selo railway. This new rapid transport link brought much closer together the“modern” city and the “Romantic” landscape of the palace ensembles; now these two contrasting worlds could no longer be conceived as being separate and sealed off from one another. In 1836 a competition was announced for designs for the station building, and the winning entry, that of A.I. Shtakenshneider, seemed to accentuate this meeting of two cultures: the station, a symbol of technological modernity, was in a thoroughly Gothic style.57 Pace modernist cultural appreciations of the railway, this was not at all an anonymous point of arrival and departure but a major social center in its own right. The station complex included a large hall for dinners, balls, and concerts, two smaller halls, two winter gardens, and forty guest rooms. The railway authorities also laid on station concerts that were free of charge for the audience and soon began to draw a regular public.

Over the following few decades music at the station brought more and more people together as a stream of musical celebrities passed through Pavlovsk. In the early 1840s Franz Liszt and Robert and Clara Schumann visited, but the mainstays of concert life were German conductors brought over with their orchestras to provide the requisite mix of classics and crowd-pleasers (usually weighted in favor of the latter). In 1856 Johann Strauss the younger arrived for the first of many concert seasons. It was Strauss who turned Pavlovsk into a proper concert venue, insisting that music be played in a separate concert hall instead of in the dining room, where the musicians had to compete with loquacious diners and waiters. He also insisted on more Wagner and Beethoven in the repertoire, and in this programming policy we can see evidence of a standard “middle-class” stage in cultural history taking place in Russia: the invention of classical music.58 Now people visited the Pavlovsk station not only for the sake of dinner and conversation in a social circle where everyone was at least a nodding acquaintance. The music was no longer merely a pleasing diversion but rather an exciting cultural experience in its own right: a performance that took center stage, not a melodious background hum. Strauss became a huge celebrity—to the extent that he was held personally responsible for pushing up Pavlovsk rents.59 Journalists and memoirists alike remarked on Strauss’s celebrity, his extravagant style of performance, and his appeal to the opposite sex. In 1857, apparently, he “literally did not know where to hide from his female admirers,” even if “on many people his affectations (his way of dancing along as he conducted) made an unpleasant impression.”60 The station concerts remained a commonplace topic for feuilletonists for several decades: in one story by the prolific sketch writer V. O. Mikhnevich, titled “Under the Bows of the Pavlovsk Violins,” the hero falls in love with a married woman, who tests the strength of his affections by insisting he sit through Pavlovsk concerts all week. He fails the test, complaining bitterly of the monotonous repertoire.61

Despite the mild notoriety that attached itself to Strauss, Pavlovsk remained a respectable and decorous place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had none of the unseemly behavior that was held to be characteristic of the immediate outskirts of the city, where urban popular culture regularly encroached on the sedate life of dacha settlements. The Pavlovsk concerts were certainly not mass entertainment. They were, however, a decidedly nonaristocratic phenomenon in a location that had from its earliest days been associated with the more enclosed and exclusive social rituals of the elite nobility. As such, they strengthened the dacha’s real and symbolic association with new, more “middle-class” habits.

Sociability: From Aristocratic Salon to Intelligentsia Enclave

Out-of-town recreations, formerly the prerogative of a high society that blended the mandarinic and the patrician, were now open to all those who could afford a ticket to the Pavlovsk station or the admission fee for the Petrovskii Park concerts. To be sure, court life followed its traditional course within and immediately around the imperial palaces, but these palaces no longer dominated the social scene or set the tone for urban people who sought convivial and culturally stimulating ways of spending their summers outside the city.62 Dachas were no longer polite exurban drawing rooms where entry was by invitation only and the rules of behavior were understood by all. Now nonaristocratic urbanites were taking up temporary residence in exurbia and seeking to cultivate acquaintances and pursue activities that would bring them pleasure and excitement while remaining harmonious and decorous.

This quest left its mark in literary accounts of the time, which, by rejecting the ambience and the poetics of the salon, may be said to have brought the dacha into the realist age. Ever since Mariia Zhukova received a favorable mention from the celebrated critic Vissarion Belinskii in the late 1830s (which, in typical style, he drastically revised a few years later), she has intermittently been regarded as a herald of the shift from Romanticism to realism; and her two best-known works are set at the dacha. In Evenings by the Karpovka (1837) she paints a picture of considerable social diversity on the Petersburg islands:

Barouches, carriages, cabriolets swept along the roads, colorful crowds strolled in the gardens, balconies turned into living rooms, whole families with their samovars and their numerous children and nannies hurried over to Krestovskii or to the hospitable garden of Countess L., they spread out with their cold supper, ice cream, and tea on the slope of the hill or under the dense lime trees on the very shore. You saw there a German craftsman and his good family, and high-spirited groups of young civil servants, and a Russian merchant with his wife and children of all ages, and two young artists discussing a forthcoming exhibition, and the chic mantilla of a high society beauty, and a servant girl’s pretty kanzu.63

The main focus of the story, however, is not the day trippers on Krestovskii but the dacha of an elderly lady, Natal’ia Dmitrievna Shemilova, in the Karpovka district—a mere stone’s throw from the dachas inhabited and fictionalized by Pushkin. Shemilova’s dacha serves as a framing device for the stories that make up the body of Evenings: she receives a handful of regular visitors from various walks of life, who over the course of several evenings spin yarns to entertain the others. The dacha is a domestic world of everyday concerns and routine informal socializing. It is in pronounced contrast to the exurban salon of Pushkin’s experience, which is a more public and convention-ridden arena for conversation. It also differs from the salon in its cultural detachment from the city. Shemilova’s house and the stories told by her guests have no place for the conflict between urban artifice and natural virtue that tends to provide the emotional dynamic of the society tale.64

The conventions of the society tale are less gently probed in Zhukova’s Dacha on the Peterhof Road (1845). This story, in its bare outlines, is structured by a set of Romantic tropes. A prince (Evgenii) chases after an eligible young woman (Mary) but is undone at the last moment because his past catches up with him: he has raised and dashed the hopes of (that is, seduced) another girl, Zoia, whose consequently shredded nerves have not stopped her from becoming Mary’s close companion, and who raises a scandal when she recognizes Evgenii. But this straightforward story line is undercut in several ways. For one thing, Evgenii is lazy and vapid and has to be pushed in Mary’s direction by his forceful aunt, who sees that a match of this kind is essential to rescue the family finances. Romantic and realist worldviews clash openly in a discussion between Zoia and Mary on the meaning of true love. Moreover, the dacha setting serves to play off sentimentalist motifs against a realist authorial sensibility. On the one hand, the two girls are trying to create an arcadia in the manner of a pair of late eighteenth-century noble shepherdesses. The garden has a carefully landscaped section, but at the back it opens up toward the sea; here the girls can seek perfect solitude and commune with nature. The stylized interior of the house makes it a shrine to Russian-style reverie (mechtatel’nost’). Other things about this dacha, however, make it an unlikely backdrop for a pastoral idyll. Although it is one of the finest dachas on the Peterhof Road, it has changed hands since it was first owned by an “aristocratic gentleman” and now belongs to an owner “whose name seemed surprised to see itself on the plaque attached to a gate that once opened hospitably for counts and princes and their expensive carriages." The grounds of the dacha are no longer as splendid as they were in its aristocratic heyday: they contain a number of crumbling little houses, once used to accommodate the many guests who arrived at the dacha, but now rented out very cheaply. And the dacha certainly cannot be regarded as a secluded rural retreat: the Peterhof Road is a “real small town in its own right, a colony where people come together from all over Petersburg, where they get to know one another, even if not immediately, but where they still try to find out who everyone is, where they’ve come from, whom they receive, how they live.”65

The pattern of life fictionalized by Zhukova is confirmed (and sometimes bemoaned) by other sources. As a leading guidebook of the time observed, the dacha plots on the Peterhof Road had long since been sold by their original owners, and most of them now contained several subsidiary houses for rent to separate tenants. Peasant villages adjacent to the road also served as dacha locations.66 One former resident recalled at the end of the century that “by the 1850s the once fashionable Peterhof Road had become completely empty [empty, that is, of the beau monde], although by comparison with what it is now it might seem full of life.”67

Other observers were less wistful as they noted the weakening presence of high society in dacha areas. Much of Karolina Pavlova’s Double Life (1844–47), a late-Romantic society tale, takes place at a dacha in Moscow’s Petrovskii Park, a location that is depicted as being antipathetic to meaningful human relations:

Several days had passed since Vera Vladimirovna had moved into one of those nice pseudo-Gothic-Chinese buildings that Petrovsky Park is strewn with. Here too everything corresponded to the demands and conditions of society. Surrounding the luxurious cottage was a luxurious garden, its greenery always an excellent, a choice, one might say an aristocratic greenery. Nowhere a faded leaf, a dry twig, a superfluous blade of grass; banished was everything in God’s creation that is coarse, vulgar, plebeian. The very shrubbery around the house flaunted a kind of Parisian haughtiness, the very flowers planted in every available space took on a certain semblance of good form, nature made herself unnatural. In a word, everything was as it should be.68

Pavlova’s critique of the undue formality, false friendliness, and servile cordiality of Russian high society may be seen as continuing a venerable tradition started by foreign observers such as the Wilmot sisters. A similar view was taken by A. F. Tiutcheva, lady in waiting for two empresses, in her diary: in Tiutcheva’s view, the empty daily rituals of life in Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo served to entrench a strict hierarchical order that precluded warm and genuine relations between individual members of the palace entourage.69 Even the reforming Alexander II (ruled 1855–81) brought no perceptible change to court mores. When Alexander went out to stroll in the Tsarskoe Selo grounds in the late 1850s, aristocratic hangers-on would make a point of being there too. As one witness commented, “everyone tried to come before the eyes of the emperor. [They all wanted to see] whom he would speak to, and who would only receive a bow.”70

Such unflattering impressions of official society had as their corollary an alternative tradition that, by presenting the dacha as a way of avoiding the contamination of public life, sought a more authentically rustic experience. V.Bykova, born in 1820 and a graduate of the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, issued an exalté farewell to her dacha (rented on the Peterhof Road) in a diary entry of August 1841: “Farewell, pleasant strolls, farewell bright days and moonlit nights!” Although Bykova was susceptible to the entertainments available at Isler’s Mineral Waters, she continued (as an older woman, by now a teacher at the institute, in the 1850s) to steer clear of the more densely populated dacha locations. In 1854, for example, she went to Kolpino with her sister and another family, the two groups renting adjacent cottages. The view from her window was “simple, quite rural. No constraints at all, life was free, quiet, and peaceful.” Two years later she found the social scene at the Pavlovsk station concerts much less to her taste: the program was monotonous, consisting exclusively of waltzes and polkas; the conductor, Strauss, was too high and mighty, even getting a servant to turn the pages for him; and there was too much audience chatter in foreign languages.71

Similarly, N. E. Komarovskii, having spent time at dachas on the Peterhof Road and on Kamennyi Island, reflected that he had been happiest in his childhood at an altogether more modest location on the river Okhta, to the southeast of St. Petersburg, in the 1850s.72 And the same nostalgia for the simple exurban lifestyle can be found in the memoirs of the Moscow-based M. A. Dmitriev, who in the 1840s celebrated his promotion to chief prosecutor and concomitant pay raise by fulfilling his long-standing ambition to rent a dacha for the summer. The house he chose was modest—“almost a peasant izba, but with large windows and Dutch tiled stoves; it was new, clean, and neat”—and it was located in the village of Zykovo, just beyond the Tver’ gates to the north of the city. Although the Dmitrievs’ dacha was only a short walk from Petrovskii Park, it gave them a much-valued feeling of rural seclusion.73

This commitment to the simple dacha lifestyle and hostility to the social vanities was shared by prominent members of the first generation of the Russian intelligentsia. It is ironic, given Karolina Pavlova’s disapproval of the Petrovskii Park haute bourgeoisie in her Double Life, that Ivan Panaev, when he visited Pavlova and her husband at Sokolovo (a little more than fifteen miles outside Moscow, in the Petersburg direction) in the early 1850s, criticized their dacha on rather similar grounds: for its “artificiality” and “dandified primness.”74 For several years in the 1850s Panaev wrote regular articles in the socially engaged journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), where he offered a survey of Petersburg society and its recreations, and this venue afforded him ample opportunity to pass further scornful comment on the bourgeois dacha public.75

But Panaev and his fellow representatives of the intelligentsia had their own “authentic” dacha model, one that was created in the 1840s as Russian intellectual life became increasingly metropolitan.76 In 1845, for example, the historian T.N. Granovskii, the translator N. Kh. Ketcher, and Aleksandr Herzen moved with their families to the village of Sokolovo, where Pavlova spent her summers a little later:

The village belonged to the landowner Divov, who retained the large mansion there for himself for any trips he might take to his family estate but leased to tenants the two wings of the mansion and a cottage behind it plus a magnificent linden and birch grove that ran from the house down a hill to the river. On the other side of the river and hill, in keeping with the common character of Russian landscapes, a solid line of peasant huts was strung out. The Herzen and Granovsky families occupied the wings and Ketcher the rear cottage.77

Herzen also mentioned this summer at Sokolovo in his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts. With his characteristic ironic detachment, he observed the peculiarities of the landscape on the two sides of the park: “On one side our Great Russian sea of wheat unfurled itself, on the other opened out a spacious view into the distance, and for this reason the owner did not pass up the opportunity to call the pavilion placed there ‘Belle-vue.’ ”78 Herzen commented further that the aristocrats of the eighteenth century, “for all their failings,” had at least had a certain “breadth of taste,” their own sense of style.

This last comment reveals that in the eyes of a sophisticated member of the literary intelligentsia in the 1840s, the culture of the country estate had lost its cultural vitality: at best, it was a living monument to an enlightened earlier generation of the aristocracy, at worst a reminder of enduring social ills. Even if they rented their summer houses on “traditional” country estates, members of Moscow intellectual circles were at pains to distinguish their values and pattern of life from those of their landlords.

The tensions that might exist between aristocrats and their tenants are well illustrated in Ivan Panaev’s memoirs. In the summer of 1851 Granovskii and his friend N. G. Frolov, a publisher and translator, rented a small house on the Iusupov estate of Arkhangel’skoe. Panaev and V.P. Botkin arrived to visit, and were soon invited by the young prince Iusupov to visit him in the main family residence on the estate. (Panaev, a nobleman, was already well acquainted with the Iusupov family.) In due course, Iusupov extended the invitation to Zagoskin too, but at this point Frolov took huge offense on Zagoskin’s behalf, supposing that Panaev and Botkin had instigated the invitation and arguing that an eminent and independent man such as Zagoskin was not to be patronized by such marks of aristocratic favor.79

The intelligentsia’s countermodel of country life was exemplified by the Sokolovo group in the mid-1840s. Herzen and his friends entertained guests on a grand scale, went for regular walks together, and above all engaged in prolonged and passionate discussions (it was here, for example, that an important fissure within the intelligentsia—between the Westernizers and the proto-populists—opened up).

only one thing was not allowed at Sokolovo—to be a limited person. Not that one was peremptorily required to be an effective speaker and display flashes of brilliant capabilities in general; quite the contrary, people wholly engrossed by their own specialties exclusively were held in very high esteem there. What was required were a certain intellectual level and a certain dignity of character. All the discourse of the circle was devoted to refining people’s intellect and character, no matter what the talk was about.80

But the Moscow circle’s model of dacha life, centered on the country estate and valuing comfort and open-ended sociability, was not shared by the Petersburg-based radicals, with whom it parted intellectual company in the 1840s. In an extremely influential essay first published in 1844, Vissarion Belinskii contrasted the warm, open, contented, familyoriented Moscow with the cold, official, but high-achieving St. Petersburg. To Moscow Belinskii went so far as to ascribe the value of komfort, which in this period was widely held to be uniquely an attribute of the English.81 Belinskii, however, was condemned to spend his summers in a succession of drafty huts on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. In 1845 he rented a dacha near Lesnoi Institut; but, according to Avdot’ia Panaeva, a well-connected member of progressive circles and subsequently the common-law wife of Nikolai Nekrasov, it can have done his fragile health little good:

What kind of a dacha was this! An izba with an internal partition that did not reach all the way to the ceiling, in which there was a kitchen on one side and on the other his room, a kind of lumber room, where he worked and slept. On hot days you could suffocate at this dacha, and when it was wet, you’d shiver to the marrow of your bones from the dampness and the wind that blew through the cracks in the floor and walls.82

This austere lifestyle (not, let it be said, adopted by choice) became one of the emblems of the radical tradition of which Belinskii was the founding father.

Suburbia Prefigured

Belinskii’s dacha experiences reflect a wider trend whereby dachas in St. Petersburg’s closer environs underwent a radical change in their function and character. Take the Koltovskaia district on the Petersburg Side, whose boundaries were the Karpovka to the north, the Zhdanovka to the southwest, and Bol’shoi Prospekt to the southeast. Briefly, in the 1820s the Koltovskaia was among the smartest dacha locations (note that it contained the dacha of Mariia Aleksandrovna Naryshkina, mistress of Alexander I). By the 1840s, however, it was mainly the preserve of middling and hard-up civil servants, whose poor living conditions and difficult rental arrangements formed commonplaces of popular journalistic accounts of the time.83 The Petersburg Side as a whole had plunged downmarket since its early days, when Peter I built himself a palace there. In a contribution to 53 Nikolai Nekrasov’s seminal almanac The Physiology of Petersburg (1845), E.P. Grebenka, commenting on the “dacha mania” of the time, wrote:

The richer people [get] farther away [from the city], but the poor folk head for the Petersburg Side; they say it’s just the same as the country, the air there is clean, the houses are made of wood on the whole, there are plenty of gardens, it’s close to the islands, and, above all, it’s not far from the city. . . .

Because of these considerations, all the houses and cottages, all the mezzanines and attics are occupied by dacha folk; shopkeepers lay in three times more supplies than usual; on Klavikordnaia Street, which leads to the Krestovskii ferry, carts thunder along and countless traders and manufacturers take up residence; every evening the streets and alleys come alive with people out for a stroll, with crowds of colorfully dressed ladies and their gentlemen.

And a little later in his article Grebenka has this to say about the houses on the Petersburg Side inhabited by dachniki and permanent residents alike: “Everywhere [you see] identical or almost identical little houses with or without mezzanines, front gardens with two lilac bushes, or a yellow acacia.”84

Several things catch the eye in this account: the opening up of the dacha to a less well heeled public, the existence of such a low-grade dacha location so close to the elite areas of Kamennyi Island and the Karpovka, and its amazing proximity to the city center. Another noteworthy development is the intermeshing of the dacha with suburbia, both physically (in the sense that the Petersburg Side was both a dacha settlement and a low-rent suburb, and a single street could belong to both) and culturally (in the sense that these dachas, with their front gardens, lilac bushes, and dark-green wallpaper with scenes from ancient mythology, conform so closely to Western stereotypes of lower-middle-class life). In the culminating passage of Grebenka’s article, the petit bourgeois domestic impulse is taken to an unsightly extreme: one resident of the Petersburg Side, determined to beautify his front garden, diverts the contents of his drainpipes into a large barrel in order to create a fountain—which spouts green water.85

Until the 1860s the Petersburg Side remained remarkably underdeveloped; its ad hoc arrangement of streets was in striking contrast to the ordered planning of the city center, on the other side of the river.86 In 1864 the Koltovskaia district was finally paved, and the roads became more or less passable. But the area had already acquired a quasi-bucolic image that it could not properly shake off. In his epic of the 1860s, Petersburg Slums, Vsevolod Krestovskii takes a break from his main themes (illegitimate children, fallen women, night life in Petersburg dives) in order to show us the charming old Povetin couple, who have lived in Koltovskaia forever, have their own kitchen garden and chickens, and lead a life of untroubled domesticity (quite an achievement in the nineteenth-century novel, especially in the Russian tradition). Koltovskaia has become gently rundown since the days when it was a luxury dacha location: it is now teeming with “numerous breeds of civil servant, from collegiate registrator to court counselor inclusive,” who are divided into those rushing about their official business and those “resting in the bosom of their families after the end of their official career.” The houses reflect the conservative values of the population:

little cottages, with three or five windows, with a mezzanine, with green shutters, the obligatory patch of garden and the dog chained up in the yard. In the windows with their prim curtains you’ll see pots with a geranium, a cactus, and a Chinese rose, some kind of canary or siskin in a cage, in a word, wherever you turn, whatever you look at, everything makes you think of a kingdom of peaceful, quiet, modest, family-based, patriarchal life.87

The image of dacha folk projected in the press overlapped to a significant extent with Krestovskii’s depiction of the Petersburg Side. In newspapers of the 1850s the dachnik emerged as a cultural personage in his own right, characterized, in the more approving accounts, by modest, restrained tastes, by a sense of responsibility for his property, and by a concern for his family’s well-being. Dacha dwellers did not require “salon-style comfort”; all they needed was a small patch of land with a rowan tree. As usual, the Teutonic population was held up as the ideal of modest, well-ordered domesticity, a stroll through the German section of Krestovskii Island presented the visitor with “images of family tranquility, of peaceful home life, just like the cover illustration of Gartenlaube, which is the favorite publication of these dachniki.”88 In 1850, similarly, in the “Miscellany” section of Sovremennik, a journalist described wandering into Novaia Derevnia and finding a "huge row of miniature cottages with microscopic patches of garden.”89 His impression was corroborated by other writers of the time, for whom this location was the embodiment of a not altogether admirable neatness and orderliness.

A correspondent of the prominent newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti was in 1850 already able to say that the dacha was a tired theme for the feuilleton.90 Another journalist commented eleven years later that the humbler dachas should not be denigrated, as they brought much joy to the “laboring class of the Petersburg population.”91 Neither of these opinions was much heeded by the bulk of their colleagues in the city’s newspapers and journals. By the early 1860s, dachas had received an extraordinary amount of verbal punishment in the press; derogatory names attached to them included “houses of cards,” “toothache resorts,” “reservoirs of rheumatism,” “undertakers’ delight,” and “sideshows of vanity.”92 These jocular designations were complemented by more serious apprehensions concerning the changing character of dacha settlements close to the city. As the censor Aleksandr Nikitenko noted in his diary for 1854: “I’ve grown awfully sick of Lesnoy Korpus. Everything has changed—the woods have been destroyed, the fields taken up with kitchen gardens, the population has grown, taverns have multiplied—in a word, it has turned into a wretched little town.”93 The outskirts of St. Petersburg were in the 1850s and 1860s becoming much more intensively developed for leisure purposes, and Isler’s pleasure garden was fast being overtaken by a wide range of other entertainments, which included, for the lowbrow audience, Italian organ grinders, drunken bears, monkeys, and mouth organs.94 If dacha locations were not derided for their conservative and bourgeois profile, they might be disdained as hotbeds of proletarian rowdiness.95

As the dacha became regularly the object of disparagement in the Petersburg press of the 1850s, so the dachnik tended to be treated as a figure of fun. Some of the stock characters created by the out-of-town feuilletonists were fanatical believers in the health-giving properties of water, air, and dew. Others were pretentious dacha owners who ruined the appearance of their homes by topping them with hideous cupolas and bedecking them with exotic fruits and flowers. Still others were ludicrous snobs whose aspirations to rusticity were allied to an obsessive concern with marks of social status.96 In a vaudeville of 1850, a not overly wealthy civil servant is begged by his wife and three daughters to rent a place for the summer. A dacha, they argue, is essential to uphold the family’s social prestige. But an inserted ditty puts their ambitions in an unflattering light:

For a rich man or aristocrat

It’s no sin to live at the dacha,

But for the likes of us

It’s quite strange and ridiculous.

Look at the next man renting a shack

Or some kind of barn

And shouting self-importantly to his friend:

Come and visit us at the dacha!

Богачу, аристократу,

Жить на даче не грешно,

А уж нашему-то брату,

Как-то дико и смешно.

Вон, иной наймет лачугу,

Иль какой-нибудь сарай,

И кричит преважно другу,

К нам на лану приезжай!97

Far from providing the necessary restorative for overwrought urbanites, dachas were often little better than shanties for the Petersburg office proletariat. Instead of providing a genuine alternative to urban existence, they were inhabited largely by people who could never hope to escape the physical and moral pollution of the city. For the first time, but by no means the last, the dacha was finding itself compromised by the discrepancy between its apparent aspirations to healthful exurban gentility and the less than genteel realities of life on the fringes of the city.

THE INCREASED importance of the out-of-town house in the middle of the nineteenth century received its most telling recognition in the appearance of a new cultural stereotype: the dachnik. At best vaguely delineated in the urban imagination of the previous generation, dachas and their inhabitants now gained sharper definition. The first satirical depictions of dacha folk appeared in the 1840s and 1850s, but they were good-natured and lighthearted in comparison with the more serious disapprobation that would be dispensed by the intelligentsia in the later nineteenth century. If dachniki found themselves in drafty, unhygienic houses at no significant remove from the city, that did not make them morally culpable—just unfortunate, foolish, or misguided.

The negative stereotypes of out-of-town life that were projected in the Petersburg feuilletons should not, moreover, be allowed to obscure the many things the dacha had in its favor. It offered health benefits to the inhabitants of crowded and unsanitary cities and provided a much appreciated amenity for an urban population that was moving decisively in the direction of apartment living. It also stood in gratifying opposition to the values of order, formality, and hierarchy that were embodied in the Russian imagination by St. Petersburg. The dacha, by contrast with the capital city, presented a site for untroubled family life, for open-ended interaction within small social groups, and for genteel (but markedly nonaristocratic) pleasures. In this respect, it can be seen as analogous to various sites in the United States and Western Europe of the same period where bourgeois habits and identities were constructed and consolidated: spa towns, vacation resorts, affluent suburbs.

These parallels should not be taken too far, however. Russia differed from Western “bourgeois” societies (and the Western societies, let it also be said, differed from one another) in two important respects. First, in the pattern of its urban and exurban development. As Russia’s major cities frayed at the edges, the dacha could no longer always be located safely on the far side of a sharp boundary between town and country. Other societies—notably the United States and England—were much more successful in creating and shoring up middle-class enclaves within a framework of high-speed urban expansion. Second, Russia differed in its social structures and ideologies. The middling urban-ites who formed the dacha’s largest constituency were a motley group whose most vocal spokesmen (often known as the intelligentsia) were becoming increasingly fractious and suspicious of any bourgeoisie that might coalesce under the watchful eye of an oppressive and autocratic state. The middle of the century may be regarded as a transitional period when the dacha gained by distancing itself from the upper-class entertainments of a slightly earlier age and thus positioning itself comfortably between the pompous court and the grimy city. By the 1870s this advantageous intermediate status was coming to seem extremely problematic, and by the end of the century it would be untenable, largely because it left the summerfolk unconnected to the vast rural world outside the court and the city. The history of the dacha was about to become a lot more complicated, contentious, and diverse.

In the 1850s, dachas were still an exciting symptom of the recent emergence in Russia of a nonaristocratic urban public. By the end of the century, this public was widely considered to have all but taken over the major cities; confirmation of the waning powers of the aristocratic elite was no longer required. Commentators on the dacha phenomenon happily abandoned all restraint. Like later historians of the Western European bourgeoisie, they spoke of inexorable expansion fueled largely by recruitment from lower social classes. One apparently overworked architect reflected in 1894:

Who isn’t looking to go to the dacha these days? From the petty shopkeeper, salesman, and member of a work cooperative right up to the rich banker, office director, and man of leisure inclusive—all of them, as soon as the first days of spring are upon them, dream of nothing but how to spend the summer outside the “dusty” city, at the dacha, in the “fresh air.”1

So deserted were the central areas of St. Petersburg after the annual mass departure for the dacha that the police had to take special measures in the early 1880s to safeguard the property of absent residents. Local superintendents were required to compile a list of all the apartments where property had been left under the supervision of servants or caretakers (dvorniki); police officers were then expected to keep an eye on these addresses and caretakers to conduct inspections to check that locks to outside doors were intact.2 Mstislav Dobuzhinskii recalled of his childhood in the 188os: “Petersburg was empty in summer,the ‘gentlefolk’ had all headed off to their dachas or to various foreign countries, and cooks, janitors, and maids became the masters of the city.”3

The dacha boom of the last third of the nineteenth century was linked to several economic and demographic factors, not least the further development of the railways. The travel season reached its peak with the heavy dacha traffic in June and July, and the late nineteenth century saw a significant rise in the proportion of short trips (in 1894, 58 percent of passenger trips in the Russian Empire were of less than fifty versts).4 Steam trains were supplemented by other forms of transport: Russia’s first horse-drawn railway (in St. Petersburg) started operations in 1863, and its network was steadily extended during the 1860s and 1870s. The first experiments in using steam-driven trams took place in 1880, and in 1886 routes for regular traffic were opened.5

But if transport had an impact on the suburban and exurban development of the Moscow and Petersburg regions, it did so rather differently than in Western Europe. Russia still lagged behind in transport provision (the first electric trams in St. Petersburg, for example, did not start running until the late 1900s), and movement both within the city and from the city center to the outskirts was less easy than in Paris or London. Russian workers—both in offices and in less genteel employment—were tied to their workplaces to a much greater extent than their counterparts in Britain or France. These limitations of urban infrastructure, however, did much to stimulate the development of dacha settlements; that is, to make the city’s inhabitants disposed to summer migration rather than to year-round residence in suburbia. Daily commuting was for the most part unfeasible, for reasons both of cost and of time, and as a result the city center became hugely overcrowded; the acceleration of population growth brought no corresponding expansion of the city’s territory. Epidemics were rife, especially in the summer. In the second half of the nineteenth century, St. Petersburg was notorious as the least healthy yet most expensive capital in Europe.6

What Was a Dacha?

If the social and geographical factors underlying the dacha boom seem clear enough, much less obvious is how we should begin to analyze the phenomenon; whether, indeed, it is possible to provide an elegant categorization of all the forms of dwelling that were called “dacha.” The only existing book-length work on the subject advances a sensible typology of summerfolk settlement in this period.7 First comes the “dacha suburb” (dachnyi prigorod), consisting of dachas that were built as part of an overall framework of urban planning (such as St. Petersburg’s Neva islands or towns within its orbit, such as Gatchina, Luga, and Sestroretsk) or that sprang up on a major estate or palace settlement within easy reach of the city (Peterhof, Oranienbaum, Pavlovsk, Tsarskoe Selo). This is the oldest form of dacha settlement: depending on how exactly the dacha is defined, it can be said to date from the 1710s or 1720s, but it had certainly made its appearance by the middle of the reign of Catherine II. Second, the “dacha village” (dachnaia derevnia) includes, quite simply, those villages where peasants and other property holders rented out their houses to city dwellers. Peasants in the St. Petersburg region were earning nonagri-cultural income of this kind from the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not before. The third category is the “dacha location” (dachnaia mestnost’). This is a form of settlement that has a strong dacha orientation (where many or even most houses were used as dachas) but that was not created with this function in view. Dacha locations were typically former villages (Beloostrov, Krasnoe Selo, Pargolovo, Toksovo) or estates (Dudergof, Kushelevka, Poliustrovo, Shuvalovo) or a combination of the two (Kuokkala, Raivola, Terioki). Finally, we have the “dacha settlement” (dachnyi poselok)designed specifically for recreational dacha use (Alesksandrovka, Vladimirovka, Vyritsa, Ol’gino, Siverskaia, Udel’naia, and many others): this phenomenon grew in significance toward the end of the nineteenth century, and it came into its own at the start of the twentieth.

Even a set of definitions as broad as this does not include everything that went under the name of “dacha” in the last third of the nineteenth century. It is fitted specifically to the dacha patterns of St. Petersburg guberniia and so does not even claim to reflect the trend for locations much farther from the city. People with the freedom and the inclination to absent themselves for the whole of the summer might rent a house in the country several hours away in remote corners of neighboring regions. In the early 1870s dachas might be located fifty versts or more from the nearest railway station. This new model of the dacha as a full-fledged summer retreat rather than as a temporary vacation cottage within easy reach of Moscow or St. Petersburg was exemplified by the habits of Fedor Dostoevsky. Recently returned from a lengthy period abroad, the writer spent the summer of 1872 in Staraia Russa, a medium-sized provincial town in Novgorod guberniia. In a letter to his sister he explained all the advantages of his decision: “It’s cheap, it’s quick and easy to move here, and finally, the house comes with furniture, even with crockery, the station has newspapers and journals, and so on.” The Dostoevskys rented this house from a local priest; the following summer they chose a dacha owned by a retired lieutenant colonel that subsequently—in 1876—they bought outright. As Dostoevskys wife reported, it was “not a town house, but rather took the form of a country estate, with a large shady garden, a vegetable garden, outbuildings, and cellar.”8

After Dostoevsky’s time, the spread of locations continued to expand and prices to come down. In the 1880s, for example, it was nothing out of the ordinary for Petersburg dachniki to venture far into Finnish territory, renting often rather modest houses in a long string of settlements that extended all the way to Vyborg. Muscovites were even more adventurous in their summer habits: for them the dacha concept had become broad enough to include houses near provincial towns such as Tver’ and Rybinsk, or in distant regions such as Ukraine. By the 1900s, moreover, newspapers carried a healthy sprinkling 61 of advertisements for “dachas” in the Crimea, a location that was no longer by any means the preserve of pleasure-seeking high society.9

As well as expanding enormously, the dacha market became much more differentiated in the last third of the nineteenth century. Rented summer accommodations were sought by everyone from craftsmen to aristocrats; accordingly, dachas varied enormously in size, level of amenities, and cost. The humblest dachniki would have an annual income of just a few hundred rubles; solid “middle-class” salaries in the major cities began at around 1,000 rubles, while certain categories of professionals (university professors, the upper ranks of the civil service) might easily bring in more than 2,000 rubles, as well as enjoying additional perks such as free or subsidized apartments. Dacha prices for the season reflected this spread of incomes. They could be as low as 40 rubles for a peasant izba; they were typically in the range of 150 to 200 rubles for something a middling civil servant might consider respectable; the grander summer residences might cost 1,000 rubles or more.10 By the 1880s, advertisements were found for modest dachas of as little as two rooms, some of them intended “for a solitary person”; at the top end of the market were spacious villas of twenty rooms or more; while a typical medium-sized family dacha might consist of six or eight rooms with modest servants’ quarters and a couple of outbuildings. This many-layered stratification was reflected in new, more elaborate terminology adopted in many newspaper advertisements of the time. Rather than referring simply to a “dacha,” they employed a range of compound nouns. Near the bottom of the range was a “dacha apartment” (kvartira-dacha), which in most cases comprised a few rooms rented in someone’s house. A more private and spacious option was a “dacha house” (dom-dacha) or a “detached dacha” (dacha-osobniak). Tenants who wanted accommodations for use outside the summer months could rent a “winter dacha” (zimniaia dacha). Customers with more refined tastes might require a “lordly dacha” (barskaia dacha) while those with manorial aspirations could look for a “dacha estate” (dachnoe imenie or, less grandly, usad’ba-dacha).

The increasingly differentiated requirements of the dacha market are reflected in the articles and books on dacha design and construction that proliferated in the 1890s. Architects, like advertisers, began to employ subtle distinctions among the “dacha,” the “house,” the “dacha house,” the “detached house,” and even the “detached dacha house,” with variations in price to match.11 They also showed increasing awareness of the material constraints and other practical difficulties likely to be facing their customers, who by and large represented an identifiably new type of dachniki: “working people who don’t possess large financial resources and who therefore aim to build themselves a dacha or a house as economically as possible.”12 Many such volumes of the 1900s contained detailed advice on building materials and instructions on how to draw up agreements with contractors. The dacha neophyte would also be advised on interior and exterior decoration. Indoors, wallpaper might be hung or patterns stenciled on the walls; for the outside, yellow was the recommended color.13 Instructions were also given on the design of gates, benches, pavilions, terraces, and verandas.14

From the early 1870s many traders addressed themselves specifically to the dacha consumer. The market in consumer goods included garden furniture, clothing, cutlery, and bathroom appliances (with water closets, perhaps unsurprisingly, represented most prominently). By the 1890s a much greater spread of goods was being offered, and emphasis was increasingly placed on modern convenience and functionality. General advertisements for furniture and baths were replaced by specifics: fold-away storage cupboards, electric bells, steel cutlery, nails, hammocks, bidets, “American trays,” spades, and coat hangers. Among the less functional goods offered were terra-cotta vases, ladies’ pelerines, and candleholders. The dacha gourmet might be tempted by hampers stuffed full of delicacies such as olive oil from Provence and Scots porridge oats.

Life at the dacha was not, however, a consumer goods paradise; it entailed significant practical difficulties. First among them was the ordeal of searching for a place to rent. By 1880 St. Petersburg had an agency dealing with dachas, but most people chose less formal channels: they simply went to a village or settlement where they wanted to spend the summer and negotiated directly with potential landlords. The dacha search could, by all accounts, be a time-consuming and frustrating business, but often it was unavoidable. Urbanites needed to make a good choice, as in many cases the dacha would become a family’s main or only residence over the summer months. To retain an expensive city apartment during the dacha season was a luxury that relatively few could afford. The tendency was, it seems, for cashstrapped dachniki to spend longer and longer time in the country each summer so as to delay their return to the urban rental market with its inflated prices.15 But this practice made finding a new apartment, given the housing shortage in the major cities, even more problematic. An editorial of 1912, for example, contrasted the “torment” of looking for an apartment in St. Petersburg in the autumn with the ease of finding accommodations in a town in Ohio that was much smaller but had an efficiently functioning real estate office.16

The difficulties did not end even after city dwellers had found a dacha to rent. They then had to move their furniture and other possessions to their summer house. Departing dachniki might hire movers—although, to judge by most accounts, they had few guarantees that their furniture would arrive intact. Journalists delighted in making puns on the term lomovoi izvozchik (which means moving carter, although “lorm-’ is the root of lomat’ “break”).17 To judge by newspaper reports and the advice dispensed in the press, dachniki did themselves no favors by piling their carts too high.18 It was only the wealthier dachniki who could afford to leave much of their furniture behind in the city. A typical bourgeois or petit bourgeois family might rent unfurnished dachas in several locations over the years; only if their material situation became more secure did the spring ritual of moving out of town become less onerous.19

A modest design of the 1870s (from “Arkhitekturnyi sbornik” sel’skikh postroek i modnoi mebeli [Moscow, 1873])

A more elaborate dacha of the late imperial era (from A.I. Tilinskii, Deshevye postroiki [St. Petersburg, 1913])

And then there was the problem of keeping the household running through the summer in the absence of an urban range of shops and services. To a large extent summer visitors were at the mercy of the local population, who were able to ask high prices for basic foodstuffs and services. Take the following description of a dacha landlord in the mid-1870s: “When renting the place out she promised everything you like—a laundry, a barn, an icehouse—but once she’d got the deposit and the money in advance, she didn’t even begin to think that her tenants wouldn’t find any of these things at her dacha.”20 In view of such cases, one household magazine urged dachniki to discuss the provision of basic services (laundry, firewood) in advance, and under no circumstances to rely on caretakers or watchmen. Summer visitors were also advised to check the details of their accommodations before arrival, as landlords—like landlords the world over—were liable to pass over in silence inconvenient details. Dacha owners liked to create more rooms for rent, and so more windows were installed and insulation deteriorated; the best safeguard against dank rooms was to heat the dacha through and give it an airing in advance of arrival.21

The Growth of Dacha Settlements, 1860S-1890S

The main casualty of the dacha boom is often assumed to be the country estate. From well before Emancipation observers bemoaned the decline of the landowner lifestyle and its replacement, under economic pressure, by more densely populated forms of settlement. Regrets of this kind gathered force over time. When Anton Chekhov’s Lopakhin purchased Ranevskaia’s estate, complete with its cherry orchard, he was setting the terms for much subsequent discussion of the “decline” of the Russian nobility in the second half of the nineteenth century. Opinions differ on the nature of this decline—it is unclear, for example, whether the sale of estates by noble families should be seen as a symptom of socioeconomic crisis or as a rational response to changing economic conditions after 1861— but its role in furthering dacha entrepreneurship is undeniable.22

On occasion the development of new dacha settlements did conform to the Cherry Orchard model. One example was Koz’ma Soldatenkov (nicknamed Koz’ma Medici), who bought the Naryshkin estate at Kuntsevo in 1865 and promptly started renting out plots of land to wealthy merchant families.23 But other scripts were also possible. Most merchants were nowhere near as wealthy as Lopakhin or Soldatenkov, and bought themselves quite small plots of land that met only the needs of their own extended family. And well-to-do urban families might lease land directly from a village in order to build themselves country retreats. One example was the merchant and Old Believer Sergei Karlovich Rakhmanov, who in 1870 built a dacha for his son in Dunino, a village in a scenic spot at the western end of Moscow guberniia. The son subsequently married the manager of the Rakhmanov dachas in the village. The house of Rakhmanov fits had around ten spacious rooms; it also had a room for a live-in servant and came with several outbuildings. Sergei Karlovich’s own dacha next door was even grander: in Soviet times it served as several discrete family dwellings. By the 1900s the village existed primarily to service the dachniki, who had taken the most picturesque sites overlooking the river.24

Noble families, too, could show themselves to be alert to the commercial possibilities of their holdings. In the 1850s and 1860s, for example, landowners along the Nikolaevskaia railway line (between Moscow and St. Petersburg) were so keen to clear their land for sale that they met peasant resistance.25 The Nikolaevskaia line was subject to particularly intensive development, as land tended to be cheaper there than in traditional dacha locations.26 Another major focus for development was the Northern line from Moscow to Sergiev Posad, which opened in 1861. Pushkino, for example, became a thriving dacha colony in little more than a couple of years. Muscovites with spare cash were encouraged to build by the opportunity to obtain land on a ninety-five-year lease for 24 rubles per year per desiatina (a separate but lower charge was made for the forested land that dachniki were entitled to use).27

Dacha entrepreneurship, on various scales, was also encountered in more heavily developed locations nearer the city. In 1877, 1878, and 1882 the family of the young Alexandre Benois (subsequently a renowned artist of the fin de siècle) was at the Kushelev-Bezborodko dacha, formerly one of St. Petersburg’s elite suburban residences, which had just recently been sold off in lots; the previous owners had built a few villas in the grounds “partly for their own house guests and partly to let.” The dacha dwellers had as their immediate neighbors an English cotton factory, a paper factory, a brewery, and a rope factory (which had been started up by Benois’s uncle); the largest dacha on the site was rented as a community center for foreign workers at the rope factory. So Benois had as the aural backdrop to his summer vacation “a single, not unpleasant, blur of sound that resembled the noise of a waterfall.”28

The dacha of Rakhmanov fils

Owners of medium-sized and large estates in the Petersburg area found a wide variety of ways to generate income. Besides selling agricultural produce, they might earn money by providing a range of services and by renting out all manner of buildings: inns, mills, factories, and of course dachas. It was a rare estate that did not have at least a handful of houses for rent during the summer. Thus in 1886 Count Stenbok-Fermor used his estate of 4,148 desiatinas at Lakhta as follows: a total of twenty dachas were rented out; four houses were leased as inns for 760 rubles annually; one other house was rented as two shop premises; a bowling alley generated 750 rubles; sand was sold for 142 rubles; rights to fish and to collect fruit and mushrooms were also sold; finally, smithies and a raft for laundresses brought in 80 and 50 rubles respectively. The 385 desiatinas owned by Countess Orlova-Denisova at Kolomiagi had, albeit on a more modest scale, a similar range of commercial functions that included nine dachas rented out for a total of 1,735 rubles each summer.29

Changes in nineteenth-century dacha life on private estate lands are well illustrated by the case of Pargolovo, part of the Shuvalov estates to the north of St. Petersburg. Pargolovo became known as a faintly bohemian place in the 1830s, when students from St. Petersburg University would go there for noisy parties in the woods. Dacha life proper began around the same time, when the area began to attract significant numbers of summer visitors. Entertainments—boating, riding, fishing—were laid on by the owners of the estate, while food and accommodations were provided by the local peasants: “Not much tilling of the soil goes on here, and peasants mostly make a living by selling firewood and coal, as cab drivers, and by renting out their homes, as numerous inhabitants of Petersburg move here for the summer and all houses without exception get taken.”30 Then and afterward, although its clientele became extremely varied, Pargolovo had a reputation as a place for intellectuals of modest means. In 1845, for example, Vissarion Belinskii lived there; from 1878 to 1906 the renowned arts critic Vladimir Stasov rented each summer the same peasant-owned house in a village half an hour’s walk from Pargolovo; and the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was married in a church in the Shuvalov park. The population in 1882 was described as “tens of thousands of protean, variegated, but at any rate intelligentsia people.”31

The construction of the Finland railway line, completed in 1870, marked a new stage in the history of Pargolovo. Hitherto land in the prime dacha territory around the lakes had been rented out by the Shuvalov family on thirty-year leases.32 Now, however, it became potentially much more profitable and amenable to larger development. In 1877 it was decided to sell the land not as individual plots but in one chunk of over fifteen desiatinas. A company of seventy shareholders bought up this territory for 350,000 rubles. Other parts of the estate were given over to commercial development and rapidly subdivided for sale. The result was a series of densely populated summer settlements (including also Shuvalovo and Ozerki; Pargolovo itself was divided into three settlements—Pargolovo I, II, and III) made up of “several hundred dachas of varying size, from enormous, three-story buildings of the most fanciful rather than splendid architecture to hovels thrown together quickly from barge timber.”33 The pace of development in the northern suburbs of St. Petersburg is shown by the profitability of the Finland railway: the part of the line that ran through Russian territory (as far as Beloostrov) had receipts of 93,ooo rubles per Verst in 1897, while the more remote Finnish section was bringing in just 7,967 per verst.34 Petersburgers were attracted to buy plots here by the good transport links to the city, by the promise of unspoiled landscapes (Pargolovo was billed as “the Russian Switzerland”), and by perks such as street lighting and watchmen paid for by the company.35 The Petersburg press reported in 1880 that Samson’evskii Prospekt, leading north toward Pargolovo through the Vyborg Side, was crammed full of cartloads of furniture heading for the dacha. Land prices were going up accordingly, from 2.25 rubles per square sazhen to as much as 6 in Ozerki. The company formed to manage the Shuvalov dacha territories decided to raise the price of unsold land further, to pay a dividend of 10 percent to shareholders, and to provide electric lighting in Ozerki.36

The plots at Shuvalovo varied in area from around 400 square sazhens to well over 1,000. Several buildings were usually found on them: a main residence, a laundry, a stable, a cellar, a woodshed, and a kitchen. Usually there was room for more than one residential building.37 Servants might be accommodated in a small room in the main house or in a separate building. The social profile of applicants for planning permission was quite varied. For the most part, they were located in Russian society’s amorphous middle (civil servants, general majors, honored citizens), but there were peasants too.38

The social breadth of Pargolovo and its adjoining settlements became a stereotype of the time. It is stressed in D.N. Mamin-Sibiriak’s Features from the Life of Pepko, a novel recounting the adventures of two students (the narrator, Popov, and his friend Pepko) who are trying to make careers as writers in the early 1870s. Popov has been confined to St. Petersburg for the last two summers, and this year he still does not have the money to go home and visit his family. But, inspired by Pepko’s can-do attitude, he joins his friend in taking a suburban train out north to Pargolovo III, the remotest and cheapest of the three Pargolovo settlements. Their means are so limited as to make them extremely implausible dachniki: their Petersburg landlady bursts into convulsive laughter when she is told their plans for the summer. On the way to Pargolovo they pass through a number of unglamorous dacha settlements (among them Udel’naia), but Popov finds even these uplifting: “So here were the first dachas with their run-down quaintness, their puny little gardens, and their modest desire to create the appearance of an untroubled refuge for simple dacha happiness. But I like these dachas that are cobbled together out of barge timber and remind you of birdhouses.”39 Arriving at Pargolovo III, the two friends discover that it is much more a village than a dacha settlement (by 1894, the time the novel was completed, it had been much more intensively developed as a summer destination). Popov and Pepko rent a no-frills izba for the fantastically low price of 10 rubles for the season. Their experiences tally with the (admittedly far from neutral) journalistic accounts of the time, which described Pargolovo as a dreary backwater whose few attractions—horseback riding, rowing, country walks, fresh milk—were quickly exhausted.40

Privately owned estate lands were not, however, the only source of dacha plots. From the middle of the nineteenth century land owned by the state and directly by the imperial family (the latter known as udel’nye zemli, or appanage lands) were increasingly made available for such purposes. A law of 1850 specified the procedures whereby state land could be transferred into individual ownership; that is, by a kind of hereditary lease called chinsh.41 Ten years later the availability of chinsh land was extended to the Moscow dacha areas of Sokol’niki (twenty-seven plots) and Shiriaevo Pole (seventeen). Regulations were fairly strict: residents were not allowed to engage in commercial activities and were forbidden to build high fences around their houses, which, it was emphasized, should have a “decent appearance.” But they were also given twenty years’ exemption from property taxes and from responsibility for upkeep of the road, and the right to roam freely on the surrounding lands as long as they caused no damage.42

The effects of an increasingly dynamic property market fed by various sources—private estates, state land, palace land, appanage land—soon made themselves felt. By the mid-1860s, patterns of ownership were looking somewhat fragmented. An 1865 survey of St. Petersburg uezd listed 455 dacha owners, classified mainly as merchants and civil servants, most of them with relatively small landholdings (under ten desiatinas). These plots of land tended to have not one building but several (typically, between five and ten), many of which were presumably rented out as summer houses.43 The number of minor dacha owners increased rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s as the leasing of state lands for private cultivation and property development continued with greater intensity. Large territories within reach of the city might be divided up into dozens or hundreds of plots, typically of 500 or 600 square sazhens. Tenants would sign a lease, often for twenty-five years, and make an annual payment of 20 or 30 rubles for rental of the land. The bulk of such tenants were categorized in the official records as civil servants, merchants, and military men, but there were also tradespeople, artisans, and peasants. The sizes of individual holdings varied significantly, from one plot to several bunched together. Very often a single plot contained more than one building fit for habitation—surely an indication that many of these dachas were built to be rented out. The most common description was “single-story wooden dacha,” usually priced for taxation purposes between 1,500 and 2,500 rubles.44

A detailed survey conducted in the late 1880s revealed a great increase in the number of minor property owners since the 1860s. In St. Petersburg uezd, for example, the number of private landowners had risen from 419 in 1864 to 1,385 in 1877–78 to 3,391 in 1889, while the amount of land in private ownership had not grown correspondingly; rather, it had decreased since the 1870s as the city expanded. The class structure of ownership remained largely intact: the major landholdings were still overwhelmingly in the hands of the nobility (which, in 1889, owned 86 percent of private land, as compared to 96 percent in 1865). But the market for smaller plots was lively, fueled by the sale of parcels of land from large noble estates. Most landowners had small holdings (less than ten desiatinas), and very many such people had a few dachas for rent. These dwellings would remain as the staple of the summer housing market even after the turn of the century, when largescale dacha entrepreneurship really took off.45

Peasants and the Dacha Industry

As transport links improved and more and more villages and settlements in the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions were colonized by dachniki, these outlying areas came increasingly to be oriented toward the capitals and their annually migrating population. The dacha market was, as ever, greatly expanded by the contribution of peasants, who readily made their izbas available for rent to summering city folk; for rural people who lived within reach both of St. Petersburg and the sea, the dacha industry was commonly their most important source of income.46 The wealthier peasants would plow their surplus money into dacha construction, and even the poorer families in the Moscow and Petersburg regions could accommodate paying guests by clearing out of their izbas and living in a barn for the summer months. Usually city folk did not have to look too hard for rental opportunities of this kind, as a horde of dacha hawkers would descend on the first cart or train arriving with prospective summer visitors. Haggling was obligatory, and was often conducted not with the owners themselves but with truculent caretakers.47 According to one memoir account, the dacha-renting procedure ran as follows: at Shrovetide dachniki would arrive at the local station, where peasants would be waiting to offer them a ride into the settlement. During the cab ride the peasant would try to sell his own izba or that of a family member; if the passenger asked to stop and look at other dachas, the peasant would do everything to prevent him from doing so, saying, “It’s no good here: the landlady is a nag and it’s full of bugs.” Eventually the two parties would negotiate a price and get to know each other better over tea and vodka.48

The more active involvement of some peasants in the dacha industry was in large part a result of the greater economic independence they enjoyed after the Emancipation of 1861. By the mid-i86os, many peasants enjoyed formal legal ownership of a plot of land, and on this land, especially in the more densely populated regions, they might well decide to build new dwellings.49 While these houses were anything but places of leisure, they served to change peasants’ outlook in ways that have significance for the subsequent history of the dacha: for a section of the village population the izba became not simply a building that enabled them to exercise their age-old right to work the land but a piece of property implying new rights and status.50

Changes in legal status were not, moreover, the only factor in fostering new proprietary instincts in villages within the orbit of the major cities. Emancipation had also brought an increase in labor mobility and a slight weakening of the traditional communal way of life. New attitudes toward housing were particularly evident in villages with a large proportion of migrant urban wage earners (otkhodniki) where the multigenerational patriarchal household was coming under strain and members of the younger generation were more likely to peel off and build their own homes. These villages were, in general, closer to the city and hence better able to take advantage of nonagricultural economic opportunities. For those peasants who had made good in the city and returned to the village in middle age to take on their patriarchal responsibilities, urban styles and standards of housing were highly desirable. Windows and metal roofs were added; the izba interior was partitioned to create new rooms.51

A house for a “prosperous peasant” in the central and southern regions of Russia (from Atlas proektov i chertezhei sel’skikh postroek [St. Petersburg, 1853])

This view of the home as a new economic unit, not exclusively agricultural, led peasants to service the expanding dacha market by making their houses available to city folk. Along the Northern line out of Moscow, for example, rural communities catered explicitly to summerfolk by raising the level of comfort in their dwellings, planting flowers and trees, leveling the path from the station to the settlement, offering their services as cab drivers, and opening boating stations.52 By the 1880s and 1890s, “suburban” peasants were observed to be building dachas “very actively, as far as their means allow.”53 In 1887, 1,560 peasants in the Petersburg region were estimated to be renting out their property, around 400 in Pargolovo volost and over 600 in the Staraia Derevnia district.54 The high representation of these areas points both to their undoubted importance in the summer residency patterns of the St. Petersburg population but also, perhaps, to the failure of the researchers to look in proper detail at less well-established locations (for example, those south of the city). It should also be assumed that many of the subjects in this survey were “peasants” in name only, and that they were actually earning wages in the city. Nonetheless, these statistics do begin to hint at the scale of “simple” families’ involvement in the dacha economy.

Urban Encroachment

The result of peasant involvement in the dacha market was not necessarily a realization of dacha life; “peasants” were by no means guaranteed to be laborers in agricultural communities. Increasingly common on the outskirts of Moscow and Petersburg were “dacha” settlements that contained artisans and tradespeople as well as summer visitors. A survey of Moscow guberniia at the turn of the nineteenth century commented: “There are rather a lot of population centers of this kind, which are not peasant settlements but which cannot be considered urban either, which are composed of a group of households connected by many common interests, both economic and social, but which have no form of public administration, no organization to oversee them.”55

The extension of urban settlement affected the character not only of peasant communities. Back in the 1840s, writers of the “physiological” school were observing that the northern districts of St. Petersburg (the Petersburg and Vyborg Sides) were turning into low-rent suburbs. From the 1860s on this state of affairs became even more pronounced. The shortage of cheap housing in the city center ensured that many of the wooden dacha-type houses on the islands and the Vyborg Side were occupied year-round.56 Former green-belt areas had in effect become slums. According to one sketch of the 1870s, the previously well-to-do Karpovka was now “the poorest part of the city,” inhabited “primarily by low-ranking civil servants.” During the winter these unfortunates huddled together in dachas, paying little or no rent for the privilege, as owners were only too glad to have someone to keep an eye on their property. Often bachelors moved in with a married friend and split the costs of the household; at times they were reduced to fishing bits of wood out of the river or to filching it from neighbors’ fences in order to keep warm. In the dacha season these young men gave way to the dachas’ owners, relocating to attics, barns, and empty stables. Sometimes they even slept out on the bank of the Karpovka.57 The Petersburg Side in the 1860s and 1870s was recalled as being a place where people would live all year round in wooden houses and where the absence of domestic comforts was only partially compensated by the cleaner air.58

Dacha areas on the city’s immediate outskirts had become decidedly seedy. Novaia Derevnia, not much favored by journalists at the best of times, was reckoned to be the preserve of hard-up civil servants and loose-living young people. The requirements of its population were reflected in the range of entertainments offered: operetta had forced out theater, inns had supplanted libraries, and cafés chantants had displaced the “delights of ins Grüne”59 Isler’s Mineral Waters, the institution to which Novaia Derevnia owed much of its original popularity, seemed tame by comparison with the forms of entertainment fashionable in the 1880s. The nearby Chernaia Rechka was fast becoming an insalubrious suburb for low-paid office workers. Houses were packed close together, brick dwellings were very few (although many residents spent the whole year there), and hygiene was dreadful (there was no proper sewage system and canals often smelled foul).60 Nor were the smarter Neva islands invulnerable to change; the common perception was that they had been colonized by merchant families.61 Even Kamennyi had “long since been democratized and just about the majority of its dachas have come into the possession of prosperous market traders.”62

Other suburban districts were even less fortunate, being taken over by factories and overcrowded worker settlements. The example most frequently cited was the route leading along the south side of the Gulf of Finland—the Peterhof Road, where the modern dacha phenomenon had originated. The old-style dacha on the Peterhof Road was still alive in the 1870s, when advertisements for fifteen-room furnished residences with stables could still be found. The family of Alexandre Benois lived there for a couple of summers when Benois’s father was a court architect. And Felix Krzesinski, successful dancer at the Aleksandrinskii Theater and the nineteenth century’s most celebrated exponent of the mazurka, rented a dacha at Ligovo in the early 1870s.63 By the 1880s, however, it was a commonplace to associate the first section of the Peterhof Road—at least to the settlement of Avtovo—with urban squalor. The next section, leading to Krasnyi Kabachok, was taken up with garden plots; it was only beyond Ligovo that uninterrupted woodland was to be found—and even here almost all villages were densely populated by summerfolk.64Ekaterinhof, although it retained in its restaurant traces of a more upmarket past, was taken over on holidays by disorderly workers from the nearby factories, who formed a “garish crowd with the cheapest pretensions to entertainments”; the air and the river smelled foul, and a temporary hospital for infectious diseases was set up.65 Settlements in the Peterhof direction such as Volynkina were becoming little more than shanty sprawl with inadequate sanitation and educational provision.66

The urbanization of traditional dacha locations from the 1860s on was also well attested in Moscow. Petrovskii Park, full of upper-class villas in the 1840s, was in the 1860s becoming a “summer town” with direct connections to the city along the horse-drawn tram lines; houses there were increasingly being used for year-round residence.67 Kuskovo had turned into “some kind of summer open-air inn”; and Ostankino was grubby and overcrowded. Of Sokol’niki it was remarked in 1860 that “the transition from city to noncity is imperceptible.” The city’s environs were poorly geared to the needs of families of modest means, but they were amply provided with entertainments—firework displays, orchestras, theaters.68 The 1904 Moscow census was the first to include “suburbs” (prigorody) as a separate category; the population of these places was found to be over 82,000 (of whom more than 66,000 were categorized as peasants).69

Exurban Property Development and Entrepreneurship, 1890s–1910s

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the dacha industry reached a new level of intensity as it began to receive organized state encouragement. In May 1896 the State Council passed a law encouraging the long-term leasing of unoccupied state lands for the construction of dachas. The land was to be rented out by auction, typically for a period of ninety-nine years. Apart from paying rent and taxes, leaseholders were obliged to erect all buildings stipulated in their original application within three years. Every twelve years the amount of rent paid could be reviewed, but any increase was not to exceed 5 percent. This initiative led to quick results in several gubernii besides Moscow and St. Petersburg: Voronezh, Kiev, Tula, Tomsk, and others.

The policy had obvious advantages for the public purse, as it was a highly profitable use of state lands (the average annual rent was 196 rubles per desiatina), but it was a success with dachniki too. By the middle of 1900, 963 dacha plots had already been created as a result of the May 1896 law, and many more applications had been received.70 By 1903, dacha plots had been created in fifty-two locations in eighteen gubernii; in total they were bringing in 75,000 rubles annually.71 As usual, however, the provision of basic services was lagging behind the pace of dacha development, which in some locations led to a sharp decline in demand for land.72 In 1901 the Forestry Department raised the problem with the State Council, arguing that, although the state would still have to meet certain basic expenses (such as surveying and the drainage of land), residents of a settlement should be required to contribute to the costs of providing basic infrastructure. The money thus received should be specially earmarked for the needs of the settlement: it should not just disappear into the state budget. This condition was accordingly written into the statutes of many dacha settlements. Even so, the State Department of Economics decided by 1903 that the state had to make a greater contribution.73

The high speed of sale and distribution of land for construction marked out the 1900s as a qualitatively new stage in the dacha’s history. Dachas were now becoming part of a large-scale “industry” that operated cheap resorts at a conveniently short distance from the city. A case in point was the Sestroretsk settlement on the Gulf on Finland, which was enlarged by land made available by the Ministry of Agriculture and State Property in 1898.74 In 1900 the new territory had around one hundred dacha plots regularly laid out as well as several larger dachas (effectively summer camps) for children. On neighboring lands were agricultural plots belonging to locals.75 As of 1903, Sestroretsk had 350 dachas and a total of 1,200 rooms, with the standard two-room accommodation costing between 60 and 80 rubles per month. Orchestras performed every day during the season, and the other entertainments included a casino.76

Nor was the state by any means the only initiator of dacha entrepreneurship. The intensive development by private owners of estate lands located on the outskirts of the major cities continued into the twentieth century. In 1899, A. D. Sheremetev owned 322 plots (typically of 600 square sazhens) in Mar’ina Roshcha that brought in a total of 26,000 rubles in rent over the year; his 262 plots in Ostankino were slightly less profitable, as the land was cheaper. Rent levels were fixed by custom (under the terms of chinsh), and so not commercially driven. In 1912, Sheremetev showed impatience with this state of affairs by submitting a petition claiming the right to demolish small rented dachas and replace them with income-generating large apartment buildings (dokhodnye doma).77 A less acrimonious venture was undertaken in 1912 on the estate of Count Stenbok-Fermor at Lakhta, to the north of St. Petersburg. With the approval of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, 2,750 desiatinas of land at Lakhta was bought by a group of shareholders for 1.9 million rubles.78 The company grew quickly, by all appearances: its balance sheet as of 31 December 1914 showed total assets of nearly 9 million rubles.79

The Lakhta company stated in its constitution that it would build in St. Petersburg guberniia “dacha settlements with the aim of making accommodations cheaper in combination with improvements in their variety and quality.”80 This provision points to an important aspect of property development in late imperial “dacha” locations: the summer hordes of dachniki were joined by increasing numbers of permanent residents.81 To take just one example, Tsarskoe Selo was in 1886 only a very small town with just over 500 taxable properties (most of them with extensive outbuildings and gardens).82 In 1895 the town was still of modest size: it numbered some 2,000 inhabitants.83 By 1910, however, it had a permanent population of just over 30,000 (swelled by 7,000 in summer by the influx of dacha folk and summer workers).84

Russia’s Out-of-Town “Settlers”

Tsarskoe Selo provides a convenient illustration of a much broader trend. As early as 1891, it was estimated that 5,000 “dacha husbands” were commuting daily to work along the Finland line alone.85 In the early 1900s appeared the first guidebooks that wrote about the dacha suburbs not from the point of view of native Petersburgers but from that of new arrivals to the city looking for a cheap and convenient place to live for the summer.86 This depopulation of the central parts of Moscow and St. Petersburg was not caused by a yearning for fresh air; escalating housing costs in the city were driving people into new settlements. Old dacha places on the outskirts of these cities were becoming thoroughly suburbanized; such, for example, was the fate of Novaia Derevnia and Chernaia Rechka in the 1900s. Comments on crowding in Moscow locations such as Petrovskii Park were likewise frequently heard.

So prospective suburbanites looked to develop new territories. At Moscow’s Losinoostrovskaia, a new station on the Iaroslavl’ line was opened in 1898. The neighboring forest land (owned by the appanage administration) was chopped into plots (averaging one desiatina) that were leased out for thirty-six years. In the first few years of the settlement’s existence almost all the plots were allocated and built on; houses for year-round habitation predominated. Residents thus solved two problems at once, acquiring an apartment and a dacha rolled into one and enjoying the opportunity to “live on quite large plots in the manner of a small landowner, with their own vegetable garden and orchard.”87 A society for the improvement of local services was formed in 1905, and new amenities quickly followed: street lamps, watchmen, squares, a summer theater, tennis courts, a telephone network, a local newspaper, a school, a postal service, a library, and a pharmacy.

New settlements such as Losinoostrovskaia aimed to avoid the urban blight that had infected Novaia Derevnia and other city outskirts adjacent to the center. In part they took their inspiration from the garden city movement, which had a growing public profile in Russia.88 Confronted with ever worsening overcrowding in Moscow and St. Petersburg, some observers looked to Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb for inspiration. As one journalist wrote, fresh from a trip to Britain, “it’s not just for fresh air and greenery that people want to move to garden cities. They want more: a more integrated, friendly, straightforward life, less conflict, more institutions for the common good, new legal and economic forms.”89 The optimal size for a garden city was held to be 2,400 desiatinas, of which 400 desiatinas were to be built up and the remaining 2,000 were to provide a surrounding agricultural belt. Adopting a line of argument characteristic of Russian thinking in many fields, the first book-length treatment of Ebenezer Howard’s ideas argued that Russia, by virtue of its late entry into modernity, could take advantage of the accumulated experience of urban planning in the West and integrate this experience into its own traditions of settlement.90 Russia’s characteristic small town (malyi gorod) made it especially suitable for the garden city: the prerevolutionary period abounded in planning proposals for pleasant green suburbs around major cities of the Russian Empire.91 The small town, which for most of the nineteenth century had been a powerful symbol of backwardness, came to be regarded, improbably, as the cutting edge of urban development. The reception and implementation of exurbanizing ideas varied from city to city in the Russian Empire. Of Nizhnii Novgorod, for example, it was written that “only very wealthy people go to the dacha. Run-of-the-mill folk are quite happy with the city parks.”92 But exurbia was by no means restricted to the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions: several other densely populated cities—Warsaw, Odessa, Kiev, for example—shared an interest in using out-of-town areas for summer habitation.93

The interest in exurbanizing projects brought with it a cult of English simplicity and practicality in house design. The new ideal of the pared-down kottedzh drew explicitly on foreign, mainly Anglo-Saxon, models. The Russians, it was commonly claimed, tended to overreach, to opt for surface grandeur rather than comfort, to give up domestic space for public entertaining, and to underequip the family’s private quarters. They did not mold the domestic environment so as to meet the requirements of convenience and efficiency; they failed, for example, to understand that entrance halls, instead of presenting a formal and forbidding front to visitors, could be used as living spaces. The Russian striving for showy effect over habitability was thought to be reflected in the taste for elaborate dacha design. A simply furnished, solidly built cottage with a plot of land was much preferable to the “Hellenic” and “Gothic” excesses of the time. Often, it was felt, foreign architectural models were transplanted unthinkingly to Russian soil with little account taken of the differences in climate. An ostentatious fountain in the front garden was to be avoided; the Russians should emulate the English commitment to comfort and ease of living. Thus, for example, the kitchen should be at the front of the house, while living quarters should look out onto a quiet back garden.94 The garden should itself be light, airy, and well maintained; paths laid out geometrically in the French style would not work without open perspectives from which to view the arrangement, and tall trees, if too densely planted, would only make the garden cold and damp.95 As one commentator admiringly noted: “An Englishman lives at home, in the family, and for this very reason the pride of English architecture is a residential house, a cottage. Not beauty, but practicality and utility—that is the top priority for the English!”96 The kottedzh was the ideal, the culmination of progress and civilization in domestic design. And not the least important of its features was the compact garden that gave the home a touch of “poetry” as well as making a gesture toward cozy self-sufficiency.97

The influence of these ideas is felt in the growing self-assertiveness evinced by the residents of new settlements. As an editorial of 1909 proudly noted: “The life of these settlements is extremely original and absolutely does not fit within the limits of the concept of ‘dacha’ life in the narrow sense of this word.”98 Three years later, the leading dacha organ was more specific in identifying the change that had taken place: “Dacha life has ceased to be a whim and a luxury for rich people who used to leave the hurly-burly of the city for two or three months in order to relax in the open air, and at the present time it would be more accurate to describe dacha settlements in the Moscow region as suburban settlements.”99

These settlements, of which there were estimated to be several hundred in the Moscow region alone in the early 1910s, set themselves a number of practical goals in the early years of their existence: to improve rail links; to establish a regular police presence and a fire-fighting force; to provide medical care and schools; to improve sanitation; to plan and administer the territory of the settlement effectively; and, on the political front, to establish a productive working relationship with local councils (zemstva) and city authorities.100 In the 1900s and early 1910s dozens of settlements applied for registration to the Moscow guberniia administration. Almost all of them had their own societies for improving services and infrastructure (obshchestva blagoustroistva).

“Settlers” (poseliane) sought to develop their own way of life and a set of values clearly distinct from those of the city; their efforts to cultivate a new cultural identity were only fueled by the superficial and dismissive treatment they continued to receive from city journalists.101 Promotional brochures presented exurban settlements as the salvation of a “middle class” that was currently at the mercy of rapacious landlords in the big cities; as more and more people joined up and the level of infrastructure and services improved, a dacha suburb would become a cheap, healthy, and pleasant alternative to life in a cramped urban apartment.102 One prominent architectural guidebook of the time recommended the “detached house” (dom-osobniak) as the optimal form of dwelling for the “middle class of people”:

Here a person can spend his private life in peace, satisfying his personal requirements and inclinations, without troubling himself or others. Everything takes on the imprint of his individuality, everything acquires the more enclosed, intimate character that is so valuable for concentrated and productive work, for the development of independence, self-awareness, and the cultural strength that follows from these.103

But the value of the exurban settlement was not conceived of only in individualistic terms. Efforts were made to construct a new kind of collective spirit based on an informed commitment to community life. Periodicals representing the settlements complained of the unruly behavior of city dwellers who frequented the local theater and turned it into a “cabaret” and “seedy bar,” and discussed the problem—one of acute public concern in late imperial society—of thieves and “hooligans”; it also registered the difficulty of harmonizing the interests of settlement dwellers (posel’chane) with those of dachniki proper (the latter were unwilling to pay taxes and generally to pull their weight in maintaining the settlement’s infrastructure). Posel’chane were urged to develop their own communal self-help ethos.104

Constraints on Exurbanization

Through little fault of their own, the settlements achieved only limited success. The practical obstacles they faced were enormous. Public transport systems developed so slowly and sporadically that the possibilities of decentralization were limited.105 Adna Weber, an influential pioneer of comparative urban geography, in 1899 identified four principal means of avoiding unacceptably high levels of urban concentration: a shorter workday, ownership associations for workers, cheap transit, rapid transit.106 As of 1917, Russia had achieved none of them.

The difficulties faced by the settlements were not, moreover, simply a matter of infrastructure. They were caught in a no-man’s-land between zemstvo and city, and hence received financial support from neither.107 The neighborhood spirit necessary to overcome this disadvantage never really developed, given the absence of appropriate institutions (such as town councils).108 The 600 or so dacha settlements in the Moscow region by the time of World War I had come into being without any planning on the part of the municipal or regional authorities. Their emergence had been commercially driven, so there was little opportunity to coordinate the provision of basic services; many of them were too large and crowded to offer their inhabitants a reasonable exurban standard of living. Crucially, settlements did not have the authority to levy taxes, so they had no way to force residents to contribute to the costs of improving infrastructure.109 Most of the local newspapers of the time complain of underprovision of basic services and of inadequate building standards caused by the pressure to exploit the land commercially; it was estimated, for example, that only 10 percent of buildings in Shuvalovo/Ozerki would meet fire safety regulations. Many dachniki felt short-changed by the shareholders’ companies, which were ostensibly responsible for the management of the settlement but in reality shifted the burden of basic maintenance to residents. Losinyi Ostrov, a settlement formed in 1899 that had over 2,000 permanent residents (as well as many more seasonal visitors) by the end of the 1900s, was typical in the problems it experienced:

Houses are multiplying endlessly. One fence adjoins another, forming long straight lines. On one side of the fences there is culture: one can see neat paths covered with sand, flowers, and fountains. But on the other side there is something vaguely reminiscent of a pavement, which, along with the roads, is layered with impassable mud in rainy weather, is a dustbowl when it’s dry, and is buried in snowdrifts in winter.110

It was almost impossible, the same editorial complained, to make residents show more concern for the settlement’s public spaces: “Shut away on our plots of land, we live aloof from one another.”

Dacha communities felt particularly acutely the lack of strong institutional backing in the face of the growing problem of maintaining public order. The settlement of Starbeevo, just outside Moscow, for example, in 1904 proposed to solve its security problem by imposing two hours of compulsory watch duty for each plot with a house.111 Other settlements might petition the police to send extra constables their way. The Sheremetev estate at Kuskovo was by 1904 attracting up to 3,000 dachniki in the summer (spread over 600 desiatinas) as well as thousands of day trippers on public holidays. The local constable wrote in desperation to the police chief of Moscow uezd that disturbances were becoming ever more common for two main reasons: first, the imposition of a state liquor monopoly, which meant that drunken crowds tended to congregate at particular retail outlets instead of dispersing around the many watering holes that used to exist; second, the spread of popular theater and other entertainments, which acted as magnets for the rowdy lower social strata. A further problem was the watchmen, who, paid a mere 15 rubles per month, were less than vigilant. On average, between fifteen and twenty dachas were burglarized each season.112

The issue of public order in Petersburg dacha locations was publicly recognized in 1871, when a “suburban” police force was set up to look after settlements whose status fell in between city and village; in the late 1870s it was expanded to take in Shuvalovo, Sestroretsk, Ligovo, Lakhta, and others.113 Yet problems remained. Particularly vulnerable were those dacha locations that adjoined worker settlements. One such place was Sestroretsk, a center for the arms industry but also a vacation resort, whose population of 5,000 in the mid-1880s was policed by a mere three constables.114 Some dacha communities made their grievances known to the higher authorities. In 1901 the police department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that the Pargolovo society for local services had petitioned the guberniia authorities to have two state-owned liquor shops closed to eliminate regular drunken disturbances in the area. At the same time, the police put in a bid to the Ministry of Finances for extra personnel, noting that in summer only eleven constables were employed to maintain law and order in settlements whose combined population swelled to 25,000. Village constables could not be sent in, as Shuvalovo-Ozerki did not fall under their jurisdiction.115

Unrest increased with the events of 1905, when suburbs and exurbs were widely perceived to be caught up in the same revolutionary disturbances as the cities. One owner of an estate near Kuntsevo, to the west of Moscow, wrote to her bank in 1908 asking for a deferment of her mortgage payments, given the collapse of the dacha market after 1905. Workers’ protests had spilled over beyond the factory limits; agitational meetings had been held in parks and forests that were privately owned and adjacent to dacha areas. In the end, Cossacks had been called in to disperse the undesirable elements, but even so, dacha life had been “destroyed”:

All this so scared and repelled dachniki that over the last two years (1906 and 1907) Muscovites have not only failed to rent any dachas at Troekurovo [the estate in question] but they haven’t even come to view them, despite a mass of publications in all the newspapers. But in point of fact over the ten years preceding 1905 Troekurovo dachas were always occupied by rich Moscow merchants, who were happy to pay more than 2,000 rubles annually.116

The local police constable wrote to the bank in support of this appeal, citing in particular the danger of “expropriations” (i.e., burglaries) for “owners of wealthy, remote dachas.” Never before had the position of dachniki, as unprotected representatives of urban society in an alien nonurban environment, seemed so vulnerable.

LIKE so many other aspects of late imperial socioeconomic history, the fate of the prerevolutionary summerfolk seems grimly overdetermined. Dacha settlements, with their inadequate economic and institutional backing and their unsure administrative status, were vulnerable to all the malaises of Russia’s high-speed but volatile and squalid urbanization. One historian of St. Petersburg concludes that “deficient municipal services and retarded technology in public transport hindered the creation of bucolic suburban enclaves for the elites and the emerging middle classes, thus limiting use of the defensive strategy against perceived urban ills commonly employed by elites in cities throughout Europe and America.”117

Yet it is important to avoid taking too teleological an approach to the history of the dacha by tying its significance too closely to the fate of Russian society in general, or by asserting that its historical trajectory was leading inexorably from the eighteenth-century aristocratic villa to the late imperial suburbs. The dacha was a much richer phenomenon than either of those interpretations would allow. The enormous expansion of the out-of-town public was not a symptom of social decline or dilution but rather a remarkable opportunity for diverse urban groups and individuals to explore and reflect on a new range of experiences. The problems thrown up by urbanization did not prevent thousands of dachniki from spending tranquil, enjoyable, and culturally productive summers in the last few prerevolutionary decades; if anything, quite the opposite. For this reason, the next chapter will swap teleology for plurality, take a step away from socioeconomic history, and examine the many meanings attached to the dacha, both publicly and privately, in the late imperial period.

1. See Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946). Timasheff’s sociological approach has an important cultural-historical analogue in Vladimir Papernyi’s Kul’tura “dva” (1985; Moscow, 1996), which, to state crudely a rich argument, reveals a shift from a dynamic, decentered, avant-garde “Culture One” (which pervaded the public discourse of the 1920s) to a static, monumentalist “Culture Two” (which increasingly took over in the 1930s and 1940s).

2. For more on this kind of argument, see D. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke, 2000).

3. See K. Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,” Soviet Studies 35 (1983), and T. Martin, “Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. S. Fitzpatrick (London, 2000). For a thought-provoking comparative case, see A.G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1986).

4. See H.F. Jahn, “The Housing Revolution in Petrograd, 1917–1920,” JfGOE 38 (1990), and N.B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg, 1999), 178–84.

5. M. Ignatiefff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), 25 and 28. Another young witness recalled that the Revolution had brought Udel’naia (a dacha location significantly closer to Petrograd) only relatively slight changes: policemen were no longer in evidence and passers-by wore red ribbons. See L. I. Petrusheva, ed., Deti russkoi emigratsii (Moscow, 1997), 484.

6. Iu. V. Got’e, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, trans. and ed. T. Emmons (Princeton, 1988). Similarly, old residents of Moscow’s Udel’naia recalled that this dacha settlement had provided a refuge for members of the city’s intelligentsia in the years after 1917 (in the mid-1920s, however, it was dealt a heavy blow by the campaign against “former people”). See N. Chetverikova, “Byt’ li muzeiu dachnoi kul’tury,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 4321, 8–14 June 2000, 19.

7. TsMAM, f. 2311, op. 1, d. 28, 1. 520b.

8. See the Durnovo correspondence published in “Zakhvatchiki, imenuiushchie sebia “narod” . . .’: Neskol’ko dokumentov iz fonda P.P. Durnovo (1917–1919),” Zvezda, no. 11 (1994), 156–68, and the general account in P. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, 1967), 130–32.

9. Blok’s account of Lakhta in a diary entry of 11 June 1919 is in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh(Leningrad, 1960–63), 7:365–67

10. See, e.g., the report by a local housing committee in TsGA SPb, f. 78 (Primorsko-Sestroretskii raiispolkom), op. 1, d. 158, l. 63.

11. TsGAMO, f. 2591 (Moskovskii uezdnyi otdel kommunal’nogo khoziaistva), op. 3, d. 1, ll. 27–29, 33.

12. K. Chukovskii, Dnevnik, 1901–1929 (Moscow, 1997), 312–17. For a typical appeal to the authorities from a dacha owner whose property had been plundered, see TsGA SPb, f. 78, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 236–37.

13. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, l. 3450b.

14. TsMAM, f. 2311, op. 1, d. 28, l. 47.

15. M. Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing during the Experimental Years, 1918 to 1933,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. W. C. Brumfield and B. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 85–86.

16. A short memoir by a resident of the children’s colony and a letter of complaint by Klara Shvarts to her local commissar for education are to be found in V. Vitiazeva, Kamennyi ostrov (Leningrad, 1986), 244–58.

17. Got’e, Time of Troubles, 140. “Gorillas” is the term Got’e uses throughout his diary to refer to the Bolsheviks.

18. RGASPI, f. 78, op. 7, d. 32.

19. An appeal to the letter of the law is made by an evicted dacha owner in TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 32, l. 288 (though it did not lead to his reinstatement).

20. One example: a woman who had married a wealthy Moscow merchant’s son before the Revolution managed to hold on to the family’s spacious dacha in the village of Dunino, thanks to her personal acquaintance with the revolutionary Vera Figner (interview with the woman’s granddaughter, September 1999). The two other families I spoke to in Dunino were also the direct descendants of the well-to-do prerevolutionary owners of their dachas; one household had retained the property by gathering the large extended family in it and arguing that they were occupying no more than their normal housing entitlement, the other simply by going through the necessary bureaucratic procedures to register the dacha in their name with the Soviet authorities.

21. TsGA SPb, f. 78, op. 1, d. 158, l. 216.

22. Ibid., f. 469, op. 2, d. 5, ll. 35, 42. The OMKh did not desist, however: it subsequently issued several requests to investigate the social background of residents at particular addresses.

23. There was some confusion at the time on this point: see the clarification offered in S. Kisin, “Dachi i desiatiprotsentnaia norma,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 24 (1927), 10–12.

24. P. A. Portugalov and V. A. Dlugach, eds., Dachi i okrestnosti Moskvy: Spravochnik-putevoditel’ (Moscow, 1935), 176–77.

25. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, ll. 329–57.

26. Ibid., l. 349.

27. See, e.g., TsGA SPb, f. 469, op. 2, d. 784.

28. D. I. Sheinis, Zhilishchnoe zakonodatel’stvo, 3d ed. (Moscow, 1926), 150.

29. G. D. Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (Albany, 1984), chap. 2.

30. See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (New York, 1999), 46, esp. n. 22.

31. TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 13, l. 12. At the beginning of 1930, Moscow’s municipal dacha stock was distributed as follows: 4,000 under the trust; 7,300 under local ispolkoms; 1,000 under the oblast department of education (BSE, 1st ed.).

32. Portugalov and Dlugach, Dachi, 166.

33. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, d. 1, l. 339

34. K. N., “Po dacham,” VM, 7 May 1925, 2. Moscow’s municipalized stock was reported to comprise 3,000 dachas in 1927, but more than half of them were occupied by permanent residents: see M. K., “Dachi,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 16 (1927), 12–13. Leningrad was similar: as many as 40% of houses in its satellite towns (such as Detskoe Selo, Slutsk, and Ligovo) were taken up by commuters: see Mikhail [sic], “O derevne, prigorodakh i okrainakh,” Zhilishchnoe delo, no. 13 (1925), 8

35. TsGAMO, f. 2591, op. 3, l. 346. The encouragement of private reconstruction in dacha areas is signaled in A. Sheinis, “Stroit’ li zanovo ili dostraivat’ i vosstanavlivat’?” Zhilishchnoe stroitel’stvo, no. 4 (1922), 15.

36. LOGAV, f. R-3736, op. 1, d. 16; f. R-3758, op. 1, d. 117.

37. U. Pope-Hennessy, Leningrad: The Closed and Forbidden City (London, 1938), 40.

38. LOGAV, f. R-2907, op. 1, d. 47, l. 2. It seems, however, that the municipalized housing stock was not always managed with great efficiency: the OMKh produced a list of seventy-two unused municipalized buildings in Slutsk (formerly Gatchina) as of 1 Oct. 1928 (ibid., ll. 71–72).

39. “Rasshirenie dachnogo stroitel’stva,” VM, 27 Apr. 1925, 2. It is unlikely, however, that many of the dachas built on this scheme were used as summer houses (as opposed to year-round residences).

40. Reports on English garden cities and on other Western European models of deurbanization appeared quite regularly in the press: see, e.g., “Goroda-sady,” Zhilishchnoe tovarishchestvo, no. 6 (1922), 29; V. Flerov, “Tipy rabochikh poselkov,” Zhilishchnoe delo, no. 4 (1924), 18–21; S. Chaplygin, “Poselok-sad,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 1 (1927), 9; S. Lebedev, “Letnii otdykh v Germanii,” ZhT-ZhS, no. 22 (1927), 16–17.

41. A good short account of the Sokol settlement is M. V. Nashchokina, “Poselok ‘Sokol’—gorod-sad 1920-kh godov,” Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo Rossii, no. 12 (1994), 2–7. Sokol was a high-prestige project that espoused the “modern” values of comfort and convenience rather than any socialist collectivism. By January 1924 the cooperative already had 250 members, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia.

42. In 1928 there was even a move to transfer part of the Leningrad dacha trust’s holdings to cooperatives (LOGAV, f. R-2907, op. 1, d. 47, l. 49).

43. See “Perenosnaia dacha,” VM, 5 May 1925, 2, and “Razbornye dachi,” VM, 10 May 1927, 2.

44. V.S. Plotnikov, Deshevoe dachnoe stroitel’stvo (Moscow, 1930), chap. 2. The 1920s press, similarly, reported that dacha cooperatives were slow to develop: see Andr., “O dache, pochkakh i kooperatsii,” VM, 15 May 1926, 2.

45. VM, 31 Mar. 1932, 2.

46. LOGAV, f. R-3758, op. 1, d. 132.

47. See “Appetity dachevladel’tsev,” VM, 2 Apr. 1926, 2.

48. The distinction between “dacha settlements” and “rural settlements” had real administrative significance: inhabitants of dacha settlements were automatically granted Moscow registration (propiska), while in rural settlements this right was extended only to temporary residents (i.e., dachniki). See the resolution of the Moscow uezd ispolkom of 23 Apr. 1928, published in Zhilishchnoe zakonodatel’stvo: Spravochnik postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii tsentral’noi i mestnoi vlasti s prilozheniem sudebnoi praktiki za 1928 god (Moscow, 1929), 388–89.

49. Dachi i okrestnosti Moskvy: Putevoditel’ (Moscow, 1928).

50. For an account that argues that prerevolutionary habits were preserved “in a truncated form” in 1920s Leningrad, see “‘ . . . I kazhdyi vecher za shlagbaumami . . .,’” interview with E. E. Friken by Tat’iana Vol’skaia, Nevskoe vremia, 10 Aug. 1996. Similar is V. Pozdniakov, “Petrograd glazami rebenka,” Neva, no. 2 (1994), 285, 288. This view of the social composition of the dacha public of the 1920s is also shared by N. B. Lebina in her Povsedtievnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda, 251–52 (Lebina cites several other memoir sources).

51. V. Shefner, “Barkhatnyi put’: Letopis’ vpechatlenii,” Zvezda, no. 4 (1995), 26.

52. Thus a 1935 collection of “dacha” designs included only houses that were equipped for year-round habitation: see G. Liudvig, ed., Rekomendovannye proekty: Al’bom dach (Moscow, 1935). Note also G.M. Sudeikin, Al’bom proektov zimnikh dach . . . (Moscow, 1928). Here the author acknowledges the difficulty of establishing a precise classification of types of dwelling: “The designs do not give the buildings names such as izba, worker’s house, dacha, and so on . . . because several names apply to a single design, and this can cause confusion for the nonspecialist reader” (v). A handbook of the following decade divides dachas into four categories: zimnii, poluzimnii, letnii, and palatochnyi (“winter,” “semiwinter,” “summer,” and “camping”): see G.M. Bobov, Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo dach (Moscow, 1939).

53. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 1930–60 (London, 1990), 25–26.

54. T. Ivanova, Moi sovremenniki, kakimi ia ikh znala: Ocherki (Moscow, 1984), 30.

55. A. S. Livshits and К. V. Avilova, “Serebrianyi bor,” in Severo-zapadnyi okrug Moskvy (Moscow, 1997), 233–34. It was in Serebrianyi Bor that the sixteen-year-old Anna Larina was courted by Nikolai Bukharin in 1930: see Larina, This I Cannot Forget (London, 1993). Larina was the stepdaughter of Iurii Larin, a leading Bolshevik intellectual close to Lenin’s inner circle.

56. See the inventory in TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 238–42.

57. Details of correspondence with the Communal Bank and Sovnarkom are drawn from RGASPI, f. 124, op. 3, d. 368.

58. E. Bonner, Dochki-materi (Moscow, 1994), 50–54.

59. Ibid., 60–63, 80–81. Memoir material suggests that Bonner’s experiences were quite typical of the Old Bolshevik milieu. Nina Kosterina (b. 1921), daughter of two members of a Civil War partisan unit, spent much of her childhood in government institutions and Young Pioneer camps; in the summer of 1937 she was farmed out to relatives in a village near Tuchkovo, on the Moscow River. See The Diary of Nina Kosterina, trans. M. Ginsburg (London, 1972). The diary was first published, to great acclaim, in Novyi mir in December 1962. Kosterina was killed in action in December 1941. The most famous absent parents of the 1920s were Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Allilueva, who would commonly spend the summer in Sochi while their children lived at their dacha, mostly in Zubalovo, an estate formerly owned by prominent industrialists (the Zubalovs) that was turned into an enclave for the Party elite in 1919. See S. Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem k drugu (London, 1967).

60. “Ugroza dachnomu sezonu,” VM, 8 Feb. 1927, 2.

61. “Tseny na dachi upali,” VM, 14 May 1927, 2.

62. LOGAV, f. R-3736, op. 1, d. 16, ll. 67–68.

63. See, e.g., the cartoon “Dachi i protektsionizm” (VM, 20 May 1927, 2), which has as its caption the following dialogue: Peasant: “Do you need a big place?” Fat dachnik in checked jacket: “No, not that big, just for the general section of our organization: my mother-in-law, my wife, and the kids.”

64. Illiustrirovannyi putevoditel’ po okrestnostiam Moskvy (Moscow, 1926), 57. This example could be supplemented by innumerable newspaper reports of predatory dacha landlords and nouveau riche tenants.

65. S. Tret’iakov, “LEF i NEP,” LEF, no. 2 (1923), 72, quoted in E. Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), 11.

66. I. Babel’, “V dome otdykha,” in Zabytyi Babel’ (Ann Arbor, 1979), 130.

67. Details in this paragraph are from LOGAV, f. R-2907 (Leningradskii okruzhnoi otdel mestnogo khoziaistva), op. 1, d. 167.

68. See, e.g., TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 252–53.

69. Portugalov and Dlugach, Dachi, 173–74.

70. TsGAMO, f. 182, op. 1, d. 5a, ll. 66, 76–79; d. 20, l. 90. The locations named were Malakhovka, Kliaz’ma, Mamontovka, Tarasovka, Tomilino, and Kraskovo.

71. For examples, see ibid., d. 8, l. 390, and d. 20, l. 8.

72. Ibid., d. 20, l. 135.

73. M. A., “Otdykh v Serebrianom boru,” VM, 7 June 1927, 2.

74. Note, e.g., the efforts of the OMKh of the Leningrad oblispolkom to boost the Sestroretsk resort in 1930 (see TsGA SPb, f. 3199, op. 4, d. 14, ll. 381–83, 592–93, 632).

75. A. Ianvarskii, “Leto ne zhdet,” SP, 30 Mar. 1934, 4.

76. E. Simonov, “Dom otdykha i otdykh doma,” VM, 10 Mar. 1932, 1.

77. Ekskursionnyi spravochnik na leto 1933 g. (Moscow, 1933).

78. V. Baburov, “Prigorodnaia zona Moskvy,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 12 (1935), 27.

79. A. V., “Progulka za gorod,” VM, 25 May 1936, 2.

80. Otdykh pod Moskvoi: Spravochnik po lodochnym pristaniam i pliazham na leto 1940 goda (Moscow, 1940); V. L. Nekrasova, Putevoditel’ po severnym okrestnostiam Leningrada (Leningrad, 1935).

81. On the debates of the 1920s, see Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing,” 85–148.

82. A critique of the Sokol settlement on economic grounds is to be found in N. Markovnikov, “Poselok ‘Sokol,’” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 12 (1929), 1071–76. Ironically, Markovnikov one year earlier had published a short book in which he presented a sympathetic analysis of garden city projects abroad; in 1929, presumably, he buckled under the pressure of incipient Stalinism.

83. K. Paustovskii, “Moskovskoe leto,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1981–86), 6:90–111.

84. TsMAM, f. 718, op. 8, d. 35, 1. 96.

85. TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 2, l. 284.

86. In 1933, for example, the Moscow-based dacha trusts were ordered to evict citizens who had moved into dachas without the necessary official permission and tenants who had been subletting rooms or not paying their rent on time; these measures were confidently expected to free up “not fewer than 300 substantial dachas.” See “Spekulianty budut vyseleny,” VM, 17 Feb. 1933, 2.

87. Programma vsesoiuznogo otkrytogo konkursa na sostavlenie proektov (Leningrad, 1934). The designs presented in this competition were intended to be used in Lisii Nos, Mel’nichii Ruchei, and other areas of current dacha construction. Further standard designs of the mid-1930s are to be found in Liudvig, Rekomendovannye proekty. This book advocates the standardized mass production of prefabricated dachas and claims to be presenting the best of the current design solutions.

88. A transcript of the relevant meeting of the presidium of the oblispolkom can be found at TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 240–42.

89. TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 271, 317, and d. 78.

90. Ibid., d. 3, l. 87, and d. 46, ll. 251–52.

91. Ibid., d. 46, ll. 402–3.

92. See Radiukov, “Tish’ i glad’ vmesto dach,” and D. Taver, “Propala programma dachnogo stroitel’stva,” VKG, 2 Jan. 1932, 2, and 15 Mar. 1932, 2, respectively. Other examples in VKG, 14 Apr. and 8 and 10 May 1933; in Moscow, VM, 3 Apr. 1935. The question of dacha provision even found its way into the all-union press: e.g., S. Bogorad, “Khozhdenie po dacham,” Pravda, 13 Apr. 1937, 6.

93. E. Bermont, “Ia khochu dachu,” VM, 10 Apr. 1933, 3.

94. Corruption cases involving the acquisition of dachas by workers in the blat-ridden trade distribution system are described in E. Osokina, Za fasadom “stalinskogo izobiliia” (Moscow, 1999), 225, 226.

95. Text of the resolution by the Moscow oblispolkom in Portugalov and Dlugach, Dachi, 164.

96. For examples of public encouragement, see “Stroite dachi!,” VM, 15 July 1932, 1, and “Zabota o sebe samom: Est’ dachi, stolovye, detploshchadki,” VM, 3 Apr. 1933, 2.

97. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 46–460b. By mid-summer of 1937, the number of cooperatives had risen to 168, but only 85 had dachas completed and ready for use (ibid., d. 24, l. 30).

98. E.g., ibid., d. 42, l. 23; d. 378, ll. 49–51.

99. For statements of people’s perceived moral right to a dacha on these grounds, see ibid., d. 42, l. 117; d. 231, ll. 10-11, 60.

100. Ibid., d. 48, l. 2380b.

101. TsGA SPb, f. 2047, op. 1, d. 27, l. 151.

102. At a meeting of members of specific dacha cooperatives with representatives of Mosgordachsoiuz on 28 July 1937, several speakers complained that policy on subletting was formulated and implemented inconsistently; the head of the Moscow housing administration asserted that to forbid the practice would be foolish and counterproductive, given the drastic shortage of dacha accommodations in the region; cooperatives should, however, ensure that the prices asked were not extortionate (TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24, l.16).

103. See, e.g., “‘ . . . I kazhdyi vecher za shlagbaumami . . .’” Servants were often employed in city apartments in the 1920s and 1930s by working couples with children, and at the dacha they may have been even more commonly encountered (because the need for child care was greater, given the prolonged absences of parents in the city, and because the labor pool—peasant women—was closer at hand).

104. Irina Chekhovskikh’s interviews, no. 2, 6. (See “Note on Sources.”).

105. Bonner, Dochki-materi, 184–85.

106. E. S. Bulgakova, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1990).

107. The number of suburban passengers was reported to have gone up by 39.3% from 1931 to 1932 (“V poezde na dachu,” VKG, 22 Mar. 1933, 4).

108. The problems (as well as the achievements) are registered in A. I. Kuznetsov, “Arkhitekturnye problemy planirovki prigorodnoi zony,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 21–22 (1940), 3–7.

109. P. Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona i problema otdykha naseleniia Moskvy,” Sotsialisticheskii gorod, no. 5 (1936), 16–21.

110. no. V. Baburov, “Prigorodnaia zona Moskvy,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 12 (1935), 27–31. The same author reiterates his agenda with a view to the third five-year plan in “Osvoenie lesoparkovoi zony,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 9 (1937), 17–18.

111. See BSE, 1st ed., s.v. “Dacha.” By effectively redefining “dacha” as any form of suburban habitation, this entry made the claim that “up to 84%” of people living in dachas were “toilers.”

112. Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona,” 17.

113. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 10, l. 1. This picture of the dacha’s class profile is confirmed by the available lists of cooperative members (assembled ibid., dd. 26, 27, 28).

114. In one Pravda commentary, for example, the growth of dacha settlements was seen as indicative of the “enormous demand for a dacha by people who previously couldn’t even have dreamed of it,” and hence of the rising cultural level of Soviet society: see “Dacha,” Pravda, 23 Apr. 1935, 3.

115. Ia. M. Belitskii, Okrest Moskvy (Moscow, 1996), 22.

116. I.N. Sergeev, Tsaritsyno. Sukhanovo: Liudi, sobytiia, fakty (Moscow, 1998), 80–81.

117. N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir, trans. M. Hayward (London, 1971), 293.

118. Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona,” 17.

119. Muscovites away at the dacha between 15 Apr. and 30 Sept. retained rights to their living space in the city and were also entitled to sublet this space for the summer, as long as the prices asked were not “extortionate” (spekuliativnye): see “Nakanune dachnogo sezona,” VM, 9 May 1933, 1.

120. VKG, 15 May 1932, 4.

121. “Na dachu! Novyi poriadok naima dach!” VM, 12 May 1932, 3. This policy had to be reiterated in the press the following year, because peasants were unwilling to believe that it remained in force (see “V mae na dachu. L’goty ostaiutsia,” VM, 30 Apr. 1933, 2).

122. “Skol’ko platit’ za dachu?” VKG, 7 Apr. 1932, 2.

123. A. Vetrov, “Kontsert v dachnom poezde: Obraztsovyi prigorodnyi poezd,” VM, 4 Apr. 1934, 3.

124. M. Iv., “Dachnikov eto interesuet!” VKG, 23 May 1933, 2. In 1935 it was estimated that dacha areas needed to be supplied with 20 tons of bread daily (“Chto zhdet dachnika?” VKG, 16 May 1935, 3). For a survey of supply problems in Moscow dacha locations, see V. Starov, “Ot dachnika trebuiut podvigov, a on ishchet otdykha,” VM, 27 Apr. 1933, 2.

125. D. Maslianenko, “Dachnye kontrabandisty,” VKG, 2 June 1935, 3.

126. “Kаk perevezti veshchi na dachu?” VM, 22 Apr. 1935, 2.

127. A rhymed reflection on the imperfection of the Lisii Nos development is A. Flit, “Razmyshlenie na Lis’em nosu,” VKG, 3 June 1933, 2.

128. A. Kagan, “‘Samostroi,’” VKG, 28 Mar. 1935, 3.

129. I. Girbasova, “Sem’ia Stroit dachu,” VKG, 26 Apr. 1935, 3.

130. A. Gerb, “Dacha v lesu,” VM, 3 July 1935, 2.

131. V. Paperny, “Men, Women, and the Living Space,” in Brumfield and Ruble, Russian Housing, 162. Some published materials of the 1930s called for increased public coverage of dacha construction projects and for greater architectural experimentation. One article recommended hexagonal clusters instead of the usual rectilinear street plans of dacha settlements: see V. P. Kalmykov, “Dachnye poselki,” Sovetskaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1934), 46–51. The same article criticized the “architectural conservatism” of the izba-style dacha.

132. That the “communal” dacha lifestyle was unpopular can be surmised from the construction policy of the Moscow dacha cooperative, which by the mid-1930s had amassed 3,081 dachas with only 3,791 sets of living quarters (Sokolov, “Prigorodnaia zona,” 18).

133. Bobov, Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo dach, 12, 21.

134. Examples are given in Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 100–101.

135. One example was the village of Zhukovka, where many peasants were dekulakized and exiled and their land was made available for the construction of elite dachas: see L.M. Trizna, “Zhukovka,” in Istoriia sel i dereven’ podmoskov’ia XIV–XX vv., vol. 5 (Moscow, 1993), 10.

136. Iurii Druzhnikov, quoted in L. Vasil’eva, Kremlevskie zheny (Moscow, 1994), 109.

137. Ibid. Other details on Stalin’s dacha taken from Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem. A map of elite dacha settlements in the Moscow region is given in T. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Sodalist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 512.

138. Bonner, Dochki-materi, 196.

139. E. N. Machul’skii, “Roslovka,” in Severo-zapadnyi okrug Moskvy, 312–13. The dacha was, from the point of view of the secret police, a perfectly convenient working location: Nina Kosterina, for example, saw her family’s dacha landlord arrested in the summer of 1937 (Diary, 42–43).

140. In July 1937 a representative of Mosgordachsoiuz reported that in the past year thirty-four members of the Podpol’shchik cooperative (run by Old Bolsheviks) had been arrested, and that a similar pattern of events could be observed in many other cooperatives. His conclusion was that “anyone who feels like it can infiltrate our cooperatives. We have provided enemies of the people with dachas” (TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24, l. 29).

141. On the nomenklatura dacha prerogative, see Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class, trans. E. Mosbacher (London, 1984), 228–39. The personalistic nature of dacha allocation in the 1930s is suggested by archival materials from the Sovnarkom apparat: see, e.g., GARF, f. R-5446, op. 34, d. 1, ll. 12, 147.

142. Details in Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s’ Moscow Show Trials, trans. J. Butler (London, 1990), 86–93. Nor was this Vyshinsky’s only intervention in the life of dacha settlements during the Terror: in October 1938 he wrote to the manager of Sovnarkom affairs complaining that although several members of Ranis (a cooperative for representatives of academia and the arts) had recently been arrested, their dachas had been sealed up and their redistribution had been delayed (GARF, f. R-9542, op. 1, d. 41, l. 2).

143. “V Maleevke stalo luchshe, no eshche ne stalo khorosho,” LG, 11 July 1932, 1, and E. Pel’son, “V Maleevke ne stalo luchshe,” LG, 29 July 1932, 4.

144. D. Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury”: Gosudarstvo i pisateli 1925–1938: Dokumenty (Moscow, 1997), 177–78, 197–98. Similar expenditure was sanctioned by other Soviet organizations: the Union of Soviet Architects, for example, resolved in 1936 to “increase funding for building and buy dachas from 100,000 rubles to 300,000 rubles” (Paperny, “Men, Women, and the Living Space,” 162).

145. Quoted in Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury,” 202.

146. See, e.g., a letter of September 1933 in which Kalinin advises Voroshilov against setting up individual dachas in Sochi, given the expense of maintaining them, the potential for corruption in their allocation, and their impracticality: if a war were to erupt in the region, it would not be easy to turn them into hospitals; for this reason, collective rest homes should be preferred: RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 42, l.38. The tendency of Party officials to affect “democratic” manners when on vacation is attested by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who recalls her husband’s improbable encounter with Nikolai Ezhov, a future administrator of the Terror, in Sukhumi in 1930 (Hope against Hope, 322). A similar account of free-and-easy socializing is given by Anna Larina, who saw Bukharin in 1930 while staying in Mukhalatka “in a rest home for members of the Politburo and other leaders” (Bukharin, however, stayed at a separate dacha in Gurzuf) (This I Cannot Forget, 107).

147. L. Sobolev, Neizmennomu drugu: Dnevniki. Stat’i. Pis’ma (Moscow, 1986), 280 (a letter of May 1938).

148. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 111–12, 209, 125. Pasternak’s Peredelkino period coincided with his general withdrawal from and disgust with Soviet public life, his cultivation of a simpler prose style and authorial persona, his growing interest in Chekhov rather than Tolstoi as a model, and, not least, his engagement with the usad’ba tradition in Russian literature: see B. Zingerman, “Turgenev, Chekhov, Pasternak: K probleme prostranstva v p’esakh Chekhova,” in his Teatr Chekhova i ego mirovoe znachenie (Moscow, 1988), esp. 145–67. Numerous other accounts echo Pasternak’s attachment to his country retreat. Note, e.g., a 1938 diary entry where the alcoholic writer and literary functionary Vladimir Stavskii launches into an undistinguished but nonetheless rapturous description of the views from his dacha at Skhodnia: V. Garros, N. Korenevskaya, and T. Lahusen. eds., Intimacy and Terror (New York, 1995), 219–21.

149. TsGAMO, f. 7539, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 1–36.

150. Quotation from Shtange’s diary, in Garros et al., Intimacy and Terror, 193.

151. E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 111–12, 209.

152. TsGAMO, f. 7539, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 1–21.

153. Condusions in this paragraph are based on a study of the lists of cooperative members and dachas built in TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, dd. 26, 27, 28. Variation in the size and style of cooperative dachas is subject to disapproving comment in A. R., “Voprosy dachnogo stroitel’stva,” Zhilishchnaia kooperatsiia, no. 6 (1935), 43–45.

154. “O sokhranenii zhilishchnogo fonda i uluchshenii zhilishchnogo khoziaistva v gorodakh,” Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva, no. 69 (1937), art. 314.

155. This is the argument of, e.g., Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development, 36–37.

156. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 23.

157. See Zhilishchnye zakony: Sbornik vazhneishikh zakonov SSSR i RSFSR, postanovlenii, instruktsii i prikazov po zhilishchnomu khoziaistvu (Moscow and Leningrad, 1947), 9.

158. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 23, l. 102.

159. The rights of people who owned houses as personal property (e.g., the right to evict tenants once the term of their lease had expired if it could be proved the house was needed for the owner’s personal requirements) are given due emphasis in an authoritative gloss on the October 1937 decree: see R. Orlov, “Poriadok primeneniia novogo zhilishchnogo zakona,” Sovetskaia iustitsiia, no. 1 (1938), 20–24.

160. TsMAM, f. 1956, op. 1, d. 24, l. 16.

161. See A. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998).

He’s got coppers on his gate, a nice place out of town,

1. The idea of “socialist suburbanization” is borrowed from Iu. Simagin, “Ekonomiko-geograficheskie as-pekty suburbanizatsii v moskovskom stolichnom regione” (dissertation, Moscow, 1997).

2. “Suburbs” is a difficult term with different shades of meaning even in countries so apparently culturally congruent as Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. One cogent explication lists five main aspects of the concept (which may, however, be weighted rather differently from one country or city to another): (1) peripheral location in relation to a dominant urban center; (2) partly or wholly residential character; (3) low density; (4) distinctive culture or way of life; (5) separate community identity, often embodied in local government. See R. Harris and P. J. Larkham, “Suburban Foundation, Form, and Function,” in Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function, ed. Harris and Larkham (New York, 1999), 8–14.

3. Thanks to Jana Howlett for the transcript of this discussion.

4. See Sh. Muladzhanov, “Pomest’e po-ministerski,” Moskovskaia pravda, 2 July 1991, 3.

5. S. Taranov, “Sobstvennost’ KPSS: Koe-chto iasno, no daleko ne vse,” Izvestiia, 27 Aug, 1991, 1.

6. A. Kravtsov, “‘Chtob ia tak zhil!’” Argumenty i fakty, no. 35 (1991), 6.

7. Full details in “Bigwigs’ holdings,” at <http://vlad.tribnet.com/1997/iss153/text/table.htm>.

8. See “Outrage as deluxe dachas rise from rubble,” at <http://vlad.tribnet.com/1998/iss171/text/news10.html>

9. Early examples from journalism include Muladzhanov, “Pomest’e po-ministerski,” and E. Berezneva, “Kto, gde, kogda i pochem privatiziroval gosdachi,” Kuranty, 7 June 1991, 1. There is an intelligent discussion of this issue in T. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.), 713–14.

10. On recent developments in Peredelkino, see N. Emel’ianova, “Nepriiatel’ v Peredelkine,” Vechernii klub, 25 Sept. 1999, and Robin Buss, “Letter from Peredelkino,” TLS, 24 Sept. 1999, 14.

11. “O merakh po razvitiiu uslug po remontu i stroitel’stvu zhilishch, postroek dlia sadovodcheskikh tovarishchestv, garazhei i drugikh stroenii po zakazam naseleniia v 1986–1990 godakh i v period do 2000 goda” (21 May 1985), text in SPP RSFSR, no. 15 (1985), art. 71. The late 1980s were also a time when the Party finally gave its unqualified approval to the “personal subsidiary farm” (lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo) that had for so long endured an equivocal and shifting legal status: see V. Ustiukova, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo: Pravovoi rezhim imushchestva (Moscow, 1990), esp. 7–16, and Z. Kalugina, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo v SSSR: Sotsial’nye reguliatory i rezul’taty razvitiia (Novosibirsk, 1991), esp. 4–7.

12. “Ob utverzhdenii Tipovogo ustava sadovodcheskogo tovarishchestva” (11 Nov. 1986), SPP RSFSR, no. 18 (1986), art. 132.

13. “O merakh po dal’neishemu razvitiiu kollektivnogo sadovodstva i ogorodnichestva v RSFSR” (5 June 1986), SPP RSFSR, no. 20 (1986), art. 149.

14. “Ob utverzhdenii Tipovogo ustava sadovodcheskogo tovarishchestva” (31 March 1988), SPP RSFSR no. 10 (1988), art. 45.

15. “O sozdanii kompleksnykh torgovo-zakupochnykh punktov v sadovodcheskikh i sadovo-ogorodnykh tovarishchestvakh” (6 Apr. 1989), SPP RSFSR, no. 11 (1989), art. 56.

16. V. S. Zakharov, “Ochered’ na lono prirody,” Nedelia, no. 40 (1988).

17. Sotsial’noe razvitie SSSR: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1990), 207.

18. “O pervoocherednykh zadachakh po realizatsii zemel’noi reformy,” in Dachniki: Vash dom, sad i ogorod (a newspaper published in the Moscow region), no. 1 (1991), 3.

19. Simon Clarke et al., “The Russian Dacha and the Myth of the Urban Peasant,” paper posted at <http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/complabstuds/russia/russint.htm>.

20. “O dopolnitel’nykh merakh po razvitiiu lichnykh podsobnykh khoziaistv grazhdan, kollektivnogo sadovodstva i ogorodnichestva,” SPP RSFSR, no. 22 (1987), art. 135.

21. “O dal’neishem razvitii podsobnykh sel’skikh khoziaistv predpriiatii, organizatsii i uchrezhdenii” (14 Oct. 1987), SPP RSFSR, no. 21 (1987), art. 131. Hitches in the implementation of the policy were also mentioned in Ustiukova, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo, 3–4; this book went on to note (5–6) that a more precise definition of “nonlabor income” (netrudovoi dokhod) was required.

22. “O pervoocherednykh merakh po obespecheniiu zhitelei g. Moskvy zemel’nymi uchastkami dlia organizatsii kollektivnogo sadovodstva i ogorodnichestva” (22 Feb. 1991), SPP RSFSR, no. 12 (1991), art. 159.

23. See, e.g., the complaints referred to in the resolution of 5 July 1989 “O dopolnitel’nykh merakh po razvitiiu lichnykh podsobnykh khoziaistv grazhdan, kollektivnogo sadovodstva i ogorodnichestva. . . ,” SPP RSFSR, no. 18 (1989), art. 104.

24. Research note contributed by Denis Shaw to “News Notes,” Soviet Geography 32 (1991): 361.

25. Gavriil Popov, interviewed in “Khod konem?” Dachniki: Vash dom, sad i ogorod, no. 1 (1991), 2.

26. V. V. Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod: Kliuchevye elementy zhizneustroistva,” Mir Rossii, no. 4 (1997), 81.

27. The next step, however—from life ownership (vladenie) to unconditional ownership (sobstvennost’)—was considerably more problematic and caused fierce political debates in the Yeltsin-era Duma: see the account in S. K. Wegren, Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, 1998), 160–66.

28. “Ob otvode zemel’nykh uchastkov v Moskovskoi oblasti dlia maloetazhnogo stroitel’stva i sadovodstva dlia zhitelei g. Moskvy i oblasti,” in Dachnoe khoziaistvo: Sbornik normativnykh aktov (Moscow, 1996). A subsequent presidential decree gave renewed support for provision of land to individual builders around the Russian Federation: see “О dopolnitel’nykh merakh po nadeleniiu grazhdan zemel’nymi uchastkami” (23 Apr. 1993), ibid.

29. See Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod,” 72, 86n.

30. Dacha—mini-ferma (Moscow, 1993).

31. Simagin, “Ekonomiko-geograficheskie aspekty,” chap. 2.

32. Iu. Nikiforova, “Mesto pod solntsem na 111-m kilometer,” in Peterburg, supplement to Argumenty i fakty, no. 31 (1997), 2.

33. V. Sergachev, “Dacha: Ot neveroiatnogo do ochevidnogo,” Birzha truda, 17–23 May 1999, 1.

34. R. Struyk and K. Angelici, “The Russian Dacha Phenomenon,” Housing Studies 11 (1996), 233–50.

35. Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod,” 73.

36. Rossiiskaia gazeta, 8 Aug. 1997, 8.

37. A. Simonenko, “Na ogorode vse ravny!” Nevskoe vremia, 15 May 1999.

38. Interesting material on the dacha habit, especially its role in the lives of a small-town intelligentsia marooned in post-Soviet conditions, can be found in A. White, “Social Change in Provincial Russia: The Intelligentsia in a Raion Center,” Europe-Asia Studies 52 (2000): 677–94 (this article takes as its case study a town in Tver’ oblast, four hours by bus from Moscow). Iaroslavl’ is a city known to me where the word “dacha” seems to be used exactly as it is in Moscow (most of the dwellings thus denoted are garden-plot houses in crowded settlements on the far bank of the Volga). The weekly publication that carries small ads in Petrozavodsk also refers to “dachas”: see “Vse”—ezhenedelnik besplatnykh chastnykh ob"iavlenii, at <http://vse.karelia.ru>. And to judge by one other Web page, the term “dacha” has made inroads as far east as Amursk: <http://www.amursk.ru/lschool/dachas.htm>.

39. Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod,” 72. It is telling that the most in-depth of the dacha periodicals in the early 1990s took “Dachniki” as its main title, even though its focus was exclusively the garden-plot dacha (and this point was specifically mentioned in the editorial of the first issue: “Obrashchenie k chitateliu,” Dachniki: Vash dom, sad i ogorod, no. 1 [1990], 2).

40. In 1998 the Center for Citizen Initiatives showed awareness of those less well equipped by pioneering a roof-top gardening scheme in St. Petersburg to help urban residents with no access to dacha plots: see <http://www.fadr.msu.ru/mirrors/www.igc.apc.org/cci/agirof.htm>.

41. Details in this and the next paragraph are taken from Clarke et al., “Russian Dacha.” Fully compatible with Clarke’s conclusions is H.T. Seeth, S. Chachnov, A. Surinov, and J. von Braun, “Russian Poverty: Muddling Through Economic Transition with Garden Plots,” World Development 26 (1998), 1611–23.

42. Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod,” 55.

43. Simagin, “Ekonomiko-geograficheskie aspekty,” chap. 2.

44. For a definition of the Soviet city as an “entirely separate category of urban settlement,” see R. A. French, “The Individuality of the Soviet City,” in The Sodalist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy, ed. French and F. E. I. Hamilton (Chichester, 1979), esp. 101–2. For a succinct “typology of socio-economic and environmental differentiation in the larger Soviet city,” see D. M. Smith, “The Socialist City,” in Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies, ed. G. Andrusz, M. Harloe, and I. Szelenyi (Oxford, 1996), esp. 82–84.

45. On the steady erosion of the greenbelt in the 1970s and 1980s, see Colton, Moscow, 468–85.

46. For an early example, see A. Neverov, “Chem pakhnet na Medvezh’ikh ozerakh?” Moskovskii komsomolets, 15 Sept. 1990, 2. For an inside account of the boom in the dacha plot market, I am indebted to an unpublished memoir by Vadim Kulinchenko, who between 1988 and 1991 served on the ispolkom of a settlement in an area that was especially attractive to the unofficial property developers of late Soviet Russia. According to Kulinchenko, in these years the dacha “was a matter not of relaxation in the country but purely of property. The local authorities were showered with blows from everyone up to the very highest levels of state power . . . , and in the localities people buckled.”

47. I am grateful to Rachael Mann for showing me her B.A. dissertation, “Moscow’s Suburbia or Exurbia?” (University of Glasgow, 1998), where these results are laid out. My own interviews and questionnaire results suggest a similarly mixed picture.

48. See J. Bater, Russia and the Post-Soviet Scene: A Geographical Perspective (London, 1996), 150–51.

49. See Wegren, Agriculture and the State, esp. 163–64.

50. O. Kostiukova, “Dachi sovetskikh pisatelei po-prezhnemu v tsene,” Segodnia, 8 June 1998.

51. D. Zhelobanov and A. Grigor’ev, “Dachniki i dachevladel’tsy ishchut drug druga bez posrednikov,” Delovoi Peterburg, 26 May 1999.

52. The statistical comparison is made in Struyk and Angelici, “Russian Dacha Phenomenon,” 247.

53. A. Aleksandrova, “Novoe dachnoe myshlenie,” Obshchaia gazeta, 31 July 6 Aug. 1997. Note also glossy lifestyle magazines such as Dom & dacha (put out by the Burda publishing house from 1995), and the dacha furniture advertised at <http://www.dos.ic.sci-nnov.ru/gorodez/english/str31.htm>. The commitment of New Russians to what they probably thought of as a manorial way of life at the dacha is suggested by their common insistence on wood-fired heating rather than the much more low-maintenance gas (thanks to Judith Pallot for this observation).

54. Struyk and Angelici, “Russian Dacha Phenomenon,” 243.

55. In 1999, for example, dacha designs were displayed at an exhibition in Saratov (a selection of the designs were posted at <http://www.expo.saratov.ru/rism>).

56. On abandoned plots in Leningrad oblast, see R. Maidachenko, “Est’ svobodnye uchastki,” SPb ved, 27 Apr. 1999.

57. Vagin, “Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod,” 75–76.

58. Struyk and Angelici, “Russian Dacha Phenomenon,” 240.

59. Nikiforova, “Mesto pod solntsem,” 2.

60. “Iuridicheskaia konsul’tatsiia,” Dachnyi kaleidoskop, no. 7–8 (1992), 1.

61. “Voina na ogorodakh,” Dachnyi kaleidoskop, no. 9–10 (1992), 1.

62. Vera Popova, “Zona vne zakona,” Chas u dachi, no. 2, supplement to Peterburgskii chas pik, 6 May 1999.

63. “Ob osnovakh federal’noi zhilishchnoi sfery” (24 Dec. 1992), sec. 2, art. 9, in Dachnoe khoziaistvo, 80; N. Kalinin, “Dacha dolzhna byt’ ‘V zakone,’” Trud, 11 Nov. 1997.

64. A. Litvinov, “Kommunalki na bolote,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 8 Aug. 1997, 8.

65. Note, e.g., the presidential decree “O gosudarstvennoi podderzhke sadovodov, ogorodnikov i vladel’tsev lichnykh podsobnykh khoziaistv” (7 June 1996), in Dachnoe khoziaistvo, 45.

66. An early discussion of the issues (which centers on the implications of the RSFSR Land Code for occupiers of garden plots) is to be found in “Nadezhnuiu zashchitu pravam sadovodov,” Dachniki: Vash dom, sad i ogorod, no. 11 (1991), 3.

67. M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York, 1988).

68. See the headline exhortation “Leto—eto otdykh, leto—eto trud,” Dachnaia gazeta (Stavropol’), no. 11 (1992), 1; and M. Nikolaeva, “Pervaia zapoved’—khranit’ i vozdelyvat’ sad,” Dachnyi sezon: Gazeta dlia ural’skikh sadovodov i ogorodnikov (Cheliabinsk), no. 9 (1998), 1.

69. This attitude is nicely captured by Nancy Ries, with specific reference to the Russian language: Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 30.

70. Irina Chekhovskikh, interview no. 5, p. 7 (see “Note on Sources”).

71. Ibid., interview no. 1, p. 6.

72. Ries, Russian Talk, 133–35. A more in-depth anthropological account of the post-Soviet dacha is R. Hervouet, “‘Etre à la datcha’: Eléments d’analyse issus d’une recherche exploratoire,” in Le Belarus: L’etat de l’exception, ed. F. Depelteau and A. Lacassagne (Sainte-Foy, Québec, forthcoming). This article draws attention to the subjective, as opposed to economic, motivations that underlie the dacha habit, and to the opportunities it brings for individual agency and self-affirmation. Thanks to Ronan Hervouet for letting me see his work in advance of publication.

73. These points are argued well in A. Vysokovskii, “Will Domesticity Return?” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. W. C. Brumfield and B. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993).

74. Clarke et al., “Russian Dacha.”

75. Gavriil Popov, interviewed in “Khod konem?” Dachniki: Vash dom, sad i ogorod, no. 1 (1991), 2.

76. “Limonov khochet razbit’ divan Oblomova,” Smena, 5 Dec. 1996.

As postcommunist Russia began to inventory the perquisites of the Soviet elite, the dacha emerged as one of the main accessories of the privileged class. There was no more high-profile commentary on this subject than Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun (1994). In its mise-en-scène this film is a Chekhovian ensemble piece: a family assembles at the dacha, but soon the air is thick with tension as long-standing animosities and disagreements are discharged into the atmosphere. Conflicts—along social, generational, and emotional fault lines—threaten vaguely but persistently to erupt into acrimoniousskandal.

But this is no cherry orchard. Rather, it is a dacha owned by a family from the old Moscow intelligentsia—the older generation remembers receiving here such illustrious guests as Boris Chaliapin and Sergei Rachmaninov—which has now been incorporated into a settlement for artists, writers, performers, and musicians (identified by the acronym KhLAM, which spells a Russian word meaning “junk”). The daughter of the family, Marusia, has married an Old Bolshevik and Civil War hero, Kotov, a rough-hewn national celebrity. This domestic milieu provides the setting for the entrance of Mitia, a former sweetheart of Marusia’s, who, after compromising himself by siding with the Whites, was lured into becoming a Bolshevik agent. Now, in 1936, he is working for the NKVD and, as is revealed in the dénouement, has been given the task of arresting Kotov, who is to fall victim to the next wave of the Terror.

The film was deservedly admired for its fine acting and high production values. But, like so much of Mikhalkov’s work, it aims for rather more than that, implying nothing less than an interpretation of modern Russian history and society. The broad-shouldered, potent, heroic, nationally rooted, ultimately martyred man of the people (Kotov) stands in opposition to the opportunist, cowardly, villainous, slightly built, childless cosmopoli-tan intelligent (Mitia). Kotov’s manly qualities are in further contrast to the almost painfully Chekhovian family into which he has entered by marriage. His in-laws are as cultured, sociable, high-strung, and charmingly set in their ways as any Gaev or Astrov viewed with the softening hindsight of revolution and state terrorism. As one critic noted, “It’s as if the old dacha folk of Burnt by the Sun are the heroes of Mechanical Piano1 who’ve grown older and survived to the 30s.”2

The case of Burnt by the Sun provides a fitting epilogue for this book, and not just in the sense that it offers a post-Soviet perspective on the dacha phenomenon. Rather more significantly, it illustrates the ease with which the dacha, over the past two centuries of its history, has been overlaid with social and cultural mythmaking. Mikhalkov could be accused of employing a kind of artistic sleight of hand in his portrayal of 1930s exurbia. For, as he himself has admitted, the dacha lifestyle depicted in his film is drawn from his recollections of a childhood spent in the milieu of the Soviet cultural elite. It does not necessarily have much to do with the ways of the prerevolutionary artistic intelligentsia.3 Here, as in many other texts mentioned in this book, the single image of the dacha is made to bear a considerable cultural burden—in this case, to elide disjoined social and cultural worlds and to evoke a transhistorical Russianness that was in Mikhalkov’s view severely damaged but not destroyed by the evil furies of the early Soviet period. The evil is conveniently externalized and objectified in the demonic Mitia, while Russianness resides in the unchanging rhythms of exurban life.

But the fact that Mikhalkov was tempted to make two such radically different eras coalesce, besides leading us to question the director’s personal motives and wider ideological purposes, illustrates a complementary point that is also central to this book: much as we may want to drag the dacha out of the cultural responses it elicits, in practice it always remains mired in them. And this in turn suggests a large potential difficulty: how are we to disentangle social and cultural history? Or, to put it still more simply, how can we know things reliably about the history of a phenomenon such as the dacha?

To these questions I can offer two broad answers. The first is practical: the only way to begin to bridge the gap between social and cultural approaches is to consult as wide a range of sources as possible. One of the advantages of studying an everyday phenomenon is that it leaves traces—small, perhaps, but discernible—in many places. The second answer is theoretical: there is in fact often no need to disentangle social and cultural history. Cultural meanings do not float in some asocial stratosphere but are themselves tied to and articulated in social relations and practices. In no field of social history would this insight seem to have more obvious relevance than in the study of people’s dwellings and habitats.Housing is so closely tied to people’s identities and to their place in the community that it would be deeply unsatisfactory to make a study of bricks and mortar without inquiring as to people’s subjective understanding of their dwellings. Many anthropologists have recognized the significance of the dwelling unit by making the household, rather than the family, the starting point for their work.4 In this light, the pronounced subjectivity of many of the sources cited in this book should be seen not as a problem but as a small contribution toward a solution.

Yet this approach poses problems for inquiry into the historical long term; it is unclear, for example, how it accounts for and analyzes change over time. One consequence of the mixing of social and cultural history is the difficulty of establishing chronological cut-off points. Any history that is at least as much cultural as it is social will tend to undermine clear-cut periodizations, to subvert simplistic notions of historical causality, to stress continuity over rupture, and to divert attention from a historiography fixated on certain key dates and schematic arguments associated with them. In Russian history, of course, the biggest landmark is 1917, and the most schematic arguments concern the nature of the Soviet system.

All this is not to belittle the enormity of the Bolshevik coup as a factor in Russia’s subsequent history or even to assert that it is not a watershed of some kind in the history of the dacha. In one sense, the October Revolution divides the present study neatly into two: it brought into being a society in which large and increasing numbers of urban office workers grew food on allotments or dacha plots; before 1917, by contrast, they did so only rarely. The extent of food gardening varied greatly through the Soviet period, and until the 1960s the plots of land where vegetables were grown were not generally called dachas; yet the Soviet takeover fundamentally rerouted Russian exurbia/suburbia toward the function of subsistence. In the 1980s and 1990s the dacha fused in many people’s minds with the allotment shack.

Nor is 1917 the only date that can be used to punctuate a history of the dacha. My chapter titles imply and my argument in many places makes explicit that this history can meaningfully be divided into successive phases, even if they invariably overlap and remain blurred around the edges.

But it is equally possible to identify aspects of the dacha’s history that are common to several epochs; to show that cultural meanings and social practices could straddle historical divides, even if people and buildings very often did not. Most obviously, for the last two hundred years the dacha has been easy prey for stereotypes that have been largely negative and have many common features. Reasons are not hard to find: Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be called a consumer society only with qualifications immeasurably greater than are necessary in the case of Western Europe, and so the discursive space available for leisure and its appurtenances was much smaller than in England or France.5 And the dacha’s public image was always colored by Russian social cir-cumstances. The tendency to see dachas as emblematic of shallowness and vanity, of rootlessness and mercantilism, has been remarkably enduring ever since summer houses were identified as an essentially Petersburg phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. The dacha was easily accommodated in an emerging bipolar typology that contrasted the cold bureaucratic granite of the new capital with the warm familial earthiness of the old. In time this contrast weakened, as Moscow acquired a prominent dacha tradition of its own, but it set the tone for much subsequent commentary on exurbia. The drafty hut made out of “barge timber,” first exposed by Petersburg journalists in the 1840s, was a regular fallback for their later colleagues.

There have, however, been distinguished exceptions to the general rule of public disapproval of the dacha. The first is that country houses inhabited by members of the intelligentsia have received more sympathetic treatment than average. Many of the writers who gave short shrift to dachniki in their articles and newspaper columns were themselves contentedly ensconced in summer houses. The double standard of a typical purveyor of doggerel was pithily laid bare by the prolific Soviet poet and translator Samuil Marshak:

There once was a man quite perverse