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