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