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