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. K. la. Poluianskii, Dachi: Temnye storony naemnykh dach i vygoda stroit’ sobstvennye dachi (St. Petersburg, 1894), 1.
2. Alfavitnyi sbornik rasporiazhenii po S.-Peterburgskomu Gradonachal’stvu i Politsii. izvlechennykh iz prikazov za 1866–1885 gg. (St. Petersburg. 1886). 110–11. These regulations went into force between 1879 and 1885.
3. M. Dobuzhinskii, Vospominaniia, vol. 1 (New York, 1976), 31.
4. J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964), 79.
5. See Ot konki do tramvaia: Iz istorii peterburgskogo transporta (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1993).
6. An excellent account of St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century is J. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), which discusses all these points in exhaustive detail.
7. See 0.1. Chernykh, “Dachnoe stroitel’stvo Peterburgskoi gubernii XVIII-nachaia XX vv.” (dissertation, St. Petersburg, 1993), 1:38–43·
8. L. M. Reinus, Dostoevskii v Staroi Russe (Leningrad, 1969), 8, 36–37.
9. Generalizations in this and following paragraphs are based on a study of advertisements in Peterburgskii listok, Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi politsii, Moskovskii listok, and Russkoe slovo.
10. On middling civil servants, see S.F. Svetlov, Peterburgskaia zhizn’ v kontse XIX stoletiia (v 1892 godu) (St. Petersburg, 1998), 21–22. Indications of the price range for rented dachas can be found in guidebooks; e.g., N. Fedotov, Opisanie i podrobnye plany dachnykh mestnostei po finliandskoi zheleznoi doroge(St. Petersburg, 1886) (this is an especially valuable source, as the author apparently did not rely on newspaper advertisements but made inquiries directly of dacha owners and caretakers); and L.A. Feigin, Sputnik dachnika po okrestnostiam Moskvy (Moscow, 1888).
11. See, e.g., G. M. Sudeikin, “Al’bom proektov” dach, osobniakov, dokhodnykh domov, sluzhb i t.p. (Moscow, 1912), 7–9·
12. V. Stori, Dachnaia arkhitektura, vol. 1, 12’ proektov i smet deshevykh postroek (St. Petersburg, 1907), 3.
13. A.I. Tilinskii, Deshevye postroiki: 100 proektov, v razlichnykh stiliakh, dachnykh i usadebnykh domov, sadovykh besedok, ograd, palisadnikov, kupalen, sadovoi mebeli (St. Petersburg, 1913), 55–56. Similar is A. Dal’berg, Prakticheskie sovety pri postroike dach (St. Petersburg, 1902).
14. P. Griundling, Motivy sadovoi arkhitektury (St. Petersburg, 1903).
15. See, e.g., K. Barantsevich, “Poslednii dachnik,” in his Kartinki zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1902).
16. Dachnitsa, 15 June 1912, 1–2.
17. See, e.g., A. Miliukov, Rasskazy iz obydennogo byta, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg, 1875), 49–54.
18. See “Podgotovitel’nye rasporiazheniia pered pereezdom na dachu,” Domostroi, no. 1 (1892), 2–3. An alternative was to put furniture in storage, a practice described in E. Mandel’shtam, “Vospominaniia,” Novyi mir, no. 10 (1995), 126.