98. Dachnyi vestnik, no. 1 (1909), 4.
99. Dachnik, no. 1 (1912), 2.
100. All these problems were discussed at length in 1909 at the first 51. Petersburg congress oflocal societies from dacha and suburban settlements. See the reports published in Trudy pervogo S.-Peterburgskogo s"ezda predstavitelei podstolichnykh poselkov, 28–31 avgusta 1909 goda (St. Petersburg, 1910).
101. One response to the prevailing stereotypes of life in dacha settlements is “Chto ob nas govoriat i pechataiut?” PLL, 13 June 1882, 2.
102. See, e.g., “Novye Sokol’niki:” Dachnye uchastki: Imenie Anny Nikolaevny Kovalevoi (Moscow, 1911), and Opisanie Edinstvennogo v Rossii Blagoustroennogo Podmoskovnogo Poselka “Novogireevo” pri sobstvennoi platforme (Moscow, 1906).
103. E. Iu. Kupffer, Zhiloi dom: Rukovodstvo dlia proektirovaniia i vozvedeniia sovremennykh zhilishch (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1914), 197.
104. Note the strictures of the anonymous columnist “Old Resident” (“Staryi posel ’chanin”) in Poselkovyi golos (St. Petersburg, 1909–10). A similar range of concerns are reflected in Losinoostrovskii vestnik (1909–17) and Vestnik poselka Lianozovo (1908, 1913).
105. Electric trams, for example, were not running in St. Petersburg until 1907. For comparison, Kiev had an electric system in the early 1890s; London had extensive suburban railways in the 1860s and a whole underground system in 1910.
106. A. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (1899; Ithaca, N.Y., 1963).
107. For a contemporary diagnosis of the problems, see K. Raush, “Prigorody bol’shikh gorodov i ikh puti soobshcheniia,” Gorodskoe delo, no. 16 (1909), 802–10.
108. T. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 60–63.
109. P. N. Durilin, “Moskovskie prigorody i dachnye poselki v sviazi s razvitiem gorodskoi zhizni,” Arkhiv gorodskoi gigieny i tekhniki, no. 1–2 (1918), 63–101.
110. Editorial, Losinoostrovskii vestnik, no. 1 (1909), 1–2.
111. TsIAM, f. 483, op. 3, d. 344, I. 8. Starbeevo was spread over 200 desiatinas and had 778 plots owned by 367 people. Each year it attracted “up to 300 dachniki.”
112. Ibid., d. 367, II. 1–2.
113. See PSZ, ser. 2, 46, no. 49718 (8 June 1871), and “Ustroistvo peterburgskoi prigorodnoi politsii,” PL, 11 May 1880, 2. Property in the suburban district was taxed at the rate of 0.5% of value in order to fund the police: see Mordukhai-Boltovskii, Svod zakonov, vol. 5, Ustav o priamykh nalogakh, arts. 116–18. The debates on public order that culminated in the creation of the suburban police force are well summarized in R. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971), 255–68.
114. “Iz dachnykh mest,” PL, 24 May 1885, 2.
115. RGIA, f. 1152, op. 13, d. 300, 11. 2–3. The police were granted their wish: Witte personally authorized the appointment of six more constables to cover the area.
116. TsIAM, f. 483, op. 3, d. 1513.
117. J. Bater, “Between Old and New: St. Petersburg in the Late Imperial Era,” in The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. M. Hamm (Bloomington, 1986), 73.
4
Between Arcadia and Suburbia
The Dacha as a Cultural Space, 1860–1917
The dacha was not just a place but a way of life. Of this the many observers of out-of-town society in the mid-nineteenth century were in no doubt: the dacha brought with it a certain range of social rituals, forms of sociability, patterns of behavior, and cultural values. But the second half of the nineteenth century outdid earlier periods in the number of models of exurban life in circulation and in the intensity with which they were articulated. The word “dacha” meant many more things than it had previously and it engaged the interest of a society increasingly committed to self-contemplation. The last decades of the nineteenth century were the dacha’s golden age not only for the socioeconomic reasons outlined in Chapter 3 but also for the cultural prominence it attained.
Dachas put tens of thousands of urban Russians at a safe distance from the world of work, giving them unprecedented opportunities to enjoy more leisure and to use it more freely, to seek new pastimes, and to adopt a new lifestyle independent of occupation or lineage. Out-of-town settlements quickly developed their own subcultures. Collective entertainments were organized, local newspapers were published, self-help societies were formed, and the exurbanite emerged as a new type. These dachniki were remarkable creatures: urban Russians who took their identity not from their legal or professional status or from their relation to the means of production but from their nonwork activities. They were not guests on a country estate or summer visitors to a rural community but—increasingly and unashamedly—vacationers: that is, people who exercised choice in how they spent their money and their time, and whose choices had implications for the kind of persons they were or wanted to become.
This is by no means to say, however, that the dachniki were a homogeneous and like-minded group. Summer houses in the late imperial era took many forms and bespoke various and sometimes incompatible values and cultural allegiances. Many meanings were attached to and generated by the summerfolk in the last few prerevolutionary decades. A particularly prestigious and influential idea was of the dacha as a rural retreat, a scaleddown country estate. A less culturally prestigious but more commonplace response was to associate exurbia with a distinctive lifestyle, centered on leisure, entertainment, and domesticity. Another approach was to judge dachas by the people who used them, and to construct an often unprepossessing general image of the summerfolk. Yet another move was to accord the dachniki a place in discussions of Russian society and its prospects. The dacha, for all its apparent marginality, held some prominence in the late imperial imagination. As an exposed and precarious outpost of urban civilization in an overwhelmingly rural and undercivilized country, it served as a focal point for the anxieties of an educated society that was extremely complex, rather unsure how to describe itself, and in general darkly apprehensive of what the future might hold.
The Dacha as Country Retreat
In the last third of the nineteenth century, summerfolk were no longer recent and insecure arrivals in exurbia. Their presence had been felt for several decades, and they represented sections of the urban population whose social prominence and economic clout were rapidly increasing. Now dachniki might try to shed once and for all their parvenu status by swapping their vacation cottage for a full-fledged country retreat, and thereby laying claim to the authentically rural, even arcadian, spirit associated with the country estate (usad’ba).