95. Fedotov, Putevoditel’, 7.
96. “Gorodskaia khronika,” Razvlechenie, no. 23 (1860), 288.
97. See S. Cherikover, Peterburg (Moscow, 1909), 203–4.
98. N. Skavronskii, “Nashi dachi,” Razvlechenie, no. 25 (1866), 395–97
99. V. O. Mikhnevich, Peterburgskoe leto (St. Petersburg, 1887), 33–51.
100. PL, 9 and 23 July 1880.
101. PL, 3 July 1880, 2.
102. See, e.g., PL, 21 July 1871, which marks out Pargolovo peasants for their drunkenness, mendicity, and neglect of the land. The same year’s issues contain numerous reports of assaults perpetrated by and on peasants in Pargolovo and other dacha locations. For a later, equally discouraging account of Pargolovo, see Dachnik, 10 May 1909, 2.
103. “Iz dachnykh mest,” PL, 7 May 1880, 3.
104. Dachnik, 10 May 1909, 2.
105. “Na skol’ko my nravstvenny?” PLL, 25 July 1882, 3.
106. See A. Donskov, The Changing Image of the Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russian Drama (Helsinki, 1972), and D. Fanger, “The Peasant in Literature,” in The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. W. Vucinich (Stanford, 1968).
107. G. I. Uspenskii, Beglye nabroski, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1940–54), 7:243.
108. Leikin, “Pered dachei,” in his Na dachnom proziabanii, 6. The idea that servants, as a “relic of serfdom,” had become less deferential and less diligent gained such wide public currency in late imperial Russia that extensive debates took place on the extent and the nature of the police controls to which they should be subjected. The image of the deracinated peasant servant taken over by urban and materialistic values also found its way into the fiction of the time. See A. Rustemeyer, Dienstboten in Petersburg und Moskau, 1861–1917: Hintergrund, Alltag, Soziale Rolle (Stuttgart, 1996), 179–83, 216–19.
109. Chekhov, “Novaia dacha,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:116.
110. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:16.
111. Here I paraphrase Vladislav Khodasevich’s fine poem on the subject, “Bel’skoe ust’e” (1921), in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1989), 142.
112. Editorial, Stolitsa i Usad’ba, no. 1 (1914), 4.
5
The Making of the Soviet Dacha, 1917–1941
It is a startling fact that dachas, which had enjoyed such a high profile before the Revolution, had by the 1930s gained a secure niche in a new order that existed under very different social and economic conditions and espoused an ideology radically hostile to cultural remnants of the old regime. But is this continuity real or illusory? Can one really see any meaningful connection between the dachas depicted in Chekhov’s stories and those of the Soviet elite in the 1930s? Are not these two sets of phenomena separated by a violent rupture that makes continuity hard to conceptualize in any satisfactory way?
Improbable as it might seem, points of connection can be found. The survival of the dacha calls into question the notion of the Revolution as a clean break in the social and cultural history of the major cities. The dacha is hardly the only thing that survived, of course: ostensibly improbable continuities have been traced in other areas of early Soviet life ever since Nicholas S. Timasheff, in a pioneering work of 1946, coined the term “Great Retreat” for the partial abandonment of radical social policies and values by the elite of the 1930s.1 In the light of the cogent arguments made by Timasheff and others, the dacha might well be seen as just one of several prerevolutionary cultural status symbols that were appropriated by a new Soviet “middle class.”
Even if we find signs of the past in Stalin-era culture, however, we are still left with important questions unanswered. For example: What were the causes of the Great Retreat—social or political expediency, the self-interest of an elite, or some more complex set of historical factors? How did it fit in with other aspects of Soviet life that, far from suggesting a retreat from revolutionary aspirations, remained aggressively radical and transformative? There is a need, in other words, to test the Timasheff paradigm against detailed social history: to show how the interaction of continuity and change took place in practice, how it informed social practice and affected people’s lives.
These tasks can usefully be related to an enduring historical debate that investigates the balance between “traditional” and “modernizing” principles in the working of the emerging Soviet system: the Great Retreat, so one argument runs, took place in a society that was very self-consciously entering a form of modernity, and it is this assertively modern orientation of Soviet society, not its traditional or conservative aspects, that needs to be emphasized.2 Another approach directs attention elsewhere: to the ways in which modernizing structures, policies, and intentions led to “neotraditional” results.3 One example is the Soviet bureaucracy, which, though designed to strengthen the centralized state and inculcate impersonal standardized practice, may actually have forced people into greater reliance on more “traditional” forms of behavior, ranging from unofficial networking to the cultivation of allotments for subsistence.
To seek out traditional and modern elements in Soviet society, then, is a worthwhile project but on its own it is inadequate. The next step is to examine their interaction over time, and we can best do so microcosmically—by fixing our attention on limited objects of study, such as the dacha. As well as bringing us face to face with the charged issue of periodization in Soviet history, the dacha can thus also provide insights into the workings of early Soviet urban society.
Exurbia in Revolution and Civil War
The revolutions of 1917 brought a rapid depopulation of the dacha areas surrounding the major cities. Just as in 1905, when popular unrest in the outlying areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg had scared away some dachniki for years, people were unwilling to expose themselves to the risk of revolutionary violence and in many cases simply left their property behind. Other dachas fell vacant not because they had been abandoned but because their owners had been called away—to the front, to the city, on business, or to relatives in other regions.
Housing in the major cities was liable to be suddenly and violently appropriated by the new regime. In Petrograd, for example, where revolutionary vengefulness was intense, “bourgeois” families had good reason to fear instant eviction from their homes.4 The situation in exurban locations was less clear and more variable. Although in some places privately owned houses were municipalized almost instantly, the authorities had neither the time nor the inclination to take full control of the dacha stock. The action taken in a particular village or settlement depended on the vigilance and activism of the local soviet—and, not least, on the behavior of the local population. Isaiah Berlin (b. 1909) and his mother escaped “the increasing tension and violence in the city” by moving to Staraia Russa for the summer of 1917. And, at least in the eyes of a young boy, life proceeded much as normaclass="underline" “There were fancy-dress parties, tombolas, and afternoons in the park listening to an Italian orchestra playing at a bandstand.” The Berlins spent the next two summers in Pavlovsk, though here the Revolution did catch up with them, as they were subjected to a humiliating search by the Cheka in 1919.5