In general, dachniki seem to have been considerably less vulnerable than estate owners to revolutionary violence: many of them rented their houses, and even those who were owners of private property could not be seen by peasants as egregiously laying claim to large tracts of land they did not use or need. A case in point was Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, professor of history and associate director of the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow, who by September 1918 had resigned himself to losing the modest estate in Tver’ guberniia where he and his family had passed their summers before the Revolution. Instead, for the following few years Got’e spent time in various villages and dacha locations in the Moscow region; most often he sought refuge in Pestovo (forty kilometers north of Moscow), a settlement that during the Civil War was reached by a twelve-verst trek from the nearest railway station. Pestovo had few comforts but offered compensating advantages—it offered a more reliable supply of basic foodstuffs than did the city, and it was largely ignored by the Soviet authorities; by engaging in hard physical activities, moreover, Got’e achieved brief periods of oblivion from the underlying despair he felt at Russia’s catastrophic social and political situation.6
The dacha zones most at risk were those that had been all but swallowed up by the city. In Moscow’s Sokol’niki, any dachas left unattended were liable to be looted, and wooden constructions were sometimes completely dismantled for firewood.7 In Petrograd, one of the first victims of the breakdown of political authority after the February Revolution was the Durnovo dacha on the Neva, seized by anarchists and converted into a “house of rest” for workers. After a lengthy standoff between the anarchists and the Ministry of Justice, the unlawful occupants were evicted by force. But to keep the dacha in private ownership was still unrealistic; even Durnovo’s own staff, on being informed by the anarchists that the dacha was now the “property of the people,” had readily believed this to be the case. In September 1917, Durnovo offered to hand over the dacha as a hospital for tuberculosis patients.8
The Durnovo dacha was a very public and obvious target in view of its central location (by the early twentieth century it was a dacha in name only) and of the fact that P. P. Durnovo had a lengthy record of state service (he had been governor general of Moscow during the 1905 Revolution). Dachas farther from the public eye, however, might also fall victim to revolutionary violence. Aleksandr Blok was one dismayed observer of the devastation of resorts outside Petrograd that had been among his favorite haunts before the Revolution.9 The damage inflicted by looters would often stretch to several thousand rubles’ worth in a single property as houses were laid waste, their fittings stolen, and their interiors vandalized.10
Many dacha owners had already fled, but not everyone was so lucky: some were forced to look on as their property was raided or requisitioned. A woman named Efremova, resident at a dacha in the Moscow region, had in the summer of 1919 been away in the town of Kolomna, where her husband, employed in the financial department of the local soviet, had just died of typhus. On her return, she discovered that neighbors had lured her infirm mother over to their house by promising her regular meals and had taken the opportunity to steal numerous pieces of furniture and other household items. They had plundered property not only from the living quarters but also from the two outbuildings, the keys to which they had confiscated. And they had let out one of the buildings, taking all the rent money for themselves.
Efremova was a typical minor dacha owner of the period. She, her husband, and her father-in-law had bought a plot of 1,209 square sazhens in 1911 and on this land had built three dachas (only one of which was equipped for year-round habitation) with the aim, in Efremova’s words, of “securing the old age” of their parents (in all probability, she intended to rent out the two surplus houses each summer for a modest unearned income). Efremova’s father-in-law, who worked as a typesetter in Moscow, had died in 1915, and since then she and her husband had lived at their dacha continuously.11 People such as the Efremovs, although two of the three “dachas” on their plot were little more than outbuildings, were soon to be classified as multiple property owners and the surplus housing made subject to appropriation by the municipal authorities.
During the Civil War and the first half of the 1920s a huge free-for-all took place in areas lying just outside the city limits. Peasants and other locals were able to occupy houses that had been left vacant. Owners occasionally wrote anxiously to the authorities asking for a protection order on their property, but in most cases were powerless to do anything. The scholar, critic, and children’s writer Kornei Chukovskii was one such victim of theft. When he returned to his dacha in Kuokkala (now on the other side of the Soviet-Finnish border) in January 1925 after an absence of several years, Chukovskii found that his furniture and a large part of his library had been sold by an unscrupulous acquaintance whom he had unsuspectingly allowed to sit out the Civil War there.12 In 1923 the people’s courts were still being swamped with appeals concerning what was often euphemistically called the “unauthorized seizure of property” in exurban locations; it was decided that such cases should have top priority, as any delay meant that the dacha season might come to an end before a verdict was passed.13
Burglaries and acts of random violence against property were, however, by no means the only concern of dacha owners. They also had the new regime and its representatives to reckon with. Municipalization of the housing stock began immediately in Moscow and Petrograd, in adjacent towns, and in high-profile dacha locations with a large number of wealthy householders. In Moscow, all such areas located within the railway ring (Petrovskii Park, Petrovsko-Razumovskoe, Ostankino, Sokol’niki, Serebrianyi Bor, and a few others) were subject to automatic municipalization in 1919.14 A total of 543 country palaces and dachas were used as vacation resorts for workers between 1918 and 1924.15Thirteen dachas on Petrograd’s Kamennyi Island, formerly reserved for high-ranking state personnel, were turned over to a children’s labor colony (named after the first minister of enlightenment, A. V. Lunacharskii) at the beginning of 1919. One dacha owner, Klara Eduardovna Shvarts, was informed abruptly (in person) on 26 December 1918 that her house and its contents were to be appropriated by the Commissariat of Education. This decision was carried out unceremoniously: the house was broken into continuously, and furniture and other items were removed without written authorization.16 The vulnerability felt by prerevolutionary property owners was captured by Got’e in a diary entry of 3 May 1918: “A strange feeling. It is as if everything were as before, but the fact is that the gorillas can come and drive out the legal owners on ‘legal’ grounds.”17