Summerfolk
A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000
STEPHEN LOVELL
Cornell University Press
ITHACA AND LONDON
For my parents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Abbreviations
Maps
Introduction
1. Prehistory
2. Between City and Court
The Middle Third of the Nineteenth Century
3. The Late Imperial Dacha Boom
4. Between Arcadia and Suburbia
The Dacha as a Cultural Space, 1860–1917
5. The Making of the Soviet Dacha, 1917–1941
6. Between Consumption and Ownership
Exurban Life, 1941–1986
7. Post-Soviet Suburbanization?
Dacha Settlements in Contemporary Russia
Conclusion
Note on Sources
Bibliography
Illustrations
Map of St. Petersburg and surrounding area
Map of Moscow and surrounding area
B. Paterssen, View of Novaia Derevnia from Kamennyi Island (1801)
B. Paterssen, The Kamennyi Island Palace as Seen from Aptekarskii Island (1804)
Neoclassical dacha design from the 1840s
Dacha “in the Gothic style”
Dacha with a minaret “in the Mauritanian style”
A gulian’e at the Stroganov gardens
A modest design of the 1870s
A more elaborate dacha of the late imperial era
The dacha of Rakhmanov fils
A house for a “prosperous peasant”
Floridly rustic dacha of the 1870s
Dacha in the style of “northern modernism”
A dacha at Siverskaia
A dacha at Aleksandrovka
Postcard view of Kliaz’ma station
“Dacha delights”
A house at Sokol
A dacha at Lisii Nos
Soviet design for a “paired” dacha
Layout of a medium-sized prewar dacha plot
Boris Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino
Dacha built in the 1940s at Mel’nichii Ruchei
A dacha at Abramtsevo
“Lady goldfish, turn my dacha into a smashed-up washtub!”
“Dacha for Hyre”
A standard design for a garden-plot house
Simple garden-plot house at Siniavino
Temporary hut (vremianka) made largely of old doors
Garden-plot house at Krasnitsy
A dacha at Abramtsevo
New Russian dacha at Mozhaiskoe
House at Zelenogradskaia
A dacha at Mozhaiskoe
A dacha at Zelenogradskaia
A post-Soviet garden-plot house at Krasnitsy
A dacha at Mel’nichii Ruchei
Garden settlement (Zelenogradskaia)
Settlement near Pavlovo, Leningrad oblast
Acknowledgments
This book would probably not have been written without the award of a Junior Research Fellowship by St. John’s College, Oxford. I thank that enlightened and generous institution for support both financial and intellectual.
Institutional assistance of a different kind has been provided by Cornell University Press, where Bernhard Kendler has been a courteous and efficient editor, and Karen Laun and Barbara Salazar have done excellent work on the manuscript.
My research has been made possible by the staff of several libraries and archives. In Oxford, I thank especially Mrs. Menzies at the Bodleian and the delightful and expert personnel at the Slavonic annex of the Taylor Institute. In Helsinki, Irina Lukka has been unfailingly helpful with illustrations and bibliographical queries. Librarians and archivists in Moscow and St. Petersburg, although not invariably charming, have been much more obliging than their abysmal salaries and working conditions give me any right to expect.
Several friends and colleagues have made my stays in Russia more pleasant and productive. I am especially grateful to Konstantin Barsht, Daniel Beer, Irina Chekhovskikh, Ol’ga Egoshina and Vladimir Spiridonov, Al’bin Konechnyi and Ksana Kumpan, Sergei and Ol’ga Parkhomovskii, Natal’ia Poltavtseva, and Ol’ga Sevan.
I gratefully acknowledge the helpful information I have received from Jana Howlett, David Moon, and Andrei Rogachevskii.
Several people have given me the benefit of their brainpower by reading various pieces of work in draft form. For this help I thank Charles Hachten, Steven Harris, Barbara Heidt, Julie Hessler, Geoffrey Hosking, Judith Pallot, David Saunders, and Gerry Smith.
Catriona Kelly has contributed to this book in more ways than I have space to enumerate here.
Liz Leach took time away from her own work to join me on trips to Russia, and her intelligent interest in the summerfolk was surprisingly undiminished by the experience; she has also taught me more about domesticity than any dachnik ever will.
A FEW sections of this book have already been published elsewhere. Some passages in Chapters 3 and 4 appeared in “Between Arcadia and Suburbia: Dachas in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 61 (Spring 2002); despite its title, this article is quite different from Chapter 4 here. About half of Chapter 5 found its way into “The Making of the Stalin-Era Dacha,” Journal of Modern History 74 (June 2002). (Conversely, the article contains detail on the 1930s that did not find a place in this book.) A few pages in Chapter 6 were used in “Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in the Postwar Era,” in Socialist Spaces in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1947–1991 edited by Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2002). I am grateful for permission to reuse all this material here, and I thank the editors—respectively, Diane Koenker, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Susan Reid—for helping me to prepare the articles for publication.
Photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.
Glossary
appanage lands (udel’nye zemli) land owned directly by members of the imperial family
blat the informal exchange of favors as practiced in Soviet society
chinsh a kind of hereditary lease
dachniki users of dachas; “summerfolk”
desiatina unit equivalent to 2.7 acres
dom otdykha rest home
DSK a dacha construction cooperative
dvor a yard or a peasant household
dvornik (pl. dvorniki) caretaker, yardsman
exurbia an area beyond the city and the suburbs inhabited mainly by people who retain social, economic, and occupational ties to the city
fligel’ a residential building separate from the main house on an estate or plot of land
guberniia (pl. gubernii) a province in tsarist Russia
gulian’e a fête; popular festivities (usually associated with a public holiday)