Introduction
The subject of this book requires less introduction than many topics in European history, since “dacha” is that rare creature: a Russian term that has gained a firm foothold in the English language. Its impact has, moreover, gone well beyond lexicography. The word has left numerous traces in the imagination of the anglophone world. It may conjure up the summer houses of Chekhov’s stories, or the out-of-town residences of the Soviet privileged classes, or even allotment shacks on the outskirts of post-Soviet cities. It is usually glossed in English dictionaries as “country house” or “cottage” and referred to as the Slavic equivalent of a vacation house or second home.
These notions have a lot of truth to them. A dacha is almost invariably a dwelling that is used intermittently, most often in the summer or on weekends. It stands on its own plot of land, is located out of town, but generally lies within reach of a large urban center (typically, no more than two or three hours’ journey). Most heads of dacha households need to remain reasonably close to the city, as it is their main provider of employment and source of income. Unlike country estate proprietors, with whom they are sometimes confused, dacha folk do not seek to make money from their landholding. They treat their house in the country as a temporary refuge and a recreational amenity, spatially separate from the city yet usually still within commuting range. The dacha may therefore be regarded as occupying a space between town and country: at a significant remove from metropolitan civilization but distinct from the surrounding rural settlement by virtue of its urban clientele.
To this extent, the dacha may be considered a by-product of urbanization and thus analogous to forms of settlement elsewhere in the developed world: the suburban zones colonized by the North American and European bourgeoisie, or indeed the country retreats of the leisure class. As cities grow larger and wealthier and as their white-collar pop-ulations expand, increasing numbers of people look to the nearby countryside for recuperation, domestic comfort, and enjoyment. Russia’s dachniki (dacha folk) fit this pattern in many ways. Out-of-town dwellings offered them favorable conditions for family life, pleasures such as recreation and relaxed sociability, and above all the opportunity to escape the heat, dirt, and disease of the city in summer.
As a social and cultural institution, the dacha has a long history that runs roughly parallel to the course of Russia’s urbanization. The story begins with the creation of St. Petersburg—Russia’s first “modern,” self-consciously Western city—in the early eighteenth century. Here, on the road that led from Petersburg to the palace settlement at Peterhof, courtiers built themselves out-of-town residences, thus marking out a space that lay beyond the city limits yet did not merge with the surrounding rural landscape. In the first stage of their history, dachas took their lead, both architecturally and in the way of life they fostered, from the aristocracy. Then, in the first third of the nineteenth century, the rental market for summer housing (mostly concentrated in the city’s immediate environs) entered a period of expansion that lasted all the way through to the Revolution. Improved transport connections in the second half of the nineteenth century greatly increased the scope for suburban and exurban settlement. Economic and legal liberalization invigorated the market in land and property. Finally, during the last two prerevolutionary decades, in the face of ever more rapid urban and industrial development, dacha settlements began to converge with suburbs.1
This brief historical outline is useful as basic orientation but has its limitations. It does not, for example, do full justice to the dacha’s local significance. Urbanization is a process whose outcomes depend heavily on how urban society is constituted in a specific time and place. The dacha’s clientele has always been city-based, but it is far from being fixed or homogeneous. Over the past two centuries the word “dacha” has been used in various senses by many different members of Russian society. For an aristocrat in 1800, it would have meant what we would call a villa or even a mansion. Inhabitants of St. Petersburg in the 1850s might have rented their “dachas” from a noble landowner, a merchant, or even a peasant. For a wealthy urbanite in 1890 the word might have referred to a house in the Crimea or to a former manor house. For a medium- or low-ranking civil servant of the same period it very often denoted a modest cottage in St. Petersburg’s or Moscow’s summer equivalent of the commuter belt. Joseph Stalin used a “dacha” as his main residence for the last twenty years of his life. For any inhabitant of a major Russian city in 2000, a dacha is likely to be a glorified allotment.
As these examples may begin to suggest, dachas have enjoyed a widening social constituency over the last two centuries; not since the eighteenth century have they been restricted to the elite. A crucial step toward diversification was taken in the first third of the nineteenth century, when the section of the Petersburg population that was not proletarian yet worked for a living increased noticeably. Members of the nobility (dvorianstvo) moved to the capital and began to pursue careers in the government bureaucracy, which many young men and their families now saw as a better route to material security and social status than military service. The number of nobles in the city more than tripled, from just over 13,000 in 1801 to almost 43,000 in 1831, while the overall population doubled in the same period, from just over 200,000 to well over 400,000. By the mid-1860s, the proportion of nobles in the Petersburg population was higher stilclass="underline" around 80,000 out of a total of nearly 540,000.2
Although they retained their formal membership in the dvorianstvo, many of the noblemen who took up residence in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg followed a professional career path and were at least partly dependent on the salaries and other benefits they received. If they owned landholdings in other parts of Russia, these properties did not always supply the means to support a decent standard of living in the big city. And even when Petersburg-based nobles could count on a substantial unearned income, their connection with the country estates that generated this income was weak: they were urbanites first, landowners second.
These noble but not necessarily wealthy Petersburgers proovided one element in a new, nonaristocratic, dacha-frequenting public that emerged in the early nineteenth century. They were joined by nonnoble contingents in the bureaucracy and other occupations, particularly by the raznochintsy, Russia’s “men of various ranks,” mostly sons of low-ranking army officers, civil servants, and priests, who provided the office workers of the Petersburg civil service and would acquire in the second half of the century a strong presence in professions such as journalism, law, and medicine. A third element in the dacha public was the merchant class, which, in the major cities at least, contained a reasonably affluent and socially aspirational upper stratum that was acquiring immovable property and adopting urban ways. In the 1830s these three sections of society (including dependents) together numbered in the tens of thousands, and by the mid-1860s they had reached a total well in excess of 100,000 (or nearly 25 percent of the overall population).3