The concept of a second home out of town is by no means unique to Russia, but nowhere else has it been so deeply embedded in cultural memory and social practice. The dacha has been the Russian way of negotiating the stresses of urbanization and modernization, of creating a welcoming halfway house between metropolis and countryside. Elsewhere in Europe, to be sure, the stresses of modernization were hardly negligible, but in Russia they were extraordinarily acute, both before and (especially) after the Revolution. Although the laboring subordinate classes of Russia’s major cities have been subjected to far more than their fair share of poor housing, unsanitary conditions, and punitive administrative attention, white-collar folk have not escaped these blights either. They have been strikingly unable to create the kind of “middle-class” suburban enclaves to which their Western European counterparts were retreating from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Under these circumstances, the dacha became a refuge from urban squalor and a bridgehead of domesticity. Although, as is often remarked, there is no word in Russian for “privacy,” that does not mean that Russians have been uninterested in such a condition. Russian major cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were full of people living in overcrowded and uncomfortable conditions, constantly mindful of surveillance by their landlord, their neighbors, the local housing committee, or the NKVD, and with little long-term control over their domestic environment. Yet, even in the formal absence of private property, twentieth-century Russians were able to feel that they “owned” their dachas. So the dacha, we might posit, has provided a substitute home: a house occupied by a single family, an island of enclosure in a sea of exposure.
Another great strength of the dacha has been its role in nurturing informal social interaction. Historians have often accorded Russian society in the last two centuries two complementary characteristics: first, the weakness of forms of grass-roots association that might form the bedrock of a “civil society”; second, the intensity of subpolitical forms of social interaction. The result has been a society in which the role of informal networks has been much greater than in the West. Here again the dacha may be seen to have played its part: by providing a setting for free-and-easy socializing across boundaries that in the city might prove rather less porous, and by contributing to the development of forms of intense informal intellectual association. It has served a similar purpose for Russia’s many nonintellectuals, who have discovered in exurbia gentler forms of sociability, a more satisfying sense of community, and a less relentless rhythm of life than in the metropolis.
Though spatially detached from the urban hubs of political and economic activity, the dacha is not a marginal or esoteric topic for investigation. Far from being an obscure background phenomenon taken for granted by generations of Muscovites and Petersburgers, it has consistently engaged a wide range of beliefs, values, allegiances, and identities. It has formed complicated relationships—of convergence and divergence, antagonism and rapprochement—with several other models of settlement and modes of living: the small-town one-family home, the peasant izba, the suburban dwelling, the country estate, the villa, the allotment garden. It has evoked delight in and also hostility to leisure. It has been associated with estrangement from and rejection of agricultural labor and (more recently) with a “return to the soil.” It has served as an emblem both of social rootlessness and of Russianness. It has been closely bound up with consumption, property, privilege, domesticity, and relations between the sexes. The fact that several of these aspects are contradictory does not necessarily make the dacha incoherent or radically discontinuous as a historical phenomenon. Rather, it suggests that a study of the dacha can help us to reconstruct, in all their complexity and interactivity, some of the major social and cultural processes at work in modern urban Russia.
1. The few people who have written on this subject all agree, from their varying perspectives, on the broad outlines of this periodization: see O.I. Chernykh, “Dachnoe stroitel’stvo Peterburgskoi gubernii, XVIII–nachala XX vv.” (dissertation, St. Petersburg, 1993); P. Deotto, “Peterburgskii dachnyi byt XIX v. kаk fakt massovoi kul’tury,” Europa Orientalis 16 (1997); Iu. M. Lotman, “Kamen’ i trava,” in Lotmanovskii sbornik, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1995); M. V. Nashchokina, “Dachnye poselki vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX vv.,” in Sel’skie poseleniia Rossii: Istoricheskii i sotsiokul’turnyi analiz, ed. O.G. Sevan (Moscow, 1995).
2. B&E, s.v. “Sankt-Peterburg,” 28:307; Sankt-Peterburg: Issledovaniia po istorii, topografii i statistike stolitsy, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1868), 46.
3. Sankt-Peterburg, 46–51.
4. See John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, 1988).
5. T. Nefedova, P. Polian, and A. Treivish, Gorod i derevnia v Evropeiskoi Rossii: Sto let peremen (Moscow, 2001), 384.
1
Prehistory
The dacha, now largely synonymous with life in a private sphere free from public surveillance, was in its medieval origins the result of a gift bestowed publicly. Derived from the verb “to give,” the word “dacha” was present in Old Russian from the eleventh century, but by the seventeenth century it tended to denote specifically land given out to servitors by the state. It became a key concept in land surveys conducted from the time of Ivan the Terrible on; during the General Survey that was carried out from early in the reign of Catherine II right up to Emancipation, the dacha was the main legal and administrative form for the allocation of property rights.1 This brief overview attests both to a long-term semantic transition and to a tension persistent in Russian history and rather significant for an analysis of the modern dacha; namely, the problematic relationship between the role of informal arrangements (the dacha received as a mark of grace and favor) and the public imperative to institute formalized legal relations (the dacha as a piece of property guaranteed by rights).