This tension was exacerbated—some would say created—by the Petrine era, a period that, among many other things, brought into being a new kind of dacha. Peter the Great, like the rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had plenty of land available for distribution; but, unlike his predecessors, he was particularly eager to hand out dachas in order to accelerate the development of a modern urban space—St. Petersburg, his new city on the Gulf of Finland. Thus, for example, city-center plots between the Fontanka River and the tree-lined Sadovaia Street were doled out to the families of courtiers in the 1710s—but on strict condition that these families actually built on them and saw to their upkeep. As one historian has it:
After you had received a plot of land for nothing, it was impossible just to offer your thanks and relax—Peter the Great might accidentally pay you a visit in his chariot to see how the recipient of his gift was getting on in his new place, and if the Emperor found that diligence had been lacking, justice and punishment were summary: Peter the Great was never parted from his cudgel.2
But Peter and his eighteenth-century successors were also able to offer land in locations that lay well outside the city’s boundaries. Here dachas began to be developed as suburban residences designed primarily for leisure. The first such instance came in 1710, when Peter, as a response to his successful campaign against the Swedes, started to hand out plots of land on the route running between St. Petersburg and his new palace at Peterhof. Terraces were built, trees were planted, and the shore was banked up so as to give protection against flooding. The dimensions of the plots were regular—100 sazhens wide by 1,000 deep; they were thus laid out like the keys of a giant piano pressed up against the south shore of the Gulf of Finland.3
The Dacha as Court Residence
Peter conceived of the Peterhof Road as a single architectural ensemble modeled on the route from Paris to Versailles. Residents were, for example, required to take good care of their property and strictly forbidden to chop down trees along the road: the more land owned and the wealthier the owner, the greater were Peter’s architectural expectations of the residence erected on a dacha plot.4 Subsequent eighteenth-century rulers took further measures to smarten the road up and improve its infrastructure. A decree of 23 August 1739 allocated funds for setting up milestones. In the mid-1750s paving of the road was undertaken, and in 1769 owners of dachas were made responsible for its maintenance (although in practice the money continued to be drawn from state revenues). In the early 1770s birch trees were planted along the road at public expense.5 In 1777 came a proposal for rebuilding a substantial portion of the route. Throughout the eighteenth century, special measures were taken to ensure that public order was maintained for the entire length of the road. In April 1748, for example, the chief of police received instructions to conduct a thorough inspection in advance of the imperial party so as to avoid “disorders”; taverns were to be removed from the roadside.6
The desired result of these measures was to create a row of imposing residences with elaborate and extensive gardens stretching all the way to the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. As early as 1736, Peder von Haven, arriving in St. Petersburg as secretary and preacher for a Norwegian sailor, commented on the row of “extremely fine out-of-town households” that he saw as he was driven into the city along the Peterhof Road.7 Eyewitness accounts of the Peterhof Road, like those of St. Petersburg itself, were not uniformly enthusiastic in its early days,8 but by the mid-eighteenth century they were consistently rapturous. Particular attention was lavished on the gardens of the princes Naryshkin, which were left open to the public.9 The positive assessments lasted well into the nineteenth century. A visitor of 1805 admired the view on heading out of Strel’na toward St. Petersburg: “As a parting gift my eyes were taken up by an unbroken chain of picturesque dachas—each one finer than the last—right up to the barrier at the entrance to St. Petersburg.”10 Fifteen years later, the author of an early guidebook found that the view from Strel’na had lost none of its charm: “From here a splendid mounded road leads to the magnificent dachas of the grandees and the wealthy.”11
The prime function of these dachas was public sociability: their owners were able to receive a stream of visitors from foreign delegations, prominent noble families, and of course the imperial court. In July 1772, for example, Prince L. A. Naryshkin laid on a lavish set of entertainments at his dacha eleven versts along the Peterhof Road. The guests started assembling at three o’clock and were able to amuse themselves by wandering through the gardens with their intriguing patterns of streams and paths. At seven o’clock the empress arrived and a “Temple of Victory” (in honor of the recent victory over the Turks and Tatars) was spectacularly unveiled. The entertainment was completed with fireworks and a masked ball.12 Five years later the Swiss scholar Jean Bernoulli called in at the Naryshkin dacha and commented especially on the tasteful English-style design of the gardens; he also noted with interest that the property was opened to the public twice a week.13 Count Stroganov, similarly, liked to entertain in the grand style: his generous hospitality cost him 500 rubles each Sunday as he threw open his dacha for music, dancing, and refreshments.14
The Naryshkin and Stroganov dachas in several ways conformed to the pattern of life often held to be characteristic of the elite country estate in the same period: display was valued over substance, short-term ostentatious hospitality over longer-term comfort. But this assessment needs to be qualified on two counts. First, the way of life on the Peterhof Road and at the country estate was not simply fixated on public spectacle. The Catherinian period was to a significant extent constructed by the new empress and her ideologues as a reaction against the artifice, luxury, and corruption of the reign of Elizabeth (1741–1762) and as a return to the austerity of Peter I’s time. The turn away from showy festivity and toward the “English” virtues of practicality and emotional depth found expression in the taste for Romantic garden designs; it also led to a change of culture at the country estate, where far niente went out of fashion, the simple country life (or its appearance) came to be more highly valued, and greater emphasis was laid on purposeful and reflective pursuits—notably reading.15 Life out of the city was, moreover, associated with a rejection of the status distinctions that underpinned social contacts in the city and at court. This relaxation of social rules prefigured an important and enduring cultural stereotype that would be articulated more forcefully in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: exurbia was seen as a uniquely “democratic” site for social interaction. As the poet and state servant Gavriil Derzhavin observed of parties de plaisir he attended in the 1770s: