Summerfolk

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)

imenie a landed estate

intelligent (pl. intelligenty) a member of the intelligentsia

ispolkom an executive committee (part of the apparatus of the Soviet state)

kottedzh in the nineteenth century, a cottage modeled most often on the English rustic house; in the late twentieth century, an exurban dwelling with the potential for year-round use

KPSS the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

meshchanin (pl. meshchane) nonnoble town dweller, petit bourgeois (sometimes pejorative)

Mosgordachsoiuz the managing organization for dacha cooperatives in the Moscow region (1931–37)

myza a farmstead or country estate (used mainly to refer to property near the Gulf of Finland, to the west of St. Petersburg)

NEP New Economic Policy

nepmen people who profited by buying and selling (“speculating”) under NEP

NKVD People’s Commissarist for Internal Affairs

oblast an administrative region in Soviet Russia

obrok quitrent

ogorod allotment

ogorodnichestvo allotment cultivation

okrug Soviet territorial division

Old Bolshevik a person who had joined the Bolshevik Party before the coup of 1917

OMKh department of local services

OSB Society of Old Bolsheviks

osobniak detached house, villa

Petersburg Side a cluster of islands directly north of the center of St. Petersburg (called the Petrograd Side since the First World War)

podsobnoe khoziaistvo subsidiary farm (agricultural land cultivated by a particular Soviet organization to guarantee a supply of produce)

pomeshchik landowner

pomest’e landed estate

poselianin (pl. poseliane) settler

poselok settlement

prigorod suburb

progulka promenade, stroll

pood unit equivalent to 16.38 kilograms

raion Soviet administrative unit approximating district

RSFSR Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic

sad garden

sadovod (pl. sadovody) a garden plot cultivator

sadovodstvo garden plot cultivation, or a garden plot settlement

sazhen unit equivalent to 2.13 meters

sluzhashchie employees, white-collar workers (in Soviet times)

Sovnarkom the Soviet government

tovarishchestvo association

uchastok plot ofland

uezd tsarist administrative unit approximating county

uplotnenie “compression” (a Soviet practice of the 1920s and 1930s whereby new residents were forcibly moved into apartments and houses that were already occupied)

usad’ba (pl. usad’by) a country estate; a farmstead

USK building control committee

verst unit equivalent to 1.06 kilometers

volost the smallest administrative unit (typically, a few villages)

vremianka a temporary shelter built on a dacha plot

Vyborg Side the northernmost district of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg