Summerfolk

But if transport had an impact on the suburban and exurban development of the Moscow and Petersburg regions, it did so rather differently than in Western Europe. Russia still lagged behind in transport provision (the first electric trams in St. Petersburg, for example, did not start running until the late 1900s), and movement both within the city and from the city center to the outskirts was less easy than in Paris or London. Russian workers—both in offices and in less genteel employment—were tied to their workplaces to a much greater extent than their counterparts in Britain or France. These limitations of urban infrastructure, however, did much to stimulate the development of dacha settlements; that is, to make the city’s inhabitants disposed to summer migration rather than to year-round residence in suburbia. Daily commuting was for the most part unfeasible, for reasons both of cost and of time, and as a result the city center became hugely overcrowded; the acceleration of population growth brought no corresponding expansion of the city’s territory. Epidemics were rife, especially in the summer. In the second half of the nineteenth century, St. Petersburg was notorious as the least healthy yet most expensive capital in Europe.6

What Was a Dacha?

If the social and geographical factors underlying the dacha boom seem clear enough, much less obvious is how we should begin to analyze the phenomenon; whether, indeed, it is possible to provide an elegant categorization of all the forms of dwelling that were called “dacha.” The only existing book-length work on the subject advances a sensible typology of summerfolk settlement in this period.7 First comes the “dacha suburb” (dachnyi prigorod), consisting of dachas that were built as part of an overall framework of urban planning (such as St. Petersburg’s Neva islands or towns within its orbit, such as Gatchina, Luga, and Sestroretsk) or that sprang up on a major estate or palace settlement within easy reach of the city (Peterhof, Oranienbaum, Pavlovsk, Tsarskoe Selo). This is the oldest form of dacha settlement: depending on how exactly the dacha is defined, it can be said to date from the 1710s or 1720s, but it had certainly made its appearance by the middle of the reign of Catherine II. Second, the “dacha village” (dachnaia derevnia) includes, quite simply, those villages where peasants and other property holders rented out their houses to city dwellers. Peasants in the St. Petersburg region were earning nonagri-cultural income of this kind from the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not before. The third category is the “dacha location” (dachnaia mestnost’). This is a form of settlement that has a strong dacha orientation (where many or even most houses were used as dachas) but that was not created with this function in view. Dacha locations were typically former villages (Beloostrov, Krasnoe Selo, Pargolovo, Toksovo) or estates (Dudergof, Kushelevka, Poliustrovo, Shuvalovo) or a combination of the two (Kuokkala, Raivola, Terioki). Finally, we have the “dacha settlement” (dachnyi poselok)designed specifically for recreational dacha use (Alesksandrovka, Vladimirovka, Vyritsa, Ol’gino, Siverskaia, Udel’naia, and many others): this phenomenon grew in significance toward the end of the nineteenth century, and it came into its own at the start of the twentieth.