Summerfolk

The effects of an increasingly dynamic property market fed by various sources—private estates, state land, palace land, appanage land—soon made themselves felt. By the mid-1860s, patterns of ownership were looking somewhat fragmented. An 1865 survey of St. Petersburg uezd listed 455 dacha owners, classified mainly as merchants and civil servants, most of them with relatively small landholdings (under ten desiatinas). These plots of land tended to have not one building but several (typically, between five and ten), many of which were presumably rented out as summer houses.43 The number of minor dacha owners increased rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s as the leasing of state lands for private cultivation and property development continued with greater intensity. Large territories within reach of the city might be divided up into dozens or hundreds of plots, typically of 500 or 600 square sazhens. Tenants would sign a lease, often for twenty-five years, and make an annual payment of 20 or 30 rubles for rental of the land. The bulk of such tenants were categorized in the official records as civil servants, merchants, and military men, but there were also tradespeople, artisans, and peasants. The sizes of individual holdings varied significantly, from one plot to several bunched together. Very often a single plot contained more than one building fit for habitation—surely an indication that many of these dachas were built to be rented out. The most common description was “single-story wooden dacha,” usually priced for taxation purposes between 1,500 and 2,500 rubles.44

A detailed survey conducted in the late 1880s revealed a great increase in the number of minor property owners since the 1860s. In St. Petersburg uezd, for example, the number of private landowners had risen from 419 in 1864 to 1,385 in 1877–78 to 3,391 in 1889, while the amount of land in private ownership had not grown correspondingly; rather, it had decreased since the 1870s as the city expanded. The class structure of ownership remained largely intact: the major landholdings were still overwhelmingly in the hands of the nobility (which, in 1889, owned 86 percent of private land, as compared to 96 percent in 1865). But the market for smaller plots was lively, fueled by the sale of parcels of land from large noble estates. Most landowners had small holdings (less than ten desiatinas), and very many such people had a few dachas for rent. These dwellings would remain as the staple of the summer housing market even after the turn of the century, when largescale dacha entrepreneurship really took off.45

Peasants and the Dacha Industry

As transport links improved and more and more villages and settlements in the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions were colonized by dachniki, these outlying areas came increasingly to be oriented toward the capitals and their annually migrating population. The dacha market was, as ever, greatly expanded by the contribution of peasants, who readily made their izbas available for rent to summering city folk; for rural people who lived within reach both of St. Petersburg and the sea, the dacha industry was commonly their most important source of income.46 The wealthier peasants would plow their surplus money into dacha construction, and even the poorer families in the Moscow and Petersburg regions could accommodate paying guests by clearing out of their izbas and living in a barn for the summer months. Usually city folk did not have to look too hard for rental opportunities of this kind, as a horde of dacha hawkers would descend on the first cart or train arriving with prospective summer visitors. Haggling was obligatory, and was often conducted not with the owners themselves but with truculent caretakers.47 According to one memoir account, the dacha-renting procedure ran as follows: at Shrovetide dachniki would arrive at the local station, where peasants would be waiting to offer them a ride into the settlement. During the cab ride the peasant would try to sell his own izba or that of a family member; if the passenger asked to stop and look at other dachas, the peasant would do everything to prevent him from doing so, saying, “It’s no good here: the landlady is a nag and it’s full of bugs.” Eventually the two parties would negotiate a price and get to know each other better over tea and vodka.48