Summerfolk

The more active involvement of some peasants in the dacha industry was in large part a result of the greater economic independence they enjoyed after the Emancipation of 1861. By the mid-i86os, many peasants enjoyed formal legal ownership of a plot of land, and on this land, especially in the more densely populated regions, they might well decide to build new dwellings.49 While these houses were anything but places of leisure, they served to change peasants’ outlook in ways that have significance for the subsequent history of the dacha: for a section of the village population the izba became not simply a building that enabled them to exercise their age-old right to work the land but a piece of property implying new rights and status.50

Changes in legal status were not, moreover, the only factor in fostering new proprietary instincts in villages within the orbit of the major cities. Emancipation had also brought an increase in labor mobility and a slight weakening of the traditional communal way of life. New attitudes toward housing were particularly evident in villages with a large proportion of migrant urban wage earners (otkhodniki) where the multigenerational patriarchal household was coming under strain and members of the younger generation were more likely to peel off and build their own homes. These villages were, in general, closer to the city and hence better able to take advantage of nonagricultural economic opportunities. For those peasants who had made good in the city and returned to the village in middle age to take on their patriarchal responsibilities, urban styles and standards of housing were highly desirable. Windows and metal roofs were added; the izba interior was partitioned to create new rooms.51

A house for a “prosperous peasant” in the central and southern regions of Russia (from Atlas proektov i chertezhei sel’skikh postroek [St. Petersburg, 1853])

This view of the home as a new economic unit, not exclusively agricultural, led peasants to service the expanding dacha market by making their houses available to city folk. Along the Northern line out of Moscow, for example, rural communities catered explicitly to summerfolk by raising the level of comfort in their dwellings, planting flowers and trees, leveling the path from the station to the settlement, offering their services as cab drivers, and opening boating stations.52 By the 1880s and 1890s, “suburban” peasants were observed to be building dachas “very actively, as far as their means allow.”53 In 1887, 1,560 peasants in the Petersburg region were estimated to be renting out their property, around 400 in Pargolovo volost and over 600 in the Staraia Derevnia district.54 The high representation of these areas points both to their undoubted importance in the summer residency patterns of the St. Petersburg population but also, perhaps, to the failure of the researchers to look in proper detail at less well-established locations (for example, those south of the city). It should also be assumed that many of the subjects in this survey were “peasants” in name only, and that they were actually earning wages in the city. Nonetheless, these statistics do begin to hint at the scale of “simple” families’ involvement in the dacha economy.

Urban Encroachment

The result of peasant involvement in the dacha market was not necessarily a realization of dacha life; “peasants” were by no means guaranteed to be laborers in agricultural communities. Increasingly common on the outskirts of Moscow and Petersburg were “dacha” settlements that contained artisans and tradespeople as well as summer visitors. A survey of Moscow guberniia at the turn of the nineteenth century commented: “There are rather a lot of population centers of this kind, which are not peasant settlements but which cannot be considered urban either, which are composed of a group of households connected by many common interests, both economic and social, but which have no form of public administration, no organization to oversee them.”55