Summerfolk

Nor was the state by any means the only initiator of dacha entrepreneurship. The intensive development by private owners of estate lands located on the outskirts of the major cities continued into the twentieth century. In 1899, A. D. Sheremetev owned 322 plots (typically of 600 square sazhens) in Mar’ina Roshcha that brought in a total of 26,000 rubles in rent over the year; his 262 plots in Ostankino were slightly less profitable, as the land was cheaper. Rent levels were fixed by custom (under the terms of chinsh), and so not commercially driven. In 1912, Sheremetev showed impatience with this state of affairs by submitting a petition claiming the right to demolish small rented dachas and replace them with income-generating large apartment buildings (dokhodnye doma).77 A less acrimonious venture was undertaken in 1912 on the estate of Count Stenbok-Fermor at Lakhta, to the north of St. Petersburg. With the approval of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, 2,750 desiatinas of land at Lakhta was bought by a group of shareholders for 1.9 million rubles.78 The company grew quickly, by all appearances: its balance sheet as of 31 December 1914 showed total assets of nearly 9 million rubles.79

The Lakhta company stated in its constitution that it would build in St. Petersburg guberniia “dacha settlements with the aim of making accommodations cheaper in combination with improvements in their variety and quality.”80 This provision points to an important aspect of property development in late imperial “dacha” locations: the summer hordes of dachniki were joined by increasing numbers of permanent residents.81 To take just one example, Tsarskoe Selo was in 1886 only a very small town with just over 500 taxable properties (most of them with extensive outbuildings and gardens).82 In 1895 the town was still of modest size: it numbered some 2,000 inhabitants.83 By 1910, however, it had a permanent population of just over 30,000 (swelled by 7,000 in summer by the influx of dacha folk and summer workers).84

Russia’s Out-of-Town “Settlers”

Tsarskoe Selo provides a convenient illustration of a much broader trend. As early as 1891, it was estimated that 5,000 “dacha husbands” were commuting daily to work along the Finland line alone.85 In the early 1900s appeared the first guidebooks that wrote about the dacha suburbs not from the point of view of native Petersburgers but from that of new arrivals to the city looking for a cheap and convenient place to live for the summer.86 This depopulation of the central parts of Moscow and St. Petersburg was not caused by a yearning for fresh air; escalating housing costs in the city were driving people into new settlements. Old dacha places on the outskirts of these cities were becoming thoroughly suburbanized; such, for example, was the fate of Novaia Derevnia and Chernaia Rechka in the 1900s. Comments on crowding in Moscow locations such as Petrovskii Park were likewise frequently heard.

So prospective suburbanites looked to develop new territories. At Moscow’s Losinoostrovskaia, a new station on the Iaroslavl’ line was opened in 1898. The neighboring forest land (owned by the appanage administration) was chopped into plots (averaging one desiatina) that were leased out for thirty-six years. In the first few years of the settlement’s existence almost all the plots were allocated and built on; houses for year-round habitation predominated. Residents thus solved two problems at once, acquiring an apartment and a dacha rolled into one and enjoying the opportunity to “live on quite large plots in the manner of a small landowner, with their own vegetable garden and orchard.”87 A society for the improvement of local services was formed in 1905, and new amenities quickly followed: street lamps, watchmen, squares, a summer theater, tennis courts, a telephone network, a local newspaper, a school, a postal service, a library, and a pharmacy.