Summerfolk

The difficulties faced by the settlements were not, moreover, simply a matter of infrastructure. They were caught in a no-man’s-land between zemstvo and city, and hence received financial support from neither.107 The neighborhood spirit necessary to overcome this disadvantage never really developed, given the absence of appropriate institutions (such as town councils).108 The 600 or so dacha settlements in the Moscow region by the time of World War I had come into being without any planning on the part of the municipal or regional authorities. Their emergence had been commercially driven, so there was little opportunity to coordinate the provision of basic services; many of them were too large and crowded to offer their inhabitants a reasonable exurban standard of living. Crucially, settlements did not have the authority to levy taxes, so they had no way to force residents to contribute to the costs of improving infrastructure.109 Most of the local newspapers of the time complain of underprovision of basic services and of inadequate building standards caused by the pressure to exploit the land commercially; it was estimated, for example, that only 10 percent of buildings in Shuvalovo/Ozerki would meet fire safety regulations. Many dachniki felt short-changed by the shareholders’ companies, which were ostensibly responsible for the management of the settlement but in reality shifted the burden of basic maintenance to residents. Losinyi Ostrov, a settlement formed in 1899 that had over 2,000 permanent residents (as well as many more seasonal visitors) by the end of the 1900s, was typical in the problems it experienced:

Houses are multiplying endlessly. One fence adjoins another, forming long straight lines. On one side of the fences there is culture: one can see neat paths covered with sand, flowers, and fountains. But on the other side there is something vaguely reminiscent of a pavement, which, along with the roads, is layered with impassable mud in rainy weather, is a dustbowl when it’s dry, and is buried in snowdrifts in winter.110

It was almost impossible, the same editorial complained, to make residents show more concern for the settlement’s public spaces: “Shut away on our plots of land, we live aloof from one another.”

Dacha communities felt particularly acutely the lack of strong institutional backing in the face of the growing problem of maintaining public order. The settlement of Starbeevo, just outside Moscow, for example, in 1904 proposed to solve its security problem by imposing two hours of compulsory watch duty for each plot with a house.111 Other settlements might petition the police to send extra constables their way. The Sheremetev estate at Kuskovo was by 1904 attracting up to 3,000 dachniki in the summer (spread over 600 desiatinas) as well as thousands of day trippers on public holidays. The local constable wrote in desperation to the police chief of Moscow uezd that disturbances were becoming ever more common for two main reasons: first, the imposition of a state liquor monopoly, which meant that drunken crowds tended to congregate at particular retail outlets instead of dispersing around the many watering holes that used to exist; second, the spread of popular theater and other entertainments, which acted as magnets for the rowdy lower social strata. A further problem was the watchmen, who, paid a mere 15 rubles per month, were less than vigilant. On average, between fifteen and twenty dachas were burglarized each season.112