Summerfolk

The issue of public order in Petersburg dacha locations was publicly recognized in 1871, when a “suburban” police force was set up to look after settlements whose status fell in between city and village; in the late 1870s it was expanded to take in Shuvalovo, Sestroretsk, Ligovo, Lakhta, and others.113 Yet problems remained. Particularly vulnerable were those dacha locations that adjoined worker settlements. One such place was Sestroretsk, a center for the arms industry but also a vacation resort, whose population of 5,000 in the mid-1880s was policed by a mere three constables.114 Some dacha communities made their grievances known to the higher authorities. In 1901 the police department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that the Pargolovo society for local services had petitioned the guberniia authorities to have two state-owned liquor shops closed to eliminate regular drunken disturbances in the area. At the same time, the police put in a bid to the Ministry of Finances for extra personnel, noting that in summer only eleven constables were employed to maintain law and order in settlements whose combined population swelled to 25,000. Village constables could not be sent in, as Shuvalovo-Ozerki did not fall under their jurisdiction.115

Unrest increased with the events of 1905, when suburbs and exurbs were widely perceived to be caught up in the same revolutionary disturbances as the cities. One owner of an estate near Kuntsevo, to the west of Moscow, wrote to her bank in 1908 asking for a deferment of her mortgage payments, given the collapse of the dacha market after 1905. Workers’ protests had spilled over beyond the factory limits; agitational meetings had been held in parks and forests that were privately owned and adjacent to dacha areas. In the end, Cossacks had been called in to disperse the undesirable elements, but even so, dacha life had been “destroyed”:

All this so scared and repelled dachniki that over the last two years (1906 and 1907) Muscovites have not only failed to rent any dachas at Troekurovo [the estate in question] but they haven’t even come to view them, despite a mass of publications in all the newspapers. But in point of fact over the ten years preceding 1905 Troekurovo dachas were always occupied by rich Moscow merchants, who were happy to pay more than 2,000 rubles annually.116

The local police constable wrote to the bank in support of this appeal, citing in particular the danger of “expropriations” (i.e., burglaries) for “owners of wealthy, remote dachas.” Never before had the position of dachniki, as unprotected representatives of urban society in an alien nonurban environment, seemed so vulnerable.

LIKE so many other aspects of late imperial socioeconomic history, the fate of the prerevolutionary summerfolk seems grimly overdetermined. Dacha settlements, with their inadequate economic and institutional backing and their unsure administrative status, were vulnerable to all the malaises of Russia’s high-speed but volatile and squalid urbanization. One historian of St. Petersburg concludes that “deficient municipal services and retarded technology in public transport hindered the creation of bucolic suburban enclaves for the elites and the emerging middle classes, thus limiting use of the defensive strategy against perceived urban ills commonly employed by elites in cities throughout Europe and America.”117