Summerfolk

109. P. N. Durilin, “Moskovskie prigorody i dachnye poselki v sviazi s razvitiem gorodskoi zhizni,” Arkhiv gorodskoi gigieny i tekhniki, no. 1–2 (1918), 63–101.

110. Editorial, Losinoostrovskii vestnik, no. 1 (1909), 1–2.

111. TsIAM, f. 483, op. 3, d. 344, I. 8. Starbeevo was spread over 200 desiatinas and had 778 plots owned by 367 people. Each year it attracted “up to 300 dachniki.”

112. Ibid., d. 367, II. 1–2.

113. See PSZ, ser. 2, 46, no. 49718 (8 June 1871), and “Ustroistvo peterburgskoi prigorodnoi politsii,” PL, 11 May 1880, 2. Property in the suburban district was taxed at the rate of 0.5% of value in order to fund the police: see Mordukhai-Boltovskii, Svod zakonov, vol. 5, Ustav o priamykh nalogakh, arts. 116–18. The debates on public order that culminated in the creation of the suburban police force are well summarized in R. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971), 255–68.

114. “Iz dachnykh mest,” PL, 24 May 1885, 2.

115. RGIA, f. 1152, op. 13, d. 300, 11. 2–3. The police were granted their wish: Witte personally authorized the appointment of six more constables to cover the area.

116. TsIAM, f. 483, op. 3, d. 1513.

117. J. Bater, “Between Old and New: St. Petersburg in the Late Imperial Era,” in The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. M. Hamm (Bloomington, 1986), 73.

4

Between Arcadia and Suburbia

The Dacha as a Cultural Space, 1860–1917

The dacha was not just a place but a way of life. Of this the many observers of out-of-town society in the mid-nineteenth century were in no doubt: the dacha brought with it a certain range of social rituals, forms of sociability, patterns of behavior, and cultural values. But the second half of the nineteenth century outdid earlier periods in the number of models of exurban life in circulation and in the intensity with which they were articulated. The word “dacha” meant many more things than it had previously and it engaged the interest of a society increasingly committed to self-contemplation. The last decades of the nineteenth century were the dacha’s golden age not only for the socioeconomic reasons outlined in Chapter 3 but also for the cultural prominence it attained.

Dachas put tens of thousands of urban Russians at a safe distance from the world of work, giving them unprecedented opportunities to enjoy more leisure and to use it more freely, to seek new pastimes, and to adopt a new lifestyle independent of occupation or lineage. Out-of-town settlements quickly developed their own subcultures. Collective entertainments were organized, local newspapers were published, self-help societies were formed, and the exurbanite emerged as a new type. These dachniki were remarkable creatures: urban Russians who took their identity not from their legal or professional status or from their relation to the means of production but from their nonwork activities. They were not guests on a country estate or summer visitors to a rural community but—increasingly and unashamedly—vacationers: that is, people who exercised choice in how they spent their money and their time, and whose choices had implications for the kind of persons they were or wanted to become.