Summerfolk

These notions have a lot of truth to them. A dacha is almost invariably a dwelling that is used intermittently, most often in the summer or on weekends. It stands on its own plot of land, is located out of town, but generally lies within reach of a large urban center (typically, no more than two or three hours’ journey). Most heads of dacha households need to remain reasonably close to the city, as it is their main provider of employment and source of income. Unlike country estate proprietors, with whom they are sometimes confused, dacha folk do not seek to make money from their landholding. They treat their house in the country as a temporary refuge and a recreational amenity, spatially separate from the city yet usually still within commuting range. The dacha may therefore be regarded as occupying a space between town and country: at a significant remove from metropolitan civilization but distinct from the surrounding rural settlement by virtue of its urban clientele.

To this extent, the dacha may be considered a by-product of urbanization and thus analogous to forms of settlement elsewhere in the developed world: the suburban zones colonized by the North American and European bourgeoisie, or indeed the country retreats of the leisure class. As cities grow larger and wealthier and as their white-collar pop-ulations expand, increasing numbers of people look to the nearby countryside for recuperation, domestic comfort, and enjoyment. Russia’s dachniki (dacha folk) fit this pattern in many ways. Out-of-town dwellings offered them favorable conditions for family life, pleasures such as recreation and relaxed sociability, and above all the opportunity to escape the heat, dirt, and disease of the city in summer.

As a social and cultural institution, the dacha has a long history that runs roughly parallel to the course of Russia’s urbanization. The story begins with the creation of St. Petersburg—Russia’s first “modern,” self-consciously Western city—in the early eighteenth century. Here, on the road that led from Petersburg to the palace settlement at Peterhof, courtiers built themselves out-of-town residences, thus marking out a space that lay beyond the city limits yet did not merge with the surrounding rural landscape. In the first stage of their history, dachas took their lead, both architecturally and in the way of life they fostered, from the aristocracy. Then, in the first third of the nineteenth century, the rental market for summer housing (mostly concentrated in the city’s immediate environs) entered a period of expansion that lasted all the way through to the Revolution. Improved transport connections in the second half of the nineteenth century greatly increased the scope for suburban and exurban settlement. Economic and legal liberalization invigorated the market in land and property. Finally, during the last two prerevolutionary decades, in the face of ever more rapid urban and industrial development, dacha settlements began to converge with suburbs.1

This brief historical outline is useful as basic orientation but has its limitations. It does not, for example, do full justice to the dacha’s local significance. Urbanization is a process whose outcomes depend heavily on how urban society is constituted in a specific time and place. The dacha’s clientele has always been city-based, but it is far from being fixed or homogeneous. Over the past two centuries the word “dacha” has been used in various senses by many different members of Russian society. For an aristocrat in 1800, it would have meant what we would call a villa or even a mansion. Inhabitants of St. Petersburg in the 1850s might have rented their “dachas” from a noble landowner, a merchant, or even a peasant. For a wealthy urbanite in 1890 the word might have referred to a house in the Crimea or to a former manor house. For a medium- or low-ranking civil servant of the same period it very often denoted a modest cottage in St. Petersburg’s or Moscow’s summer equivalent of the commuter belt. Joseph Stalin used a “dacha” as his main residence for the last twenty years of his life. For any inhabitant of a major Russian city in 2000, a dacha is likely to be a glorified allotment.