Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (review)

In the late summer of 1989, I was invited for the weekend to a friend’s family’s dacha in Zhukovka, a pretty village less than an hour’s drive west of Moscow. The dacha was a modest two-story wooden house, with a small overgrown garden in which we drank tea, ate home-made black currant preserves, and lounged about discussing the turbulent political events of that spring and summer. When my friend gave me a tour of the village, I was surprised to learn that the owners of the neighboring dachas included Brezhnev’s daugher Galina as well as Andrei Sakharov and Mstislav Rostropovich. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Allilueva was a former resident of the elite dacha settlement. Sakharov had only recently ended his internal exile in Gorky, while Rostropovich had emigrated to the United States years before, but their dachas had remained in their families’ hands even though both were prominent critics of the Soviet regime. Discussing this seeming paradox with my friend, I realized that the dacha was more than a summer cottage; it was a uniquely private space where Russians of starkly opposing political views could apparently live side by side in cozy domesticity, far from the codes that governed everyday life.

Stephen Lovell’s Summerfolk is an elegant analysis of the cultural meanings and social practices that have shaped the dacha’s history over almost three hundred years, from its aristocratic origins in the eighteenth century to its latest nouveau riche incarnation in post-Soviet Russia. One of the few Russian words to have entered the vocabulary of other languages, dacha originally meant a parcel of land given by the tsar to his aristocratic servitors. The history of the modern dacha began with Peter the Great, who gave suburban tracts of land to nobles along the road leading from St. Petersburg to his summer palace at Peterhof and ordered them to construct palatial country residences. By the mid-eighteenth century a row of imposing residences and gardens lined the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, where noble families and courtiers organized lavish entertainments in an environment “associated with a rejection of the status distinctions that underpinned social contacts in the city and at court.”

Toward the end of the eighteenth century a new and less aristorcratic entertainment culture had emerged, one focused on more casual social interaction centered on small groups of family and friends. Large public spectacles were no longer centered on the dachas, but took place in the more anonymous settings of public parks and pleasure gardens, and Dacha owners and even peasants began to rent out smaller houses and even rooms to civil servants, shopkeepers, and craftsmen. By the early nineteenth century, renting a summer house had become “a universal aspiration for well-to-do sections of Petersburg society.”

The opening in 1837 of a suburban railway line from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk marked the beginning of the transformation of the dacha into an amenity to which broader sections of middle-class society could aspire. By the mid-nineteenth century there was a thriving rental market for dachas, giving rise to a new cultural type, the “dachnik”. Dachniki, or summerfolk, came to be associated with a distinctive lifestyle centered on leisure and domesticity. Identified not by their professional or social status, but by their leisure pursuits, they were often the objects of derision in the press, which made fun of their supposedly banal pastimes. Lovell, however, shows how by the late-nineteenth century the dacha became the setting for the creation of a “cultivated ‘middle-class’ lifestyle” that eroded the boundaries between the commercial and cultural elites, arguing that the dacha was “one of the defining attributes of the late imperial middle class.”

The revolutions of 1917 transformed the dacha, which became in the Soviet period a dispensation offered by the state to political and cultural elites, although some private owners did succeed in holding on to their property. Indeed, the...