But it was not only intellectuals of a populist persuasion such as Mikhnevich who bemoaned the changing character of village life within the dachnik catchment area of the major cities. The freeing of peasants from their agricultural pursuits stoked fears of social tensions and even unrest. The village of Tosno, for example, had been greatly affected by the opening of the Nikolaevskaia railway line (between St. Petersburg and Moscow). Agriculture was in decline, and now peasants could not even derive supplementary income from ferrying dachniki about, as the railway provided a regular and efficient transit service. Local peasants mostly earned money by piecework in the city; but they were left little time for kitchen gardening and animal husbandry, and ended up buying a lot of their food at inflated prices from traders. The tourist orientation of the village was confirmed when the manager of Tosno station—to the dismay of local peasants—invited gypsy musicians to perform so as to attract visitors.100 According to many press reports of the 1880s and 1890s, peasant responses to social and economic dislocation often went a lot further than mere dismay. Here again Pargolovo was a popular example:
The St. Peter’s Day holiday was celebrated by Pargolovo aboriginals for three whole days. On the first day everything was fine and proper: peasant girls, women, and lads went around the village in groups singing and playing the harmonica; but by the evening there was a complete change of ambience: decorum was replaced by impertinence and unruliness, and all of a sudden the dachniki were under siege.101
The report went on to describe how an elderly gentleman had had his hat knocked off by a peasant lad, how two ladies had been harassed by drunken and foul-mouthed locals, and how three men had been prevented from entering a local restaurant by a group of drunken peasants who were urinating by the entrance. All the while the local police were nowhere in evidence. Reports on peasant violence in dacha settlements were as old as the Petersburg boulevard press itself, and they continued to the end of the imperial period.102In Pargolovo in 1880 a peasant boy hanged himself after he had taken the family’s plow out without asking permission and his horse fell at the first furrow, breaking the shaft.103 In 1909 a journalist reported that in Pargolovo III there were “four pubs, two wine stores, a wineshop, and other similar institutions” within a stretch of only 100 sazhens. “This once peaceful dacha resort now resounds every evening with drunken singing and the swearing of local hooligans.”104
The local newspaper for Pargolovo volost, although it often disputed the sensationalized reports found in the boulevard press, shared its perception of social tensions. In 1882 it contended that the “upper layers of the dacha population”—with the exceptions of “minor cases of bullying that have brought dachniki to the local police cell and of suggestions of dramas and romances that are supposed to have taken place during the present season”—should not bear responsibility for the general decline in standards of public behavior. Rather, blame should be attached to servants and to various kinds of migrants (in winter, spring, and autumn, these were laborers; in summer, peddlers, organ grinders, and beggars). In summer the population swelled from around 2,000 to 10,000 registered residents (the real number was significantly greater). The six village constables currently employed could not cope with the resulting waves of drunkenness and burglaries, and dachniki were unwilling to hire yardmen to keep an eye on their property.105
Mutual suspicion and incomprehension between dachnik and peasant had also become a common theme of fiction set in dacha settlements. Literary representations of the peasantry had by the 1880s a sizable history. In the sentimentalist age, representatives of the common people were human props in dramas of sensibility; in the mid-nineteenth century they emerged as full-fledged human beings with the potential to be dramatic heroes; but in the 1870s disappointment with the peasantry set in, and it only deepened thereafter. Poverty, hunger, adultery, and crime (without repentance) became dominant themes.106
