Preferred Citation: Bernstein, Laurie. Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9199p2dt/
 | Sonia's DaughtersProstitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial RussiaLaurie BernsteinUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford© 1995 The Regents of the University of California |
Preferred Citation: Bernstein, Laurie. Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9199p2dt/
Acknowledgments
This book would never have seen completion without the encouragement and assistance of my loved ones, friends, and colleagues—many of whom overlap. I want to begin by thanking the people who were helpful to me in one way or another in the days when this was still a doctoral dissertation: Andrea Bass-Brawer, Lois Becker, Zita Bekes, Laird Boswell, Inga Bruk, Esther Cohn-Vargas, Carole Curtis, Valerii Danchenko, Carolyn Dean, Linda Edmondson, Stephen Frank, Rose Glickman, Jane Hedges, Shimon Iakerson, Richard Johnson, Julie Liss, Sergei Maksimov, Lynn Mally, Gary Marker, Louise McReynolds, Robert Moeller, Csaba Nemes, Joan Neuberger, Jan Olbertz, Suzanne Qualls, Helen Schwartz, Daniela Steila, Mark Steinberg, G. A. Tishkin, Nina Zonina, and Andrei Zonin.
I also received assistance from librarians and archivists in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) at the Library of the Academy of Sciences (BAN), the Central State Historical Archive (TsGIA), and the Central State Archive of the Leningrad Region (TsGALO). In addition, I would like to thank librarians at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hoover Institution, the New York Public Library, the New York Academy of Medicine, the National Library of Medicine, and the Library of Congress. Jim Fraser from the library at Fairleigh Dickinson University (campus at Madison, New Jersey) and Ben Goldsmith at the New York Public Library helped me find the appropriate illustrations.
This project would never have seen the light of day without Richard Stites, who was the first Western historian to consider the problem of prostitution in Imperial Russia and who kindly encouraged me to ex-
plore the issue in depth. I must also thank Barbara Engel for sharing with me a bibliography on Russian prostitution that proved invaluable in getting this work started.
My remarkable professor at Merritt Junior College in Oakland, Eve Wallenstein, sparked my interest in Russian history. If not for the fine example she set as a teacher, I never would have become one myself. I am also grateful to my dissertation advisers, Nicholas Riasanovsky, Gail Lapidus, and Ruth Rosen, for their encouragement, time, and assistance. Most of all, I want to acknowledge my debt to the chair of my dissertation committee, Reginald Zelnik, for the hours he spent reading drafts of my work, for his suggestions, for his patience with me when I was a graduate student, for his guidance in helping me to make sense out of "Sonia's daughters," and, finally, for giving this project its fitting title.
Several organizations provided me with financial assistance which supported the research and writing of this work. While I was conducting dissertation research, I received funding from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and the Department of History and Center for Slavic and East European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The American Association of University Women Education Fellowship Program and the Mellon Foundation contributed generously to my support while I was writing my dissertation. During the post-doctoral phase, I received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Association, IREX, and Rutgers University.
Since I began revising the dissertation, several individuals have offered valuable suggestions. I would like to thank Laura Engelstein, Adele Lindenmeyr, David Ransel, Christine Ruane, Gerald Surh, William Wagner, and Elizabeth Waters in this regard. I am also grateful to my women's book club in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and to the members of the Delaware Valley Seminar on Russian History. Sheila Levine of the University of California Press has been more than patient with me over the long haul from completed dissertation to finished manuscript. In the final stages of revising the manuscript, suggestions and support from Carolyn Dean, Joan Neuberger, and Andrew Lees proved extremely helpful. Janet Golden, in particular, helped guide me through the difficult, ultimate revisions. I am deeply indebted to Janet for giving this work a final and close reading, and for bringing to it her keen intelligence and fine editorial skills.
Though many eyes have been on Sonia's Daughters, all errors and misguided flights of historical fancy are very much my own.
The list is getting long, but I cannot stop without acknowledging the love and encouragement from my family. My mother, Priscilla Bernstein, who died in 1982, would have been so proud to see the published me. The subject of my research has always embarrassed my loving father, Sylvester Bernstein, but that has never stopped him from supporting my decision to pursue Russian history as a career, or from doing his best to understand my choices. Sara Mebel', my dear relative in Moscow, was of great help in translating some difficult passages, sending updates in current newspapers, and frying potatoes. My wonderful six-year-old son, Perry Weinberg, made no scholarly contributions to speak of, but the joy that he brings me more than compensates for the many times he has leaned on the computer keys. Last, but never least, I owe my greatest thanks to Robert Weinberg. Since we met in 1979, he has shared his research and ideas with me. He rescued me in the early days of graduate school by taking me to Ramones concerts and teaching me the joys of roller derby. In 1981, he had the foresight to suggest that prostitution would be a worthwhile dissertation topic. His attentive, repeated readings of my chapters and grant proposals, and his insightful suggestions have been above and beyond the call of duty. By marrying me in 1986, he demonstrated how the categories of "colleague," "friend," and "loved one" could indeed overlap—in the best of all ways.
Finally, I want to acknowledge my debt to a skeleton in the Bernstein family closet—my great-great-grandmother, who is whispered to have managed a brothel in Russian Poland.
Introduction
"I ask you: what has Russian literature squeezed from all the nightmare of prostitution? Just little Sonia Marmeladova."
From Aleksandr Kuprin, Iama (1912)
Carrying a parasol and clad in a "fourth-hand, flowery silk dress . . . with its immensely long, ridiculous train and vast crinoline," Dostoevsky's Sonia Marmeladova could not be mistaken for anything but "indecent."[1] "Fallen women" like Sonia figured prominently not only in the fiction of nineteenth- and early, twentieth-century Russia, but also in journalistic and anecdotal accounts. Prostitutes were a fixture on the main streets of Russia's cities—along Kiev's Kreshchatik, in Odessa on Deribasovskaia Street, and in Kazan on the Voskresenka. In Moscow, prostitutes "impudently badger[ed] male passers-by and importunately offer[ed] their services, spewing forth foul language, pushing those they [came] across, squabbling with cab drivers and amongst themselves."[2] The poorer prostitutes in St. Petersburg congregated in the seedy neighborhoods around the Ligovka, the Viazemskii monastery, and the setting for Crime and Punishment, Sennaia Square's Haymarket.[3] Better-
[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 192.
[2] Iurii Iu. Tatarov, "Postanovka prostitutsii v gorode Moskve," in Trudy pervago vserossiikago s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami i ego prichinami proiskhodivshchago v S.-Peterburge s 21 do 25 aprelia 1910 grada, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1911), pp. 396–97.
[3] A. Chivonibar, "Torgovlia zhivym tovarom," in Bosiaki. Zhenshchiny. Den'gi . (Odessa, 1904), p. 63. See also Prostitutsiia v Rossii: Kartiny publichnago torga (St. Petersburge, 1908), pp. 154–55.
heeled women sought clients along lively Nevsky Prospect, the scene of Nikolai Gogol's story about an artist who is ruined by his fantasies of a prostitute.
A Kazan journalist described the local prostitutes as "blondes, brunettes, tall, short, old, young, some still slips of things [devchonki ]," wearing fur coats or cloaks, with little caps, hats, or kerchiefs on their heads. Readily identifiable by signs of their trade—painted lips, rouged cheeks, and finery that seemed to mock the decorous dress of the proper lady—prostitutes might also be recognized from the look they cast at potential customers. Unlike "honest' women who remained elusive and demure, prostitutes gazed at men directly. Their "long, expressive glance," wrote the journalist, blended "restless curiosity, the timidity of a beaten dog," and "entreaty" with erotic promise.[4]
In 1843, bowing to prostitution's seeming inevitability, the tsarist Ministry of Internal Affairs began to regulate commercial sex in the Russian empire. A compromise between absolute prohibition and decriminalization, "regulation" purported both to police the behavior of lower-class women and to curb the spread of venereal disease. "Medical-police committees" oversaw the operation of brothels and issued licenses known as "yellow tickets" to prostitutes, obligating them to appear for periodic medical examinations. Authorities incarcerated in hospital wards prostitutes believed to suffer from venereal diseases, releasing them only when the more obvious symptoms of infection abated.
Official counts in 1889 put the number of yellow-ticket holders at somewhere between 17,600 and 30,700.[5] Policemen arrested thousands more each year on suspicion of prostitution. Not all of these women were prostitutes—many former prostitutes remained on the lists, mistakes were made, and overzealous policemen improperly railroaded some women into the system. But, significantly, officials believed that only a fraction of the women who exchanged sex for money had been counted and inspected. High rates of venereal diseases among soldiers, male civilians, and even peasants in the countryside seemed to prove that prostitutes were everywhere and that they presented a serious threat
[4] Aleksandr N. Baranov, V zashchitu neschastnykh zhenshchin (Moscow, 1902), pp. 42–44.
[5] The Medical Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs provided a high number of 30,762. Cited in Konstantin L. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," in Trudy Vysochaishe razreskennago s"ezda po obsuzhdeniiu mer protiv sifilisa v Rossii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 20. A census for the same year conducted by the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs quoted the smaller figure of 17,603. A. Dubrovskii, ed., Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 13 (St. Petersburg, 1890), p. xi. I have not been able to determine the reason for the discrepancy between these two ministry totals.
to public health. To tsarist authorities, regulation seemed like the best strategy for tackling both these problems.
Although it was not implemented uniformly, throughout the Russian empire, regulation remained in effect from 1843 until the overthrow of the tsarist regime in February 1917. As state policy, regulation coincided with the era of late Imperial Russia's most momentous transformations, including the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861, the government-financed industrialization drive of the 1880s and 1890s, the revolution of 1905, and World War I. Yet even as social and economic structures changed and the autocratic political order underwent repeated assaults, regulation stood firm. The state never stopped treating prostitution as a "necessary evil" and never ceased to define prostitutes as women in need of supervision.
The tenacity of regulation reflects the fact that one aspect of Russian life stayed relatively constant: that of gender—the way in which male and female roles were socially constructed. The state enshrined the gender system in legal codes and rules that institutionalized male and female difference, such as the law that a wife "obey her husband as the head of the family" and render unto him "unconditional obedience."[6] The regulatory system was a critical expression of this gender order in the way it created a category of "public women" (publichnye zhenshchiny ) whose bodies were supposed to be available to clients, doctors, and policemen on demand. The ideology of male and female difference provided regulation with a steady anchor, enabling the yellow ticket to weather historical currents relatively intact.
Central to this ideological underpinning of regulation was an understanding of sexuality based on gender difference. State officials and educated society conceived of males as requiring outlets for their natural sexual energy, of females as exempt from such needs. Consequently, women who engaged in prostitution were seen either as having been tricked into acting sexually—against their nature—or, at the other extreme, as depraved by definition. In both instances, they deserved medical and police supervision. Men, by contrast, could patronize prostitutes without any interference. In keeping with this double standard of sexual morality, prostitutes were acknowledged as necessary to men's physio-
[6] Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 10, pt. 1 (1914. ed.), quoted in Dorothy Atkinson, "Society and the Sexes in the Russian Past," in Women in Russia, ed. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 33. See also William Wagner, "The Trojan Mare: Women's Rights and Civil Rights in Late Imperial Russia," in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
logical well-being at the same time they were vilified as "fallen women." Regulation exacerbated their position by setting them apart and branding them as threats both to public health and the social order.
Gender worked in tandem with class to define who would fall under state surveillance: the regulatory system primarily embraced women from the lower classes. Economic prospects available to these women expanded while regulation was in force, but not sufficiently to provide them with the money they needed to flourish. In the countryside, peasant custom tended to keep women from gaining control over household land; in the cities, female workers were paid one-half to two-thirds of the (low) wages earned by men. Even though industrialization created jobs for tens of thousands of women, there were few paths to female economic independence. As if by design, the wages of working women were too meager and too uncertain to sustain them.
Gender made women economically vulnerable, but it also afforded them the opportunity to supplement their salaries with prostitution or to give up "honest work" completely. Prostitution remained the one (predominantly female) trade that seemed to promise both good money and freedom. Most prostitutes, in thrall to brothelkeepers, exploited by landlords and pimps, and stricken with alcoholism and disease, failed to see those promises materialize. Nevertheless, prostitution had its attractions when compared to other forms of female labor and always held out the possibility that commercial sex could provide an exit from a life of poverty.
Prostitution and its regulation were integral to Russia's structures of gender, class, and politics. Gender ideology and the economic system together guaranteed that there would be a supply of women ready to satisfy the demands of men. The overwhelming majority of prostitutes came from the lower classes, but males from all social strata depended on prostitutes for sexual relief. Sex with prostitutes violated the moral precepts of religion and ethics, but it was as woven into the fabric of Russian society as the larger patriarchal and hierarchical threads. The government for its part strove to protect prostitutes' clients as well as the overall polity through the regime of the yellow ticket.
Regulation was not unique to Russia. In fact, it had been imported from Paris's police des moeurs, and analogous rules governed prostitution in most of continental Europe.[7] Throughout Europe in the late nine-
[7] On prostitution in Britain and the United States, see Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Other recent histories of prostitution include Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
teenth and early twentieth centuries, regulation was a troublesome and controversial system that raised questions about medical ethics, civil liberties, police authority, and class and gender equality. Regulation prevented a woman from engaging in prostitution on a casual basis; once registered, she generally had no choice but to earn her living from commercial sex alone. Moreover, regulation gave clients illusory notions about the health of registered prostitutes, for physicians often failed to diagnose diseases accurately, and prostitutes contracted and spread infections between examinations. Mandatory hospitalization also failed to justify itself medically. Not only were hospitals unable to house prostitutes through syphilis's elusive contagious periods, but medical science lacked reliable methods for identifying and curing venereal diseases. Regulation, furthermore, created a category of prostitutes that resisted registration. Afraid of detection, many women who genuinely needed medical attention avoided doctors for fear of regulation's consequences. Finally, by limiting compulsory, medical supervision to the women and exempting their customers, regulatory agencies defeated their very purpose, since men remained free to spread venereal diseases.
Prostitutes in all of Europe lived and worked in contrasting degrees of degradation, luxury, and exploitation, with customers ranging from the poorest working man to the richest aristocrat.[8] Russian women turned to prostitution for reasons that varied little from those that motivated women in Europe: financial need, the desire to make "easy money," desperation, unemployment, and personal inclination. As happened in nineteenth-century Europe, prostitution in Russia became associated with the combined traumas of industrialization and urbani-
[8] On prostitution in Imperial Russia, see Barbara Alpern Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Personal and Social Profile," Russian Review 48, no. 1 (January 1989): 21–44; Laura Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphills, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890–1905," Representations, no. 14 (Spring 1986): 169–208; Laura Engelstein, "Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes," Journal of Modern History 60 (September 1988): 458–95; and Richard Stites, "Prostitute and Society in Pre-revolutionary Russia," Jahrbücher für Osteuropas 31 (1983): 348–64. See also Laurie Bernstein, "Yellow Tickets and State-Licensed Brothels: The Tsarist Government and the Regulation of Prostitution," in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
zation, and, like prostitutes in European countries, many Russian prostitutes suffered from venereal disease and alcoholism. But in other important respects, prostitution in Russia differed. Conditions peculiar to the Russian economy, political environment, and society itself affected the character of prostitution and regulation.[9]
To begin with, regulation took shape in the context of strong patriarchal and paternalistic traditions that lingered well into the twentieth century. Russian society was based on a three-tiered hierarchy of rule, with the father as head of the peasant household, the lord as master of his peasants, and the tsar as the "little father" (batiushka ) of them all. This arrangement was meant to encompass, protect, and restrain all of the ruler's subjects. However, the system began to break down in the mid-nineteenth century, with enough individuals falling through the cracks to warrant official concern. By regulating prostitutes, the state could monitor women who no longer had fathers or lords to control their behavior. Regulation was designed to protect public health, but it was also in place to shore up the patriarchal order.
Second, regulation represented one more restriction on an already encumbered population. The post-emancipation social structure of Imperial Russia adhered to a system of estates (sosloviia ), despite the transition to class society. The population of the Russian empire fell within legal social groupings that restricted each estate's occupational and geographic horizons and delineated its respective rights and obligations. The majority of individuals were part of the peasant category and lived on the land, but even many of the Russian workers in towns and cities were still formally inscribed in the legal peasant estate. Post-emancipation Russia therefore had anomalous qualities tied to the conventions of serfdom and the fact that the tsar's subjects never knew legal equality.
Third, notions peculiar to Russia about the peasantry and its role also affected the way prostitution was interpreted. Russian educated society analyzed prostitution in ways similar to the middle and upper classes in Europe, but native cultural traditions also influenced the nature of the discussion, particularly Russia's "populist" legacy of romanticizing the peasantry. Many observers characterized prostitutes as innocent peasant girls whose naïveté had left them vulnerable to the machinations of
[9] Paris regulations, as well as comparable rules for Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and Denmark, are in Abraham Flexner, Prostitution in Europe (New York: The Company, 1914), pp. 405–52.
brothel owners and "white slave traders." A State Duma deputy displayed an extreme side of this view when, in face of much evidence to the contrary, he denied an allegation that peasant families were sending their daughters to an annual fair in Nizhnii Novgorod to earn money as prostitutes. "The Russian peasant population," he declared, "has never engaged in this sort of business and never shall."[10]
Fourth, although women throughout Europe faced terrible workplace oppression, Russian female workers were confronted with an especially hostile environment, working as they did up to sixteen hours a day in unsanitary conditions for wages well below subsistence levels. Industrialization in the Russian empire lagged far behind western and central Europe until the state promoted rapid, massive economic development at the end of the nineteenth century. That is, when most of Europe had already absorbed the shocks of industrialization and urbanization, Russia was just beginning to feel them. Both male and female workers in the Russian empire lacked the benefits of effective protective legislation or trade unions to redress their grievances. Women occupied the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder as domestic servants and unskilled and semiskilled laborers.[11] While women everywhere, burdened with low wages, job discrimination, and sexual harassment, often found that prostitution spelled the difference between starvation and survival, Russian women had even fewer options. The dual legacy of serfdom and patriarchy kept them in an unusually downtrodden position, while Russia's legally structured estate system and the laws against labor organizing placed strict limitations on their social and geographic mobility.
[10] Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Stenograficheskie otchety (St. Petersburg, 1909), tretii sozyv, sessiia 2, zasedanie 109, May 8, 1909, p. 899.
[11] On women workers, see Rose Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). For discussions of Russia's working class, see Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); W. Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War (New York: The Dial Press, 1983); Gerald Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Robert Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993); Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Fifth, questions of Russia's relations to the West occupied a prominent place in the minds of privileged society. In Western industrializing societies, prostitution became a symbol of what had gone wrong since the advent of "the city" and "the machine." Along with its dread companion, venereal disease, prostitution represented the corruption of sexuality itself.[12] It mattered little that prostitution had existed for centuries; counterpoised against the transformations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this trade assumed new cultural meanings. In Russia as well, prostitution took on symbolic importance as one of the malignant aspects of modern urban life. But because policies promoting industrialization were associated with the West, prostitution also became another lens through which to view "westernization." As one contemporary observer claimed, Russia had been unsullied by the Western vices that nurtured the growth of prostitution until Peter the Great looked to the West for technology and guidance and the German-born Catherine the Great increased burdens on the serfs. Nonetheless, prostitution never "attained such dreadful proportions" as it had "beyond the border."[13]
Finally, the civil liberties cherished in the emergent bourgeois societies of western Europe never blossomed in Russia. Though revolution in 1905 loosened some of the tight shackles on society, censorship and police repression persisted. Individuals in the Russian empire felt political oppression not only as a lack of rights, but as an inability to develop organizational traditions outside state control and tutelage. Laws limiting the actions of educational institutions, charities, and professional groups stunted the growth of Russia's civil society. While labor unions and political parties were changing the nature of western and even central European states, similar organizations in Imperial Russia—at least until 1906—had to remain underground, their members subject to arrest and exile. In the years prior to World War I and the revolutions of 1917, Russian prostitution served as an ideal locus for the various strains of social dissatisfaction and political dissent. The tsarist government's control of prostitution meant that the general heading of prostitution also embraced larger political questions concerning the role of the state.
[12] Allan M. Brandt has argued that venereal disease symbolized "corrupt sexuality" and appeared to be a "sign of deep-seated social disorder." See his No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.
[13] K. F. Griaznov, Publichnye zhenshchiny: Kartiny sovremennoi i drevnei prostitutsii u vsekh narodov (Moscow, 1901), pp. 108–10, 170, 172.
Prostitution and its regulation impinged on questions relating to labor, sexuality, urbanization, public health, and the status of women, and thus easily lent themselves to critiques of existing social, economic, and political structures.
The singular qualities of Russia's experience of prostitution suggest that it would be most fruitful to examine prostitution and regulation contextually and thematically, rather than chronologically. The advantages of the thematic approach are that, first, it provides a perspective from which to study the historical actors as they went about their business—the bureaucrats who contrived regulation, the doctors who conducted it, the policemen who enforced it, the members of society who accepted it or challenged it, and the prostitutes who lived with it. Second, it reveals the enduring power of the state as the author and executor of regulation. Last, the thematic approach makes clear how deeply entrenched was the system of gender in all of the factors that influenced prostitution and its regulation.
That is not to argue that historical events did not affect prostitution and regulation in significant ways; to be sure, historical developments strongly affected prostitution. Nevertheless, three key factors stayed constant: gender ideology, the role of the state, and the identification of women who engaged in prostitution as a class apart. Each chapter in this work therefore provides a different angle from which to view Russian prostitution and regulation. Taken together, they supply a panoramic view that is connected by persistent ideologies of gender, class, and power. The survival of prostitution—even into the Soviet period—underscores the way gender is a fundamental construction for the ordering of society.
This work begins with the advent of regulation, exploring the rules developed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the mid-nineteenth century, concerns about morality, public order, and public health materialized in the form of regulation. The rules promulgated in 1843 were broken more than they were followed, and they left prostitutes and other women vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by policemen and other authorities. Yet they served an important purpose: they created a framework in which the state could order the lives of lower-class urban women.
When we understand the model world that Russian bureaucrats constructed for Russia's prostitutes, we can comprehend how women operated within and outside it. The second chapter examines how the regulatory system affected the lives of all women from the urban lower classes,
whether or not they were prostitutes. The existence of regulation necessitated coping with two groups that challenged the whole logic of the system, juvenile prostitutes and unregistered ("clandestine") prostitutes. Regulation also fashioned another stage—the medical-police clinic and venereal ward—on which prostitutes, doctors, and policemen acted out their prescribed roles.
Chapter 3 situates prostitution in Russian society, both as a response to male demand and female supply. It looks at how prostitution fit into the overall conception of male and female sexuality and then examines it in the light of the economic structure by discussing the wages and conditions that affected the female work force. Who were the women who turned to prostitution in Russia? Where did they come from? What kind of experiences did they have before they made the decision to engage in prostitution?
Chapter 4 explores the reasons that impelled women to prostitution, first from the point of view of society and then from that of the women themselves. For educated society, prostitution functioned symbolically, with prostitutes either falling into commercial sex as passive victims or because they consciously chose a path of degeneracy. When we look at the prostitutes' own reasons, the meaning of their trade becomes more prosaic and, consequently, more comprehensible.
The world of the Russian brothel is the subject of the fifth chapter. Brothels were as much objects of prurient fascination as they were anathemas to a society that liked to think of itself as morally sound. Brothel prostitution and "white slavery"—forcing women into prostitution by kidnapping, drugging, and beating them—were synonymous in Russia. Although forced prostitution did exist, the reality of brothel life involved less sensational kinds of oppression—debt peonage, exploitation, and disease. The myth of widespread white slavery, particularly that element of the myth which labeled Jews as the chief perpetrators, nevertheless allowed Russians a comfortable way to pigeonhole prostitution and affirm popular, antisemitic images. The outcry against brothel prostitution and white slavery also helped fuel a grassroots movement to rid Russia of licensing altogether, with opponents of brothels battling in city councils and district meetings.
Chapter 6 discusses how men and women from Russia's privileged strata interacted with prostitutes as their self-appointed saviors in charitable societies. It explores the philosophy and routine of two institutions designed to rehabilitate prostitutes and the activities of Russia's main organization to prevent prostitution, the Russian Society for the
Protection of Women. Finally, it examines the conflict between two groups with antithetical definitions of prostitution—salvationists and socialists.
Official state attempts to reform regulation are the subject of chapter 7. Essentially, the state was stuck in the contradictory role of acting as both the protector of the Russian people and the sponsor of women who traded in sex. One way officials handled this situation was by trying to perfect regulation so that it served to protect not only prostitutes' customers and society, but, paradoxically, the prostitutes themselves. Criticism of regulation spurred these efforts and illuminated the hole that the state had dug for itself by regulating prostitution in the first place. For more than a decade, regulation underwent various projects of reform, most of which never moved off the paper on which they were scribbled. But governmental self-criticism in this area encouraged the efforts of opponents of regulation, who used critiques of the medical-police committees to pursue their own visions.
The final chapter analyzes the attempts by Russian educated society to abolish regulation altogether. Like "abolitionists" in Europe, opponents of Russian regulation attacked the system for its medical shortcomings, the way it oppressed women, and its institutionalization of the sexual double standard. But, although society raised a fairly strong voice for abolition of regulation at the First All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women and Its Causes (Pervyi vserossiiskii s'ezd po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami i ego prichinami) in 1910, the state turned a deaf ear. As much as it recognized regulation's many flaws, it could not see its way to turning prostitutes loose. Ironically, for all their antipathy to regulation, neither could the self-styled "abolitionists."
There is, finally, another group that explored and confronted Russian prostitution—Russian writers. Elevated into powerful literary symbols by authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov, prostitutes became female archetypes who either disillusioned the men with whom they associated or raised them to a higher plane of being.[14] Dostoevsky's
[14] For discussions of literary images, see George Siegel, "The Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature," Harvard Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 81–107; Mariia I. Pokrovskaia, O padshikh: Russkie pisateli o padshikh (St. Petersburg, 1901). Examples of literature with prostitutes as characters include Nikolai Gogol, "Nevsky Prospect"; Nikolai Nekrasov, "When from Thine Error, Dark, Degrading"; V. Krestovskii, "Pogibshee, no miloe sozdanie"; S. Nadson, "Slezy"; Vsevolod Garshin, "An Incident" and "Nadezhda Nikolaevna"; Leonid Andreev, The Dark; Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground; Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina and Resurrection; Anton Chekhov, "A Nervous Breakdown"; Aleksandr Kuprin, Iama .
Sonia, one of literature's most memorable characters, worked the streets, but her selflessness and inner purity helped cleanse the blood from the hands of the murderer Raskolnikov. Because the image of Sonia informed all educated Russians' perception of prostitution—whether they believed in her or not—this work is called "Sonia's daughters."
Chapter 1
The State and the Yellow Ticket
Churches, icons, crosses, bells, Painted whores and garlic smells, Vice and vodka every place—This is Moscow's daily face.
Quoted in Olearius, Travels (1647)
The Birth of Regulation
The first official government policies in Imperial Russia treated prostitution as a serious crime against both public decorum and morality. As early as the seventeenth century, an order lumped "whoring" with fighting and robbery, stipulating that "streets and alleys should be strictly patrolled day and night" to prevent such occurrences.[1] In 1716, Tsar Peter the Great proclaimed that "no whores [bludnitsy ] will be permitted near the regiments." Women who violated his order ran the risk of being taken under guard and driven out of the area—naked. Two years later, Peter directed the police chief of the new city of St.
[1] I. E. Andreevskii, Politseiskoe pravo, vol. 2, p. 17, in Veniamin M. Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm (St. Petersburg, 1888), p. 98; Mikhail M. Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma i razlichnye fazisy v istorii otnoshenii k nim zakonodatel'stva i meditsiny v Rossii," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 337. According to the Law Code of 1649, a beating from a knout awaited anyone who arranged "lecherous relations" between men and women.
Petersburg to stamp out "all suspicious houses, namely taverns, gambling parlors, and other obscene establishments."[2] His niece, the empress Anna, also refused to tolerate prostitution, ordering all "debauched" women kept by "freethinkers and innkeepers" to be beaten with a cat-of-nine-tails and thrown out of their homes.[3]
The prohibition of commercial sex assumed another character in the middle of the eighteenth century, now influenced by fears that linked prostitutes with the spread of venereal disease. In 1762, a home designated by St. Petersburg authorities "for the confinement of women of debauched behavior" became Kalinkin Hospital, an institution that would develop into Russia's most prestigious center for the treatment of venereal diseases.[4] The next year, women who had been named by soldiers as the source of their venereal infections were ordered confined within its walls. After "treatment," the ones with no visible means of support were deported to labor in Siberian mines.[5]
[2] Voinskie artikuly of April 30, 1716, cited in Arkadii I. Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii do revoliutsii 1917 goda," in Prostitutsiia v Rossii, ed. Volf M. Bronner and Arkadii I. Elistratov (Moscow, 1927), p. 13. Peter's second decree is described in Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 337–38. Another source quotes a decree against houses suspected as sites for various "obscenities." See R. L. Sabsovich, "Reglamentatsiia prostitutsii i abolitsionizm, in O reglamentatsii prostitutsii i abolitsionizm (Rostov-na-Donu, 1907), p. 1.
[3] Ukaz of May 6, 1736, quoted in Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii," p. 14.
[4] There is some confusion in the sources over the origins of Kalinkin Hospital. A nineteenth-century Russian physician dates Kalinkin from the 1750s, but admits that the hospital's history is obscure because records were not kept until after 1830. According to one Soviet source, from 1765 to 1774, women with venereal disease were treated not in Kalinkin, but in two merchants' homes on the Vyborg side of St. Petersburg. Others, however, name as the place to which such women were sent. John Alexander mentions a Kalinkin Institute that had been founded in 1783 to train German surgeons, but asserts that it had little significance until an 1802 merger with the Medical-Surgical Academy Mikhail Ia. Kapustin, Kalinkinskaia gorodskaia bol'nitsa v S.-Peterburge (St. Petersburg, 1895), pp. 3, 7; A. M. Kopylov, "Iz istorii pervykh bol'nits Peterburga," Sovetskoe zdravookhranenie, no. 2 (1962): 58–59; M. A. Frolova, "Istoriia stareishei v Rossii Kalinkinskoi kozhno-venerologicheskoi bol'nitsy," Autoreferat dissertatsii (Leningrad, 1960), p. 4; A. A. Martinkevich and L. A. Shteinlukht, "Iz istorii Kalinkinskoi bol'nitsy (175O–1950)," Vestnik dermatologii i venerologii, no. 1 (January–February 1951): 43–44; John T. Alexander, "Catherine the Great and Public Health," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2 (April 1981): 195, 198. There is a brief description of Kalinkin Hospital in S. P. Arkhangel'skii, S. E. Gorbovitskii, S. T. Pavlov, O. N. Podvysotskaia, and L. A. Shteinlukht, "Kratkii ocherk razvitiia dermatologii i venerologii v Peterburge-Leningrade," Vestnik dermatologii i venerologii, no. 4 (July–August 1957): 45.
[5] This is called an ukaz by the empress Elizabeth in Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii," p. 14, but it is dated more than a year after her death. In Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny k prostitutsii (Kazan, 1903), p. 23, the State Senate is listed as the author. See also Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," Real'naia entsiklopediia meditsinskikh nauk, vol. 16 (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 469; Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 339.
Syphilis was of such concern to Catherine the Great that in her famous "Instructions" she referred to it as a disease that "hurried on the Destruction of the human Race." The empress urged that the "utmost Care ought to be taken . . . to stop the Progress of this Disease by the Laws."[6] During her reign, new regulations on public order made it illegal "to open one's own home or to use a rented home day or night for indecency [nepotrebstvo ]; to enter a home day or night for indecency; to support oneself or another through indecency."[7] Catherine's son, Paul I, decreed in 1800 that all women "who have turned to drunkenness, indecency, and a dissolute list" should be exiled for forced labor in Siberian factories. One source mentions how Tsar Paul compelled prostitutes to wear yellow dresses as a sign of their "shameful trade."[8]
Yet despite repressive laws, there is no doubt that prostitution thrived in Imperial Russia, sometimes with the permission of the authorities. In the mid-seventeenth century, a German observer of Russian life commented on the "insolence" of Moscow women and the scandalous public brothels. Aleksandr Radishchev, Russia's first "repentant nobleman," in his 1790 Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, complained of the "painted harlots on every street in both the capitals," and blamed the government for allowing prostitution to take place. Indeed, in direct contradiction to the Catherinian regulations, authorities in the late eighteenth century apparently designated certain sections of St. Petersburg for the operation of "free houses."[9]
Prostitution remained illegal, but in the 1840s the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del; hereafter MVD) initiated a policy of official toleration after the fashion of the Parisian police des moeurs . The state's decision to regulate prostitution had roots in the continental European tradition of the "medical police" that had associated public health with public order as early, as the eighteenth cen-
[6] Basil Dmytryshyn, ed., Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700–1917, 2d ed. (Hinsdale, IL: The Dryden Press, 1974), pp. 76–77 (emphasis in original).
[7] Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 21 (St. Petersburg, 1830), p. 480.
[8] N. I. Solov'ev, "Presledovanie prostitutok v tsarstvovanii Imperatora Pavla Pervago," Russkaia starina (February, 1916): 363–64; Belyia rabyni v kogtiakh pozora (Moscow, 1912), p. 48. For yellow dresses, see Griaznov, Publichnye zhenshchiny, p. 110.
[9] "Olearius's Commentaries on Muscovy," in Basil Dmytryshyn, ed., Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 900–1700 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 241; Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 170. See also S. Bogrov, "Prostitutsiia," Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' t-va F. Granat i K, vol. 33, p. 582. A Baku physician claimed that the first brothels were permitted in Russia during Catherine's reign. Arutuin A. Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," Svedeniia mediko-sanitarnago biuro goroda Baku (November–December 1913): 846.
tury.[10] But the regulation of prostitution was also one among many of Tsar Nicholas I's efforts to standardize and bureaucratize Russian society. Lev Perovskii, the tsar's ambitious new minister of internal affairs, reckoned the regulation of prostitution as part of his numerous programs of medical and police reforms.[11]
Like the prefect of the Paris police and many other nineteenth-century European administrators, Perovskii equated the control of venereal disease with the control of prostitution. Prostitutes were "public women," dangerous founts of disease whose very existence necessitated state intervention. But it was considered futile for the state to prohibit prostitution entirely; rather, authorities were now to recognize prostitution as an inevitable and necessary evil. It no longer sufficed to send prostitutes and women suspected of prostitution to Siberian mines, to beat them or to stigmatize them with yellow dresses; they were now to be tolerated for the sake of monitoring and control.
Perovskii's decision was influenced by the recent triumph of Dr. Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet's formulation about prostitutes and prostitution in France.[12] According to a historian of French prostitution, "The nineteenth-century view of the prostitute was essentially that of Parent-Duchâtelet." This influential French physician published a major tome in 1836 that hailed toleration as a necessary evil engendered by the inevitability of prostitution.[13] Essentially, whether
[10] Catherine's concerns about syphilis mirrored central European notions of a "medical police." Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, J. P. Brinkman, author of Patriotische Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Medicinalanstalten (1778), served as the personal physician for two Russian grand dukes. An advocate of a medical-police system, he believed that "the moral behavior of the people must be regulated by law so that dissipation will not sap their vital energies." George Rosen, "Cameralism and the Concept of Medical Police," in From Medical Police to Social Medicine (New York: Science History Publications, 1974), p. 140.
[11] Perovskii is characterized as a dynamic and ambitious administrator in Daniel Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 30. Perovskii attempted to eradicate crime in St. Detersburg by organizing police raids and dispatching spies and agents provocateurs among the city's population. See Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 247. Perovskii was also instrumental in centralizing medical affairs under the recently organized Medical Council. Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del: Istoricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1901), p. 54. One year after Perovskii was appointed, a "medical-police regulation" called for the identification and isolation of urban residents with contagious diseases. Statute 562, Ustav meditsinskoi politsii, izd. 1842 g., quoted in Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 78.
[12] See Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 342.
[13] Harsin, Policing Prostitution, p. 102. To Parent-Duchâtelet, prostitution was an "indispensable excremental phenomenon that protects the social body from disease." Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 4.
prostitution was tolerated or not, men would continue to seek commercial sex, women from the lower classes would continue to oblige them, and venereal disease would continue to spread as a result. Thus, reasoned Parent-Duchâtelet, it was necessary to intervene, if only to stem the damage.
The advent of industrialization and the rise of a bourgeois class coincided with the evolution of regulation in western Europe. Russian regulation, however, was not connected with a perceptible growth in industry. In fact, Nicholas I was hostile to industrialization because he feared the social dislocation it produced. Until the late 1880s, Russia industrialized slowly and cautiously, ever wary of fostering a landless proletariat that would threaten the social order.[14] Nor had a bourgeoisie emerged in Russia to strive for political, economic, social, or cultural hegemony. Rather, regulation emerged in a more narrow stratum, the result of one ambitious individual's desire to make his mark during the reign of a tsar justly known as the "gendarme of Europe." Though European systems and ideas inspired Russia's toleration of prostitution, regulation emerged in a peculiarly Russian milieu and in a peculiarly Russian context. In other European states, the ground had to be prepared in order to launch regulation.[15] By contrast, no one paved the way in Russia for regulation; in an autocracy one had only to convince the tsar.
Whereas French regulation was tied to fear of the lower orders in the early part of the nineteenth century—when the "laboring classes" and "dangerous classes" were essentially synonymous to the bourgeois observer[16] —Russian cities involved a different kind of social geography. Free workers were an anomaly in a society mostly divided into lords and their serfs. Neither the worker nor the bourgeois "owned" the cities. With the exception of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and other provincial capitals, cities and towns within the Russian empire were mostly administrative centers for the execution of state duties. The great influx of rural migrants did not really begin in Russia until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there were evidently enough women on the fringes of the patriarchal system in Nicholas I's Russia —
[14] See Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford: University Press, 1971).
[15] For example, during the 1850s the writings of William Acton and W. R. Greg served this function in Great Britain. British attention to this issue also followed a sanitary movement that linked public order and public health. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 42, 70–71.
[16] Alain Corbin ties support for French regulation to the phenomenon described in Louis Chevalier's classic work, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century . See Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 111.
daughters of artisans and tradesmen, daughters of serfs who had been sent to the cities to work, former serfs, domestic servants, soldiers' wives (soldatki )[17] —to warrant official concern. As Laura Engelstein has pointed out, "The original program of syphilis control targeted groups that had escaped the traditional, patriarchal institutions supposed to keep the dependent orders in line: peasants who left the village, women who had left the family."[18] An early twentieth-century tsarist bureaucrat characterized the shift to a policy of tolerating prostitution this way: "The interests of public morality fell victim to the interests of public health."[19] But regulation clearly represented more than a public health measure; it was also informed by the desire for an orderly social body, as well as a distinct interpretation of gender and sexuality. Despite peasant wisdom that saddled women with reputations as insatiable temptresses,[20] the authors of regulation tacitly accepted a more bourgeois vision of sexual desire—one that associated it exclusively with males. Male desire was considered so irresistible as to require gratification; female desire remained beneath mention or consideration. Regulation thus institutionalized this sexual order by monitoring the women who would cater to male sexual needs. Regulators also reasoned that by sanctioning the existence of a class of prostitutes, they were clearing the way for most women to remain virgins until marriage. As long as prostitutes were available, it was believed men would keep their hands off non-prostitutes.
Using Parisian regulation as its guiding light, an advisory commission organized by Perovskii in 1843 recommended establishing a trial system of toleration in St. Petersburg. The central government's Committee of Ministers approved the proposal before the year was out, but made it clear that it would not accept a plan for funding regulation from the prostitutes themselves. In the committee's words, a tax on "public
[17] Married to men with twenty-five-year obligations in the army, soldatki had reputations for loose morals. They constituted half of the women Paul I sent to Siberia, and they figured prominently among the women who turned children over to Russia's foundling homes until military reforms in the 1870s. David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 154–60.
[18] Engelstein also argues that regulation was "[i]n the classic tradition of enlightened despotism and the domestic tradition of paternalistic rule." Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon," pp. 189, 194.
[19] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 341–52.
[20] On peasant images of female sexuality, see Christine D. Worobec, "Temptress or Virgin? The Precarious Sexual Position of Women in Postemancipation Ukrainian Peasant Society," Slavic Review 49 (Summer 1990): 227–38.
women would not conform with the spirit of our laws because it would seem as though the government for its part was permitting the earning of a living through indecency."[21] Thus, the Committee of Ministers was careful to have the government's hands appear clean, even as those same hands signed the papers that countenanced state sponsorship of commercial vice. Though the system was frequently referred to by a cognate of the French réglementation (reglamentatsiia in Russian), the administration and eventually the public employed the native word for supervision or surveillance, nadzor .[22]
To establish nadzor on an empirewide basis, in October of 1843 the MVD's Medical Department requested all provincial governors to provide it with information on rates of venereal disease among the "common people" in their area of jurisdiction and to propose measures to halt the spread of these diseases. Interestingly, though many governors sounded an alarm about the rise of venereal disease, they did not attribute it solely to prostitutes; they also blamed military personnel, serfs who engaged in seasonal labor, and soldiers' wives. Suggestions to protect public health included ordering Russian Orthodox priests to admonish their flocks and instituting a regimen of periodic medical examinations for men, not women. One provincial governor, for example, proposed broad surveillance of the military, factory workers, shops, and taverns. But the Medical Department responded by asserting that women were in fact the chief source of venereal disease.[23]
Particularly influential was a report from a Major-General Akhlestyshev, the city governor of Odessa. The Black Sea port, it appears, had already implemented a program with policies reminiscent of Paris's police des moeurs . In Odessa, prostitutes were registered on police lists, obligated to undergo weekly examinations, and, if physicians diagnosed them as suffering from a venereal disease, incarcerated in the hospital.[24]
[21] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343. Quote from Mariia I. Pokrovskaia, "Iarmarochnaia prostitutsiia," in Prostitutsiia, ed. Ape (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 12; "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie ob otmene reglamentatsii prostitutsii," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2074.
[22] Such an interpretation of the government's duty is well suited to Michel Foucault's analysis of other nineteenth-century disciplinary procedures. See, for example, Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977).
[23] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 344–45.
[24] Ibid., p. 345; Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 74–76; Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (hereafter TsGIA), Upravlenie glavnago vrachebnago inspektora MVD (hereafter UGVI), fond 1298, opis' 1, delo 1730, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," June 1910–December 1911, report of July 15, 1910, by privy councillor Mollerius.
Those three I's—identification, inspection, and incarceration—would ultimately serve as the linchpin of the empire's new system, guiding Russia's treatment of prostitution until the collapse of the tsarist regime in February 1917.
The Medical Police and Yellow Tickets
"Danger of disease? . . . A solicitous government looks out for that. It looks after and regulates the activity of brothels and makes lewdness safe. And doctors for a consideration do the same."
Pozdnyshev, in Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
In the autumn of 1843, tsarist authorities organized a trial medical-police committee (vrachebno-politseiskii komitet ) for St. Petersburg under the MVD's Medical Department and in 1844 created a similar committee for Moscow.[25] By fits and starts, other Russian cities followed suit. The MVD issued specific rules pertaining to the regulation of prostitution several times: for Petersburg in 1844, 1861, 1868, and 1908, and for the entire empire in 1851 and 1903. Several cities, including Moscow, Minsk, and Nizhnii Novgorod, developed their own locally tailored systems of regulation, but at least theoretically, most of the Russian empire conformed to the model created by the ministry.
An investigation and comparison of the rules for "public women" reveal how the tsarist administration conceived of its role and the way that it understood prostitutes and prostitution. Though regulation had a simple raison d'être, that of protecting society from likely carriers of venereal disease, taking its cue from Paris it quickly assumed other guises as well. In the regulators' view, women who worked as prostitutes needed not only medical screening, but protection and management. As a "necessary evil," prostitution was considered a receptacle for the male desire that could not be contained within the sexual status quo. Thus, prostitutes were both "victims of social temperament" (as Russians euphemistically referred to them) and "temptresses" who corrupted and ruined young men. Prostitutes were scorned as fallen women, but they were also seen as requiring paternalistic care. Such care was assigned to the medical police in the form of strict monitoring
[25] Derived from "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie," pp. 2072–77; Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.
of dress and behavior in addition to physical health. Yet, as the MVD realized its own limitations and how the regulations themselves were inadequate in terms of their original rationale and the epidemiology of venereal diseases, the rules changed.
The minister of internal affairs, Lev Perovskii, conceived of nadzor when the vast majority of Russia's population was still made up of serfs. As a result, the rules that Russia had borrowed from Paris assumed a different aspect, for they were no longer designed for the urban lower classes of a constitutional monarchy, but for an autocratic society divided into legally defined estates. In Paris, the rules limited a woman's freedom; in Russia, they simply placed new constraints among a population accustomed to living in bondage. The MVD made explicit the estate-based nature of regulation in an 1844 administrative circular. "It goes without saying," wrote the ministry, that these measures must apply to "only those individuals who by their way of life, as well as their rank and other communal [obshchezhitel'nye ] circumstances, can be subject to them" (i.e., serfs and the urban lower classes).[26]
The first set of rules, designed for St. Petersburg in 1844, began unequivocally: "A public woman is obliged with all conscientiousness to carry out the rules that have been enacted and shall hereafter be enacted by the committee."[27] Violators risked indeterminate sentences in the workhouse. Medical examinations were to be undergone "unquestioningly" once a week for independent prostitutes (odinochki ) and twice weekly for women in brothels. If a prostitute or her examining physician noticed any signs of venereal disease, she was to report immediately to the hospital. The rules rewarded a prostitute's compliance by promising free treatment to women who reported voluntarily.
When it came to disease prevention and personal hygiene, a prostitute's obligations became vague, of dubious benefit, and impossible to enforce. For example, the rules required her to wash "certain parts" of her body as often as possible with cold water. "After relations with a man," she could not take another client before having washed and, if possible, changed the linen. As for actual baths, though, she need take only two per week. Because physicians believed that blood served as an ideal conduit for infectious diseases, a prostitute was not to practice her trade during menstruation. A spartan note crept into the rules with
[26] Quoted in Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 23.
[27] Rules in Sbornik pravitel'stvennykh rasporiazhenii kasaiushchikhsia mer preduprezhdeniia rasprostraneniia liubostrastnoi bolezni (St. Petersburg, 1887), pp. 49–51. See also Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," p. 470.
cautionary words against too much makeup and perfume. In the realm of extreme administrative fantasy was a rule asserting that "public women are obliged to examine the reproductive parts and underwear of their visitors in order to protect themselves from infection." Needless to say, the dark, hasty, and often drunken encounters between clients and prostitutes rarely leant themselves to such clinical beginnings.
Reflecting the dual nature of regulation as both a police and hygienic measure was a rule that demanded prostitutes carry their "medical ticket" at all times. Commonly known as the "yellow ticket" (zheltyi bilet ), this was a card issued to all registered prostitutes as certification of their trade and a handy medical guarantee for the interested client.[28] In its original form, the medical ticket listed a woman's name, age, and address, and left room for a physician's stamp or mark regarding her state of health.[29] While it appeared innocuous, the yellow ticket in fact created a new social category in tsarist Russia, that of the "public woman." Divided from those women who were practicing prostitution on a casual or clandestine basis, bearers of the yellow ticket were protected from police harassment as much as they were fully subject to police controls. Unlicensed women avoided the obligation to appear for examinations, but they remained vulnerable to arrest during the police raids that periodically swept through the working-class districts of Russia's major cities.
A set of regulations even more exacting than those directed toward prostitutes governed brothelkeeping (soderzhatel'stvo ), a profession limited to women between the ages of 30 and 60 who had no children living with them.[30] Whereas prostitutes had only eleven rules to obey, brothelkeepers were subject to nearly three times as many. These rules combined ministry concerns about order and public health with a new element—evident discomfort over licensing houses of vice. Consequently, a madam (soderzhatel'nitsa ) had to be more than a mere landlady; she had to "restrain" the women in her charge from abusing alcohol, to "demand" that they remain "tidy," to "observe" that they
[28] Yellow tickets appear to have existed even prior to the introduction of regulation. In 1835, an "Imperial command" provided for free treatment at the police ward of Kalinkin Hospital for women with "distinctive yellow tickets." Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 341; Kapustin, Kalinkinskaia gorodskaia bol'nitsa, p. 13. In 1909, the MVD's Medical Council ruled that yellow tickets should be replaced by white ones that contained photos of their bearers. From "Usilenie nadzora za prostitutsiei," Populiarnyi literaturnomeditsinskii zhurnal doktora Oksa (April 1909): 53.
[29] Sbornik contains a sample copy of the 1844 medical ticket on p. 51.
[30] For the rules pertaining to brothelkeepers, see ibid., pp. 35–39.
followed the regulations about modestly applied makeup and personal hygiene (such as making sure that their underwear was clean). It was also her responsibility to maintain not only "quiet" in the bordello, but an atmosphere of "decency" (blagopristoinost '). Accordingly, brothel doors were to remain shut on Sundays and holy days until after the midday meal, and male minors and students could not be admitted "under any circumstances." As for the "whores" themselves, none of whom could be under 16 and all of whom had to be registered with the police, they were not to be "exhausted" by "excessive use." Nor could they be held in a brothel any longer than they wished. Should a woman wish to quit, any debts she owed the brothelkeeper could not serve as an obstacle.
Rules gave the brothelkeeper medical responsibilities as well. Although the medical-police physician made regular visits, madams were expected to examine the women in their houses on a daily basis and dispatch those with venereal symptoms to the hospital. Monetary incentive was added: women who appeared voluntarily would be treated without charge, while treatment for those whose illness had been discovered by a doctor would be charged to the brothelkeeper. If a prostitute missed an examination, the brothelkeeper herself would be liable to prosecution. The madam upon suspicion of vice had to submit to medical examinations, as did her grown daughters, female relatives, and female servants. Finally, severe penalties could be imposed for aiding a pregnant prostitute in securing an abortion, turning to unlicensed medical practitioners, or using home remedies to treat sick prostitutes.[31] (This proscription no doubt referred to the common practice of brothelkeepers and their associates of dabbling in folk medicine to cure various illnesses, as well as to their custom of terminating unwanted pregnancies.)
The St. Petersburg experiment proved auspicious enough for the MVD to order provincial authorities throughout the empire in 1851 to follow the capital's rules in their home provinces by keeping "full and accurate lists of public women, that is, those women who regard debauchery [rasputstvo ] as a trade."[32] But provisions for the control of venereal disease were broadened here to include the potential male carriers whom regulation had, at first, ignored. Prevention of venereal disease
[31] Statutes 25–32 in ibid., pp. 37–39.
[32] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 13–14; Nikolai Di-Sen'i and Georgii Fon-Vitte, eds., Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor gorodskoi prostitutsiei (St. Petersburg, 1910), p. 11.
now meant surveillance in the form of general periodic examinations for male factory workers as well as for prostitutes. The examinations of factory workers did not, however, succeed in discovering venereal disease with any great accuracy. A Russian worker described how these examinations proceeded in his Moscow factory prior to Easter and Christmas holidays:
On payday, in the paymaster's office, a doctor would be seated next to the bookkeeper while he paid us. We would line up, undo our pants, and show the doctor the part of our bodies he needed to see. The doctor, after tapping it with a pencil, would tell the bookkeeper the results of his "examination," whereupon the bookkeeper would hand us our pay. Although there were probably quite a few workers at the factory who were infected with venereal disease, I do not know of a single instance when the doctor found such a person during these medical examinations.[33]
Men suffering from venereal disease were also to be interviewed to determine the source of their contagion, with examinations obligatory for those whom they named.[34]
Although empirewide nadzor fell under the aegis of public health protection, it is obvious that regulation and related measures were aimed at the lower classes. The rules betrayed the administration's willingness to stop short of subjecting female workers to invasive medical procedures. Yet, when it came to women identified by diseased males or women about whom "strong doubts" existed as to their state of health, scruples gave way to intervention. The ministry also mandated medical examinations for "all persons of both sexes from the lower class who had been arrested by the police for deeds against public decency [blagochinie ]." Tsarist authorities had granted themselves the prerogative to determine which women exhibited "debauched" behavior and thereby represented a threat to public health. Essentially, the state inscribed society on a grid of class and gender that divided the "good" women from the "bad," and the rich men from the poor.
The MVD approved a new, more explicit set of rules for Petersburg's
[33] Reginald E. Zelnik, trans. and ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 51–52.
[34] From A. I. Smirnov, "Ob uchrezhdenii vrachebno-politseiskikh komitetov," Trudy Vysochaishe razreshennago s"ezda, vol. 1, p. 3. When a military commander of troops in Kaluga province ordered examinations for twenty women who had been named as sexual partners of soldiers with venereal infections, only two turned out to have visible signs of venereal disease. Otchet Meditsinskago departamenta Ministerstva vnutrennikh del za 1891 god (St. Petersburg, 1908), p. 177.
medical-police committee just a few months following the emancipation of Russia's serfs in February of 1861. Although most of the revised rules simply reiterated earlier ones, some painstakingly elaborated prior rulings and softened a few others. Police-oriented regulations were now expanded to counter the serfs' newfound freedom, creating a novel dimension for the government regulation of prostitution, the substitution of medical licenses for prostitutes' internal passports. Deprived of the identification required of all Russian subjects, women who registered with the medical-police committees after 1861 had nothing to show prospective landlords or employers but their embarrassing yellow tickets. At the end of the century, critics would charge that this policy doomed thousands of women to treat prostitution as their permanent and irrevocable career, and removed any cloak of anonymity that women who turned to this trade on a casual or clandestine basis may have maintained within their communities.[35] Though only Petersburg's rules specified the confiscation of a prostitute's passport, most cities and districts adopted similar policies.
The new rules also circumscribed prostitutes' movements in ways that the original regulations did not.[36] Now prostitutes had to conduct themselves "as modestly and decently as possible, not displaying themselves from windows in an unseemly state, not touching passers-by on the street, and not calling them over." If they appeared in public, they could not "do anything indecent and were not to walk together in a group." Furthermore, in the name of propriety, public women were forbidden from occupying in box seats in local theaters.[37] To guard against the existence of unlicensed bawdy houses and to make sure that groups of prostitutes remained under a watchful eye, odinochki could not live
[35] This is called the "first terrible instrument of bondage" in Elistratov O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 7. In Prostitution and Victorian Society, Walkowitz argues that the promulgation of regulation in Great Britain accelerated the creation of a professional class of prostitutes. A prostitute who participated in a 1975 prostitutes' strike in Lyons described how she felt when she accepted Morocco's version of a yellow ticket for work in a licensed brothel: "[The police] issued you with a special card with all your particulars and your photo on it. They took away all your papers—your passport, your identity card, absolutely all your papers. That bit was terrible. You felt well and truly . . . BOOKED." A——, "A Woman's One Asset," in Prostitutes—Our Life, ed. Claude Jaget (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1980), p. 61.
[36] For the 1861 rules, see Sbornik, pp. 52–55.
[37] In a more extreme vein, Berlin rules from 1911 prohibited prostitutes from visiting "theatres, circuses, or exhibitions, or the concert gardens connected with them, the Zoological Gardens, the Museums, the railway stations . . ., or, finally, any places that may be named in later orders of the police authorities." Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, p. 416.
more than two to an apartment and could expect periodic home visits from committee doctors and police agents.
From a hygienic point of view, the new rules adhered to the former principles, but with some curious additions, such as recommendations for weekly baths only. No longer were prostitutes obliged to examine their clients' underwear and genitals; this was now a "right," not a requirement. Between clients, a prostitute had to add douching to her routine of cold-water washing. In a more propitious direction, a new statute guaranteed free treatment for all diseased prostitutes. But women who did not enter Kalinkin Hospital within two hours from the time a physician diagnosed them as contagious risked being brought there by police agents.
The final four rules were designed to regulate the relationship between prostitutes and brothelkeepers. Brothelkeepers could not keep more than three-fourths of a prostitute's income and in return they were obligated to provide lodging, light, heat, plentiful and healthy food, sufficient linen, and clothes. If a woman remained in a brothel less than one year, she was compelled to return those items given to her by the brothelkeeper; otherwise, everything remained in her possession. The rules of 1861 for prostitutes also contained a statute reminding them of their right to leave a brothel at any time, specifying that any obstruction by the brothelkeeper constituted a criminal offense.
The new rules for brothelkeeping narrowed the age limit to women between the ages of 35 and 55, and spelled out their obligations with much more detail.[38] Although the early rules had specified how debts could not obstruct a woman's desire to quit her brothel, several of the 1861 regulations addressed this issue more explicitly, suggesting that indebtedness had turned out to be a highly contentious area. For example, 1861 regulations granting brothel prostitutes the right to maintain separate account books for recording their earnings and personal possessions indicate that brothelkeepers had been guilty of keeping their own (dishonest) records. Illiterate prostitutes (the overwhelming majority) were even permitted to request assistance in this endeavor from their friends or from police agents and, as further protection, the police kept their own record of a prostitute's possessions. Every week, a prostitute and her brothelkeeper were supposed to review their accounts and sign them; failure to do so meant that the prostitute did not have to pay anything. Yet, significantly, a prostitute could no longer leave at will: the
[38] In 1844, there were thirty-two statutes for brothelkeepers. In 1861, this number increased to fifty-eight. See Sbornik, pp. 36–49; Baranov V zashchitu, pp. 158–62.
new rules obliged women to pay their debts unless they demonstrated a sincere desire to reform by entering a halfway house for "fallen women."[39]
The 1844 regulations had been silent about a brothelkeeper's past. The medical-police committee, however, now required a police investigation of a prospective madam's background to find out whether she had a criminal record and whether she was prone to drunkenness or "unruly conduct" (k buistvu ). Along the same lines, brothelkeepers were to treat their prostitutes "gently" and refrain from beatings. That the committee believed it necessary to include rules designed to prevent the "oppression" of prostitutes in 1861 suggests that brothelkeepers and their associates had earned reputations of brutality.
On paper, the rules transmuted bawdy house revelries into sterile encounters designed only to satisfy the client's "physiological needs." New regulations carefully setting exact limits on the brothel's location, appearance, and functions signaled the committee's desire to mask brothel activities and render these houses invisible.[40] In the paradoxical formulation of a medical-police inspector at the end of the nineteenth century, "The committee does not regard the brothel as a place for debauchery, but as a place which serves the physiological needs of unmarried men. As a result of this view, it is impossible to tolerate any kind of facilities in these houses which would induce debauchery."[41] Accordingly, brothels could not open onto the street like stores. Brothel windows facing the street had to be kept permanently shut and covered with white muslin curtains during the day, wooden shutters or some heavy, opaque material at night, and most brothels could not be within 320 meters of churches or schools.[42] Rules also advised brothelkeepers to restrain prostitutes from unspecified forms of immodest behavior in theaters and other public places. The same rule applied within the brothel: gambling was prohibited, and brothelkeepers were forbidden from selling
[39] Though there were frequent accusations about collusion between brothelkeepers and local authorities, this rule more likely reflected fears that former brothel prostitutes would continue to engage in prostitution without any official supervision.
[40] When a university student in the novel Iama read the rules posted on a brothel wall, he commented ironically, "What a serious and moral view of things!" Kuprin, Iama, p. 198. In relation to similar rules in Paris, Alain Corbin has remarked, "Like corpses, carrion, and excrement, prostitution must remain as hidden as possible." From Corbin, "Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France: A System of Images and Regulation," Representations, no. 14 (Spring 1986): 215.
[41] Aleksandr I. Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora za prostitutsiei v S.-Peterburge (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 57.
[42] A brothel could be closer than this distance if the entrance was off the street on which the religious or educational institutions were located. However, sufficient light had to be available to conduct medical examinations. Sbornik, p. 40.
alcohol and tobacco, and from allowing music other than from a piano. Any disorders had to be reported to the police.
Eloquent testimony to the need to distance the autocracy from houses of prostitution was a rule prohibiting the display of portraits of the imperial family on brothel walls. Though the tsar had agreed to tolerate the existence of these institutions, it would have been awkward to remind patrons of the link between his station and commercial sex. As the embodiment of God on earth and the "little father" of the Russian people, the tsar had a distinct role to play as guardian of the Russian Orthodox religion and morality. Indeed, in 1843 Nicholas I had hesitated before extending his "favor" to brothelkeepers. Only when Perovskii invoked Parent-Duchâtelet's conception of brothels as the most suitable vehicle for surveillance, as well as assured Nicholas that brothels were "relatively useful for society" since madams could function as agents of the police, did he relent.[43] Brothels would be tolerated, but they would not be blessed.
The MVD approved three additional sets of rules for Petersburg in 1861, one of which established a whole new category of "vagrant women of debauched behavior" who could not be considered professional prostitutes, but were still to be treated as a danger to public health and order.[44] Coinciding as they did with the serfs' emancipation, these rules evince the state's determination to keep as tight a handle as it could on unattached women who were no longer under the patriarchal controls of their former lords or husbands. Citing statistics on the rise of venereal disease in St. Petersburg, the rules directed local police to investigate public baths, flophouses, hotels, and bars and subject "suspicious" women to examinations at medical-police headquarters to identify all women who were practicing prostitution without a license.[45] The rules remarked that the ranks of women apprehended for unlicensed debauchery often comprised "kitchen maids, governesses, and domestic servants," but the desire to hide their occasional prostitution from families and friends prevented them from registering onto police lists. The MVD advised the police to treat these women justly, but nonetheless do their utmost to register all prostitutes.[46] In essence, the medical-police
[43] Quoted by Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 349–50.
[44] Sbornik, pp. 61–69.
[45] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebnow-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 33–35, describes how St. Petersburg handled this regulation.
[46] Sbornik, pp. 66–67. The number of registered odinochki in Petersburg did not necessarily reflect the committee's success at increasing the ranks of registered prostitutes. Although 866 odinochki were on police lists in 1861, a full 129 women more than the previous year, in 1862 the number was only 869. Mikhail Kuznetsov, "Istorikostatisticheskii ocherk prostitutsii v Peterburge s 1852 g. po 1869 g.," Arkhiv sudebnoi meditsiny i obshchestvennoi gigieny (March 1870): 5–38. I am grateful to Reginald Zelnik for his notes on this article.
committee was institutionalizing a system of surveillance over urban lower-class women by means of periodic raids and roundups.
Prostitutes and Policemen
Sanitary madzor . . . scarcely exists. What has remained is simply police surveillance, which pursues some kind of uncertain goals.
Dr. Petr Gratsianov (1902)
As conceived by the tsarist administration, the regulatory system strove to balance health and morality. Yet the authority given to the police in supervising the lower classes and registering suspicious women meant that the coercive and punitive aspects of nadzor could easily tip the scale. Regulation's ambiguous legal status was partly responsible: although the MVD had seen fit to regulate prostitution, commercial sex still remained officially illegal.[47] Medical-police committees functioned in the administrative realm, neither inside the law nor wholly outside of it, much like the tsarist military courts that would deny political prisoners due process after 1872.
It was no wonder that many local authorities were perplexed by the ministry's new rules. In July, 1845, the tsarist administration instructed the empire's police to refrain from prosecuting prostitutes who were guilty of no other crimes. This order apparently met with resistance, for one year later the minister of internal affairs found it necessary to remind provincial governors to ignore the laws against debauchery and stop arresting prostitutes for simple vice. In 1848, Perovskii enlisted the aid of the minister of justice to clarify matters in a joint declaration pertaining to prostitution's altered status.[48] The confusion persisted, however. Twenty years later, the State Council pondered the contradiction of regulating an illegal trade, only to withdraw from the quandary completely by concluding that the law, "without obviously contradicting
[47] Laura Engelstein has explained, "technically speaking the Russian system allowed for competing legalities, in which statutes, regulations, imperial decrees, and ministerial instructions jointly occupied the disciplinary field." Engelstein, "Gender and the Juridical Subject," p. 484.
[48] "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie," pp. 2074–76, contains the best description of the legal muddle created by Russian regulation.
itself," could not consider matters pertaining to the organization of prostitution.[49] As late as 1912 the Ministry of Finance was still writing to the Department of Police for clarification of the contradiction between the law forbidding brothels and the fact that such houses "in reality exist."[50]
Despite an 1858 MVD circular calling for collective administration of regulatory agencies, the fate not only of Russia's prostitutes, but of thousands of women whose behavior could be construed as improper, essentially lay in the hands of the MVD's agents, the notorious tsarist police.[51] There, corruption and abuse mere, in the words of one critic, "business as usual" (obychnyi poriadok ).[52] With their carte blanche to penetrate working-class communities, policemen blackmailed, harassed, and arrested prostitutes and nonprostitutes alike, threatening young, lower-class women in particular. "Improper" behavior was a broad, arbitrary rubric that could include women whose conduct was not to the liking of the local police or simply women who walked alone after dark. Dr. Aleksandr Fedorov, chief inspector of the St. Petersburg medical-police committee, named as targets "all women of too free morality who have given grounds for suspicion of trading their sexual pleasures."[53] Not surprisingly, such wholesale pronouncements afforded the police plenty of latitude.
The ramifications for social class were all too obvious. In the Baltic city of Riga, the local police were ordered to arrest individuals suspected of spreading venereal disease when "the source belongs to . . . the ranks of artisans, servants, male and female workers, etc." The Warsaw police had instructions to bring before the medical-police committee any
[49] Pokrovskaia, "Iarmarochnaia prostitutsiia," p. 12; "Ob"iasnitel'naia zapiska" Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2086.
[50] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," January 1912–March 1913, letter of April 30, 1912.
[51] The author of a turn-of-the-century work on European prostitution pointed out that regulations differed throughout Europe, but all "have been generally developed by more or less arbitrary action on the part of the police and without the deliberate and express sanction of a competent legislative authority." The sole exceptions were Great Britain (which had already abolished regulation), Belgium, and Hungary. Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, p. 136.
[52] Petr E. Oboznenko, "Po povodu novago proekta nadzora za prostitutsiei v Peterburge, vyrabotannago Kommissiei Russkago sifilidologicheskago obshchestva," Vrach, no. 12 (1899): 348. A recent work describes the urban police as "often [taking] advantage of their considerable powers to ensure themselves immediately personal profit." Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 15.
[53] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 6.
lower-class woman arrested for vice, vagrancy, drunkenness, robbery, or sleeping in a public place. When women from the more privileged classes committed similar offenses, their names would be entered in medical-police files, but they were spared the degrading personal appearance. Warsaw policemen also hauled in women found in "suspicious places" at odd hours. Included here were the "outskirts of the city," that is, the working-class neighborhoods.[54] Often, technical virginity was the sole evidence a woman could use to prove that she was not a prostitute. But this "proof" was predicated on an intimate mortifying examination in police headquarters and obviously was of no help to single women with sexual experience.
Lacking a passport to show prospective landlords, odinochki were restricted to living in only certain parts of the city. Concerned that "fallen women" were insulting public morality and disrupting order, in 1893 the city governor of Odessa instructed the police to issue to odinochki special booklets describing committee rules. Included among these was a prohibition against walking or living in the city's fashionable Boulevard district. Any prostitutes who lived there had to move immediately or face prosecution.[55] Minsk's municipal council (duma ) went one step further, forbidding anyone from renting to a prostitute without first securing permission from the city's sanitary commission. Most rules forbade more than two prostitutes from occupying a single apartment, and several cities adhered to an even stricter policy requiring prostitutes to live alone. Such rules could have sad consequences for prostitutes unable to afford single rents. During the summer, prostitutes were known to abandon their apartments in order to sleep in fields, near camps, in cemeteries, and in abandoned, decrepit homes. Even in winter, poverty-stricken prostitutes would loiter in taverns during the day and spend the nights in shelters.[56] The head of the Minsk sanitary commission, Dr. Petr Gratsianov, recalled a scandalous incident involving four prostitutes who had been sleeping in a town square milk booth during the winter.[57]
In Minsk, women were prohibited from soliciting on the streets
[54] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 24–31.
[55] Vedomosti Odesskago gradonachal'stava, no. 214 (September 30, 1893), in Adres kalendars' Odesskago gradonachal'stva na 1898 g., pp. 39–40. I am grateful to Bob Weinberg for this reference.
[56] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 14.
[57] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," Russkii meditsinskii vestnik, no. 4 (February 15, 1903): 9.
openly. Consequently, odinochki had to rely on pimps and other middlemen to drum up potential clients. Hotel owners found the leasing of rooms for hasty trysts extremely profitable, as did the enterprising landlords who would rent rooms at inflated prices. Prostitutes would thus have to divide their earnings among procurers, hotel managers, and apartment owners. "It's a pity, mister doctor," Gratsianov would hear in his capacity as head of the sanitary commission, "the client gave me five rubles, but the pimp [faktor ] took them away."[58]
With only a yellow ticket for identification, prostitutes could not hide their trade from landlords and landladies. In Warsaw, the very residency lists in gateways of apartment houses signaled which women were working as prostitutes, with conspicuous blanks next to the space designated for a person's occupation and marks underlining a woman's last name. On occasion, the word "prostitute" would even be filled in.[59] Unregistered prostitutes also had much to fear, should nosy neighbors or concierges discover their activities. As a result, both groups were vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation when it came to housing. Apartment owners could turn a sizable profit by allowing a "secret den" (tainyi priton ) to operate on their premises, exploiting the prostitute-tenants by charging exorbitant rents.[60]
Unregistered prostitutes tended to live in areas familiar to women of their own social classes. If they were registered, prostitutes had to rent apartments in the parts of town designated by medical-police committee rules. In other words, both groups lived among the urban poor. In Moscow, for example, university students (known for their poverty) and prostitutes were concentrated in the same sections.[61] When some 7,500 Moscow students were surveyed about their housing situation in 1907, more than one-third complained that noisy neighbors prevented them from studying. "Prostitutes live next door," responded one student, "[and] there are constant scandals, screams, and sometimes fights."[62]
St. Petersburg's medical-police committee further institutionalized the class-based nature of regulation by developing special procedures
[58] Ibid., p. 6.
[59] P. Pushkin, O polozhenii nadzora za prostitutsiei v Varshave (Warsaw, 1895), p. 12, quoted in Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii," p. 18.
[60] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 4–5, 9.
[61] Those parts of Moscow with the highest percentage of inhabitants living in basement quarters were the same as those with many of the university students and prostitutes. Walter Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study in Municipal Self-Government" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1964), p. 38.
[62] M. Benasik and V. V. Sviatlovskii, Studenchestvo v tsifrakh (St. Petersburg, 1909), pp. 51–52.
for "educated and well-off prostitutes." Unlike the vast majority of prostitutes in the capital, this elite group of prostitutes was allowed to retain its passports and had the prerogative to appear for periodic examinations at a separate section of a committee clinic.[63] In cases of "valid reasons," these women could appear on a biweekly rather than a weekly basis. They might also be treated for venereal disease at home rather than in the hospital. In 1912, an MVD commission acknowledged the existence of sixty such "cleanly dressed" individuals, all able to conduct themselves more "decently" than the rest of the registered prostitutes.[64] Nizhnii Novgorod adhered to a similar practice, allowing some women to visit private doctors for private fees. These doctors would then send the results of their examinations to the local medical-police committee.[65]
Rules directed at "vagrant woman of debauched behavior" gave official recognition to regulation's most controversial and mishandled practice, that of examining and registering women involuntarily. A commission of the State Duma admitted in 1909 that inscription lists could include women "who were under no circumstances earning a living through depravity."[66] The MVD itself acknowledged in circulars to Russia's provincial governors in 1896 and 1910 that policemen and medical police personnel frequently inscribed women against their will.[67] The press, eager for scandals and often delighted to find ways to embarrass the tsarist authorities, repeatedly publicized incidents involving "innocent" young women who had been abused by the police. One daily maintained that Petersburg medical-police committee agents would register women without informing them. In this article, the registration process was described as a simple exchange: "Can you [ty ] read and write?" Upon an affirmative reply, they would bark, "Sign!"[68]The North-west Word (Severno-zapadnoe slovo ) reported in 1910 how a 25-year-old
[63] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, 27–29. Shtiurmer refers to these women as kabinetnye prostitutes in "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 39.
[64] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 17; TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "Doklad kommisii, izbrannoi vrachebno-politseiskom komitetom dlia proverki pronikshikh v pechat' i osnovannykh na doklade doktora P. N. Shishkinoi-Iavein svedenii o deiatel'nosti ispolnitel'nykh organov komitetov."
[65] A. A. Chagin, "Otchet po Nizhegorodskoi iarmarochnoi zhenskoi bol'nitse dlia venericheskikh boleznei za 1900 g.," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoi meditsiny, no. 2 (February 1901): 166.
[66] TsGIA, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, f. 1278, op. 2, d. 3476, "Zhurnaly komissii po sudebnym reformam."
[67] MVD circulars of July 18, 1896, and April 10, 1910, to provincial governors published in Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 8 (August 1896): 16; no. 6 (July 1910): 120.
[68] V. G——llo, "Zloupotrebleniia v Peterburgskom vrachebnom komitete," Vechernee vremia, no. 132 (April 30, 1912): 3.
woman had been brought to a municipal hospital on the basis of "rumors" that she practiced clandestine prostitution. There, doctors soon discovered that she was a virgin.[69] One critic accused medical-police committee agents in St. Petersburg of recruiting "any girl who lacks the means to survive," because they were paid "by the piece" (po-stuchno ) for anyone they could induce to register.[70] This particular allegation was unfounded, but it was nonetheless true that the St. Petersburg committee pressured agents to register all clandestine prostitutes. In 1910, the sanitary commission in Minsk had its operations temporarily suspended because of the agents' improprieties in arresting "respectable" women.[71]
One scandal implicated Kazan's chief of police. According to newspaper reports, he had forced a married woman who was walking after dark to replace her passport with a medical ticket. When her husband protested, the police beat him up.[72] In 1889, a Simbirsk policeman, distressed by reports about the prevalence of syphilis among the local military, ordered his underling Kamenskii to subject all the women in one section of the city to medical examinations. The zealous Kamenskii not only picked up women on the streets, he even went into people's homes, dutifully hauling in female children, girls, married women, and old women. One nursing mother, forced to leave behind several unsupervised children, filed a complaint against him that resulted in a ten-day jail sentence for Kamenskii and a three-month salary deduction for his superior.[73] A few years earlier, newspapers reported how an Odessa police inspector had tried to blackmail a woman into having sex with him by threatening to issue her a yellow ticket if she refused. Unable to find any protection against his persecution, she went after the inspector with a knife.[74]
An author in 1906 told of an educated but unemployed young
[69] Severo-zapadnoe slovo (February 9, 1910): 3.
[70] Ape, "Moia zametka," in Prostitutsiia, ed. Ape (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 5.
[71] Vrachebnaia gazetta, no. 30 (1910): 3.
[72] Boris I. Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 12 (December 1904): 147–48; D. L. Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," Zhizn', no. 10 (October 1899): 399–40. Cases involving arrests and examinations of virgins by medical-police agents are also in Ezhenedel'nik zhurnala "prakticheskoi meditsiny," no. 8 (1901): 149.
[73] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 44–45; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 150; Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," p. 408. A policeman in a Siberian village ordered all women to submit to pelvic examinations as well. V. D. Mitrich, "K voprosu o tainoi prostitutsii," Sibirskaia zhizn ' (September 19, 1899), cited in Vrach, no. 40 (1899): 1187.
[74] Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 147; Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," p. 397; A. L. Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," Vestnik prava, no. 8 (October 1905): 157.
woman in St. Petersburg who was harassed incessantly by a medical-police agent. According to this account, she wound up fleeing her apartment and suffering from some nervous disease.[75] St. Petersburg was the scene of another episode involving the daughter of a state official who had been arrested by a medical-police agent, Vasilii Zhirnov. The newspaper Russia (Rossiia ) described how the official's daughter had been walking at midnight with an actor friend. When Zhirnov saw her smoking a cigarette and talking loudly, he assumed that she was a "nocturnal butterfly" (nochnaia babochka ) and took her to the police station. The St. Petersburg police released the young woman when her identity was established, but that was only after Zhirnov had confiscated her personal documents and begun filling out her yellow ticket.[76]
Another incident involved an accusation of extortion which merited an investigation by an MVD privy councillor. Upon returning from a wedding in Nizhnii Novgorod, two peasant couples were stopped by a pair of policemen on night duty. The policemen accused one of the women, a certain Platonova, of theft and "very likely, according to habit, treated her rudely so that Platonova raised a fuss." When the two drunken peasant men tried to assist her, they were arrested. The privy councillor concurred with the opinion of the assistant police chief that the policemen probably solicited a bribe to keep the men out of jail, since "everyone knows that Nizhnii Novgorod's arms of the law [bliustiteli poriadka ] allow themselves to accept gratitude in the form of festive gifts and the like." Apparently, there had been recent accusations of bribes from brothel owners as well.[77]
Low salaries almost invited agents to supplement their income through bribery and blackmail. In 1912, when a commission appointed by the MVD investigated charges of corruption leveled against St. Petersburg's committee, its members concluded that the 30-ruble per month salary of committee agents created "highly receptive grounds for the tendency to add to one's living through illegal means."[78] Prior to an 1889 reform of Moscow's committee, local agents also earned only 30
[75] Ape, "Moia zametka," p. 5. Dr. Petr Oboznenko, who conducted a major study of the capital's prostitutes prior to the turn of the century, in response to Ape's allegations pointed out that all abuses were punished with the utmost severity. Oboznenko, "O zashchite priezzhikh devushek," in Prostitutsiia, ed. Ape (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 8.
[76] Zhirnov was found guilty in the circuit court and sentenced to three months in prison, but the sentence was dropped upon appeal. Rossiia, no. 162 (October 7, 1899): 3; Vrach, no. 42 (1899): 1251.
[77] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, report of July 15, 1910, by privy councillor Mollerius.
[78] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "Doklad kommisii."
rubles a month. As the chair of the Moscow duma put it, "these officials themselves must need inspection."[79] The police were not the only ones who took advantage of their authority: in 1910, The Russian Physician (Russkii vrach ) divulged, "not without disgust," that a fire had taken place in a Petersburg building containing two brothels. It turned out that the house belonged to a district police physician.[80]
Prince Sergei Volkonskii, a member of Russia's aristocratic elite, reporting to the 1899 Congress on the White Slave Traffic held in London, argued that there were scarcely any rules to protect prostitutes "from the abuse of power on the part of those into whose hands they fall. Their position is one of utter helplessness, and they are considered as being beyond the pale of the law, undeserving of protection from the authorities, who are, as it were, only called upon to protect others from their injurious influence."[81] Government observers often reached similar conclusions. A commission organized by the MVD's Medical Council noted in 1899 that medical-police agents came from the "lowest ranks" and were hired "without any kind of discrimination."[82] Moscow went so far as to dispense with agents entirely, arguing in 1908 that "it is highly difficult to find people suited for an occupation of this sort."[83] The debate over the morals of medical-police committee agents also reached Russia's short-lived legislative body, the State Duma. During a discussion of a proposed bill on the "trade in women," a Duma representative spoke of how agents protected brothelkeepers for mercenary reasons.[84]
[79] M. P. Shchepkin, Opyt izucheniia obshchestvennago khoziaistva i upravleniia gorodov, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1884), pp. 237–38, quoted in Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century," p. 265 (emphasis added).
[80] Russkii vrach, no. 19 (1910): 679.
[81] Congress on the White Slave Traffic: Transactions of the International Congress on the White Slave Trade (London: Office of the National Vigilance Association, 1899), p. 108. His gloomy analysis was confirmed several years later by prostitutes undergoing treatment at Petersburg's Kalinkin Hospital who reported to a member of the Society for the Care of Young Girls that committee agents frequently demanded money from them and prevented them from leaving the trade. Even when someone quit prostitution officially, she still had to endure surprise visits from agents. Aleksandra N. Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora po pokazaniiam prostitutok," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchianami, vol. 2, pp. 508–9.
[82] "Svod postanovlenii komissii po razsmotreniiu dela o vrachebno-politseiskom komitete v Moskve, v sviazi s proektom obshchei organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v Imperii," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 3 (March 1901): 44.
[83] "Zhurnal soveshchaniia po voprosu o nadzore za prostitutsiei v gorode Moskve," Izvestiia S. -Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2068.
[84] Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety, p. 891. In 1910, an assistant professor from the Imperial Academy of Military Medicine referred to a bribery scandal involving gifts from brothelkeepers to the city governor, other municipal authorities, and medical-police agents. Mikhail P. Manasein, "Obshchii vzgliad na sovremennoe polozhenoe voprosa o prostitutsii i sviazannykh s neiu voprosov," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 200.
The State Senate, the tsarist government's chief judicial organ, addressed the problem of abuses in the registration process as early as 1892, ruling that women could not be registered as prostitutes against their will and that medical-police committees which administered examinations to women against their wishes were criminally liable. Prostitutes who refused to register risked legal prosecution under a statute that prescribed penalties for the defiance of administrative rulings regarding indecency, but they could not be compelled to register.[85]
From the police's viewpoint, however, leaving uncertified women free to practice prostitution contradicted the very essence of regulation. The Senate's 1892 ruling seemed like needless interference with normal police procedures, particularly because legal proceedings against suspected prostitutes tended to mean time wasted in court, collection of a small fine, and a woman's quick return to the streets. Most local police and regulatory agencies continued to follow the more logical procedure of registering and requiring exams of all known and suspected prostitutes. Disregard for the Senate's ruling was built into many committees' rules. Minsk's sanitary commission, for one, called for the immediate registration of all women whose names had been reported to the commission or to the police. In the Georgian capital of Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the rules stated that a woman could be inscribed on the basis of her free will or according to the local police's decision. Prostitutes who arrived in town and refused to register could be subjected to immediate exile.[86] St. Petersburg required all vagrant women to undergo medical examinations and, as Aleksandr Fedorov confirmed, committee agents indeed signed women into the ranks of prostitutes against their will.[87]
When medical-police committees named women to the ranks of registered prostitutes, more often than not they were inscribing all suspects, instead of heeding the Senate's ruling. Police would routinely drag in the women they suspected were engaging in prostitution, question them, examine them, confiscate their passports, and issue them yel-
[85] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 33; Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," p. 157; Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," p. 478.
[86] Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," pp. 156–59; statute 56, Materialy po voprosu ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v gorode Tiflise i bor'be s venericheskimi bolezniami (Tiflis, 1909), p. 9; Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 37–38.
[87] "O priniatii v vedenie goroda vsego dela po nadzoru za prostitutsiei," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 38 (December 1902): 1842.
low tickets.[88] While this did not guarantee that a woman would adhere to the responsibilities accompanying her license, she was seen as at least subject to some kind of controls.
Dr. Veniamin Tarnovskii was the first president of the Russian Syphilological and Dermatological Society and a professor at the Imperial Academy of Military Medicine. Russia's leading venereal specialist and regulation's greatest advocate, he estimated that one in five women was registered involuntarily.[89] This was probably a modest guess. An empirewide survey of 1889 showed that 78 percent of all registered prostitutes were illiterate.[90] Written safeguards were therefore virtually useless for more than three-quarters of the women who held yellow tickets, some of whom were as young as 11.[91] Despite the modicum of protection provided by the central tsarist government, most girls and women knew only those procedures followed by their local police.
On the surface, medical-police regulation of prostitution fulfilled Perovskii's desire to keep prostitutes "under surveillance" (podnadzornye ) and it gave the tsarist state an additional mechanism of (ostensible) control over the urban lower classes. Though regulation had been implemented in the nineteenth century in the name of public health, it perpetuated earlier traditions that treated prostitutes as threats to public order. Women who were perceived as dangerous were subject to supervision over both their whereabouts and their bodies. Regulation also supplied policemen, doctors, and tsarist officials with additional authority. Not only did it give them an institutional structure through which to exercise their power, at the most basic level it provided opportunities for monetary and sexual exploitation.
Though the regulation of prostitution built itself on established concepts of class and gender, it also served to reinforce and further institutionalize class and gender hierarchies in Russian society. As we have seen, regulation explicitly targeted the lower classes and thus excluded women of more privileged strata from its regimen. Even the state's broader efforts to stop the spread of venereal disease by inspecting male
[88] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 37–38.
[89] Quoted in Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," p. 156. See also Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 228–29.
[90] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. xxvi.
[91] Seven of a Baltic city's ninety-one registered prostitutes had registered between the ages of 11 and 15. A. M. Vasil'ev, "O prostitutsii v Libave," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 10 (October 1911): 1423.
workers left men from the upper classes free from surveillance. Toleration enshrined the sexual double standard which declared male desire uncontrollable and female desire nonexistent or, in any case, irrelevant. Theoretically, it involved recognition of a peculiar sexual arrangement: prostitutes would ply their trade so that a class of "respectable" and "virtuous" women would be available for marriage and reproduction.
Medical-police rules made it extremely difficult for a woman to extricate herself from the ranks of registered prostitutes. Contemporary economic conditions involved slow periods and layoffs, times when many women would take to the streets temporarily in order to make ends meet. The yellow ticket, however, could transform prostitution into a career, for the rules governing this license required its holder to break ties with her work, family, and children. Dostoevsky's Sonia Marmeladova herself was forced to move out of her family's home when she was issued a yellow ticket.[92] As soon as a woman registered with the police, prostitution became her full-time vocation. Whereas formerly she may have resorted to streetwalking as an occasional and supplemental trade, casual prostitution was no longer an option. Even Veniamin Tarnovskii, in an effort to describe the seriousness of the registration process, acknowledged that registration amounted to "a strict, unappealable sentence which deprives [a woman] of equal rights, circumscribes her freedom of activity, and sullies her honor." The yellow ticket condemned a woman to a "shameful life" and cut her off from the "honest" working world.[93]
When critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assailed regulation, its defenders claimed that the system was warranted by nadzor's medical value. Restrictions on a minority of women, they argued, could spare hundreds and thousands of men, women, and children the ravages of syphilis and other venereal diseases. Said one physician in reference to nadzor, "we must consider the facts of real life" and look out for "the people's highest good, their health."[94]
But, as many critics retorted and medical science has indisputably confirmed, regulation's very claim to guard public health was highly dubious. From a scientific standpoint alone, physicians faced diseases that were difficult to diagnose accurately and did not yet possess reliable
[92] Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, p. 20.
[93] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii s"ezda," Trudy Vysochaishe razreshennago s"ezda, vol. 2, p. 11
[94] N. A. Moskalev, "Abolitsionizm ili-zhe reglamentatsiia prostitutsii?" O reglamentatsii prostitutsii i abolitsionizme (Rostov-na-Donu, 1907), p. 30.
cures. Without microscopic analyses of vaginal discharge, doctors could easily confuse gonorrhea with simple infections. Because syphilis traveled back and forth between contagious and latent periods, prolonged hospitalization did not necessarily mean that a woman would be isolated during her most infectious phase. Regulation also suffered from a one-sided approach to disease prevention, since few serious measures provided for examinations of the customers who visited prostitutes. These men were left free to seek treatment of their own volition or to continue to infect their sexual partners. As a British opponent of regulation wrote in 1870, "As well might we attempt to stop a river in its course by damming it halfway across."[95]
The regulation of prostitution had very little to recommend it as an effective prophylactic against the spread of venereal disease. Without serious attention to clients and with no reliable diagnostic procedures or cures, the best that the government could hope for was the removal of prostitutes from their trade for limited periods of time. Though this appears to be small compensation for the system's inherent injustices, the tsarist government nonetheless remained committed to registering, examining, and incarcerating prostitutes. In turn, most women who engaged in prostitution did their best to stay beyond the reach of medical-police clutches.
[95] C. B. Taylor, The Contagious Diseases Acts (Women) (London, 1870), p. 32, quoted in E. M. Sigsworth and T. J. Wyke, "A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease," in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 96.
Chapter 2
Living with Regulation
Only someone deaf and blind could walk along St. Petersburg streets without knowing of the existence of [prostitution].
Russian Society for the Protection of Women (1910)
The system of nadzor created an institutional structure designed to encompass Russian prostitution. Yet the lives of women who engaged in prostitution were much more complex and variegated than the MVD rules allowed. Girls younger than the minimum age of 16 worked the streets, unlicensed brothels were run by unsupervised brothelkeepers, and most women who earned money as prostitutes had no desire to give up their passport in exchange for a yellow ticket. Nadzor, however, with its police inspectors and physicians, divided women into those who traded sex for money and those who did not. Whether or not women registered with the police as prostitutes, they were still living with regulation.
In this chapter, we shall examine the way prostitutes responded to that salient fact of their lives. The regulatory lists did not include most prostitutes, but regulation affected them nonetheless. Inside the system, a woman was subject to medical examinations and restrictions of her movements, and she had to earn money exclusively from prostitution. Outside the system, as a "clandestine" (tainaia ) prostitute a woman had much more flexibility, but she was also in constant danger of discovery. The goal of the medical police was to bring all prostitutes in—the desire of most women who made money from prostitution was to stay out.
Children and Prostitution
Work all day? What for, when someone like me can wear a hat and beautiful dress, and have white hands just like a lady?
Child prostitute in Kiev
Too young to register, child prostitutes could easily be found amid the ranks of Russia's clandestines. Urban neighborhoods such as Dumskaia Square in Kiev and Znamenskaia Square in St. Petersburg had reputations as centers of child prostitution.[1] Entire hotels reportedly catered to pedophiles, with prepubescent girls openly soliciting customers and sometimes supplying their parents with the money they earned from prostitution. Whereas child prostitution had once attracted only a limited clientele, Boris Bentovin, a physician who worked at Kalinkin Hospital, claimed that after the turn of the century the trade in children had soared and was no longer considered perverse or unusual.[2]
The onset of World War I apparently drove many more children to the streets. Social dislocation caused by war meant an increase in homelessness and a concomitant rise in children who were growing up in doorways and sleeping in boxes and on cemetery grounds. To support themselves, they engaged in prostitution. An official from the Kiev juvenile court attributed the child prostitution he encountered during the war years to "poverty and defenselessness," rather than simple hunger. Only two of the hundreds of young prostitutes he encountered between 1914 and 1917 traded in sex because they were on the verge of starvation.[3]
There are too many accounts of child prostitution in the sources to attribute its descriptions to adult paranoia and fantasy alone. The charitable organization known as the Russian Society for the Protection of Women (Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin, hereafter ROZZh), for example, wrote in its annual report of a nine-year-old prostitute who reportedly lost her virginity to an "urchin" at the age of
[1] M. K. Mukalov, Deti ulitsy (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 8, 18 (quotation from child prostitute); Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow, pp. 3–4, 124–26.
[2] Boris Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki (St. Petersburg, 1910), p. 4. See also Russkii vrach, no.18 (1909): 631. Laura Engelstein argues, "By 1910, . . . so-called child prostitutes came to symbolize the entire social problem in its most acute and menacing form." Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 284.
[3] Valerii Levitskii, "Deti-prostitutki v dni voiny," Vestnik vospitaniia, no. 2 (February 1917): 168–71. See also A. I. Zak, "Tipy detskoi besprizornosti, prestupnosti, i prostitutsii," Vestnik vospitaniia, no. 7 (October 1914): 70–101; no.8 (November 1914): 81–110.
seven and was then repeatedly molested by her father. When a policeman brought her to the local halfway house for prostitutes, she was smoking and apparently drunk. In response to a question about why she smoked and drank, she said, "It pleases men."[4] In 1913, a Petersburg feminist journal described how a male ROZZh member followed a soldier and two 11-year-old girls. When he caught up with this trio, he found one girl standing guard and another alone with the soldier. The soldier went free, but the girls were whisked off for examinations at a medical-police committee clinic.[5]
A colonel stationed near the Persian border at the turn of the century reported how his riflemen sought "diversions," which sometimes meant buying sex from the native women. He saw "one of these beauties" sleeping curled up on a fox coat. When the girl's mother kicked her awake, the colonel realized that she was a "real girl-child" (devochkasushchii rebenok ). In answer to his queries about her age, "with pride" the mother replied, "Twelve, but she has been acquainted with men since she was nine." Thus inspired, the colonel proposed that civilian authorities in the nearby city of Samarkand might ease the troops' burdens by bringing half a dozen such young women to live near the soldiers in remote outposts. To strengthen his case, he pointed out that the British had been doing something similar for their troops in India for years.[6]
On one hand, observers were outraged and disgusted by the idea of young girls catering to the sexual fancies of adult men. At the same time though, privileged society found something exciting and prurient about child prostitution. Surely Boris Bentovin gave his 1910 book on juvenile prostitution a distinctly erotic flavor when he described a 12-year-old girl—a "little female onanist" (devochka-onanistka )—who masturbated by leaning against sewing machines. He wrote about how, in order to satisfy the huge demand for virgins, some St. Petersburg midwives specialized in sewing on "hymens" fashioned from scraps of cow bladder or very thin pieces of rubber. A capsule of blood or a red-colored liquid would be attached, ready to provide a client with "the illusion of a 'first night.'" Bentovin's vision of St. Petersburg included girls as young as 10
[4] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g . (St. Petersburg, 1910), p. 70.
[5] "K voprosu o detskoi prostitutsii," Zhenskii vestnik, no. 9 (1913): 195.
[6] Polkovnik Lossovskii, "Kavkazskie strelki za Kaspiem," Razvedchik, no. 521 (October 10, 1900): 914. Indignant comments on his proposal can be found in Vrach, no. 42 (1900): 1295. For a report on a 14-year-old prostitute in Moscow, see "Maloletnaia prostitutka," Stolichnoe utro, no. 47 (July 24, 1907): 4.
or 11 who would "look you in the eye, promise you astonishing pleasures, and spew nasty language."[7]
Child prostitution existed for two reasons: first, there was a market for young bodies and, second, children of the urban poor faced the choice of earning negligible "honest" wages or making good money on the streets. The latter must have been a great temptation.[8] In 1909, a Petersburg newspaper wrote of two girls aged 9 and 11 who had been taken in by the House of Mercy, the private charitable institution dedicated to "reforming" prostitutes. On the street, these children earned 60 and 90 rubles a month respectively, that is, more than four and six times what an adult female worker might average.[9] When Bentovin asked a girl around 11 or 12 years old whether she was bothered by the "vileness and immorality" of her life, she reportedly answered, "Not in the least. . . . There's nothing so bad here. . . . It's much better than a brothel. . . . I get sweet and delicious things. . . . The little uncles [diad'ki ] are all really funny and kind. . . . If they come up with something bad, I don't do it."[10] Christine Stansell has shown that girls in the urban lower classes of nineteenth-century New York City faced sexual aggression from men at many turns; the "innocence" of childhood was in essence a bourgeois myth. Realistically, then, child prostitution could be viewed as a "way of turning a unilateral relationship into a reciprocal one."[11]
Medical-police committees struggled against juvenile prostitution by various means, but at least in St. Petersburg, police raids remained the weapon of choice. In 1889, the Petersburg committee picked up twenty-two girls between the ages of 11 and 15 for soliciting. According to Aleksandr Fedorov, they were from poor, morally corrupt families who would dispatch their daughters straight to the streets. The committee sent ten of the girls to the House of Mercy for correction and rehabilitation, but the remaining twelve, much to Fedorov's regret, were returned to their parents' care. In 1890, when seventeen minors were arrested, all wound up back with their families because the House of Mercy was
[7] Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki, pp. 4, 10–12, 33–34.
[8] On children living on Russia's urban streets, see Joan Neuberger, Hoolganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 158–215.
[9] "Bor'ba s prostitutsiei," Rech ', no. 111 (April 25, 1909): 4.
[10] Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki, p. 15.
[11] Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 185.
full.[12] Minors, naturally, presented a dilemma to authorities. A physician from the Stavropol' provincial administration pinpointed part of the problem in a letter to the MVD branch that handled regulation after 1904, the Office of the Chief Medical Inspector (Upravlenie glavnago vrachebnago inspektora, hereafter UGVI): ministry rules directed the medical police to send underage girls and women to their parents or to the proper philanthropic institutions, but Stavropol' (like most Russian cities) had no such agencies and many children were orphaned.[13]
But the central issue was registration. State policies for this category of young women reflected some of the lingering ambivalence toward nadzor. As the author of a 1914 study of European prostitution put it, it was "the very acme of unwisdom and inhumanity" to brand 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old girls with the label of "prostitute."[14] Though the MVD considered itself in the business of controlling venereal disease by controlling prostitutes, it retreated from the aggressive surveillance of juveniles. In 1903, the ministry raised the minimum age of registration from 16 to 18, essentially lumping 16- and 17-year-old young women into the same category as children and giving them the automatic status of clandestine prostitutes.[15] Medical-police committees were expected to act accordingly, but local regulators, as usual, often did as they pleased. In Petersburg, for example, the existence of an "army" of juvenile prostitutes spurred authorities to lower the age of registration in 1909.[16] Among 379 prostitutes who were registered in the northern capital in 1914, 40 were under the age of 18, and 9 were 14 or 15 years old.[17]
Authorities were understandably loath to condone and, in effect, institutionalize the sexual trade in children by issuing them yellow tickets, Yet the failure to subject young prostitutes to identification, inspection, and incarceration defeated regulation's very purpose, since children and young women with contagious diseases stood by definition outside medical-police surveillance. Petr Gratsianov recognized this dilemma when a European colleague at a Brussels conference proposed establish-
[12] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 52, 54–55.
[13] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter of May 8, 1911.
[14] Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, pp. 152–53.
[15] A Tomsk physician blamed the revised age limit for the "almost boundless" spread of clandestine prostitution. V. M. Timofeev, "Otchet po nadzoru za prostitutsiei v gorode Tomske za 1911 god," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika goroda Tomska, nos. 7–8 (July–August 1912): 369.
[16] Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki, p. 37.
[17] Otchet o deiatel'nosti Petrograndskago doma miloserdiia za 1914 g . (Petrograd, 1915), p. 18.
ing 21 as the minimum age for registration. To Gratsianov, age was irrelevant. "Regulation," he pointed out, "does not strive to punish the prostitute [who is suffering from a venereal disease], but only to render her harmless [obezvredit '] and completely isolate her."[18]
The reluctance of the state to move young women into a life ruled by the yellow ticket—despite the ostensible reasons for taking this step—shows how state authorities as well as women could be trapped in a tangled web of gender, morals, and ideology. From the vantage point of the regulationists, Gratsianov was right; logic demanded that all prostitutes fall under the state's purview. Nadzor, however, did not simply render the prostitute harmless and isolate her; it labeled her a "public woman," putting her movements and her body into public hands. The MVD bowed to this verity by raising the age limit and thereby undermining its own policies. Having refrained from putting girls into the social category of women who sold sex, the regulators tacitly acknowledged their system's injustice. They also bolstered the ranks of so-called "clandestine" prostitutes, the outlaw group that regulation paradoxically created.
"Clandestines"
It is impossible for those who do not wish to close their eyes before a gaping abyss not to ponder the question and extent of clandestine and open [iavnaia] prostitution in the big cities.
Dr. Vladimir Bekhterev (1910)
In 1900, when the number of registered prostitutes had reached approximately 34,000, The Women's Cause (Zhenskoe delo ) reported that anyone familiar with the problem of prostitution in Russia had to be aware that the actual number was close to ten times higher. Ten years later, the Social Democrat Aleksandra Kollontai asserted that the true numbers of prostitutes in St. Petersburg alone fell somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000. The psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev, who was president of the Psycho-Neurological Institute and the director of a clinic for mental and nervous diseases, quoted a figure of 50,000 prostitutes for Petersburg. According to his extravagant calculations, one in
[18] Gratsianov, "Briussel'skii mezhdunarodnyi s"ezd po priniatiiu mer bor'by s sifilisom i venericheskimi bolezniami," offprint from Russkii meditsinskii vestnik (St. Petersburg, 1899), pp. 3–33.
every nine women between the ages of 16 and 60 was earning money as a prostitute.[19]
In a description that made all of the capital sound like a veritable sex market, Robert Shikhman of the ROZZh claimed that St. Petersburg's restaurants, hotels, boutiques, and employment agencies served as centers of prostitution. Clandestine prostitutes lurked in taverns and tea shops, picking up customers and bringing them to nearby hotels. In some cases, bar and restaurant owners functioned as middlemen and supplied their clients with prostitutes. Some of these restaurants and shops paid no salaries to their female employees; women were expected to earn their money through prostitution.[20]
Although estimates of the numbers of clandestine prostitutes are impossible to verify, there is much evidence that prostitution flourished outside the official world of the medical police in Imperial Russia. During the year 1908, more than 11,000 women in Russia were arrested on suspicion of prostitution.[21] In 1909 members of a State Duma commission bowed to the existence of clandestine prostitution when they chose to define nonprostitutes as women "not earning a living through vice," rather than according to the more limited description, those "not inscribed in the ranks of public women." The number of registered women, they explained, was far from an accurate reflection of all those engaging in prostitution.[22]
Indeed, committee statistics could not begin to reflect the actual numbers of women who worked as prostitutes, either casually or professionally. Registration records showed that a significant number of women had worked as prostitutes before they actually registered. From 1908 to 1910, only between 34 and 39 percent of the women who newly registered with the St. Petersburg medical-police committee answered that they had been prostitutes for less than a year. At least 50 percent admitted they had been working as prostitutes for one to five years, and another 11 or 12 percent had been prostitutes for even longer.[23] In 1913, only two newly registered women (less than 0.5 percent) said they had
[19] Zhenskoe delo (June–July 1900): 201; Aleksandra M. Kollontai, "Zadachi s"ezda po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Vozrozhdenie, no. 5 (March 30, 1910): 8; Vladimir Bekhterev, "O polovom ozdorovlenii," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 57.
[20] Robert Shikhman, "Tainaia prostitutsiia v S.-Peterburge," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 93–99.
[21] Di-Sen'i and Fon-Vitte, Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor, p. 30.
[22] TsGIA, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, f 1278, op. 2, d. 3476, "Zhurnaly komissii po sudebnym reformam."
[23] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 52; Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta S.-Peteburgskago doma miloserdiia za 1910 g . (St. Petersburg, 1911), pp. 10–11.
not yet engaged in prostitution. None of the 379 women who registered in 1914 answered that they were not already earning money through prostitution.[24] There were also extremely high rates of venereal disease among women newly registering as prostitutes, often an indication of having engaged in commercial sex. Among first-time registrants in St. Petersburg in 1908, 213 (28 percent) of 756 women suffered from venereal disease. In 1909, the percentage rose to 37, or 199 of the 545 women who registered.[25]
Other statistics also substantiate the existence of widespread clandestine prostitution. In 1889, of 972 women stricken from the registration lists of the St. Petersburg medical-police committee, a full 550 (57 percent) "concealed themselves from surveillance" (ukryvshchikhsia ot nadzora ). The percentages of women in 1890 and 1895 were smaller—33 and 23 percent respectively—but they nonetheless bolstered allegations of extensive clandestine prostitution and reinforced fears about women engaging in commercial sex without any medical or police supervision.[26]
From one perspective, the yellow ticket offered several advantages over the unregulated street trade—safety, medical care, and a modicum of negotiating power. Possession of the license spared women from roundups following police raids of working-class neighborhoods. The yellow ticket also guaranteed free medical treatment for those women who contracted a contagious disease. (One reason why the rates of syphilis and gonorrhea were so high among first-time registrants was because the uncomfortable stages of syphilis and gonorrhea were often the precipitant to registration and subsequent free medical attention.) Without a license, prostitutes were more likely to need the aid of pimps and other protectors in order to stay free of the police. Moreover, if they were not registered, prostitutes were more vulnerable to extortion and other forms of exploitation from hotel managers and greedy landlords. The yellow ticket, purchased at the price of freedom, brought some maneuverability to an otherwise circumscribed life.
For most women, however, the price was too high. Registration meant that prostitution, which might previously have been a part-time venture, a means of supplementing meager earnings or bridging a spell
[24] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1913 g. (Petrograd, 1914), pp. 101–2; Otchet o deiatel'nosti Petrogradskago doma miloserdiia za 1914 g., pp. 16, 20.
[25] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 54.
[26] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 46; Fedorov, "Deiatel'nost' S.-Peterburgskago vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta za period 1888–95 gg.," Vestnik obshchest-vennoi gigieny, no. 11 (November 1896): 185.
of unemployment, now became a full-time career. Lack of a passport made it difficult to earn money from anything but commercial sex. Any hopes to maintain a semblance of respectability had to be abandoned when a woman entered her name on police lists. Once registered, she became a public woman, the property of the state. Not only did clients have access to her body, so did policemen, committee agents, and physicians.
The yellow ticket virtually announced to a woman's community that she was working as a prostitute because it replaced her passport and kept her wedded to the local committee's examination schedule. Women not only feared the external stigma; many women did not wish to define themselves as prostitutes. Beyond medical-police control, a woman could tell herself that the prostitution in which she engaged, no matter how frequently, was temporary, that it was not her true profession. A law professor from Kazan University, Arkadii Elistratov, repeatedly heard women who had been threatened with legal action declare, "Do with me what you will, but I will not show up for medical examinations because I do not consider myself a prostitute."[27] The yellow ticket obliterated this self-definition. Its holders were unequivocally labeled "prostitute" and were required to live according to rules that differentiated them from the rest of the female population.
Vulnerable to venereal infections from clients, prostitutes were painfully aware of regulation's one-sided approach to disease prevention. This too soured them on nadzor. In 1909, a prostitute wrote a letter to the feminist Anna Miliukova about the necessity of subjecting clients to medical tests.[28] One year later, a member of St. Petersburg's Society for the Care of Young Girls (Obshchestvo popecheniia o molodykh devitsakh, hereafter OPMD) reported that the prostitutes she worked with at Kalinkin Hospital felt similarly. She recounted having heard several prostitutes declare that it was unfair to examine women only; it was their guests, not they, who were spreading disease. One said she could name a hundred men with syphilis whom no one had compelled to seek treatments.[29] At the 1910 All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against
[27] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p.39. In a recent BBC documentary, a woman who had just answered a Riga policeman's questions about her clients and her preferences still said no when he asked, "Do you consider yourself a prostitute?" Olivia Lichtenstein, "Prostitutki," BBC and WGBH production aired on the Arts and Entertainment network, May 26, 1991.
[28] "Pis'mo prostitutki, Soiuz zhenshchin, no. 4. (April 1909): 9–11
[29] Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony," p.508.
the Trade in Women and Its Causes, a petition submitted by sixty-three prostitutes also addressed the inequity of a system that left syphilitic men, "whom it occurs to no one to examine," free to spread disease as they pleased. They complained that male syphilitic guests were permitted "to infect us without hindrance and without punishment, and eventually make us into unhappy cripples from whom anyone will turn away in horror. Indeed, our guests are not little children and they must understand that there is nothing to be proud of in spreading disease. They do not have the right to spread syphilis, not even to girls who walk the streets. We, too, are human beings who value our health; our old age will not be sweet without it."[30]
Nonetheless, observers often reversed the scenario: in most accounts it was the prostitute who willfully and maliciously infected her clients out of indifference or revenge. In Veniamin Tarnovskii's view, prostitutes had no scruples about damaging men's health; one rarely met a woman who would volunteer, "Stop me, I'm sick."[31] Aleksandr Kuprin's Iama, a popular fictional representation of brothel life, portrayed a syphilitic prostitute who repaid men for her fate by infecting them in return. "But I purposely infect these two-legged scoundrels. I infect ten, fifteen men every night. Let them rot, let them give syphilis to their wives, their lovers, their mothers. Yes, yes, also to their mothers and their fathers and their governesses, and even to their great-grandmothers. Let them all die, all those honest scoundrels!"[32] In White Slave: From the Diary of a Fallen Woman (Belaia rabynia: Iz dnevnika padshei zhenschiny ), the purported author proclaimed, "I'll infect anybody and everybody, I'll be a breeding ground of infection, but I'll take revenge." On the day after the new year of 1902, she tallied up her victims—one old man, two artisans, one merchant, and one young student.[33] The medical-police committee in the Amur region in 1910 was so woried about the danger presented by unregistered prostitutes that it petitioned the MVD for the right to subject those women found guilty of clandestine prostitution to martial law.[34]
Although many prostitutes with venereal disease may indeed have felt justified or smug about paying back a hypocritical society for their
[30] "Ot zhenshchin zanimaiushchikhsia prostitutsiei," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 511–12.
[31] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 126, 157–60.
[32] Kuprin, Iama, p. 145
[33] Belaia rabynia: Iz dnevnika padshei zhenshchiny (Moscow, 1909), pp. 14–15.
[34] Vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 37 (1910): 1084.
fate, there were actually more practical reasons for a woman to continue to work the streets after she contracted an illness. Even Tarnovskii admitted that the early manifestations of disease could seem mild and that a woman facing hospitalization had to worry about the loss of her earnings and very likely her place to live.[35] Fear of contamination from ignorant and vindictive prostitutes nevertheless dominated contemporary images. The prostitute's hidden organs were perceived to function as the proverbial vagina dentata, with dangerous, mysterious infections serving as the deadly "teeth."
A certain element of fantasy made its way into educated society's impression of the ubiquity of prostitution. We can almost detect a note of longing in some descriptions of contemporary prostitution, as though observers secretly relished the idea of so much sex for sale. Robert Shikhman's characterization of clandestine prostitution in St. Petersburg fits into this category, as do his readings of some advertisements in local newspapers. To Shikhman, there was no doubt about what an "elderly and well-to-do gentleman" who had "lost the ability to take pleasure from life" had in mind when he advertised for "all sorts of services." His account of restaurant prostitution also had a salacious tone. "For a generous 'tip."' he wrote, prostitutes "are brought to the customer. The restaurant not only gives its guests a goblet from Bacchus, but one from Venus."[36]
Like bourgeois Parisians in the nineteenth century who could not really distinguish between the working classes and "less classes dangereuses, " Russian privileged society seemed to confuse all women who worked for a living with women who engaged in commercial sex. Mary Gibson's observations about Italian privileged society's response to female migration could apply equally to Russian women of the urban lower classes: the "nineteenth-century mind found it hard to conceive of any way to categorize these young, single, working-class migrants other than as prostitutes." Essentially, there was no way to understand women who were not under the "tutelage of men."[37]
In what was more than a metaphor equating wage labor with prostitution, claims surfaced throughout Europe that linked all working women with prostitutes.[38] An essay written by Aleksandr Fedorov in
[35] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, p. 126.
[36] Shikhman, "Tainaia prostitutsiia," pp. 95, 99.
[37] Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, p. 3.
[38] Alain Corbin has also suggested that there was much confusion between prostitutes and all women of the lower classes who catered to the needs of the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Paris. See Corbin, "Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France," p. 215. In her study of domestic servants in eighteenth-century France, Sarah Maza argues that servants were suspected of prostitution because "if a defenseless woman sold her work in someone's household, might she not sell her body as well?" Sarah C. Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 131.
preparation for an 1897 state conference on syphilis recommended medical inspections for "all women of the working class." As he put it the following year, "Whoever is familiar with factory life knows the utility and necessity of sanitary exams of factory women." Fedorov used another criterion to give credence to his suspicions. Revealing a stark vision of supply and demand, he argued that clandestines existed because the number of registered prostitutes was not "proportionate" to the male population.[39]
Several hundred physicians and tsarist officials attended the 1897 Congress for the Discussion of Measures against Syphilis in Russia (S"ezd po obsuzhdeniiu mer protiv sifilisa v Rossii), with the majority ruling that "Domestic servants make up a large component of clandestine prostitutes. In several cities, almost all domestic servants prostitute themselves."[40] This sentiment was echoed in congress proposals to institute physical examinations for all female domestic servants and women workers. In the eyes of participants at the congress, "clandestines" represented the greatest danger in terms of spreading venereal disease, and attendees made various proposals to compel prostitutes to register. Penalties for offenders included the shaving of their pubic hair by police-men, enclosure in a punishment room (as suggested by Warsaw's chief of police), and attaching a red stamp labeled puella publica to a prostitute's residence permit.[41] In 1899, when a commission was discussing ways to reform regulation in St. Petersburg, its members also proposed that examinations be extended to include all female workers.[42] Shikhman once remarked that the term "female factory worker" often served as a synonym in the lower classes for a debauched woman. His fellow ROZZh member admitted that they tried to keep women they had "rescued' away from factory labor because "women there generally fall."
[39] To protect the "modesty" of women who might be hesitant, Fedorov conceded that female nurses might be employed. Fedorov, "Deiatel'nost' S.-Peterburgskago vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta," p. 194; Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 56, 58, 64.
[40] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. xviii.
[41] Elistratov, O prikrepelenii zhenshchiny, p. 365.
[42] "Protokol zasedaniia sanitarnoi komiissii s priglashennymi spetsialistami 12 noiabria 1899 g.," in Otchet S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi ispolnitel'noi sanitarnoi komissii za 1899 g. (St. Petersburg, 1900), p. 434.
Even an administrator from the House of Mercy claimed that the "majority of women in the trades engage in clandestine prostitution."[43]
Aside from the wealthier, professional prostitutes who paid the requisite bribes to maintain their freedom from the police, it is unlikely that so many full-time prostitutes could have remained beyond the police's reach indefinitely. Dr. Petr Oboznenko, a student of Tarnovskii and the author of a major study of St. Petersburg prostitutes, questioned the assumption of widespread clandestinity among women workers. Oboznenko doubted that so many "simple peasants" could have eluded the police quite so successfully. Rather, many had fallen through holes in the bureaucratic sieve and had done nothing more than return to their village, find work elsewhere, or get married. Oboznenko also doubted that most working women doubled as prostitutes. Servants, for example, maintained such demanding duties and schedules that it would have been extremely difficult to find the time or privacy to engage in prostitution. A high percentage of prostitutes indeed listed domestic service as their former occupation, but this did not necessarily indicate that they had held their jobs simultaneously with their work as prostitutes. As for factory workers, how could a woman succeed as a prostitute after working a typical twelve- to fourteen-hour day in the factory? On the other hand, Oboznenko acknowledged that tradeswomen, chorus girls, ballerinas, sales clerks, and others who supplemented their income with prostitution could remain outside medical-police surveillance because they avoided the areas where police agents tended to focus their raids. Neither vagrant nor destitute, they had permanent addresses and often held regular jobs. They could stay free of the regulatory system by visiting private physicians when they required medical treatment and bribing bothersome police agents to leave them alone.[44]
The truth about clandestinity lies somewhere between the polarized visions of women as prostitutes or innocents. Seasonal layoffs, unemployment, and low wages could impel many women workers to supplement their income with occasional prostitution. Oboznenko overlooked the fact that "prostitution' was a broad and flexible trade. Though servants and factory women indeed labored long hours and had few opportunities to walk the streets during the workday, the workplace itself of-
[43] Shikhman, "Tainaia prostitutsiia," p. 108; N. Fon-Guk, "Sluchai pokhishchenii zhenshchin v Peterburge," Peterburgskaia gazeta, no. 199 (July 22, 1908): 2; Serafima I. Konopleva, "Otdelenie dlia nesovershennoletnikh S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia," Trudy s" ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 307.
[44] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia v Peterburge po dannym vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta i Kalinkinskoi bol'nitsy (St. Petersburg, 1896), pp. 15–16, 40–41.
ten provided ample opportunities to pick up extra cash or favors. Casual prostitution may have assumed many forms, from repaying men with sex for dinners and presents, to occasional stints on the street in order to earn extra money. Certainly, all women understood that the promise of sex, implicit or otherwise, gave them leverage and helped them exact favors or gifts from men. Christine Stansell's contention that for poor women in nineteenth-century New York City, prostitution was not a "radical departure into alien territory" in light of its "resemblance . . . to other ways of dealing with men" might also hold for Imperial Russia.[45]
Sincere but moralistic reformers could easily confuse sexually selfconfident, independent, young women with prostitutes, forgetting that a line divided professional prostitution from casual sex. Like the Petersburg agent who mistook the cigarette-smoking, loud-mouthed daughter of a state official for a "nocturnal butterfly," observers might identify any sort of assertive behavior or provocative dress as a sign of prostitution. Kathy Peiss suggests that we "reach beyond the dichotomized analysis of many middle-class observers." Her study of young working-class women in New York at the turn of the century reveals that many exchanged sexual favors for opportunities to indulge in the pleasures that city life offered them. These "charity girls" were not clandestine prostitutes, but neither were they the respectable paragons of virtue that middle-class observers sought to find. "Working women's public behavior often seemed to fall between the traditional middle-class poles: they were not truly promiscuous in their actions, but neither were they models of decorum."[46]
Critics of the regulatory process charged that the practice of arresting female vagrants as possible clandestines occasionally backfired, creating prostitutes rather than exposing them. Oboznenko sensitively described the psychological vulnerability of a young woman without a home or job who might be swept into the net of one of Petersburg's police raids. Compelled to spend the night in the company of seasoned professionals, she could easily be influenced among such well-fed and elegantly dressed women, particularly because some might attempt to recruit her. In this environment, it would become painfully obvious that she too
[45] Stansell, City of Women, p. 180.
[46] Kathy Peiss, "Charity Girls' and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880–1920," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 75. See also Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, pp. 42–45.
might enjoy such material comforts. Police officials might aggravate the situation by advising her that she could avoid future arrests simply by accepting a yellow ticket.
Oboznenko wrote that most women resisted this path, refusing to register and resuming their struggle to survive by virtue of "honest labor." But if they remained without work, invariably they would once again be brought into police custody to relive the scenario of envy and temptation. The more desperate a woman felt, the more probable it was that several arrests would convince her to accept what seemed to be her inevitable fate, full-time prostitution. By the same token, if St. Petersburg's medical-police committee found a woman to suffer from any sort of vaginal ailment—even simple lice or some kind of vaginal inflammation—she would be brought to Kalinkin Hospital and housed with experienced prostitutes, some of whom were rewarded by brothelkeepers for finding fresh recruits. Upon their discharge from the venereal ward, many women would sign right up on committee lists. Bentovin agreed that Kalinkin itself created professional prostitutes, dubbing its section for women with venereal disease a "prep ward" (prigotovitel'nyi passion ).[47]
As Fedorov put it, the role of medical-police committee agents consisted of "keeping an eye on all women of very loose morality who furnish grounds for suspicion of trading their sexual pleasures." Agents supposedly adhered to elaborate rules for confirming their impression, first monitoring a woman's behavior to find out whether their suspicions were founded. This involved following her home and "cautiously" interviewing the doorman or concierge of the building about her comings and goings. Depending on the interview's outcome, the medical-police committee would decide whether to "invite" her for a medical examination or simply place her under further surveillance. If an examination was prescribed and the woman refused to appear, she was liable for prosecution. She was likewise prosecuted if the committee asked her to register and she refused. In Fedorov's view, however, the courts tended to be lenient, penalizing reluctant women with "only" a one- or two-ruble fine.[48] Though a certain number of checks and balances were
[47] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 33–37; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 11 (November 1904): 92; A volunteer at Kalinkin Hospital told of a woman in the prostitutes' ward who continually talked about the good life at her brothel. As it turned out, this woman was a recruiter paid by a brothelkeeper to secure new residents. Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony," p. 507.
[48] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 6, 34–35.
built into the committee's procedures, it is easy to see opportunities for abuse, harassment, and impropriety.
As we saw earlier, numerous instances involving false arrests continually came to light, prompting discussions among officials on how to reform the process of registration. But in fact the problem was inherent to the agents' assignment. Expected to bring unregistered prostitutes under medical-police control, agents needed to exercise a certain freedom of movement and judgment. It was up to them to draw the very ambiguous line between apparently immoral behavior and actual prostitution. Even an MVD commission admitted, "it is difficult to establish in individual cases where the border lies between an immoral way of life and the trade of prostitution."[49] Untrained and underpaid, agents used the power they wielded in working-class neighborhoods to solicit bribes and sexual favors. Confusion over who was and who was not a prostitute did not originate with medical-police agents. They naturally took their cues from their superiors, who, as we have seen, suspected all working women of engaging in clandestine prostitution.
Examinations
The examination itself cannot trouble them in the least, as is possible to see by the ease with which they undergo it.
Dr. Aleksandr Fedorov (1897)
In 1904, the MVD received a complaint from the military governor of Irkutsk asserting that troop movements in the Russo-Japanese War had caused an increase in prostitution and venereal disease rates in the areas along the Trans-Siberian railway. With no special facilities in which to examine these women, the Krasnoiarsk medical-police committee held examinations in the local hospital, giving rise to all sorts of problems. According to the report, the prostitutes were often drunk, creating "an extremely unpleasant impression on passers-by." They also violated "the peace of other patients with their loud conversations, abusive language, and occasional fighting." When they left, there remained behind "a great deal of rubbish, including the heap of rags with which
[49] TsGIA UGVI, f. 1298 op. 1, .d. 2332, "Doklad kommisii."
they wipe themselves prior to their medical examinations."[50] In Narva, the scenario was reversed, but no less disturbing to local authorities. There, when prostitutes visited the municipal physician for their exams, they faced "derision and even insults from the curious crowd." The prostitutes also aroused "undesirable curiosity" among high school students on their way to and from classes.[51]
Despite Fedorov's sanguine remark about "the ease with which [prostitutes] undergo" their examinations, most accounts suggest that obligatory medical inspections were extremely odious for the women who endured them. At best they were terribly inconvenient. At worst they not only left women feeling ashamed and deeply degraded, but functioned to spread rather than curb venereal diseases. Lined up and looked over like cattle in the stockyards, prostitutes might well have felt more dehumanized by medical-police physicians than they did by their customers. Prostitutes in Kalinkin Hospital told a member of the OPMD that they found examinations terribly burdensome, especially the first few times. Examinations, they complained, were conducted crudely, with no attention to "female modesty." Several found them so mortifying that they needed to get drink before they could face committee physicians.[52]
A look at the circumstances under which most women underwent their medical inspections not only confirms the prostitutes' characterization, but impugns the regulators' claims of preventing the spread of venereal disease. Whereas Moscow's Women's Municipal Free Clinic examined only 45 women in three-hour shifts, Petersburg doctors often saw between 200 and 400 women in a mere four hours' time.[53] That meant each prostitute received perhaps a minute of medical attention. It is difficult to believe that a physician could conduct the required examination of a woman's internal and external genitalia, her anus, as well
[50] The women probably wiped themselves to remove vaginal discharges that could be diagnosed as gonorrhea. TsGIA, Glavnoe upravleniia po delam mestnago khoziaistva (hereafter GUDMKh), f. 1288, op. 12, d. 1622, letter of September 28, 1904.
[51] Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Leningradskoi Oblasti (hereafter TsGALO), Vrachebnoe otdelenie S.-Petersburgskago gubernskago upravleniia, f. 255, op. 1, d. 852, letter from police chief of July 8, 1905.
[52] Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony," p. 508.
[53] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 41–42. During World War I, a United States colonel who was investigating regulation in France reported having seen a Bordeaux physician examine fifty-nine prostitutes in one hour and a Cherbourg physician examine fifteen in just thirteen minutes. George Walker, Venereal Disease in the American Expeditionary Forces (Baltimore, 1922), pp. 84–89, in Brandt, No Magic Bullet, p. 100.
as her nose, mouth, and throat in so short a time.[54] Most likely, the doctors just took a quick glance at each patient's vulva to see whether there were any sores or other readily apparent signs of sexually transmitted diseases.
The main clinic in St. Petersburg sat upstairs from medical-police committee headquarters in the Rozhdestvo district, while the remaining two clinics were located in other parts of the capital. The Rozhdestvo clinic had access to hot water, but the other two obtained it by boiling water in a "common kitchen cauldron."[55] With such an overload of patients, the medical staff routinely failed to follow standard hygienic procedures. It was also easy for them to overlook more subtle forms of contagious diseases. Committee doctors themselves admitted it was impossible to diagnose a disease accurately, let alone observe the most rudimentary sanitary precautions, such as washing their hands and rinsing vaginal speculums (even in cold water) between patients. Clinics were so crowded and inspections so brief that Petersburg prostitutes sometimes merely lifted up their dresses for their "examinations."[56]
The Petersburg clinics also provided very little in the way of comfort for the stream of patients.[57] The Women's Municipal Free Clinic in Moscow had a rug covering the floor and a cloak room for outer garments, but Petersburg's clinics lacked both; when the weather was rainy or cold, women there would be examined in their coats and galoshes. Dr. Konstantin Shtiurmer, a medical-police official who reported on the workings of nadzor to the syphilis congress in 1897, characterized Petersburg prostitutes as "completely undisciplined." In the cramped quarters of St. Petersburg's clinics, prostitutes, many of whom arrived drunk or
[54] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," pp. 470–71; Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 40.
[55] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 43.
[56] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 40; Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," p. 471; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 157; Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseikago nadzora, pp. 39–43. Russian doctors were not the only ones lax in this regard. Prior to World War I, Abraham Flexner witnessed a Paris physician "examine 25 or 30 girls without changing, washing, or wiping the rubber fingers he wore." Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, p. 217.
[57] Several St. Petersburg outpatient venereal clinics also earned "unsatisfactory" ratings, according to municipal council reports, with three suffering from poor ventilation, excessive noise, and lack of light. Kalinkin's outpatient facility was so small that patients had to stand outside the hospital on Libavskii Lane. (As many as 81,613 patients visited Kalinkin for outpatient care in 1897.) "Ob organizatsii ambulatornago priema sifiliticheskikh, venericheskikh, i kozhnykh bol'nykh," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi dumy, no. 24 (August 1899): 648-51; "O prizrenii sifiliticheskikh, venericheskikh, i kozhnykh bol'nykh v S.-Peterburge," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskago gorodskoi dumy, no. 15 (August 1898): 321.
hung over, had no choice but to mill around the corridors. Given the terrible crowding, it was no surprise that patients were known to faint and that misconduct of all kinds—from pushing, cursing, and fighting, to urinating on the floor—was common.[58]
The chaos was rivaled only by the filth. In 1912, Dr. Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, a leading member of the All-Russian League of Equal Rights for Women, having investigated the city's facilities, complained to The Evening Times (Vechernee vremia ) that all three of the capital's clinics were in appalling sanitary conditions. Each was damp, dirty, and too dark to permit careful examinations during Petersburg's long winters.[59]
It is no great wonder that registered prostitutes avoided examinations as often as they could, in spite of surveillance by medical-police agents. Fedorov tallied attendance rates for Petersburg's clinics in his 1897 Study of Medical-Police Surveillance of Prostitution in St. Petersburg (Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora za prostitutsie v S.-Peterburge ). According to his calculations, odinochki had to appear at least forty times a year and brothel prostitutes would have seen physicians in their brothels at least eighty times.[60] But the actual number of exams given fell far short of the required numbers. For example, the committee reportedly carried out 134,319 instead of the targeted 237,480 exams in 1883, the year the ranks of registered prostitutes had reached 4,700. Even in the best year for exams, 1872, Only 133,761 out of a required 160,760 had been administered.[61] Petr Oboznenko, who also worked for the committee, counted a mere 150 women in St. Petersburg who showed up regularly for their examinations, most of them prostitutes who had been on the police lists for more than five years. Approximately two-thirds of the registered prostitutes would appear twice a month, that is, for only half the required number of examinations. Of the remaining third, 100 to 200 women would appear only once or twice a year, and another 450
[58] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 40.
[59] When a commission appointed by the UGVI investigated Shishkina-Iavein's allegations, its members found that the rooms were indeed small and that proper ventilation was lacking. This commission pointed out, however, that electric lamps and windows did in fact provide adequate illumination. See G—llo, "Zloupotrebleniia," p. 3; TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "Doklad kommisii."
[60] Although a once weekly appearance was required for odinochki, Fedorov presumably subtracted twelve from fifty-two in order to account for twelve menstrual periods. For brothel prostitutes, the number was simply doubled because they were examined twice a week.
[61] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 6–7. Fedorov miscalculated this last number, thereby reducing the gap of 26,999 to a less extreme 6,999 exams.
to 775 not at all. As early as 1896, Oboznenko noted that the group of "no-shows" was growing, partly because supervisory personnel was lacking, but also because many women were registering with the medical-police committee simply to avoid being arrested for clandestine prostitution. These women would keep their yellow ticket, but they would not fulfill the obligations that accompanied registration.[62] Even if women came for their exams, their presence did not necessarily guarantee further cooperation.
In 1909, a report from the St. Petersburg medical-police committee to the UGVI echoed Oboznenko's analysis. That year the committee noted that the number of examinations administered to odinochki was dropping; 401 of the capital's registered prostitutes failed to show up for a single examination. According to this report, only a third of St. Petersburg's registered odinochki would appear more or less regularly. The rest would appear "when they feel like it." In many cases, women would show up five or six times and then disappear from committee view, shielded, the committee believed, by their landladies and pimps.[63] (Of course, the clinics were already overcrowded. Had all the women on medical-police lists attended regularly, conditions would have been even more intolerable.)
Though the clinics in St. Petersburg sound dreadful, the facilities were still far superior to those used by most doctors and policemen for the regulation of prostitution. In fact, most cities had no medical-police clinics whatsoever. In 1897, basing his report on descriptions by local officials, Shtiurmer evoked a horrific image of the medical side of regulation for his colleagues at the 1897 congress. Because they lacked funding for medical facilities and equipment, most officials, policemen, and doctors made do with what was already at hand when they followed MVD instructions. According to Shtiurmer, prostitutes in the city of Baku were examined in the police station on a tattered lounge or on a table borrowed from another office. Prostitutes awaited their turn to-
[62] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, p. 46. Upon examining medical-police reports from Russia's cities prior to the 1897 congress on syphilis, Konstantin Shtiurmer discovered that some officials recorded the number of annual examinations administered to prostitutes simply by multiplying the number of registered prostitutes by the number of examinations required. That is, if 100 prostitutes were expected to undergo one examination every week, a district physician might dutifully (albeit wrongfully) report that 5,200 exams had been conducted. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 48–50.
[63] These figures are from TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, "Otchet inspektora meditsinskoi chasti S.-Peterburgskago vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta za 1910 g."
gether with the usual "motley public" (raznosherstnaia publika ) and, according to officials in Baku, were often too "ashamed" to arrive sober.[64] From Saratov officials, Shtiurmer learned that prostitutes in brothels were examined on simple tables. They would undress, mount the table and, because no speculum was available, spread their own vaginal lips (sometimes concealing venereal sores with their fingers). In Orel, prostitutes were examined in a small, damp, poorly lit room in the local police station. In Nikolaevsk and Tula, policemen brought prostitutes into prison cells for their examinations. In Astrakhan, women were examined on a wooden chair by doctors who lacked medical instruments.[65] Physicians in the Baltic city of Revel' (now Tallinn) also had no special medical equipment for internal examinations. They examined prostitutes in a small, unheated room. Warsaw's medical-police committee until just prior to the congress had conducted examinations of prostitutes in a dark basement in the humiliating presence of several policemen. Shtiurmer referred to the conditions in Zamost' as "revolting." From the district doctor's report, he discovered that examinations took place in a ground-floor room whose window faced the street. When prostitutes would come for their weekly examinations, a crowd of spectators would gather on the street to peek through the open window and jeer.[66]
Thirteen years later, an official MVD publication entitled Medical-Police Surveillance of Urban Prostitution (Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor za gorodskoi prostitutsiei ) showed that many doctors were still conducting examinations in dark, makeshift, and underequipped locations like cellars, city jails, flophouses, and even in morgues. A medical inspector's report from Astrakhan set the tone with its description of a "decrepit" building with a leaky ceiling and tattered, vermin-infested wallpaper. During the winter, temperatures in the (unheated) examination room would fall so low that the doctor would leave on his coat while inspecting local prostitutes.[67] Such surroundings no doubt added to the discomfort and humiliation of local prostitutes, as well as to the tremendous resistance they displayed toward medical-police obligations.
[64] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 46.
[65] Ibid., pp. 44–46. According to an 1891 Medical Department report, the Astrakhan city council withheld funding from local regulation. Otchet Meditsinskago departamenta, p. 178.
[66] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 42, 44–46.
[67] Di-Sen'i and Fon-Vitte, Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor, p. 35.
In 1912, Dr. Shishkina-Iavein charged that a housekeeper at the Rozhdestvo clinic had been accepting bribes from prostitutes for help in covering signs of disease.[68] Stories abounded of prostitutes who tried to fool doctors by covering venereal lesions with their fingers or spreading a cauterizing substance like silver nitrate on them. Others might simply squeeze the pus from festering sores prior to examinations. Oboznenko claimed that all experienced prostitutes knew how to mask the symptoms of gonorrhea when the infection was not too far advanced. One medical journal admitted that prostitutes often inserted a tampon-like wad of cotton in their vaginas before examinations in order to absorb telltale discharge. Urination just prior to examination was also believed to hide signs of gonorrhea.[69] In her book on prostitutes in nineteenth-century Paris, Jill Harsin mentions that women would cover lesions with fake beauty marks and patch their genitals with various powders and pastes. To mask ulcers in their mouths, prostitutes would eat chocolate before they were seen by committee doctors.[70] Because the initial symptoms of venereal disease could be so mild, many prostitutes would simply avoid committee doctors until their illness reached a more uncomfortable stage—as indicated by festering sores and intense pain.
Such subterfuge on the part of a prostitute is understandable. From her point of view, what good would come of these examinations? If the doctors found no sign of venereal disease, she would be sent back to the streets to resume her trade. If not, she had to endure several weeks or months of incarceration in a locked hospital ward. This meant not only the deprivation of freedom, but loss of her wages, regular clients, and place to live. Viewed in this light, reports of how assiduously prostitutes tried to avoid registration and examinations become more comprehensible, as does their rebellious behavior in clinics and hospitals.
[68] When a commission organized by the UGVI investigated this allegation, its members found that an ex-prostitute at the Narva clinic had been prosecuted for such a practice. But the Rozhdestvo clinic was an unlikely place for such an abuse because only one physical space was available: a tiny, dark dressing room in constant use. A woman did sit in attendance, but she was not the housekeeper, only the wife of the watchman, and too uneducated to assist prostitutes in disguising their symptoms. G- —llo, "Zloupotrebleniia," p. 3; TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "Doklad kommisii."
[69] A. D. Suzdal'skii, "K voprosu ob uporiadochenii prostitutsii v Smolenske," Meditsinskaia beseda, no. 22 (November 1900): 649; Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 50–51; Russkii zhurnal kozhnykh i venericheskikh boleznei, no. 11 (November 1903): 655.
[70] Harsin, Policing Prostitution, p. 271.
Hospitalization
It's a Monday come about.
A discharge is to come my way.
Doctor Krasov won't let me out.
Well, the devil can make him pay.
Sung by the prostitutes in Iama
In the spring of 1912, Petersburg's medical-police committee beseeched the municipal duma to fund carriages for transferring prostitutes from the city's clinics to Kalinkin Hospital. Apparently, medical-police agents marched their reluctant wards on foot from the city's clinics, giving rise to all kinds of unpleasant displays. Some prostitutes would break ranks, now having "the full opportunity to spread venereal disease." Others would make the best of a bad situation by insulting the agents and accosting passers-by. Prostitutes might also duck into taverns en route to Kalinkin, where they would "hastily drink beer and wine, become drunk, and then create disgraceful scenes." The sight of prostitutes and agents walking through the capital's streets, said one observer, presented an "ugly spectacle, insulting to public morality." Not surprisingly, the daily parade inspired mockery and harassment from onlookers. "[I]t is only with the greatest difficulty," lamented the committee, "that [the prostitutes] are delivered to the hospital."[71]
The regulatory system rested on the belief that the removal of contagious prostitutes from circulation would reduce the spread of venereal disease: logic demanded that these women be locked up. But mandatory hospitalization posed a whole new set of problems, for prostitutes deeply resented their internment in locked hospital wards. By and large, their cases of syphilis and gonorrhea could have been treated at outpatient facilities. Instead, prostitutes had no choice but to face extended stays in institutions that were uncomfortable and painful under the best of circumstances, fatal under the worst. Meanwhile, whatever sort of domestic stability they may have achieved in terms of their neighborhoods and communities, their friendships and romantic relationships, and their households and residences, underwent an abrupt break.
Understaffing and overcrowding were problems for Russian hospi-
[71] "Po otnosheniiu S.-Petersburgskago gradonachal'nika ob ezhednevnom otpuske v rasporiazhenie vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskago gorodskoi dumy, no. 8 (February 1913): 1744–47. Only the weakest prostitutes were transported to Kalinkin in a cab; the others walked. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 35.
tals in general; it is not surprising that special venereal wards for prostitutes were similarly affected.[72] Although Kalinkin Hospital was indisputably the best facility of its kind in Russia, venereal patients were still known to sleep two to a bed, and it was not uncommon to place patients in corridors and dressing rooms.[73] At the end of the nineteenth century, Kalinkin's chief doctor reported to the Petersburg duma that second-floor patients had less than four cubic meters of air per person and that first- and third-floor patients had less than two. In this stifling environment, he pointed out, syphilitic patients undergoing treatments with the disease's primary cure, mercury, could become especially uncomfortable. Many syphilitic patients were receiving mercurial unctions; the noxious fumes given off by the ointment on their bodies were believed to compromise the health of other patients.[74] No doubt the malodorous smoke emitted by nearby factories added to the unsavory environment. In 1882, the municipal administration declared the century-old Kalinkin decrepit and not in conformance with standards of hygiene. That same decade, a Petersburg physician made reference to the likelihood that diseases were spreading within the hospital by unsanitary medical instruments and utensils, and the proximity of contagious patients.[75]
As of January 1, 1907, there were 8,143 available hospital beds in all of St. Petersburg, with 10,460 patients occupying them. On that date in Kalinkin Hospital, 507 beds held 589 patients. Patients throughout the northern capital slept in corridors, cafeterias, and operating rooms on couches, benches, and even floors.[76] When the prostitutes' ward in Kalinkin was full, prostitutes might be sent to other women's sections, in spite of their reputation for singing dirty songs, playing bawdy games, and corrupting "respectable" female patients. According to one outraged source, prostitutes could even be found interned among syphilitic children.[77]
At Kalinkin, a frugal 15 kopecks a day went toward feeding each in-
[72] Results of a survey organized by Dmitrii Zhbankov on the state of hospital care were published in 1903. His study showed that while the major cities had hospitals, these were insufficient to meet the population's needs. A. A. Chertov, Gorodskaia meditsina v evropeiskoi Rossii (Moscow, 1903).
[73] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 52, 55.
[74] "O prizrenii sifiliticheskikh, venericheskikh, i kozhnykh bol'nykh," pp. 324–25.
[75] Kapustin, Kalinkinskaia gorodskaia bol'nitsa, pp. 15, 22, 33, 93–94.
[76] TsGIA, GUDMKh, f. 1288, op. 13, d. 4., "Ob organizatsii bol'nichnago dela v S.-Peterburge 1907–1913 gg."
[77] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, p. 54; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 92; Novoe vremia (October 27, 1899), cited in Vrach, no. 44. (1899): 1315.
mate. In 1881, a typical breakfast at Kalinkin consisted of bread, tea, and sugar. For dinner, patients received some kind of soup with roast meat and cutlets or milk, and for their evening meal, porridge made from buckwheat, barley, or wheat. On meatless Fridays, patients could anticipate pea soup and buckwheat porridge for their midday meal, followed by wheat porridge for supper. Because many prostitutes had become accustomed to rich food and plenty of wine and vodka, the spartan, monotonous diet in the hospital contributed to their restlessness.[78] In 1899, a Professor Smirnov suggested to the St. Petersburg duma that prostitutes housed in Kalinkin Hospital ought to receive even poorer quality food than its other inmates.[79] Smirnov, like many others involved in the medical-police regime, evidently saw venereal disease and incarceration as a prostitute's just deserts.
The hospital in Revel' provided a mere ten beds for prostitutes in "one pitiful room, badly illuminated by daylight, extremely filthy, and steeped in soot from lamps and all sorts of fumes."[80] In 1901, a journal of venereal medicine described Moscow's Miasnitskaia Hospital as dirty, unventilated, and overcrowded. According to this account, Miasnitskaia housed more than 400 patients in its facilities for 300.[81] The same year, a report on Martynov Hospital in Nizhnii Novgorod characterized it as damp, dirty, and uncomfortable. During the busy summer season, prostitutes there were sometimes housed two to a bed, forcing the administration to turn away ailing prostitutes for lack of space. In these cases, the local committee would ask brothelkeepers to sign a paper (dubiously) guaranteeing a diseased prostitute's sexual abstinence.[82] A clinic doctor noted that a new record player and a supply of books had been appreciated, but the fact that many women had traveled to this city only to take advantage of the annual fair created major problems, for these women resented their confinement more than ever. "The desire to be discharged sooner manifested itself in several [patients] so vehemently and was accompanied by such disgraceful escapades," reported a local physician, "that sometimes it was even necessary to resort to the help of the police."[83] Shtiurmer mentioned one city that had diagnosed 151
[78] Kapustin, Kalinkinskaia gorodskaia bol'nitsa, pp. 5, 41.
[79] Novoe vremia (October 27, 1899), cited in Vrach, no. 44 (1899): 1315.
[80] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 221.
[81] "O Miasnitskoi bol'nitse dlia kozhnykh i venericheskikh bol'nykh," Russkii zhurnal kozhnykh i venericheskikh boleznei, no. 7 (July 1901): 215.
[82] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 57.
[83] Ezhenedel'nik zhurnala "prakticheskoi meditsinoi," no. 12 (1901): 223; Chagin, "Otchet po Nizhegorodskoi iarmarochnoi zhenskoi bol'nitse," p. 173.
prostitutes as having venereal disease within a five-year period; only three of these women admitted themselves to the local hospital.[84]
As for the free care guaranteed by medical-police committee rules, this too did not necessarily hold. In Kharkov, prostitutes had to contribute a full 25 rubles insurance annually to guarantee themselves an available hospital bed. Prostitutes paid for care in many other cities as well. A 1903 MVD directive stipulated that hospitalization of venereally diseased prostitutes was an absolute requirement, but some cities permitted prostitutes to be treated at home. Although prostitutes no doubt bribed doctors for this privilege, shortage of space in hospitals remained the determining factor.[85] When participants at the 1897 congress on syphilis discussed a resolution forbidding hospitals from refusing to admit syphilitics in the disease's infectious stage, they wound up voting it down as unrealistic. What would happen, one physician asked, if a hospital had no available space?[86]
Shtiurmer blamed the chronic shortage of beds for the practice of discharging diseased prostitutes prematurely. Medical authorities believed that syphilis could require months if not years of treatment, yet prostitutes in Russia averaged only five and a half weeks in the hospital. Moreover, the hospital staff tended to release prostitutes long before they were considered fully cured. Shtiurmer complained that medical-police physicians daily found signs of venereal disease on prostitutes who had just been discharged from Kalinkin. These women would be dispatched right back to the hospital.[87]
If hospitalization, marked as it was by confinement and tedium, resembled imprisonment, medical treatment represented nothing less than punishment and torture. Women who suffered from gonorrhea had to endure painful cauterization treatments that, as we now know, tackled the symptoms, not the disease. As for syphilis, prior to 1910 the most common remedy consisted of a prolonged series of mercurial injections.[88] Mercury essentially poisoned the entire organism. It could kill off syphilis's spirochetes and thereby suppress clinical manifestations
[84] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 47–51, 59.
[85] Ibid., pp. 36–37, 57–58.
[86] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," pp. 70–72.
[87] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 52–53, 55.
[88] As late as 1912, a Tomsk physician reported that he was using mercurial injections to treat syphilitic patients. V. M. Timofeev, "Otchet po svidetel'stvovaniiu prostitutok v g. Tomske za 1912 g.," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika g. Tomska, nos. 8–10 (August–October 1913): 485.
of the disease, but it did not necessarily effect a cure.[89] A brothel musician recalled how after these injections "lumps bigger than walnuts" would appear on a woman's legs, so that "for a long time the poor thing could neither walk, lie down, nor sit."[90] In Nizhnii Novgorod, syphilitic prostitutes were injected in the buttocks with a compound of mercury and salicylic acid (hydrargyrum salicylicum ) every four days. Patients there, a resident physician admitted, "very frequently" complained of pain and suffering from inflammation at the injection site.[91]
We may also question the quality of Russia's various medications and their distribution throughout the huge empire. On the advice of Veniamin Tarnovskii, Petr Gratsianov of Minsk's sanitary commission relied on the Fridlander Pharmacy in distant St. Petersburg for his solution of salicylic acid and mercury.[92] If Minsk's pharmacies could not be trusted for the careful filling of such a delicate prescription, could the availability of reliable medical preparations have been better in the rest of Russia?
Severe salivation, often measured by the pint, was one of the mercury treatment's least unpleasant side effects. Others included severe gastro-enteritis, weakness, anemia, depression, liver and kidney disease, and loss of teeth. When the patient's gastrointestinal tract "could stand no more," injections could be replaced by ointments made from mercury in a base of suet and lard. These were gentler to the human organism, but they promoted skin diseases and caused great embarrassment because of their smelly, ghastly blue-gray sheen.[93] The "cure" could also prove worse than the disease, with some patients dying of mercury poisoning. It is no wonder that many syphilitics were reluctant to place themselves in the hands of Russia's doctors.
Although many registered prostitutes accepted their fate passively, some responded with outright rebellion and others could be stirred to resist under certain conditions, such as not being released on the day they expected.[94] In 1897, Anna Kaliagina, a 22-year-old prostitute, fractured her leg and injured her back when she attempted to escape
[89] John T. Crissey and Lawrence C. Parish, The Dermatology and Syphilology of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Praeger, 1981), p. 366.
[90] A. I. Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata: Moi vospominaniia iz zhizni zhenshchinprostitutok (Ufa, 1908), p. 8.
[91] Chagin, "Otchet po Nizhegorodskoi iarmarochnoi zhenskoi bol'nitse," p. 172.
[92] Gratsianov, "Desiat' let sanitarnago nadzora za prostitutsiei v g. Minske," Russkii meditsinskii vestnik, no. 15 (August 1, 1903): 19.
[93] Crissey and Parish, The Dermatology and Syphilology of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 360–62.
[94] Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 89.
through the second-story window of a hospital in Kazan. Kaliagina explained that she had no desire to remain locked in a hospital when she felt perfectly healthy. Two years later, at the same hospital, twenty prostitutes shut themselves in and smashed windows and dishes. Eight of these women were arrested.[95] A similar incident occurred in June 1898 when prostitutes at the Mariupol' city hospital attacked the medical staff, broke windows, and tossed out "everything they could get their hands on." According to the local newspaper, the ruckus began when a prostitute who was scheduled to undergo medical treatment began shouting. Hearing her cries, her "cronies" (tovarki ) came running to her aid, beating the physician and demanding to know whether he would be "torturing us for a long time." When an assistant came to help him, the women attacked him as well. Only when the local police arrived was order restored.[96]
In 1904, the police chief from the city of Narva informed the St. Petersburg provincial governor that a prostitute named Anna Miule had been thrown out of the district hospital for "her scandals and swearing" before she had been cured of her venereal disease. A concerned policeman returned her to the hospital, but the doctor refused to admit her in light of her bad behavior. He accused Miule of using foul language, provoking scenes, and threatening to break all the windows. His answer was for her to receive medical attention where prostitutes were formerly treated—in the local jail. The police chief declined and, instead, had her sent to the hospital in the nearby town of Iamburg. It, however, was full. Asked Narva's police chief, what was to be done?[97]
Prostitutes also fought among themselves. Troubled by frequent disturbances among resident prostitutes, the district hospital administration in Voronezh in 1896 affirmed the necessity of separating them from the rest of the venereal patients. "Brawls among the so-called 'spirited whores' [veselyia devitsy ]" were "commonplace events" in the hospital. The report characterized the prostitutes as having "lost their shame, conscience. proper pity, and love of humanity." They created "so much noise and hubbub with their quarrels, fights, and vile pranks, that they
[95] The 1897 incident was described in Vrach, no. 28 (1897): 794; Kamsko-volzhskii krai, no. 458 (July 1, 1897): 3. The second incident was described in Vrach, no. 43 (1899): 1282.
[96] Vrach, no. 28 (1898): 841; Priazovskii krai, no. 150 (June 1898): 3. In 1900, a Siberian daily reported that ten prostitutes in a Tomsk hospital had gotten drunk on vodka and created a row that necessitated police intervention. Sibirskii vestnik (November 9, 1900), cited in Vrach, no. 48 (1900): 1477.
[97] The provincial governor supported the Narva physician's refusal to readmit her. TsGALO, Vrachebnoe otdelenie S.-Peterburgskago gubernskago pravleniia, f. 255, op. I, d. 852, letter from Narva police chief of July 12, 1904; letter from governor of July 15, 1904.
upset the peace and quiet not only of the first and second women's wards, but even the wards on the lower floor."[98]
We can only guess at the source of such fights. On one hand, they may have originated in personal slights and insults, sexual jealousies, and other private conflicts. According to Bentovin, brothel prostitutes and odinochki were natural rivals in this setting. Furthermore, prostitutes were acutely conscious of their economic standing and this too could lead to problems. Differences of affluence and status, obvious even among the hospital's standard issue gray gowns, evidently took their toll. The wealthier prostitutes interned in Kalinkin managed to dress up their drab uniforms with fine lingerie, lace, bows, and boots with French heels; in their coarse hospital underwear and hand-sewn skirts, the poorer prostitutes provided a sharp contrast.[99]
On the other hand, observers acknowledged that boredom, exacerbated by crowding and physical discomfort, also played a significant role in provoking hospital brawls.[100] Participants at the 1897 congress on syphilis voted that a prostitute's incarceration should not be spent "in idleness or yearning about their interrupted profession." One of their proffered solutions involved seeing to inmates' "moral ascendancy through expedient labor according to each one's taste." This entailed "readings, visits to church, and various distractions."[101]
Though lack of funding and volunteers made it difficult to see such intentions through, several hospitals did implement programs designed to edify and divert their resident prostitutes. An inmate in Kalinkin asked the medical assistant (fel'dsheritsa ), Tat'iana Baar, a "big favor"—"whether you have some kind of work for Mania and me, or some kind of book to look at." With the support of the countess Elizaveta Musin-Pushkina and Tarnovskii's protegée, Dr. Zinaida El'tsina, Baar launched a program whereby inmates could earn money by sewing hospital gowns. In 1897, Kalinkin's resident charitable society provided more than 150 books and journals to the hospital and sent a priest to the prostitutes' ward to read aloud from moral and religious selections. According to the society's annual report, the women listened "with thrilled interest."[102] In Nizhnii Novgorod, occasional shadow plays with a
[98] Meditsinskaia beseda, no. 1 (January 1898): 29–30.
[99] Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," pp. 81–82.
[100] British prostitutes interned under the Contagious Diseases Acts responded to boredom in the same way. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 224.
[101] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. xx.
[102] Boris Bentovin, "Spasenie 'padshikh' i khuliganstvo (iz ocherkov sovremennoi prostitutsii)," Obrazovanie, nos. 11–12 (1905): 341–42; Otchet o deiatel'nosti blagotvoritel'nago obshchestva pri S.-Peterburgskoi Kalinkinskoi bol'nitse (St. Petersburg: October 13, 1897–October 23, 1898), p. 4; (October 23, 1898–October 23, 1899), p. 5.
"magic lantern," readings, and the provision of a record player helped calm and distract patients.[103] Thanks to Petr Gratsianov, women in Minsk's municipal hospital were provided with materials to sew and embroider, and they were read to and visited by members of a local ladies' circle. Yet an Odessa professor attributed the unusual calm in Minsk to Gratsianov's success in supplying the inmates with distractions and making sure they were treated humanely.[104]
The efforts of reformers, however, were not always well received. Prince Sergei Volkonskii reported to his international audience at the 1899 London Congress on the White Slave Traffic that attempts to "rescue" fallen women at Kalinkin Hospital had been "paralysed by the influence of the majority of the sick prostitutes who often hinder those who wish to return to a proper mode of life by making fun of them."[105] The chief doctor at Odessa's municipal hospital began a program to teach interned prostitutes to read and write, but apparently no one was interested. That left them with the sole distraction of biblical readings by a local priest.[106] Perhaps prostitutes resented the condescending attitudes of reformers and the moral agenda that underlay hospital programs. Activities like sewing and laundering hospital gowns must have reminded many of the thankless jobs they had abandoned when they turned to prostitution. Prince Volkonskii endorsed work programs because, "besides putting an end to the idleness that hitherto reigned supreme in the hospital, [they] can give the convalescents the opportunity of earning some small amount of money with which to begin a life of honest labor."[107] But sewing and laundering served a prosaic function as well—that of defraying the costs of interning so many women for such long periods of time.
Until Dr. Eduard Shperk assumed command of Kalinkin Hospital in 1871, the staff routinely meted out harsh punishments to uncooperative prostitutes. Both medical and nonmedical personnel had the authority to discipline prostitutes by withholding their food, taking away their
[103] Chagin, "Otchet po Nizhegorodskoi iarmarochnoi zhenskoi bol'nitse," p. 173.
[104] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," p. 19; "Zamechaniia i soobrazheniia ordinarnago professora gigieny V. Khlopina otnositel'no zhelatel'noi reorganizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v g. Odesse," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 17 (October 1904): 596.
[105] Congress on the White Slave Traffic, p. 110.
[106] Odesskie novosti (December 3, 1897), cited in Vrach, no. 50 (1897): 1465.
[107] Congress on the White Slave Traffic, p. 110.
visiting privileges, confining them in straitjackets, and locking them in dark closets. "The patients at Kalinkin Hospital," wrote one chronicler, "stood as though outside the law, dependent on the arbitrary rule and the extent of the severity of this or that person in authority." Not surprisingly, disciplinary procedures sometimes sparked reprisals. The same author confessed that the hospital's history was fraught with "many cases of violations of order, disorderly conduct, escapes, and the like." When one woman would be dispatched to the punishment cell, her friends would protest vehemently, continuing until the police were called in. Shperk's policy of treating the prostitute-patients with respect is said to have succeeded in establishing amicable relations between them and Kalinkin's staff.[108]
Innovations in the hospitals derived as much from humanitarian impulses as they did from the desire to achieve more control over the unruly inmates. Thus they can be seen in the broad context of the substitution of discipline for punishment throughout nineteenth-century Europe. Kinder treatment for those incarcerated in prisons, psychiatric institutions, and hospitals furthered the social agendas of reformers who defined certain groups as deviant. In regard to prostitution in Victorian England, Judith Walkowitz has characterized this phenomenon as the "replacement of visible forms of restraint with the bonds of obligation and personal attachment to figures of authority."[109] For Gratsianov, Shperk, and other physicians, a calm prostitute was in effect a pliable and cooperative prostitute; her docility reinforced her keepers' careers and social positions. Gratsianov was so confident of the good behavior of Minsk's syphilitic prostitutes that he could boast of living with his family on hospital grounds. But another source suggests that Gratsianov had found alternative ways of eliciting cooperation, for Minsk sanitary commission rules in fact punished disobedience, insults, or fraud.[110]
The gap between the intentions of hospital reformers and the experiences of prostitutes remained vast. Mandatory hospitalization, originally designed to protect society from diseased women, took on addi-
[108] Kapustin, Kalinkinskaia gorodskaia bol'nitsa, pp. 42–47. Shperk also organized free outpatient care for syphilitics. Frolova, "Istoriia stareishei v Rossii," p. 11.
[109] Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 217. Michel Foucault provided the theoretical base for this kind of analysis in Discipline and Punish . For its application to the evolution of insane asylums, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin, 1987).
[110] Nikolai Di-Sen'i, "O sovremennoi postanovke vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora za gorodskoi prostitutsiei i neobkhodimykh v etoi oblasti reformakh," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 468.
tional functions as time passed. Designed for isolation and treatment, it could serve the purposes of those who wished to punish the prostitute-inmates, as well as those who hoped to rehabilitate them. But happy endings were unlikely amid the screams of women being cauterized, the deadly boredom of those locked in filthy hospital wards, and the physical toll of even the best treatment. Most importantly, while hospitalization was the fate of only some prostitutes, it functioned as a threat to all, reinforcing the separation of prostitutes from other members of the population.
Heaven, Hell and Health
"That's the way it should be, they say. Such and such a percentage has to go every year, they say. . . . Where? To the devil, probably, so as to keep the rest fresh and uninterfered with."
Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment
In Russia and the rest of Europe, physicians and reformers engaged in heated debates regarding the eventual fates of women who worked as prostitutes. Opinion was divided over whether prostitutes simply rejoined the working class and urban poor, or whether they died young, casualties of disease and drunkenness. Was prostitution simply a stage that many young, female members of the lower classes passed through, as Parent-Duchâtelet asserted about Parisian women, or was it a final, fatal step for an unfortunate minority?[111]
The existence of regulation complicated the answer to this question, militating against a woman's simple change of trade. Regulation's opponents characterized the yellow ticket as an insurmountable obstacle for prostitutes who wanted to quit the profession. In his polemic against regulation, On the Binding of Woman to Prostitution (O prikreplenii zhenshchiny k prostitutsii) , the law professor Arkadii Elistratov blamed regulation for making it nearly impossible for a prostitute to change her ways.
[111] Writing of French prostitutes, Parent-Duchâtelet claimed that prostitution was but one phase in the life of many working-class women. According to his influential view, women workers simply drifted into prostitution and then passed out of it, eventually becoming ordinary members of the working class. See Harsin, Policing Prostitution, p. 103; Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 4. Parent-Duchâtelet's contention is called a "myth" in Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: A Study of Victorian Prostitutes in York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 159.
Like a "stone" around a drowning woman's neck, regulation "paralyzes her last efforts" to rescue herself, "irrevocably dragging her to the bottom."[112] Elistratov and other critics stressed the permanence of the yellow ticket: once a woman registered, her status as a public woman was difficult to rescind.
A look at committee rules supports this interpretation; it was no simple matter to extricate oneself from the committee's watchful eye. According to ministry regulations issued in 1903, a woman might be stricken from police lists when it was ascertained that she had "quit the trade of vice." But many cities put hurdles in a woman's way by requiring more specific reasons for canceling registration, such as a "written declaration" in Astrakhan, proof of pregnancy or having reached one's fortieth birthday in Iaransk, and a marriage certificate in Ponevezh.[113] The St. Petersburg medical-police committee specified sickness, old age, death, confirmed possession of an "honest" job, relocation outside the committee's jurisdiction, or entry into the House of Mercy or an ROZZh rehabilitation program. Registration could also be revoked at the request of a verifiably reliable person or if a woman's parents, relatives, or guardians demanded that she be removed from the inscription lists.[114] The rules of 1903 prohibited confiscation of an odinochka's passport, yet the police might still write on it the telling words, "lives by her own means" (zhivet svoimi sredstvami ). As prostitutes interned in Kalinkin Hospital complained to Aleksandra Dement'eva of the OPMD, everyone knew quite well that this indicated a woman supported herself through prostitution.[115] Former prostitutes, as well as their concierges and doormen, could expect surprise visits from medical-police agents intent on verifying a woman's new status. Even after a woman had been taken off medical-police records, she was obligated to appear after a certain amount of time for a follow-up medical examination. Should the examining physician discover signs of what he judged to be promiscuous sexual activity, the woman would be registered once again. All of these practices slowed a woman's ability to put the trade of prostitution behind her.
Observers also cited soaring rates of venereal disease and alcoholism to reinforce arguments about prostitution's deadly cost. Venereal dis-
[112] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 1
[113] These examples are from Di-Sen'i, "O sovremennoi postanovke," p. 466.
[114] Di-Sen'i and Fon-Vitte, Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor, p. 26; Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 49–55.
[115] Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony," p. 509.
ease represented more than an occupational hazard for prostitutes; contraction was almost inevitable. To be sure, turn-of-the-century physicians often mistook simple vaginal ailments for gonorrhea and syphilis, and they rarely adhered to any standard norms in formulating statistics. But even if they diagnosed only three-fourths of the women in their studies correctly, they were still discovering epidemic rates of syphilis and gonorrhea. In 1889, A. Dubrovskii, the editor of an empirewide census of Russian prostitution, estimated that 58 percent of all registered prostitutes suffered from a venereal disease. In Oboznenko's sample, around half the prostitutes contracted syphilis or gonorrhea during the very first year after registration. One well-known venereal specialist, Aleksandr Vvedenskii, estimated that 93 percent of all prostitutes would contract syphilis during the first three years of their career.[116]
The links between syphilis and long-term chronic illnesses were confirmed by the work of scientists like Alfred Fournier and Jonathan Hutchinson at the end of the nineteenth century. The risks of future complications like paralysis, insanity, blindness, and other serious ailments could, however, take on a more definite quality in contemporary works. Syphilis assumed a particularly nightmarish quality in popular fiction. To the 17-year-old youth who contracted syphilis from a prostitute in Leonid Andreev's "In the Fog" ("V tumane"), his disease was "more horrible than deadly, murderous wars, more devastating than the plague and cholera." In despair, he stabbed a prostitute to death and then turned the knife on himself.[117] In Iama, Kuprin publicized what he took to be syphilis's terrible dangers through the prostitute Zhenia. When a military cadet told her he knew about syphilis—"That's when your nose falls off"—she passionately retorted,
No, Kolia, not only your nose! Everything gets sick: a person's bones, veins, brain. . . . Doctors say otherwise—that it's a trifle, that it's possible to be cured. That's baloney! You can never be cured! A person rots for ten, twenty, thirty years. At any moment, he can be crushed by paralysis and the right half of his face, his right arm, his right leg will die, and he won't be a person anymore, but some kind of half-person—half-man, half-corpse. The majority lose their minds. And everyone understands, every person with this disease understands, that if he eats, drinks, kisses, even breathes, he
[116] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. xxvi; Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 51, 56; Shtiurmer cites Vvedenskii in "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 69. Of the 496 women who registered in St. Petersburg in 1890, 74 were diagnosed as having contracted syphilis by the year's end. Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 53.
[117] Leonid Andreev, "V tumane," Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, bk. 14 (St. Petersburg, 1913), pp. 130–57.
can't be sure he's not going to infect someone around him, someone from his closest family—his sister, his wife, his son. . . . The children born to syphilitics are all monsters, prematurely born, sick with goiters, consumption, idiots.[118]
Zhenia (and, by extension, Kuprin) misrepresented syphilis as an airborne contagion that irrevocably canned its victims and everyone they touched.
Fiction writers were not the only ones guilty of hyperbole in this area. Physicians also lacked clear notions about the epidemiology of venereal diseases, often confusing moral issues with medical ones.[119] As late as 1897, a Kalinkin Hospital commission inaccurately described non-syphilitic venereal infections (including gonorrhea) as able to "pass after several weeks without leaving a trace." Syphilis, however, was considered infectious enough to be passed along on kitchen utensils.[120] A 1904 book entitled The Great Evil (Velikoe zlo) by a Moscow University professor, Mikhail Chlenov, provides us with an excellent example of how prevention often blurred the lines between science and morality. Chlenov advised men with gonorrhea to sleep on cold, hard beds, to refrain from eating rich foods and, to avoid not only sexual relations, but the sexual excitement induced by pornographic books and pictures, and female company. Horses posed a threat to health; trains did not. Underwear and clothing could also serve as transmitters for gonococci. Syphilis represented an even greater danger, as it lived in clothing, cigarettes, pipes, toys, musical instruments, utensils—essentially, most items that were passed from hand to hand or mouth to mouth. Chlenov even knew of one clerk with a syphilitic sore on her tongue. Rather than tracing her lesion to sexual contact, physicians attributed it to her habit of licking her finger when she counted money. Condoms served no purpose in prevention as they could easily break and, by Chlenov's reckoning, harmed the nervous system.[121]
Prostitution was portrayed as endangering women's health in other ways as well. One study by a female physician for the Moscow Venerological and Dermatological Society showed that irregular periods and
[118] Kuprin, Iama, p. 249.
[119] In "Morality and the Wooden Spoon," Laura Engelstein argues that Russian physicians were reluctant to attribute the spread of venereal disease among the common people to sexual means.
[120] "O prizrenii sifiliticheskikh, venericheskikh, i kozhnykh bol'nykh," pp. 296–97. Aleksandrovsk medical-police rules prohibited prostitutes with sores on their lips from sharing cups, utensils, cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Di-Sen'i, "O sovremennoi postanovke," p. 468.
[121] Chlenov, Velikoe zlo (St. Petersburg, 1904), pp. 7, 29, 31–32, 62–64, 111.
spontaneous abortions occurred with particular frequency among prostitutes.[122] Prostitutes also suffered from sexually transmitted diseases other than syphilis and gonorrhea, as well as vaginal and pelvic infections, and traumas to the sexual organs.[123] Most accounts of brothel life attested to an endless stream of customers, and punishments enforced by madams and their assistants.
Judging by the anecdotal evidence, alcoholism was also one of prostitution's more obvious bedfellows, its "inevitable companion."[124] Not only was the sale of alcohol at inflated prices used to fill the coffers of brothelkeepers, it was also a common prelude to relations between odinochki and their clients. A temperance crusader described how guests would arrive at brothels from restaurants cafes, and bars "sufficiently loaded" and then, despite the rules prohibiting its sale, find more liquor readily available. Expensive brothels sold various sorts of champagne; in the lower-priced houses, madams would sell lemonade, kvass, and "whatever" (chto takoe ), all spiked with cheap vodka. Guests wary of the brothels' high markup on liquor prices and the way madams would pass off drinks of the poorest quality might also sneak in their own supply past the bouncer stationed at the door. "Athenian nights," drinking bouts "en grand, " would be held at the fancier establishments.[125]
Many observers approached this issue in a way that reflected their inability to comprehend how women could otherwise bring themselves to engage in commercial sex. They readily believed that drinking played an important role in quelling "natural female modesty." Dement'eva, for example, told of a young prostitute she chided for drinking who snapped in response, "Yeah, would you really approach this life sober?"[126] Although observers repeatedly remarked on the heavy drinking
[122] Dr. Vera I. Arkhangel'skaia found that 16 percent of her subjects had irregular periods, only 12 percent had experienced pregnancy, and that miscarriages were three times more prevalent among prostitutes than among the rest of the female population. Unfortunately, we cannot determine whether these figures reflected self-induced abortions, the widespread use of contraceptives, or infertility. Vrach, no. 13 (1898): 394.
[123] See Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, p. 99.
[124] Dmitrii Borodin, "Alkogolizm i prostitutsiia," Trezvost' i berezhlivost', no. 2 (February 1903): 13; no. 3 (March 1903): 2. See also Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony," p. 506. Ermolai Erazm, a mid-sixteenth-century churchman, wrote, "if there be no drunkenness in our land, there will be no whoring for married women. . . ." Quoted in R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 92.
[125] Borodin, "Alkogolizm i prostitutsiia," Trezvost' i berezhlivost', no. 2 (February 1903): 11, 13; no. 3 (March 1903): 2.
[126] Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony," p. 506.
in brothels and the pervasive drunkenness among prostitutes, regrettably, few conducted serious research on the consumption of alcohol. Two minor studies, one conducted in Baku and the other in Odessa, showed respectively that 61 and 75 percent of the prostitutes surveyed in these cities admitted to using alcohol. In Odessa, a full 48 percent of the women told the researcher that they got drunk every night.[127]
Most of the literature in Russia portrayed prostitutes as meeting a sad end in the back alleys of a big city. Fedorov's numbers on prostitutes who died in 1889, 1890, and 1895 provide little statistical confirmation for this vision, however. Among 972 women who were removed from the registration lists of the St. Petersburg medical-police committee in 1889, 55 (6 percent) had died, 32 (6 percent) of 581 died in 1890, and 47 (8 percent) of 621 died in 1895.[128]
Since observers never succeeded in charting the life cycles of most women who earned money as prostitutes, descriptions primarily functioned as cautionary morality. As A. I. Matiushenskii, author of The Sex Market and Sexual Relations(Polovoi rynok i polovjia otnosheniia ) put it, "It follows that as a general rule, it is possible to assume that the prostitute always dies a prostitute." One book described how destitute prostitutes, those too old or dissipated to succeed at their trade, lived in St. Petersburg's Haymarket. According to this source, these women "almost never wash, and wear clothes until they fall to pieces from rot. Their apartments are so disgusting that it is impossible to imagine anything more vile." Bentovin also believed that the decline was inevitable. He discerned three stages in a prostitute's career. She would begin in her teens, too inexperienced to get rich at her trade. However, at the age of 20 a smart and lucky prostitute might have enough experience to earn a lot of money. By the age of 30, years of alcohol abuse and disease would have taken their toll, and prostitutes would be left to collect 25 or 30 kopecks for quick trysts. Fedorov commented that most prostitutes ended their days tragically—in hospitals and cheap flophouses.[129]
[127] Though these numbers are not reliable, they probably suffer from underreporting rather than overrepresentation, given some women's reluctance to admit their drunkenness. Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," p. 857; "Prostitutsiia v Odesse," Odesskie noposti, no. 5216 (February 18, 1901): 3.
[128] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 46; Fedorov, "Deiatel'nost' S.-Peterburgskago vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta," p. 185.
[129] A. I. Matiushenskii, Polovoi rynok i polovjia otnosheniia (St. Petersburg, 1908), p. 97; Prostitutsiia v Rossii, p. 160; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," pp. 171–72; Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 22.
With similar goals in mind, observers maintained that high rates of suicide and attempted suicide were common to the trade.[130] Dr. M. A. Kalmykov claimed that nearly half the suicides in his city, Rostov-on-the-Don, were committed by prostitutes. To him, suicide represented a form of moral justice. "This is evidence," he wrote, "that even such a lowly trade does not extinguish the spark of God in the prostitutes and that the consciousness of the horror of their fall and the infamy of their position brings them to the decision to finish off their ruined lives."[131] Another doctor noted to the 1897 congress on syphilis that scarcely a night at the Kazan city hospital passed without an incident involving the self-poisoning of a brothel prostitute. These incidents were so frequent, he said, that the hospital installed a stomach pump in the reception room. Dr. Zinaida El'tsina confirmed that an "entire mass" of prostitutes poisoned themselves in Nizhnii Novgorod each summer. This showed "how burdensome their profession is for prostitutes."[132] An 1885 newspaper article printed the final words of a Kharkov prostitute who poisoned herself with phosphorous and then refused treatment. According to the article, she kept repeating, "Release me from this hell. I have no more strength to suffer."[133]
At the 1910 Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women, one doctor asserted that 13 percent of prostitutes in St. Petersburg ended their lives in suicide. This rate was several times higher than that of the capital's population in general. He attributed this phenomenon both to the abnormal conditions of prostitution and the overall circumstances of urban life. Half these prostitutes attempted suicide between the ages of 16 and 20, usually with poison. In the majority of cases, prostitutes killed themselves while drunk. Interestingly, the incidence of double or triple suicide was higher for prostitutes than for the rest of the population, suggesting perhaps a camaraderie of sorrow and misery.[134]
[130] Rosen's sources suggested high rates of depression and suicide for American prostitutes as well. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, pp. 99–100.
[131] M. A. Kalmykov, "K voprosu o reglamentatsii prostitutsii i abolitsionizme,' O reglamentatsii prostitutsii i abolitsionizme, p. 73.
[132] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. 132.
[133] Russkie vedomosti (June 19, 1885), quoted in Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," p. 407.
[134] Nikolai I. Grigor'ev, "Samoubiistva prostitutok v gorode S.-Peterburge (1906–1909 gg.)," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 558. Accordingly, even Kuprin's Zhenia, the most outspoken prostitute in Iama, ended her own life when she learned she had contracted syphilis. So did the author of the purported diary, Belaia rabynia, p. 16.
To be sure, many prostitutes felt burdened by their trade. Disease and drunkenness would most certainly have complicated attempts of former prostitutes to marry, raise children, and integrate themselves into "respectable" working-class communities. On the other hand, as we saw, moral and political imperatives clouded the judgment of many contemporary observers. Kalmykov and El'tsina presumed much about the causes of the suicides they witnessed. Though they provided no evidence, they nonetheless asserted that the dead women were running from prostitution itself.
Doomsday projections about syphilis and its long-term consequences also adhered to their own agenda. Some observers wished to impress on Russian society the dangers of diseases once considered transitory and relatively harmless. Others hoped to bolster their support for regulation by asserting that venereal diseases were so serious that they required strict government vigilance. Physicians and other experts often failed to stress that in its tertiary stage, syphilis remained dormant for many years and that most sufferers did not face its more extreme consequences. Though syphilis, with all its attendant pain and risks, was a serious illness that afflicted many prostitutes, it did not pave a straight path to death's door. Moreover, as we have seen, the cure could be more traumatic than the disease.
Though the yellow ticket distinguished registered prostitutes from other women, most succeeded in discarding it one way or another. A significant percentage of registered prostitutes stopped fulfilling their obligations and disappeared from medical-police scrutiny. While this cannot be verified statistically, it is likely that most found other jobs and established families. The police succeeded in maintaining records only for those women who remained on the registration lists. As we have seen, most women who earned money at prostitution did so casually or clandestinely, and thus stayed outside the policeman's (and statistician's) reach. Furthermore, most ventures into commercial sex were sporadic, based on the particular circumstances of a woman at a particular time of her life.
On the average, women who registered seem to have stayed in the life for around five years. Six hundred prostitutes studied by the House of Mercy in 1910 had worked an average of five years and three months as prostitutes. Oboznenko's research also indicated a five-year stint in registered prostitution, but he believed that this number was somewhat inflated. According to his findings, there were two types of prostitutes in St. Petersburg: habitual prostitutes who remained in the trade much
longer than the five-year term, and women who worked as prostitutes only temporarily. The latter group generally quit within three years."[135]
Our best sketch of aging prostitutes comes from Oboznenko, who, in an attempt to discover some prostitutes' natural immunities, described in detail twenty women who had been registered in the trade for more than ten years, all or most of them in brothels, and had never contracted syphilis.[136] These portraits are remarkable for their bleak depiction of poverty, hardship, and illness, three circumstances that were inextricably linked to these women's personal histories.
Of the twenty prostitutes, eleven were drinkers or alcoholics, and another five drank "in moderation." Thirteen reported that their fathers were alcoholics, and four had alcoholic mothers and fathers. Nine had parents who suffered from tuberculosis. One 40-year-old woman, a peasant and former day laborer with the initials "A. R.," came from a family of sixteen children, of which only four survived past the age of 10. Between 1884 and 1896, A. R. had been interned in Kalinkin for various nonsyphilitic ailments thirty-four times. Her mother and father lived to old age (65 and 80 respectively), despite the fact that her father was a drunkard. An alcoholic woman with epilepsy was described as covered with scars she had suffered during her periodic fits. "E. K.," nearly deaf in one ear from a recent beating, became a prostitute at age 12 after she lost her virginity while drunk. Her sister also worked as a prostitute in St. Petersburg. Another woman turned to prostitution because she had an "aversion for work, and a passion for drink and the dissolute life." At 34, she had been a prostitute for seventeen years. "E. S.," who was 37 years old, had been registered as a prostitute for twenty-one years, but had been working the streets since she was 12. She characterized both her parents as drunkards, and spoke of a mother with rheumatism who had been bedridden for two years. An alcoholic peasant referred to as "M. T." had lived in brothels for fourteen years, and had been dispatched to Kalinkin Hospital eighteen times. One "A. P.," who was raised in a foundling home, said her mother became a prostitute when A. P. was 10 years old. A woman from Tambov province came from a family of sixteen brothers and sisters, only three of whom were still living. "A. S.," a 30-year-old peasant from a Baltic province, lost both her parents when she was 3 years old.
[135] Raisa L. Depp, "O dannykh ankety, proizvedennoi sredi prostitutok S.-Peterburga," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 146; Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, p. 14.
[136] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 61–90.
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These stories depict terrible family tragedies and endemic diseases in this particular group. Most important, though, is the fact that Oboznenko's aging prostitutes were atypical; their exceptional status helps prove the more likely rule about prostitution as a risky trade, but one that could nevertheless be left behind.
If we look closely at some figures provided by the medical-police committee in St. Petersburg, we can see that officialdom could not really account for most former prostitutes. Fedorov, for example, provided lists of 2,174 women who went off the St. Petersburg committee lists in 1889, 1890, and 1895 (see table 1). Though it was assumed that the women who "concealed themselves" from nadzor were continuing to earn money through prostitution, this was not necessarily the case. A yellow ticket would have frustrated efforts to find housing and regular employment, but a woman could have bribed her way into a desired situation, purchased a forged passport, or returned home to her village without one.[137] Unfortunately, categories like "abandoned debauchery" and "voluntarily departed" do not tell us much about the fates of these women or the reasons why the committee removed them from the rolls. Yet it is still obvious that substantial numbers of women in St. Petersburg either quit registered prostitution or at least learned to elude com-
[137] Barbara Engel believes that these scenarios were common. Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes," p. 42.
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mittee agents. Though not in the majority, significant numbers of women did enter stable relationships (i.e., submitted proof of patronage or got married). If we take into consideration that many of the women who vanished from the sight of committee officials blended into urban and village communities, then we can assume that, in reality, most prostitutes did eventually give up their trade.
A report from the St. Petersburg medical-police committee to the UGVI for the year 1909 listed 341 prostitutes as having been removed from the records. Their reasons are summarized in table 2. These numbers suggest that most women reintegrated themselves back into "respectable" village and urban communities. Those who left, however, did so with little to show for their labors. Savings from the "wages of sin" were rare. More likely, former prostitutes had acquired some kind of venereal disease, an alcohol dependency, and perhaps habits from the brothel or the street that would keep them feeling separate from other women. Still, the permeability of the trade of prostitution marked a woman's venture into commercial sex more as a temporary strategy for survival in an economically cruel world than as her life or her everlasting fate.
The regulatory system had been implemented to curb the spread of venereal diseases and exercise control over a disorderly section of the population. Toward these ends, policemen and doctors monitored women of the urban lower classes and drew thousands into
the world of identification, inspection, and incarceration. But as the president of the OPMD pointed out, the very existence of regulation created a whole new problem for the tsarist authorities: clandestine prostitution was in fact "a logical consequence of nadzor itself."[138] By attempting to put all prostitutes under control, the state created a class of women who would do their best to avoid detection and scrutiny. "Clandestine prostitution" inevitably accompanied regulation, always working to thwart, undermine, and counter the regulatory system's efforts. Regulation failed to bring order to the disorderly. Instead, it engendered different forms of disorder. Not only did it beget clandestine prostitutes, it constructed institutional settings for abuses of power, arbitrary authority, corruption, scandals, fighting, riots, and other mayhem.
Regulation also subverted its own medical goals. The state's attitude toward children identified as prostitutes demonstrated this very well. Though the authorities feared unchecked venereal disease, they halted before taking regulationist ideology to its logical end by wedding minors to the yellow ticket. As for adults, women who feared the police often hid their venereal symptoms and as a result not only suffered the physical consequences themselves, but could serve as further transmitters. Even as the doctors and policemen locked up hundreds of prostitutes in hospital wards, thousands more women with contagious venereal diseases were still at large and determined to remain so. Manuil Margulies, in a 1903 book entitled Regulation and "Free" Prostitution (Reglamentatsiia i "svobodnaia" prostitutsiia ), maintained that the regulatory system manufactured its own criminals. The more rigid the system, the more women would attempt to circumvent it, particularly if they suffered from an illness and therefore had something to fear from discovery.[139] Moreover, the medical procedures themselves may have served to spread infection at the same time they supposedly limited it. In effect, the medical side of regulation probably did more damage than good from an epidemiological and social standpoint. Here too, then, we can judge regulation a failure.
Registered or not, all women who engaged in prostitution had to contend with the institution of nadzor. Nadzor shaped what lay in store
[138] "Soobshchenie obshchestva popecheniia o molodykh devitsakh v S.-Peterburge," Izvestiia S.Peterburgskago gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2054. In Policing Prostitution, pp. 241–42, Harsin also points out that by developing a regulatory system the police created clandestine prostitution.
[139] Manuil S. Margulies, Reglamentatsiia i "svobodnaia" prostitutsiia (St. Petersburg, 1903), p. 8.
for them on the streets and defined where they stood in relation to the police and their community. If they held the yellow ticket, they could pursue their trade, but they were supposed to conform to medical-police restrictions and examination schedules, as well as submit to hospitalization at their doctor's orders. If they engaged in clandestine prostitution, they had more options, but they ran the risk of arrest and legal prosecution for disobeying ministry regulations. If they were discovered to have venereal disease, hospitalization awaited them in either case. The choice was not an easy one; the dangers were great whichever way a woman went and the rewards were questionable. Yet tens of thousands of women registered as prostitutes and even greater numbers engaged in prostitution without official permission. The "laws of the market" were key here, for the "supply" of prostitutes existed in relation to a significant male "demand."
Figure 1.
Norblin de la Gourdaine, sketch of A. O. Orlovskii with a tavern-keeper on his lap
(late eighteenth century). From V. A. Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura , vol. 3
(St. Petersburg, 1915). Chesler Collection, Florham-Madison Campus Library,
Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Figure 2.
Drunken prostitute outside a tavern. From Erich Müller, Sitten-Geschichte Russlands:
Entwicklung der sozialen kultur russlands im 20. jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1931). Chesler
Collection, Florham-Madison Campus Library, Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Figure 3.
"Troika" — a drunken gentleman with a prostitute on each arm. From Müller, Sitten-Geschichte
Russlands . Chesler Collection, Florham-Madison Campus Library, Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Figure 4.
Prostitute and sailor. She: "Yeah, you can take a lot from a soldier!"
He: "Only a fool would say that's going to happen. Do you honestly think
a soldier would even talk to you?" From Aleksandr I. Lebedev, Pogibshiia,
no milyia sozdan'ia , tetrad 1 (St. Petersburg, 1862–63). Slavic and Baltic
Reserve, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Figure 5.
Brothel prostitute and client. He: "Tell me, please, how'd you wind up here?"
She: "Real easy. My lover went to Novgorod for a while. I got bored. . . .
And now I'm in debt." From Lebedev, Pogibshiia, no milyia sozdan'ia . Slavic
and Baltic Reserve, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Figure 6.
Two prostitutes sitting at a table. First one: "Iashlev offered me 100 rubles, Rylkin
200, Shumov 250. So what do you think, Marie?" Second one: "What's to decide
here? Take from everyone—then you won't insult anybody." From Lebedev,
Pogibshiia, no milyia sozdan'ia . Slavic and Baltic Reserve, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Figure 7.
Advertisement for "The Yellow Ticket: A Drama in Five Parts." My
thanks to Louise McReynolds for supplying me with this photograph.
Chapter 3
Supply and Demand
[I]n the contemporary bourgeois structure, a woman entering into marriage is almost as little protected from contracting syphilis and other sexual diseases as a man going into a public brothel.
L. Kruchinina (1904)
The yellow ticket marked both the women who held it and the society that issued it. By creating the setting for prostitution in the Russian empire, regulation strongly influenced the forms that prostitution would take. But this setting was devised to suit an arrangement that most Russians took for granted: when it came to sex, men had the prerogative to act as the consumers of marketable female bodies. As the officials who served in the tsarist administration knew quite well, prostitution occupied an integral place in the scheme of things, serving men sexually and women economically.
Gender ideology functioned as the underpinning of regulation and prostitution, couching the existence of commercial sex in terms of male need and female depravity. Prevailing views had it that the sexual double standard was an expression of nature, rather than a reflection of how gender operated in a particular political economy. But if gender ideology contributed to the foundations of prostitution in Imperial Russia, the bricks and mortar of this structure were newly made as the nineteenth century wore on, forged by the emergence of Russia's industrial economy and urbanization. To understand prostitution in this period, we must thus investigate the urban marketplace that supplied women
willing to engage in the commercial sex demanded by male clients. This chapter begins with a consideration of the nature and extent of this male demand, and then develops a social profile of the female supply that met it.
Male Demand
One day, Del'vig invited Ryleev to go to some whores. "I'm married," answered Ryleev. "So what," said Del'vig. "Do you not eat in restaurants just because you have a kitchen at home?"
Aleksandr Pushkin
Moral reformers rightly pointed out that prostitution would cease to exist as soon as the demand for commercial sex did likewise. Yet, like men in the rest of Europe, Russian men of all social classes depended on prostitutes for much of their sexual gratification. Prostitutes catered to the sexual demands of Russia's large army, served the male peasants who had left their villages to labor in the cities, and entertained the young men of the upper classes before and in many cases after their marriages to proper young ladies. Prostitution in effect played a key role in gender relations in Russian culture.
Sex with prostitutes was built into the erotic histories of men from privileged society. Late marriages and cultural norms made visits to prostitutes and brothels perfectly acceptable, if not de rigueur. When Pierre and his drunken companions took off for ". . ." in Tolstoy's War and Peace, contemporary readers needed no explanation; they knew quite well that the young gentlemen were en route to a brothel.[1] The great Russian poet, Aleksandr Blok, attended the Vvedenskii School in St. Petersburg during the 1890s, asserting that "[b]y the time they were halfway through school many boys were already having affairs."[2] These "affairs" frequently meant commercial sex of one sort or another. (Blok himself developed venereal disease—probably syphilis—before he was 17.) Premarital and extramarital carousing were so prevalent that one
[1] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, vol. 1, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1904), p. 38.
[2] Quoted in Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, vol. 1: The Distant Thunder, 1880–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 33, 57. My thanks to Joan Neuberger and Simon Karlinsky for this reference.
author could claim that 50 percent of the Russian intelligentsia was syphilitic![3]
Sex with prostitutes, servants, factory girls, and seamstresses was considered a "natural and healthy outlet" for upper-class male sexual desires and a preferable alternative to masturbation and seductions of "honest?" women, that is, their social equals. Proscriptions against masturbation as an activity that could induce dementia and long-term physical harm reinforced privileged society's belief that sexual relations with prostitutes and lower-class women represented the lesser of two evils.[4] Physicians like Veniamin Tarnovskii helped validate popular views about the male sex urge as uncontrollable with "scientific evidence" concerning the perils of male chastity and masturbation. Abstinence, wrote Tarnovskii, was fraught with dangers because it was an unrealistic goal for most men and, when actually practiced, could result in the "demonic hallucinations of medieval monks." As for masturbation, it left a man "irreversibly ruined." Tarnovskii held that men had physiological needs "which could only temporarily be suppressed without harm to the health." Trends toward late marriage among the middle and professional classes placed men in a physically vulnerable position that prostitution alone could solve.[5]
Women's sexual needs rarely warranted mention in such discussions. Desire's very existence branded the women who felt it as abnormal and depraved—prostitutes in spirit, if not in reality. The presence or absence of desire could thus separate the good women from the bad. Regulation, of course, codified popular and scientific beliefs about male and female sexuality by elevating the double standard to state policy. But social norms that called for women from the upper classes to remain chaste before marriage virtually guaranteed that men of their social standing would turn elsewhere for the sexual gratification it was believed they required physiologically.
The knowledge that their fathers, husbands, and sons were in all likelihood on intimate terms with "fallen women" scandalized women in
[3] M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago na prostitutsiiu (1904), p. 4.
[4] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 211. See also Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, esp. pp. 20–22. On similar notions in Victorian England, see Eric Trudgill, "Prostitution and Paterfamilias," The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 2, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 701.
[5] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 55–56. Tarnovskii told the 1897 congress on syphilis about physicians who would direct men troubled by wet dreams, restlessness, and temporary weight loss to prostitutes for immediate relief. "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. 15.
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privileged society and catalyzed fears for their own health. As they well knew, the venereal diseases that men contracted from and spread among "fallen women" could come home to roost. Regulation provided little protection, since its medical guarantees were so questionable and its punitive side drove so many women to hide their illnesses or avoid the system altogether. Because men were apt to engage in extramarital sex, female premarital chastity and marital fidelity provided no assurance of freedom from venereal disease. Women's health risks and sexual jealousies quite naturally complicated their attitudes toward prostitutes and prostitution, not to mention the men with whom they lived.
A Russian journal in 1907 cited a talk by a French venereal expert on how one study showed that 20 percent of women with syphilis had been infected by their husbands.[6] Statistical evidence from turn-of-the-century surveys meant to quantify male student sexuality bore out such claims.[7] Responses to questions about venereal diseases and their source attest to both the widespread nature of sexual infections and the way sex with prostitutes was built into the male student experience (see table 3). Nearly 1,300 students in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov responded in 1902 to a question on venereal disease. A full 562 students (43 percent of the total) believed they had contracted gonorrhea (tripper ), 123 before they turned 19. Of the students with gonorrhea, 343 (61 percent) blamed
[6] Akusherka (February 1907): 59–60.
[7] Female student sexuality drew less scholarly attention. A medical society developed a questionnaire for women studying in Moscow's higher educational institutions in the early 1900s, but it was confiscated by the police. The author of a survey in Tomsk forwarded the answers of 100 female students to this society. Mikhail Chlenov, Polovaia perepis' Moskovskago studenchestva i eia obshchestvennoe znachenie (Moscow, 1909), p. 13; Ia. Falevich, "Itogi Tomskoi studencheskoi polovoi perepisi," Sibirskaia vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 17 (April 25, 1910): 198.
prostitutes as the source. Of 124 men (10 percent) who suffered from chancroid (miagkii shankr ), 99 (80 percent) attributed their lesions to prostitutes. Seventy-eight men (6 percent of the total respondents in Kharkov) answered that they had been stricken with syphilis (sifilis ), 55 (71 percent) of whom thought that prostitutes had infected them.[8] Among 1,210 male students surveyed in 1904 in the Baltic city of Iur'ev (now Tartu), 855 (71 percent) claimed to be sexually active and 335 (28 percent) had already contracted some form of venereal disease. Thirty (2 percent of the Iur'ev total) had been diagnosed as syphilitic.[9] When Professor Mikhail Chlenov of Moscow University collected the results of questionnaires filled out by 2,150 male students, he learned that 1,410 (66 percent) were sexually experienced, and 1,052 (49 percent) had engaged in sex before they entered the university. The first partners of 575 students (27 percent) had been prostitutes. All told, 543 (a full one-fourth of the sample) complained of suffering from some form of a sexually transmitted disease. Of 421 men (20 percent) suffering from gonorrhea, 285 (67 percent) blamed prostitutes; of 65 (3 percent) with chancroid, 49 (75 percent) traced their lesions to prostitutes; of 57 (3 percent) with syphilis, 37 (65 percent) believed that prostitutes had infected them.[10]
A Tomsk medical student conducted a similar survey in 1907 and 1908, learning not only about his respondents' sex lives, but their politics. As it turned out, around half of the 573 men who answered had taken part in revolutionary activities. Their radical involvement apparently influenced both their views on sex and their perceptions of sexual desire, with 39 percent characterizing the revolutionary movement as having altered their relations with the opposite sex and several remarking on having changed their attitudes toward prostitution. One student, for example, had learned to see the prostitute as a victim of social and political conditions, a "female-heroine of the revolutionary period." Another developed "disgust toward prostitution." Nevertheless, many of the male students in this Siberian city still turned to prosti-
[8] V. V. Favr, "K statistike polovykh zabolevanii sredi studentov i o merakh ikh preduprezhdeniia," Trudy deviatago Pirogovskago s"ezda (St. Petersburg, 1905), pp. 292–93.
[9] Benasik and Sviatlovskii, Studenchestvo v tsifrakh, pp. 46–47.
[10] Chlenov, Polovaia perepis', pp. 53, 56, 67–69. One student claimed that the respondents only filled out the forms "to get plenty of laughs during lectures over the 'naïveté' of the survey's organizers." According to a letter he sent to the editor of a newspaper, they took great delight in inventing "fictitious" answers to the more personal questions. E. Gel'ts, letter to the editor, Russkiia vedomosti, no. 319 (November 16, 1904.): 5.
tutes for sexual gratification. Among the students who claimed to lead active sex lives (43 percent of those surveyed), 48 percent went to prostitutes.[11] With student demand for commercial sex so commonplace, it is no wonder that rumors surfaced about brothels offering a special 50 percent student discount (skidka ).[12]
Observers tended to identify prostitution as a phenomenon involving rich men and poor women. In Europe, this image served both a self-consciously moral middle class that contrasted itself to a decadent aristocracy, and, paradoxically, a socialist movement that interpreted prostitution as a trade involving bourgeois exploiters of proletarian victims. In Russia, however, an inherently populist critique informed the vision of prostitution: there, privileged society in general was seen as victimizing the long suffering narod (common people). Disdain for the aristocracy was part of this image, but so was the intelligentsia's self-criticism and guilt.
Though men from privileged society indeed went to prostitutes, the greatest number of prostitutes' clients came from the groups that constituted the vast majority of the population, the lower classes. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the lower ranks of Russia's enormous military provided a ready supply of customers, given their absence from home and the twenty-five-year draft. So did urban artisans, merchants, and male serfs engaging with their masters' permission in labor migration (otkhodnichestvo ). But the greatest boost to prostitution came at the end of the century, when the tsarist state launched its industrialization drive and an urban labor force emerged.
For most of the nineteenth century, Russia had stayed relatively aloof from the shocks and tremors associated with urbanization and industrialization. In the late 1880s and 1890s, however, pro-industrial policies of the Ministry of Finance created factory jobs for the countless peasants who had been driven from their villages as a result of famine, overpopulation, and rural impoverishment. This contributed to what Daniel Brower has termed the "migrant city," urban centers bursting at the social and cultural seams from the onslaught of peasant workers.[13] Hundreds of thousands of male peasants now lived far from their families, an uprooted work force with a burgeoning demand for commercial sex.
[11] Falevich, "Itogi Tomskoi studencheskoi polovoi perepisi," Sibirskaia vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 17 (April 25, 1910): 198; no. 18 (May 2, 1910): 209–10; no. 19 (May 9, 1910): 222; no. 23 (June 6, 1910): 270–71.
[12] M. Ratov, "Beseda o prostitutsii," Soiuz zhenshchin, no. 4 (November 1907): 5.
[13] Brower, The Russian City .
Consequently, Russian prostitution began to assume a more modern guise, with features common to its neighbors to the west.
The Russian empire maintained a unique identity, however, related to the nature of its working class at the turn of the century. Unlike the proletariat in western Europe, many Russian male workers tended to keep one foot planted squarely in the village. Though they worked in factories and acquired urban habits and tastes, "their identity, their emotional commitments, and an important part of their social lives remained in the countryside."[14] Part of this was linked to financial obligations to administrative communes that collected taxes and redemption payments after the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, but part stemmed from a deeper, dual identity that kept many peasants from total urbanization and proletarianization. It was not unusual for male workers to leave families in the countryside while they themselves lived in the city, adhering to labor cycles that left them free to return to their villages at harvest times and holidays. In turn-of-the-century Russia, many urban working-class males accordingly considered themselves part of village domestic households.
Nearly one-third of Moscow printers queried in 1907 and half of the tailors surveyed just prior to World War I had wives they left behind in the countryside.[15] A metal fitter who described the eighteen men in his one-room apartment mentioned how eleven were married to women who lived in peasant villages. One of these workers had not seen his wife for five years.[16] With marital sex so remote and infrequent, it was commonplace for male workers to engage in extramarital liaisons and to use part of their factory or shop earnings to pay prostitutes.
St. Petersburg, which had an estimated 133,500 single women for 182,500 single men in 1901, earned its reputation as a city of "bachelors, prostitutes, and old maids."[17] One author dubbed it The Cruel City (Zhestokii gorod ) in 1907, partly because it was home to so many more
[14] Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 3. See also Robert E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979).
[15] Overall, in 1882 there were only 625 female immigrants for every 1,000 male immigrants, and twice as many men than women in the age group between 10 and 29. Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite, pp. 112–13, 134.
[16] P. Timofeev, "What the Factory Worker Lives By," in The Russian Worker: Life and Labor in Tsarist Society, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), p. 79.
[17] Fedorov, Pozornyi promysel (St. Petersburg, 1901), p. 3; M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 6.
males than females.[18] Aleksandr Fedorov believed that the capital's high concentration of troops and schools necessitated the availability of prostitutes: "where there's a demand," he wrote, "there's also a market."[19] Like Fedorov, the authors of an 1898 report by the municipal administration of St. Petersburg considered it only "natural" for so many men to seek sexual satisfaction with prostitutes.[20]
In 1911, the military governor of the island-city of Kronstadt summed up the trans-class nature of male demand in response to a neighborhood's effort to shut down a local brothel. As he wrote to the UGVI, this brothel was located in one of five areas specially designated for houses of prostitution. He explained that a committee of military personnel had identified five categories of Kronstadt residents as patrons of prostitutes, making allowances for brothels accordingly. Those groups which tended to visit brothels included merchant marines and foreigners, the lower ranks of the navy, dockworkers, the lower ranks of troops in the Kronstadt fortress, and "the intelligentsia." The contested brothel occupied a strategic location in this map of male desire, one which the military governor had no intention of disrupting.[21] Similarly, the vice governor from a Russian province disputed an order to close the brothel in one town because "in Kobrin there are a considerable number of lower ranks."[22] From 1912 to 1915 the Ministry of Finance granted 500 rubles annually for medical examinations of prostitutes in Krasnoe Selo (outside St. Petersburg). With so many troops encamped there, the examinations were seen as a "highly important preventive measure for protecting the health of the lower ranks, as well as the civilian population."[23]
Their position in the social order influenced men's understanding and experience of prostitution and regulation. Males from the privileged classes lived in a world that dichotomized women into those worthy of marriage and those available for purchase. These men picked and chose from both categories as they saw fit, with the women's social class
[18] P. Dneprov, Zhestokii gorod (St. Petersburg, 1907), p. 6.
[19] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 19.
[20] "O prizrenii sifiliticheskikh, venericheskikh i kozhnykh bol'nykh," pp. 298–99.
[21] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter of December 10, 1911, from Kronstadt military governor to UGVI.
[22] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, letter of March 14, 1913.
[23] The provincial governor himself had requisitioned this stipend. TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," January 5, 1915–February 7, 1917, letter of May 29, 1915, from Petrograd governor to minister of internal affairs; letter of May 29, 1915, from MVD to minister of finance.
the chief determinant of just where the dividing line would be drawn. The state did its part by identifying, inspecting, and incarcerating the women who served as sexual commodities. Men from the lower classes consumed from the same general marketplace, albeit with women who shared their social status and could conceivably one day share their name. Their respective social and economic situations separated the men who would turn to prostitutes, but the ideology of gender gave them a unity that transcended class. As males, they were all in it together; they were a population with a (perceived) legitimate demand for sexual relief
Female Supply
"Now, . . . can much, in your opinion, be earned by a poor but honest girl with honest labor? Not even 15 kopecks a day, sir, will she earn if she is honest and has no special talents, and for that she'd have to work nonstop."
Sonia's father to Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment
Urbanization and industrialization both increased the demand for prostitution and enlivened the supply that would meet it. Radical social and economic change also sent increasing numbers of young girls and adult women from their villages to seek a living in Russia's growing cities. Rose Glickman has ably described the process by which women abandoned rural Russia and joined the working population as domestic servants, artisans, shop clerks, and factory workers.[24] Here we will look at these same women, but from the point of view of how they fared when "honest labor" proved impossible or perhaps simply inconvenient and unnecessary.
There is no shortage of sources for the personal histories of registered prostitutes: statisticians, policemen, physicians, and moral reformers exhaustively polled "public women" to find out about their family backgrounds, their first sexual experiences, and their motivations for taking up this particular trade. Using studies of registration materials, publications by medical-police personnel, surveys from philanthropic agencies, and an official 1889 empirewide census, we can view the profile of the women who registered as prostitutes in Russia.
[24] Glickman, Russian Factory Women, passim.
However, the data in these sources, derived almost wholly from surveys of registered prostitutes, by no means provide us with a comprehensive picture. As we have seen, registered prostitutes made up only a fraction of the population of women who engaged in sexual relations for money and favors. Consequently, official statistics only reflected certain types of prostitutes: those who chose registration over the uncertainties of working clandestinely, those unable to evade medical-police agents, and those in state-licensed brothels. Prostitutes who were discreet about their trade, part-time prostitutes who held jobs, and wealthy prostitutes who could afford the proper bribes were invariably omitted from the official lists and records.
We have also been left to cull our social profile indirectly, since very few direct testimonies exist. Russian prostitutes did not leave memoirs for us to see.[25] Their words were invariably filtered through the voice of a policeman, a physician, or a philanthropist. Just as invariably, these words were employed in the service of a political argument pertaining, for example, to the "nature" of prostitutes or to the value of regulation. Not surprisingly, then, the questions posed to prostitutes tend to reveal more about the surveyors than their subjects. Investigators' queries conformed to what were considered the pressing issues of the day, such as the circumstances under which a prostitute lost her virginity. Unfortunately, they asked little or nothing about prostitutes' specific attitudes toward their trade, their current relationships, and their sexuality.[26] To a large degree, researchers created the prostitutes they interviewed according to the prejudices, expectations, and goals with which they set out.[27] (The sources for the general profile of prostitutes in the Russian empire are listed in table 4.)
Another problem with the available statistics stems from the sources of information themselves, for prostitutes were notorious for their mendacity. Petr Gratsianov, revealing as much of his own attitude toward prostitutes as an accepted convention, put it this way: "First and foremost, [prostitutes] are all liars; to lie—it is as though it is their calling,
[25] Though Belaia rabynia: Iz dnevnika padshei zhenshchiny (1909) claimed to be "from the journal of a fallen woman," it did not appear authentic.
[26] Compare the categories employed by observers in turn-of-the-century Russia with those from recent interviews of prostitutes, such as in Roberta Perkins and Garry Bennett, eds., Being a Prostitute (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985).
[27] A recent work on prostitution in nineteenth-century Scotland argues, "With a view to discovering the 'truth' about the phenomenon [of prostitution] moral reformers actually created the 'prostitute,' giving a history to the individual women." See Mahood, The Magdalenes, p. 10.
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to lie to everyone, to lie about trifles, to lie without any grounds. And as soon as you catch one in a lie, she will sincerely repent in order to lie again in a minute."[28] More sympathetic observers remarked that prostitutes learned to become what other people wanted them to be.[29] This was, after all, a trade where patrons almost begged to be told lies (about, for example, their physical attractiveness and sexual prowess), and where public officials were understandably regarded as enemies. Prostitutes had good reasons to lie. If they told stories that conformed to prevailing myths about prostitution as an involuntary trade made up of poor, innocent victims who had been seduced or drugged by unscrupulous procurers, they might find pity rather than moral condemnation from straight society. Intimate questions almost invited exaggeration of
[28] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh,' p. 28.
[29] In his classic mid-nineteenth-century study of prostitution in Paris, Parent-Duchâtelet suggested that lying among prostitutes originated as a form of self-defense against the repeated questions of police and clients, and that it gradually developed into a habit. Discussed by Harsin, Policing Prostitution, p. 116.
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some sort or another. Prostitutes may have told what was expected; recorders may have written down what they wanted to hear.
Some of the findings can be relied on more than others. Information on a prostitute's social estate (soslovie ) and place of origin tended to be accurate, for they appeared on her passport. There could be no ambiguity about the social backgrounds of these women: every study demonstrated that the great majority of prostitutes came from the Russian poor—the peasantry and the urban lower classes (meshchanstvo ). (See table 5.) If we total the figures from the Dubrovskii, Fedorov, and Oboznenko studies and examine them in relation to the general urban population, we find that peasant and lower-class women disproportionately dominated the ranks of Russian prostitutes. When female peasants and townswomen (meshchanki ) were 74 percent of St. Petersburg's population,[30] women from those social estates were between 78 and 84 percent of registered prostitutes. If we add another category of lower-class women, soldatki (soldiers' wives), we see that the percentage rises even more steeply, to a total of 91 percent for Dubrovskii, 96 percent for both of Fedorov's samples, and 85 percent for Oboznenko.
Dubrovskii, Fedorov, and Oboznenko conducted their studies on the eve of Russia's industrialization drive. When we compare their findings
[30] The figure of 74 percent is from an 1890 census of St. Petersburg cited in Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes," p. 26.
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to registration statistics for Petersburg just prior to World War I, we see that the proportion of peasants newly registering as prostitutes almost doubled, and this proportion increased even further in 1914. Such a rise in the number of peasants corresponds only somewhat with the migration of the general population, suggesting that women of the peasant stratum may have had a more difficult time making their way in the urban setting once industrialization had peaked.[31]
Yet we must reject the scenario that many contemporaries envisaged in relation to the predominance of peasants among registered prostitutes—these women did not land on the streets or in a brothel straight off the farm. To be sure, a few new arrivals to Russia's cities were lured into prostitution by procurers who specialized in targeting gullible young innocents, but the great majority lived and worked in urban areas for several years before they registered as prostitutes. In March 1910, the House of Mercy, the St. Petersburg institution for "fallen" girls and women, conducted its survey among 600 prostitutes in St. Petersburg. Almost 90 percent of the sample said they had held other jobs, working an average of almost two and three-quarters years, before turning to prostitution.[32]
As would be expected, the great majority of women who worked as prostitutes were ethnic Russians (see table 6). Fedorov found that 87 percent of the women registered in St. Petersburg during 1888 were Russian, 9 percent were non-Russian natives (urozhenki ), Germans made up another 2 percent, while the remaining 2 percent hailed from various
[31] According to Gerald Surh, peasants made up 42 percent of St. Petersburg's population in 1881, but 63 and 69 percent in 1900 and 1910 respectively. He reminds us, however, that the "peasant estate living in Petersburg contained an entire world of urban types, ranging from those fresh from the country to those who had lost all connections and sense of identity with rural life." Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, pp. 11–13.
[32] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," pp. 135, 145.
other European countries. Three years later, the national composition of St. Petersburg's prostitutes appeared nearly identical. Among the prostitutes with known nationalities studied by Oboznenko, 83 percent were Russian, 10 percent were Poles, Finns, Latvians, and Jews, while the remaining 6 percent were German, Hungarian, Swedish, Czech, French, Swiss, Belgian, Danish, Italian, English, and Armenian.
The presence of non-Russian and foreign prostitutes probably reflects several factors, one of which was proverbial in the contemporary literature about prostitution. As the story went, young women from Germany and the Baltic regions would register as prostitutes in Russia in order to earn comfortable dowries. After several years, they would return home, now highly eligible women with attractive nest eggs.[33] There was also a demand for non-Russian women as exotic sexual partners; the more expensive the brothel, the higher the number of foreign prostitutes. In his diary, Aleksandr Blok recorded his erotic adventures with "a stupid German girl" who struck him as "hideous except for the divine passionate body."[34] Perhaps non-Russian and foreign women were also more likely to fall under St. Petersburg medical-police surveillance as a result of their visibility and the unfamiliarity and vulnerability they may have experienced as foreigners. Finally, their numbers, as well as the numerous peasant women, also suggest that it may have been easier to transgress cultural norms far from one's home.
The ages of prostitutes varied, but as a rule, prostitutes in the Russian empire seemed somewhat younger than prostitutes in western Europe. Dubrovskii's 1889 research showed that 90 percent of registered prostitutes were under 30, as compared to 80 percent in Italy and 84 percent in Berlin. Among the women surveyed by Dubrovskii, 32 percent were under 20 and another 38 percent under 25.[35] In St. Petersburg, the ages
[33] See Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," p. 18; Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 20, 24, 36. See also the section about El'za in Kuprin, Iama, pp. 134–37.
[34] In 1909, Blok bragged that this woman was his latest conquest: "Laughs and speaks stupidly. But when I speak of Goethe and Faust she begins to think and to fall in love. . . . My system—of transforming shallow professionals into passionate and tender women in three hours—has scored another triumph." Blok, Zapisnye knizhki, ed. V N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov, K. I. Chukovsky (Moscow, 1965), p. 129, quoted in Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, Vol. 2: The Release of Harmony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 35. Kuprin describes the Baltic German prostitutes in an expensive brothel as "large, white-skinned, with lovely breasts." Kuprin, Iama, p. 6.
[35] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. xxii. European studies cited in Nikolai A. Zakharov, "Istoriia S. -Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia i itogi ego deiatel'nosti," Trudy s"ezda po borbe s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 292.
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of prostitutes conformed more closely to the European norm. For women registered there during the years 1889 through 1893, Shtiurmer found that an average of 84 percent were under 30, with 41 percent of registered prostitutes between the ages of 20 and 25.[36] But the majority of prostitutes did not necessarily fall into that age group, for as we have seen, most women who registered with the police had already engaged in prostitution for periods from several months to several years. Furthermore, the MVD's decision to establish 21 as the minimum age for brothel prostitutes in 1901 and to raise the minimum age of registration from 16 to 18 in 1903 left younger prostitutes outside official counts.
A close look at Dubrovskii's figures for 1889 reveals that, although the largest number of registered prostitutes in European Russia were between the ages of 20 and 25 (38 percent), brothel prostitutes were considerably younger than women who worked the streets (see table 7). While 39 percent of brothel prostitutes were younger than 20, only 26 percent of odinochki fell into that category. Conversely, only 19 percent of brothel prostitutes were age 25 or older compared to 39 percent of odinochki. These figures bear out contemporaries' claims that brothels both attracted and demanded younger women, as well as notions about
[36] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 25.
odinochki as generally older, independent, and more experienced than women in state-licensed brothels.
The majority of the women who registered as prostitutes in Russia were also illiterate, something that typically accompanied poverty—particularly female poverty. According to Dubrovskii's survey, in 1889 more than three-quarters of all prostitutes (78 percent) registered in the empire had received no education whatsoever. As would be expected, literacy varied according to place of birth. For example, 80 of the 96 prostitutes (83 percent) from the province of Astrakhan were illiterate, but only 33 prostitutes (32 percent) of the 104 from the Baltic province of Estliand (now Estonia) could not read or write. St. Petersburg prostitutes were not as educated as the prostitutes from Estliand, but their 1889 literacy rate of 41 percent was well above the empire's average (estimated at 14 percent for Russia's entire female population as late as 1903–5).[37] Though older and more independent than brothel prostitutes, odinochki were not necessarily more educated. In 1889, among the prostitutes registered in the European part of Russia, 75 percent of brothel women and 77 percent of odinochki could neither read nor write.[38]
As literacy improved in the empire in general, women who became prostitutes seem to have benefited along with the rest of the population. In 1889, Dubrovskii labeled 1,519 (59 percent) among a total of 2,586 registered prostitutes in St. Petersburg province illiterate.[39] Of the 463 women who registered in St. Petersburg during the year 1913, however, only 143 (32 percent) were illiterate. Another 97 (21 percent) were considered "almost illiterate" (malogramotnye ), and just 3 had finished high school. In 1914, of 379 newly registering women, 153 (40 percent) were illiterate.[40]
The above figures can be read with some confidence, for prostitutes would not have easily embellished or hidden the truth about their origins and educational backgrounds. In light of the MVD rules that established a minimum age for registration, it is possible that some falsified
[37] Literacy rates for prostitutes from Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. xxv; for women in general, see Russkaia mysl ' (June 1910): 130, in Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshvism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 166.
[38] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. 48–49.
[39] Ibid.
[40] For the 1913 statistics, see Rossiiskoe obshckchestvo zashchity zhenshckin v 1913 g., p. 100; for 1914, see Otchet o deiatel'nosti Petrogradskago doma miloserdiia za 1914 g., p. 18.
their age in order to remain on police lists and avoid the cycle of arrest and examination. Nonetheless, even if Russia's prostitutes were actually younger than they appear in this profile, this would only contribute to our general impression of the prostitute as young, unschooled, and vulnerable.
Contributing to such a portrait is the fact that studies also demonstrated the overwhelming majority of prostitutes to be full or half orphans. Dubrovskii's 1889 census showed that of the 17,603 prostitutes registered in the empire, less than 4 percent reported that both of their parents were still living, just over 3 percent had fathers who were alive, and under 6 percent had living mothers.[41] Detailed descriptions of 146 women among Fedorov's larger sample for the year 1888 also revealed a high percentage of orphans: only 17 percent of the women he surveyed had both parents living, 20 percent had mothers, and 2 percent had fathers.[42]
When a schoolteacher named M. S. Onchukova personally interviewed 100 prostitutes interned in an Odessa hospital, she found that disrupted family backgrounds were these women's most distinguishing characteristic. Widowed members of peasant and working-class families acted quickly to replace a lost spouse in order to resume the usual division of labor. As a result, children were often saddled with unloving and emotionally and sometimes physically abusive stepparents. Of the 100 prostitutes Onchukova interviewed, 49 had been orphaned and 10 complained of bad relations with stepparents. One woman claimed that she had been driven out of her house: "My stepmother beat me and tormented me, especially because I was my father's favorite." Another told her, "[Our stepfather] beat us mercilessly, as though we were his own. He married our mother and used the land and money our father left." Still another prostitute said, "I remember neither my father nor my mother. My blind grandmother took me in when she herself was begging for alms."[43]
Unlike the figures on class, age, and literacy, the answers women gave about their family backgrounds were more susceptible to distortion. First, researchers failed to specify a crucial factor: whether their subjects
[41] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. xxv.
[42] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 25–32.
[43] M. S. Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok v Odesse," Trudy Odesskago otdela Russkago obshchestva okhraneniia zdraviia, vol. 4 (1904), pp. 53–54. Broken homes were also common among American prostitutes at the turn of the century. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, p. 143.
had been orphaned in childhood or whether they were simply orphans at the time when they were interviewed. Second, it is possible that some women preferred to report their parents as deceased to officials in order to prevent medical-police committees from attempting to contact their families; few women wished to undergo the shame of such a revelation. Third, they may have represented themselves as orphans to earn the sympathy of interviewers from privileged society. Finally, some living parents were undoubtedly as good as dead to their prostitute daughters (and vice versa).
It is reasonable to surmise that, having been spared what Judith Walkowitz has termed "the stranglehold of standard female socialization," girls who grew up in broken families were indeed more prone to turn to prostitution as a trade.[44] Nonetheless, because of the correspondence between prostitution and poverty, we must also recognize that broken families may have lacked something even more fundamental than the ability to socialize their daughters: the ability to feed them.
It is easy for us to make connections among poverty, youth, illiteracy, broken families, and prostitution. Having conducted detailed studies of registered prostitutes, observers at the turn of the century also could not help but be aware of the social and economic factors that contributed to the decision to engage in commercial sex. Nonetheless, as though one thing quite naturally led to another, they added another ingredient that often overshadowed social and economic realities: the circumstances of a prostitute's first sexual experience.
Attention to "defloration" evinced the inordinate value placed on virginity as a woman's most valuable possession. Suggested one work in 1908, "As long as [girls] are still virgins, they will be restrained from that fatal step into the unknown. But as soon as they lose their innocence, they become conscious that everything is lost and that it is impossible to regain their lost honor by any means. [Then] they involuntarily try to derive as much profit as they can from their unfortunate position."[45] Related to the focus on defloration was a common belief that a woman had no sexual feelings until they were "awakened" by intercourse. Once her lust was stimulated outside of marriage, it would be difficult to contain. Prostitution, then, was just a way to earn a living from what had become a physical compulsion. Paradoxically, the same
[44] Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 16.
[45] Zhenskaia prostitutsiia. Vyrozhdennye i sluchainye prostitutki, ikh svoistva, nravy, i privychki (Moscow, 1908), p. 63.
authors who counted prostitutes as "victims of social temperament" could grant them agency when it came to sex.
As soon as their virginity was lost, women suffered doubly: they had become sexual beings and they also risked pregnancy. Sadly, the rigid polarization of women into good and bad, Madonna and whore, could become self-fulfilling. Any venture into the world of sexuality, especially if the experience resulted in an unwed pregnancy, could indeed serve to thrust a woman to the other side, to brand her, and thus compel her to join the ranks of the "fallen." Oboznenko, for example, learned that 1,295 (31 percent) of the 4,220 women for whom he had information had been pregnant at the time they became prostitutes.[46]
The biggest problem in analyzing data on defloration stems from our lack of similar information on women who were not registered prostitutes. If most peasant and urban lower-class girls also had early sexual experiences (which is certainly likely), then the responses of registered prostitutes shed little light on prostitution.[47] The perception of a prostitute's "first fall" as of the utmost importance nevertheless spurred researchers to compose numerous questions concerning the age at which each woman first had relations, the status of her partner, and the specific circumstances. Dubrovskii charted the conditions of registered prostitutes' loss of virginity with unusual zealousness, dividing the Russian empire into its component parts, comparing the ages at which prostitutes reportedly first had intercourse, examining how this age compared with each woman's onset of menstruation, seeing how various nationalities fared in comparison with one another, and listing whether a woman's defloration had been reported as voluntary. While some of his conclusions were provocative enough to suggest directions for comparisons of different cultural values—for example, that proportionally fewer prostitutes in central Asia had lost their virginity as a result of rape and that proportionally more Jewish prostitutes had lost their virginity prior
[46] Nearly one-quarter did not carry to term, either due to abortions or miscarriages. The remaining women gave birth to children, most of whom died or were turned over to a foundling home. Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, p. 30.
[47] By comparing the ages of women who bore illegitimate children with the ages prostitutes gave for their first sexual experiences, Barbara Engel concluded that prostitutes were probably sexually active earlier than most women. Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes," p. 34. For attempts to gauge lower-class sexuality, see Engel, "Peasant Morality and Pre-marital Relations in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia," Journal of Social History 23 (Summer 1990): 695–714; Worobec, "Temptress or Virgin?"; David Ransel, "Problems in Measuring Illegitimacy in Prerevolutionary Russia," Journal of Social History 16 (Winter 1982): 111–27.
to the onset of menstruation than prostitutes of other nationalities—his efforts mostly yielded results of questionable merit.[48] When the ROZZh devised a twenty-nine-question form for women registering as prostitutes in St. Petersburg, a full six questions, one of which had nine subheadings, pertained to the particular circumstances of the first time they had sexual intercourse.[49]
A high incidence of rape came to light under the rubric of research on defloration. In his census, Dubrovskii found that 15 percent of registered prostitutes had first experienced sex against their will. Eleven percent of the women studied by Oboznenko reported that their first sexual experience involved rape. Among Fedorov's sample, 17 percent of the women claimed that they had been raped. Figures from the St. Petersburg medical-police committee for 1908 recorded a lower, albeit still significant incidence: 8 percent of the 756 women who registered that year.[50]
The number of women who claimed that their first sexual experience was involuntary raises many questions. Surely a charge of rape would wrest more sympathy from an interrogator who seemed to place great stock in the circumstances surrounding a prostitute's first experience of intercourse than an answer betraying her sexual license. In that sense, we may assume the numbers to be artificially high. Nonetheless, there is no reason to believe that rape was necessarily a rare experience for women, especially for those from the peasantry and urban poor. (Without statistics on the general female population, we really have no basis for comparison.) Just as some women may have misrepresented their first sexual experience as against their will, others may have failed to characterize their loss of virginity as involuntary. For example, seduction by a male with authority and power may have involved psychological or economic coercion that was not perceived as rape.
The relationship between rape and prostitution is also difficult to establish. On one hand, we can no more assume that rape was a catalyst for prostitution than we can assume that early sex impelled girls to take to the streets. An average eight and one-half years elapsed before registration for twenty-two women interviewed by Fedorov who claimed that they were raped, a full year longer than the average for women
[48] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. xxxi–xxxv, 70–73.
[49] TsGIA, ROZZh, f 1335, d. 28, "Anketa otdela bor'by s vovlecheniem zhenshchin v razvrat."
[50] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperrii, pp. xxxi–xxxv; Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, p. 31; Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 25–32; Pokrovskaia, "O prostitutsii maloletnykh," Zhenskii vestnik, nos. 7–8 (July–August 1912): 150.
whose first experience of sex was portrayed as voluntary. Three of these women apparently waited more than twenty years before they registered.[51] If rape victims were slower than other prostitutes to register, perhaps this indicates that rape was actually a deterrent to full-time prostitution. On the other hand, if rape resulted in pregnancy, the victim might be included among the "fallen" and have no choice but to make a career out of financial and social necessity.
Just as we must question the accuracy of the answers on rape, we cannot place complete confidence in the ages at which women reportedly lost their virginity. While some women may have exaggerated theirs in order to sound less sinful,[52] others may have given young ages simply for the pleasure of shocking their interviewers and still others may have forgotten. Judging by the figures, the majority of prostitutes first engaged in sexual intercourse when they were well over the age of consent (14), with most women losing their virginity at 16 and older. More than four-fifths of the women interviewed by Oboznenko were 16 or more, with a full 97 percent over the age of consent. Nearly two-thirds of the prostitutes interviewed by Fedorov had been 16 or older, with 93 percent older than 14.[53]
To be sure, deprived of parental supervision and the usual mechanisms of the patriarchal village that worked to ensure marriage between heterosexual partners, girls might find that early sex increased their vulnerability, but there are no indications that loss of virginity in itself was a sure ticket to prostitution. The lapse of time between a woman's first sexual experience and her registration as a prostitute—seven and one-half years, according to Fedorov's study—confirms that this picture was false. In fact, it suggests that the circumstances of a woman's decoration had little to do with her prostitution at all.
Answers to questions about these women's first partners also make anything more than tentative conclusions impossible. Nikolai Zakharov from Petersburg's House of Mercy felt skeptical of his own data because he recognized that women may have inflated the occupation of their lovers, just as the latter may have embellished their own status. "Undoubtedly, in certain areas [their answers] conform to the truth," he wrote, "but it is necessary to keep in mind, on one hand, the intimacy
[51] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 25–32.
[52] Barbara Engel has suggested that a woman might, for example, exaggerate her age at the time she first had intercourse in order not to risk censure from her interrogator. Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes," p. 34.
[53] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, p. 31; Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 28–31.
of the question and, on the other, the situation wherein a girl cannot always precisely determine who deprived her of her innocence. Cases are well-known to us where a 'colonel' turned out to be a military clerk, where a 'student' was really a messenger, and an 'engineer' a postman." Even so, Zakharov, who also served on the government's Committee of Ministers, found that the majority of St. Petersburg prostitutes registered in 1909 had slept with men from humble backgrounds. Of 344 women who identified their first lover, 210 (61 percent) listed men from the working and lower classes.[54] The survey of prostitutes who registered in St. Petersburg in 1910 also yielded a figure of 61 percent.[55]
Such numbers belie the popular belief that most prostitutes were women who had been seduced and abandoned by upper-class rakes. Though men from the privileged classes patronized prostitutes and seduced working-class girls, most women were not drawn into prostitution itself at the hands of irresponsible gentlemen. Russian studies by most observers thus corroborate what Walkowitz has demonstrated for Victorian England: the majority of prostitutes had been sexually active with members of their own class prior to their career as prostitutes.[56]
Most women actually appear to have participated in youthful, voluntary sexual relations with their social equals. Yet we cannot ignore the significant number who reportedly lost their virginity to men from the more privileged strata. Sexual harassment and seduction by supervisors and employers were part and parcel of working women's on-the-job experiences. The political Left trumpeted the sexual links between upper-class males and lower-class females to further a socialist critique of prostitution as inherent in the capitalist system. One socialist writer referred to a Kazan study that showed "very very many" prostitutes blaming members of the "intelligentsia for their first push on the road to prostitution. By his reckoning, a woman's "fall" constituted the single most important event in her life.[57] In an essay published during the early Soviet era, Arkadii Elistratov cited two prerevolutionary surveys in which more than half the prostitutes interviewed reportedly first had intercourse with men from privileged society.[58] In this sense, socialists were
[54] Zakharov, "Istoriia S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia," pp. 281–82.
[55] Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta, pp. 14–16.
[56] Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 16–17.
[57] D. G. Gremiachenskii, Sovremennyi stroi i prostitutsiia (Moscow, 1906), pp. 16, 19.
[58] The first study, in Karl Nötzel, Oeffentliche Häuser in Russland (1906), involved 59 women in Minsk, 31 (53 percent) of whom attributed their loss of virginity to upper-class men. In the second, of 198 Moscow prostitutes who supplied information about the first time they had intercourse, 128 (65 percent) identified men from the educated and upper classes. Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii," p. 12.
in the same camp with moral conservatives who also associated prostitution and a woman's loss of virginity.
The narrative of seduction and betrayal was a romantic, tragic story that served to garner sympathy from reformers and attract readers for journalists and fiction writers. But the spotlight on defloration outshone the social and economic forces at play in prostitution by making each prostitute an agent in her own downfall. At the same time, it illuminated the way for a critique of capitalism by blaming rich men for corrupting poor women. Finally, it veiled the fact that prostitution was an industry, rather than a sentimental tale of love gone wrong. Ironically, the focus on defloration could unite the Left and Right in the myth that prostitution was about sex, not labor.
Making an "Honest" Living
If the men had demand a raise, I very likely would have honored their request; but broads [baby]—they always have a way to earn more money!
Riga hosiery manufacturer in reference to a strike
It is more rewarding to develop a profile of Sonia's daughters from descriptions of Russian labor and women's experiences at earning wages "honestly." Since most of the women who registered as prostitutes not only came from the lower classes, but had labored at urban jobs before engaging in prostitution, we need to consider the options available to women workers, the conditions of female labor, the size of women's earnings, and the nature of gender and the workplace in Russia's cities.
The largest proportion of prostitutes came from the ranks of Russia's domestic servants. According to Dubrovskii's 1889 census, 8,151 prostitutes (46 percent) listed domestic service as their former occupational.[59] Other studies also showed that most prostitutes claimed to have worked as housekeepers, cooks, and nursemaids before they turned to prostitution as a trade. For example, 1,753 (41 percent) of the women studied by
[59] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. 74–75.
Oboznenko from 1891–93 had been servants.[60] Among the women who registered in 1909, 48 percent had been in domestic service. For comparison, servants in general comprised only one-third of the women workers in St. Petersburg (1890) and 28 percent of those in Moscow (1902).[61]
In 1910, when the House of Mercy surveyed 600 prostitutes in the capital to understand something of the correspondence between women's labor experience and their entry into prostitution, it learned that one third of the sample, 199 women, had previously worked in domestic service.[62] On average, the former domestics had worked four years and three months before turning to prostitution and had earned an average 6 rubles per month plus room and board. Evidently, they had not starved, but their salaries had begun as low as 2.5 rubles and had reached as high as 15. In addition, seventy-nine of the former servants (40 percent) regularly had attempted to share part of their wages with their families.[63] A servant's overall salary could shrink even more, since employers were known to deduct the cost of things broken or damaged.
The House of Mercy could not determine the average length of a servant's workday, because hours were erratic and depended on the employers' varying demands. It was clear, however, that women in domestic service had neither a regular leisure time nor a standard hour to eat, drink, or sleep. Employers generally restricted their servants' visitors and allowed them only two free days a month; for the remaining period they were expected to stay home, just in case their services were required. Very few had the luxury of private sleeping quarters; most slept beneath the stairs, under a window, by the stove, or in a far corner of a dark corridor. Lacking contracts and unprotected by labor legislation, ser-
[60] This percentage is derived from the total number of women (4,214) for whom Oboznenko listed former occupations. Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 22–23.
[61] Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 60. These figures correspond to similar studies conducted around the turn of the century among prostitutes in western Europe. Among 6,842 prostitutes in Paris from 1878 until 1887, 39 percent had been servants; among 1,327 prostitutes in Geneva from 1907 until 1911, 38 percent had been servants; among 173 prostitutes registered in Munich in 1911, 17 percent had been servants; among 1,574 "clandestine" prostitutes in Munich that same year, 28 percent had been servants; among 1,200 prostitutes in Berlin from 1909 until 1910, 36 percent had been servants; among 2,275 prostitutes in Vienna, 45 percent had been servants. See Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, pp. 64–65, 76. Walkowitz mentions a "late Victorian study" of London prostitutes that found 50 percent to have been in domestic service. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 15.
[62] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," pp. 136–38.
[63] Ibid. An earlier study arrived at a figure of five rubles per month. See Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 61.
vants could be fired at the employer's slightest caprice. Of the former servants interviewed by the House of Mercy, 118 (59 percent) said they became prostitutes out of need and loss of their job.[64] It is no wonder that one study referred to them with the term often reserved for prostitutes: "white slaves."[65]
In a recent study of child abandonment, David Ransel argues that domestic servants also dominated the ranks of mothers who left their children at foundling homes. Using data from censuses conducted in Moscow and St. Petersburg just prior to the turn of the century, he concluded that servants were both economically and personally vulnerable. "The female domestic in the city—frequently isolated, without a family life, and deprived of the minimal legal protection enjoyed by some categories of factory workers—lived in a kind of personal bondage."[66]
Contemporary observers believed that the leap from servant to prostitute was a relatively short one. Even the expression, "a certain servant" possessed a "suggestive, wanton character" in Petersburg society.[67] When a woman is a servant, Robert Shikhman argued, "any consciousness of human dignity becomes crushed. From this point, the transfer to prostitution is accomplished freely and easily."[68] Arkadii Elistratov also emphasized the psychological vulnerability of these women. "Isolated" in a "strange family," the servant was a "lifeless tool in which glimmers of humanity appear only as annoying, impermissible displays of self-will and impudence." Domestic service reduced a woman "to a state of slavery" and left her "ill-equipped for the staunch resistance to the stubborn struggle for the inviolability of her moral and physical self." Perhaps, mused Elistratov, "a woman is made a prostitute spiritually earlier than she becomes one physically."[69]
Being a poor woman in an urban middle- or upper-class household left a woman sexually vulnerable, just as it increased the chances that she might think about sex in exchange for money. When house rules forbade, as they usually did, visits from friends and family, a woman was
[64] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," pp. 136–38; Shikhman, "Tainaia prostitutsiia," pp. 101–3.
[65] Evgeniia Turzhe-Turzhanskaia, Belye nevol'niki (Domashnaia prisluga v Rossii) (Smolensk, 1906), cited in Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 61 n. 9.
[66] Ransel, Mothers of Misery, pp. 165–66.
[67] A. V. Amsterdamskii, "Rasprostranenie sifilisa v Petergofskom uezde," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 2 (February 1901): 210.
[68] Shikhman, "Tainaia prostitutsiia," pp. 101–3.
[69] Elistratov, "Bednost' i prostitutsiia," Soiuz zhenshchin, no. 3 (October 1907): 6.
sure to feel even more alone, particularly if she had left her family behind in the countryside. For servants, the contrast between rich and poor could be even more striking than for other members of the urban working classes. A servant had access to all the accoutrements of middle- and upper-class living, yet she possessed none of them. Within veritable reach were lovely clothes, elegant hats, silky undergarments, soft beds, perfumes, and delicious foods. We need not go as far as Fedorov, who claimed that domestic servitude bred laziness in former peasant girls, causing them to long for the "gay life."[70] It is reasonable to assume, however, that such proximity to privilege could foster resentment and envy. If a woman's mistress did not work outside the home, a servant might herself conclude what socialist parties were avowing—that marriage itself was simply a legitimized form of prostitution. For women from the lower classes, there were only two ways to mimic their mistress's enviable lifestyle: they could trade in sex or they could marry a gentleman. Attention from adult males in the household obligingly nourished hopes for the latter, but women who had relations with such men frequently wound up pregnant and out on the streets, the stock figures of defloration tales. In the expanding cities of post-emancipation Russia, prostitution was often the next alternative, the next best thing.
The sexual censuses that were issued in Moscow and Tomsk reinforce the image of habitual relations between privileged men and the women who served them, revealing that students carried on sexual relationships with servants almost as often as they had sex with prostitutes. Of the men surveyed in Moscow who were not virgins, 38 percent had their initial experiences with domestic servants. Among the respondents who claimed to have sexual experience in the Tomsk 1907–8 survey, 47 percent first had sex with servants. A full 17 percent of the students who said they led active sex lives had ongoing relations with servants.[71] Art imitated life in Tolstoy's novel Resurrection . His story of a servant drawn into a sexual intrigue with her employer's nephew was, in his words, "a very common one."[72] Having read a newspaper article about a jury member who recognized a prostitute accused of murder as someone he had long ago seduced, Tolstoy devised a morality tale about a servant turned prostitute and the nobleman responsible for her "fall."[73] Tolstoy's Maslova—the servant girl from the peasantry who was seduced,
[70] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 19.
[71] Chlenov, Polovaia perepis', p. 58; Falevich, "Itogi Tomskoi studencheskoi polovoi perepisi," Sibirskaia vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 23 (June 6, 1910): 270.
[72] Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Vera Traill (New York: Signet, 1961), p. 12.
[73] Alan Hodge, foreword to Resurrection, p. vii.
impregnated, and fired—was a literary creation, but her experience clearly had roots in reality.
Many observers agreed that employers of servants added sexual favors to the rest of household duties. A "huge number" of respondents to the House of Mercy survey wrote things like, "The gentleman seduced me," "The master's son deprived me of my virginity," and "I lost my job when I became pregnant by the master's relative."[74] Shikhman blamed not only the seducers for their behavior, but rich women, some of whom pushed their sons into liaisons with servants to keep them from "unhealthy" sexual practices (e.g., masturbation and sex with prostitutes). To Shikhman, the employer/servant relationship was an anachronistic vestige of the feudal practice of primae noctis, the serf master's right to sleep with a peasant bride on her wedding night.[75] The social and cultural gulf between servants and employers also evoked and reinforced deep-rooted traditions of deference and inequality. Indeed, there was much about domestic servitude that was reminiscent of serfdom.
Although domestic servitude was clearly "the least desirable, the most degrading of all women's work,"[76] We must also acknowledge the other side to servant life. For a peasant woman, even the brutal schedule of a harried urban household might appear light in relation to work in the hut and fields. After all, servants received room and board which often enabled them to save their money at a time when factory women and seamstresses could barely make ends meet. Moreover, we must also keep in mind that the men and women who described the life of a servant in such grim terms may have exaggerated the bad conditions of domestic labor in order to encourage other members of their class to treat their servants more kindly.[77]
Workshops supplied the second largest number of prostitutes. Dubrovskii's census showed that 1,759 prostitutes had formerly worked in the trades, 10 percent of his empirewide total.[78] Oboznenko found that 806 (19 percent) of the prostitutes he interviewed had formerly been in
[74] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 137.
[75] Shikhman, "Tainaia prostitutsiia," p. 103. A member of the legal profession also characterized relations between employers and domestic servants as a holdover from the days of serfdom. Rubinovskii, "O nekotorykh ustranimykh prichinakh prostitutsii," Vestnik prava, no. 5 (May 1905): 151.
[76] Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 61.
[77] A feminist physician, for example, cautioned employers not to damage their servants' self-esteem and to be careful to protect them from the importunities of male family members. Pokrovskaia, O zshertvakh obshchestvennago temperamenta (St. Petersburg, 1902), pp. 52–53.
[78] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. 74–75.
the trades.[79] In 1909, of 361 women who registered as prostitutes in St. Petersburg, 85 (24 percent) reported similar job histories. The House of Mercy also found that 24 percent of the prostitutes they surveyed in 1910 had formerly worked as dressmakers, seamstresses, typographers, coatmakers, milliners, shoemakers, and so on.[80] Prostitutes who had once earned their living in the trades outnumbered the general percentage of female tradeswomen as a whole: when 8 percent of working women in St. Petersburg and Moscow labored in the needle trades, a full 12 percent of Oboznenko's sample were dressmakers alone. If we include women in other needle trades, the percentage rises to 15.[81]
A typical workday for women in Russia's workshops lasted twelve hours for an average salary of 15 rubles a month.[82] This was 2 rubles less than the amount a 1906 government study estimated as the minimum salary by which a single woman could subsist.[83] While the hours were more clearly defined than those for domestic servants, work in the trades was very grueling and workers were still subject to the caprices of employers. Descriptions of shops in Russia universally portrayed the wretched work conditions, overlong hours, and miserable pay. Seasonal layoffs also plagued many of the trades, with tailors working at an "unrelenting" pace from March to June and September to December, but having little or no work at all during the slow months.[84] In 1910, The Tailor's Voice (Golos portnogo ) published an article entitled "How Prostitutes Are Manufactured" ("Kak fabrikuiutsia prostitutki"). Its author wrote in relation to off seasons in the hat trade, "What is left for a weak-willed young girl . . . to do? Frequently, those who are less resolute leave their jobs and go down that slippery slope."[85]
Rose Glickman has commented about women's particular "disadvantages" in the garment trades. Although men and women "had to cope equally" with "the miserable living and working conditions, the abuse and exploitation, the rhythms of a fickle and seasonal industry," women tended to suffer more because they lacked mens "protective cushion
[79] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 22–23.
[80] Zakharov, "Istoriia S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia," p. 282; Depp, "O dannykh ankety," pp. 142–43.
[81] St. Petersburg and Moscow figures from Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 61; Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 22–23.
[82] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," pp. 138–39.
[83] Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, p. 25. Also in Anna Gurevich, "O zhenskom fabrichnom trude i prostitutsii," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 153.
[84] Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 63.
[85] M. B——a (Balabanova), "Kak fabrikuiutsia prostitutki," Golos portnogo, nos. 1–2 (May 10, 1910): 10.
against unemployment." That is, during the slow seasons, men might leave the city to live and work among their families in the countryside. Peasant women, on the other hand, whom custom generally prevented from controlling land, had "more decisively severed their links to the village than had men."[86] They tended to be "from purely proletarian families," and therefore lacked the option of returning home on a periodic basis.[87]
Women also made a fraction of their male co-workers' earnings. In the garment industry, women typically earned less than two-thirds of their male co-workers' pay. Such inequity followed women in all the trades. In 1910, Pavel Pavlov, secretary of a Moscow printer's union, told the Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women that women in the printing industry earned only 40 percent of their male counterparts' salaries. Since this was not enough to make ends meet, women needed to find money from another source, often from "so-called 'supplemental' [podrabotyvan'ia ] prostitution." Women also suffered from an extremely low "cultural level." Although most male printers could read and write, 40 percent of female printers surveyed in Moscow could not. "At first glance, it seems ironic," commented Pavlov, "that such a large percentage of illiterates are engaged in printing books!!!"[88]
Women had another problem in the trades—"an absence of respect" from the administration. Shikhman described Russia's workshops as "seedbeds of alcoholism, depravity, crime, and prostitution."[89] He was one of many observers to characterize workshop foremen as vulgar and ignorant men who exploited their employees and subjected them to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Not only did women face "vulgarities and cynicism" from their bosses and supervisors, they could also encounter disdain and harassment from their co-workers. In a remark highly unusual for a union activist, Pavlov conceded that "cultural backwardness by the male workers themselves also allows itself to be felt."[90]
The link between prostitution and the trades was reinforced in the educated public's mind by Crime and Punishment: Sonia turned her first trick after she was driven out of a garment shop by an abusive state
[86] Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 65, 103.
[87] According to a 1907 survey of Moscow typographic workers, 52 percent of male printers maintained ties to the countryside, as opposed to only 40 percent of female printers. Pavel S. Pavlov, "O polozhenii zhenshchiny-rabotnitsy v Moskovskoi tipografskoi promyshlennosti," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 125.
[88] Ibid., p, 126.
[89] Shikhman, "Tainaia prostitutsiia," p. 105.
[90] Pavlov, "O polozhenii zhenshchiny-rabotnitsy," pp. 127–28.
official who accused her of sewing a shirt collar improperly. Harangued by her stepmother for having deprived the family of her income, Sonia left their house at 6 P.M., returned three hours later, and "silently placed 30 rubles on the table."[91] Though women workers were not ordinarily reading Dostoevsky, they were acutely aware that the "wages of sin" exceeded what they earned at "honest labor." For women hunched over a sewing machine for most of their waking life, the thought that a few hours on the streets could net twice their monthly salary must have been tempting indeed. Most women in the trades did not, of course, appear on medical-police lists, but it appears that many may have occasionally relied on the "supplemental" labor of which Pavlov spoke. The author of The Contemporary Structure and Prostitution (Sovremennyi stroi i prostitutsiia ) wrote how the "endless, dulling, monotonous work" of the needle trades could weaken a woman's will. Under such circumstances, "often a ticket to the theater or a cheap gift can decide matters."[92]
The Nizhnii Novgorod fair provides a good case study. Many of the women who traveled there in the summer were not full-time prostitutes, but peasants and workers who came to take advantage of local medical-police rules that provided them with temporary yellow tickets. At summer's end, they would return to their villages and regular jobs. One study of 336 women registered at the fair showed that 42 percent were indeed prostitutes, but 33 percent turned to prostitution as a supplemental trade, and 25 percent prostituted themselves only at fairtime. As one physician reported, prostitution meant "necessary help" toward their existence.[93]
A smaller percentage of prostitutes came from mills and factories. Dubrovskii found that only 765 women (4 percent of registered prostitutes) in 1889 had been factory laborers. Four hundred thirty-nine prostitutes (10 percent) interviewed by Oboznenko had formerly worked in factories.[94] Even after the industrialization drive at the century's end, only 85 women (14 percent) from the House of Mercy's study had been
[91] As a seamstress, Sonia earned 15 kopecks a day. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, pp. 19-19.
[92] Gremiachenskii, Sovremennyi stroi i prostitutsiia, p. 18.
[93] Although women in Nizhnii Novgorod brothels tended to collect a set wage from their madams (between 30 and 100 rubles for the duration of the fair), tips in the more prestigious houses could mean more than 1,000 additional rubles. Yet the fair might also mean exposure to venereal disease as well; more than 50 percent of both brothel prostitutes and odinochki in 1904 contracted syphilis. Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 10; A. Orglert, "Nizhegorodskii iarmarochnyi vrachebno-politseiskii komitet za iarmarku 1904. g.," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 7 (July 1905): 1040–45.
[94] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. 74–75; Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 22–23. Both percentages include "cigarette girls" (papirosnitsy ).
factory laborers.[95] Medical-police committee records for newly registering prostitutes in St. Petersburg gave a still smaller figure of 30 (8 percent) in 1909. The former factory workers among new registrants in 1913 rose only slightly—to 39 women (9 percent).[96]
Contemporary descriptions attest to the exhaustion and degradation workers suffered in Russia's filthy, unventilated factories. Despite protective labor legislation, industrialists generally enjoyed the government's blessing to exact from workers as much as they could. Women, in particular, suffered from oppression particular to their sex: rates of pay much lower than men's, humiliating body searches by male personnel at the close of the day, and other forms of sexual harassment.[97] When the House of Mercy interviewed Petersburg prostitutes, it learned that former factory workers had labored an average of three years in factories (from two months to twelve years), for workdays at least twelve hours long at an average of 13 rubles a month. This was, of course, 4 rubles short of the 17 ruble salary established as the minimum required for women. Of eighty-five women interviewed, fifty-one had even less pay at their disposal since they sent money home to their families.[98] Fines for "truancies" like time off for childbirth also eroded women's salaries. Many observers agreed with the writer who concluded that "all the conditions of the woman worker's life . . . push her toward the street."[99] Indeed, one author repeated a story about female workers at St. Petersburg's Laferm tobacco factory. When the women requested a raise from their boss, he, like the hosiery manufacturer in the epigraph to this section, contemptuously told them, "If you earn too little here, you can pick up extra money on the street."[100]
Russian female factory labor was what one cleric called a "Hell more terrible than Dante's ninth circle."[101] Why, then, did Russian factories
[95] Although some of these women held jobs as hatters, beltmakers, and shoemakers, they were labeled factory workers because of labor conditions. Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 140.
[96] Zakharov, "Istoriia S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia," p. 282; Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1913 g., p. 99.
[97] See Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 106–14, 141–45; Ariadna V. Tyrkova, "O zhenskom trude i prostitutsii," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 166.
[98] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 140.
[99] "Nabliudatel'," "Pervyi s"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Russkii pechatnik, no. 17 (May 13, 1910): 4.
[100] Quoted in Pokrovskaia, "Zhenskii trud v Rossii: Fabrichno-zavodskaia rabotnitsa," Zhenskii vestnik, no. 9 (September 1913): 182. Hosiery manufacturer quoted in Kollontai, "Zadachi s"ezda," p. 13.
[101] Mikhail A[rkhimandrit], Zhenshchina-rabotnitsa (St. Petersburg, 1906), quoted in Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 145.
send relatively few women to the streets as professional prostitutes? As we have seen, prostitutes who had formerly worked as servants and tradeswomen exceeded the general percentages of these workers among the female working population. But we see a striking contrast for factory work. As early as 1890, it accounted for 20 percent of women's occupations in St. Petersburg; both the real numbers and proportions of women in factories would rise steadily thereafter. Nonetheless, the percentage of registered prostitutes who had worked in factories did not rise above 14.
Elistratov believed that servants were more likely than factory women to turn to prostitution because of the latter's class solidarity. Unlike servants, who were "isolated in some remote cell of a primitive domestic economy," factory women were relatively independent, more likely to draw on inner strength and social support.[102] Only just recently, Barbara Engel has revived Elistratov's argument, suggesting that factory women's "greater opportunity for mutual support and collective action" helped diminish their numbers among prostitutes.[103] At the turn of the century, the feminist physician Mariia Pokrovskaia attributed the statistically disproportionate numbers of factory women to their higher "intellectual level." During her volunteer work at Sunday meetings for the OPMD, she observed that factory women and seamstresses demonstrated a greater eagerness to learn and tended to be more literate. Pokrovskaia concluded that rather than corrupting women, factory work actually "saved" them.[104]
These explanations serve to help sort out the problem, but they also betray the sympathies of the authors. Pokrovskaia appears to have been trying to counter the sense among privileged society that the working class was inherently licentious.[105] Elistratov is guilty of romanticizing the female proletariat as material ripe for revolution. Both he and Engel take it for granted that prostitutes suffered from alienation and lack of "mutual support." Yet female artisans who worked in small shops with other women and did not have the din of loud factory machines to interfere with their conversations also had much opportunity for mutual support.
In fact, prostitution sometimes seemed to be a consequence rather than a casualty of support, if we can trust those prostitutes who attrib-
[102] Elistratov, "Bednost' i prostitutsiia," pp. 6–7.
[103] Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes," p. 31.
[104] Pokrovskaia, O zhertvakh, p. 52.
[105] Ibid., pp. 52–53.
uted their trade to the persuasion of girlfriends. As Raisa Depp, a Women's Progressive Party member who described the results of the House of Mercy survey to the 1910 Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women, heard from several former factory workers, "Oh, my girlfriends got into it and then I myself did."[106] "Persuasion" figured strongly as a reason why women turned to prostitution and actually placed second after various factors of economic need among artisans and domestic servants, according to the House of Mercy study. Overall, 7 percent of the women in Oboznenko's survey, 9 percent of those in the House of Mercy study, and 13 percent of women who registered in 1910 answered that they followed a friend's example or had been persuaded by girlfriends.[107]
Engel mentions something more plausible, the stability of the factory work force.[108] Unlike tradeswomen, who had to face the annual cycles of layoffs, and servants, who changed jobs frequently, factory women tended to remain at their posts. According to Glickman, one-quarter of the women surveyed in 1900 from St. Petersburg's cotton industry had worked at their jobs for a period of six to fifteen years and another 11 percent had been at their factory for more than fifteen years. Glickman's research also revealed that a significant number of women had parents working in their factory: among 5,000 women in Kostroma province, 19 percent had both parents there, 10 percent had their father, and 5 percent had their mother.[109] Thus, the stability that accounted for these women's "proletarianization" may have served to keep women out of prostitution at a greater rate than women in domestic service or the artisanal trades.
Other former jobs listed by registered prostitutes included actress, teacher, dancer, nurse, cashier, salesclerk, day laborer, and laundress. The last two categories involved long days for abysmally low wages. The House of Mercy survey estimated that unskilled workers and laundresses earned approximately 50 kopecks a day for work that lasted from 6 A.M. until 8 or 9 P.M.[110] Perhaps for some women prostitution seemed
[106] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 141.
[107] Oboznenko, Podnadzornaia prostitutsiia, pp. 23–24; Depp, "O dannykh ankety," pp. 138–40; Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta, pp. 19–21. Walkowitz asserts, "Most prostitutes were recruited into prostitution by other women." Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 201.
[108] Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes," p. 31.
[109] Glickman, Russian Factory Women, table 17 on p. 100; table 18 on p. 103.
[110] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 142.
a welcome alternative from the long, hard days and insufficient compensation.
Salesclerks and cashiers faced a situation that differed in kind, for they were paid relatively high salaries of approximately 20 rubles per month.[111] Nevertheless, a recent study of Russian salesclerks demonstrates that they were exploited as badly as workshop employees.[112] For women in particular, the visibility of work at a store counter brought additional economic pressures to bear: in order to greet the public, a female clerk needed to dress in fashionable clothes and wear nice shoes. New Russia (Novaia Rus ') published a letter from a female salesclerk who admitted, "Many clerks, cashiers, and other service personnel increase their budget with evening strolls."[113] A woman named Aizenshtein also wrote to this paper:
The salesmen think we all are prostitutes. And in fact, it is hard to find even one virtuous girl at the New Aleksandrovskii Market. The first thing the shop owner or manager says when you ask for a job is "Are you ticklish?" If you bat your eyes or nod your head suggestively, the job is yours. But if you don't agree, you might as well forget it .
The boss will court you, pay you on time, treat you politely and give you presents, etc., until you "grow heavy in the waist." But when you "grow heavy," he will drop you and maybe even fire you. After that you follow in the footsteps of many other salesgirls until you get sick and wind up in the hospital.[114]
The path from "honest" work to prostitution could indeed lead to the hospital, but the road was by no means straight nor did it end in the venereal ward. Most women with syphilis could look forward to being discharged. They could also comfort themselves with the fact that venereal diseases could do less immediate damage than the occupational injuries and other ailments to which the working class
[111] The House of Mercy study arrived at this figure by averaging salaries that ranged from 4 to 40 rubles per month. Glickman estimates that female salesclerks earned between 180 and 200 rubles annually. Pokrovskaia provides a figure of 25 to 30 rubles monthly for female salesclerks and female office workers. Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 142; Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 67; Pokrovskaia, "Zhenskii trud v Rossii: Prikazchitsy," Zhenskii vestnik, no. 3 (March 1914): 80.
[112] See Robert Weinberg, "The Politicization of Labor in 1905: The Case of Odessa Salesclerks," Slavic Review 49 (Fall 1990): 427–45.
[113] Quoted in Tyrkova, "O zhenskom trude," p. 166. See also Pokrovskaia, "Zhenskii trud: Prikazchitsy," p. 79.
[114] Aizenshtein, quoted in A. M. Gudvan, "Essays on the History of the Movement of Sales-Clerical Workers in Russia," in Bonnell, The Russian Worker, p. 196 (italics in original).
was prone, such as tuberculosis. Prostitution had distinct disadvantages: social opprobrium, physical intimacy with men who excited no physical desire, risk of disease, and having to live "under surveillance" or operate clandestinely. The risk of diminishing income due to aging, disease, and competition from new entrants was also great. Yet commercial sex also provided the one thing other jobs could not—good money. As one observer admitted, prostitution "gives any pretty girl in the bloom of her youth and beauty much more than she can earn in any other kind of sphere available to a woman."[115] Domestic, shop, or factory labor paid wages that were below subsistence, provided no job security, kept women at work for most of their waking day, left workers susceptible to occupational diseases and injuries, and did not guarantee freedom from sexual exploitation. In effect, women from the lower classes were free to choose from the lesser of several evils.
Observers of prostitution attempted to understand this phenomenon by analyzing who prostitutes were, where they came from, how they lost their virginity, and what kind of life they had known. But this only provided a hazy picture which was further blurred by a reluctance to see prostitution in terms that were not moral. As we have seen, prostitution was often a secondary career, a kind of casual work that supplemented earnings or helped tide women over seasonal unemployment. Even when it was full time, it rarely set the course for a woman's whole existence. It is more realistic to conceive of prostitution as a career path, one part of the life course for many women from the lower classes. Seeing it in those terms does not explain why women became prostitutes, but it does situate prostitution in a social structure, in the world of work. To be sure, prostitution was an expression of culture, society, and political economy, but it was also something very simple—it was a job. And yet, since it was a job not all women chose to pursue, we must also take into account factors other than the laws of the sexual market.
[115] Borodin, "Alkogolizm i prostitutsiia," Trezvost' i berezhlivost', no. 3 (March 1903): 9.
Chapter 4
Explaining Prostitution
"Why did you come to Petersburg?" I began with a certain authority.
"I just came. . . ."
"But you were comfortable enough in your parents' home, weren't you? Warmth, freedom, your own corner —"
"Suppose I tell you that it was worse than here?"
Conversation between Dostoevsky's "underground man" and a prostitute, Notes from Underground
By examining prostitutes' social backgrounds and considering what it meant to labor as a female servant, seamstress, or factory worker in late Imperial Russia, we begin to gain insight into the situations which may have impelled some women to prostitution. Unemployment, hunger, and isolation could act alone or in concert to persuade a young woman that prostitution represented a viable or necessary alternative. At the same time though, because not all women in precarious socioeconomic situations wound up registering as prostitutes, we cannot call poverty the sole axis on which this choice turned.
Having conducted exhaustive studies of prostitution, observers at the turn of the century were aware that many factors contributed to the choice of prostitution. Nonetheless, they tended to approach the question of a prostitute's motivation from a static and linear point of view. At one end of the spectrum, observers dismissed social issues and rooted prostitution in the tendencies of some women toward vice. At the other end, both women and social issues were ignored, with third parties like
pimps and "flesh traders" taking the blame for dragging innocent girls into prostitution against their will. In between was a more persuasive explanation tying prostitution to broad structural causes linked to gender inequalities and Russia's social and economic system. But, like the observers who attributed prostitution to procurers or depraved women, those who relied on structural explanations were inclined to tailor complex realities to suit their comprehensive visions. Moreover, though observers asked many questions and even had at their disposal the subjects of their curiosity—the prostitutes themselves—they tended to distort and ignore the prostitutes' own voices when it came to explaining prostitution.
Speaking for Prostitutes
"She got that yellow ticket because my children were dying of starvation, she sold herself for us!"
Sonia's stepmother, Crime and Punishment
Marxists had the most all-encompassing explanation for prostitution: from their viewpoint it was endemic to capitalism. According to August Bebel, the authority most often invoked on this question by Russian social democrats, prostitution was "A Necessary Institution of the Capitalist World," no different than "the police, standing armies, the Church, and wage-mastership ."[1] Friedrich Engels characterized the number of women who "surrender themselves for money" as "statistically calculable" within the capitalist system.[2] In Russia, Aleksandra Kollontai echoed Bebel and Engels when she described prostitution as "the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labor by capital." Prostitution, wrote Kollontai, reflected the "hypocritical morality of the bourgeois structure." It was a requisite component of a system that "by the structure of its exploitative economy" drove women to the streets.[3] In 1910 Kollontai gave historical immediacy to her analy-
[1] August Bebel, Woman under Socialism, trans. Daniel De Leon (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 146 (emphasis in original).
[2] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 139.
[3] Aleksandra M. Kollontai, "Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It," in Selected Writings, trans. Alix Holt (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 263.
sis by linking the expansion of prostitution in Russia with the economic crisis and government reaction in the wake of the 1905 revolution.[4]
The tsarist policy of licensing streetwalkers and brothels made the Russian state vulnerable to more pointed criticisms from the Left about profiting from the business of sex and bedding down with prostitutes, pimps, and brothelkeepers. A. A. Kuznetsov, an Ekaterinoslav province social-democratic deputy to the State Duma, summed up the Russian socialist position in 1909 during a debate on a law designed to suppress the "trade in women." As a representative of the proletariat, "the consistent and stoic defenders of women's rights," it was his duty to expose the "pathetic, wretched creation of your bourgeois morality." Kuznetsov scorned the bill because the Duma's composition unfairly favored the propertied classes. It was "hypocritical" that the Duma was now talking about protecting women when his colleagues had acted so diligently to keep them out of government. If a female peasant or woman worker had been there, he declared ("to laughter from the Right"), then there may have been something worth discussing. Meanwhile, the government itself acted to degrade women—through permitting the rape of female political prisoners, through protecting and collaborating with brothelkeepers, and through the very process of subjecting prostitution to state licensing and regulation. The law under consideration, argued Kuznetsov, could be no more than a palliative, so long as the economic conditions that fostered prostitution among working and peasant women continued. The true culprit was none other than capitalism.[5]
Surprisingly, revolutionary socialists shared common ground not only with liberals and moderates but with many conservative observers when it came to connecting prostitution with economic hardship. Economic misery among the peasantry and urban lower classes was so widespread in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia that it indeed seemed responsible for the "ruin" of so many young women. Even tsarist bureaucrats could be satisfied with pure economic explanations. Dr. Vasilii Fon-Anrep, an Octobrist member of the State Duma and a former director of the MVD's Medical Department, attributed prostitution to "poverty, hunger, cold, and the frequent impossibility for a hard-
[4] Kollontai, "Zadachi s"ezda," p. 7.
[5] Another socialist deputy blamed prostitution on those gentlemen who persisted in practicing "gentry privilege" through the right of primae noctis, as well as those bourgeois who systematically lowered the wages of working women. Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety, pp. 893–98.
working woman to provide herself with a piece of bread."[6] In 1906, a book published by the MVD's own press made a similar assertion: "The chief root of prostitution undoubtedly lies in our economic conditions. A woman sells her body for the sake of a piece of bread."[7]
Of course, socialists and state officials anticipated different solutions, with tsarist bureaucrats relying on philanthropy and paternalism as palliatives, and revolutionaries awaiting a completely new order. Although socialists recognized that prostitution was woven into the moral fabric of a society that judged male and female sexual behavior and desire by different standards, like Kuznetsov they had faith that, "with the fall of the capitalist system, this disgrace will undoubtedly disappear."[8]
Feminists were less optimistic. They, too, associated prostitution with structural economic factors, but they also focused on gender in terms of the role played by "unbridled male sexuality." Raisa Depp of the Women's Progressive Party first and foremost blamed prostitution on the "total economic precariousness and the difficult legal and everyday [bytovoe ] position of servants, tradeswomen, factory workers, and working women in general." But in second place were "the double standard, abnormal upbringing, and the excessive licentiousness of men's sexual instinct."[9] The feminist physician Mariia Pokrovskaia declared that depravity (raspushchennost '), not physiology, sent men to brothels. She said it loud and clear in her 1902 On the Victims of Social Temperament (O zhertvakh obshchestvennago temperamenta ): "The slavery of women and the depravity of men—here in essence are the chief causes of prostitution!"[10]
Feminists also accused the regulatory system of nurturing commercial vice by giving it semi-legal sanction. Strong feminist sentiments against regulation emerged simultaneously with the rise of an organized women's movement in Russia. At the opening of the 1910 Congress on
[6] Trudy s"ezda bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 32.
[7] V. Nedesheva, Nevskii prospekt (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 11. In 1909, when the princess Elena Saksen-Al'tenburgskaia listed the reasons for prostitution in a memorandum requesting permission to hold what would be the 1910 congress, the ministry's reader made no marginal comments next to Saksen-Al'tenburgskaia's assertion of economic motives. This did not indicate a lackadaisical attitude toward the memo, however, for the reader did see fit to underline a potentially subversive remark about women's lack of rights and the need for "improvement of the legal position of women." TsGIA, Departament obshchikh del, MVD, f. 1284, op. 188, d. 135, "O pervom vserossiiskom s"ezde po bor'by s torgom zhenshchinami," letter of June 29, 1909.
[8] Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety, p. 896.
[9] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 148.
[10] Pokrovskia, O zhertvakh, pp. 25, 31.
the Struggle against the Trade in Women, speech after speech unequivocally demanded the abolition of regulation.[11] In some ways, this reflected the speakers' political pragmatism; it seemed more realistic to rid Russia of nadzor than to persuade men to avoid nonmarital sex or even to grant women equal rights. But the indignation aroused by the injustice of such a gender-based system occasionally served to reverse cause and effect. A woman named Mariia Vakhtina, for example, spoke passionately on behalf of the St. Petersburg Club of the Women's Progressive Party at the 1910 congress. To Vakhtina, prostitution orbited around regulation, rather than the other way round. "[A]s long as we have regulation and its satellite [sputnik ], prostitution," she cried, "not one woman can justly consider herself free under any circumstances!"[12]
Feminists tended to keep gender central to their analysis of prostitution and they usually acknowledged economic issues. Some, however, joined more conservative members of Russian society in turning to an explanation that eliminated the prostitutes' conscious involvement in their trade—forced prostitution. According to this vision, women became prostitutes because they were defrauded, drugged, or coerced into selling sex. Though there were indeed many such instances, the focus on "white slavery" blurred the more prevalent issues and assuaged society's guilt about what prostitution was and how it functioned.[13] Some feminists found white slavery a compelling notion because it completely divested women of any responsibility for their participation in prostitution. Conservatives gravitated toward it because it precluded thoroughgoing social and economic explanations. If commercial sex was something forced on innocent girls, then society had only to locate and punish the perpetrators. A collective sigh of relief could follow, and more troublesome questions about female agency and Russia's social and economic ills could remain unaddressed.
The question of immorality appeared in contemporary discourse as well, sometimes as the true cause of prostitution. But opinion diverged over who in particular was immoral. Was it men with their "depravity," women with their "indecency," or society with its "moral hypocrisy"?[14]
[11] See opening statements by representatives from the All-Russian League of Equal Rights for Women, the Petersburg Women's Club, the German Educational and Auxiliary Society in St. Petersburg, and the Petersburg Club of the Women's Progressive Party, in Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 48–52.
[12] Ibid., p. 52.
[13] See chapter 5 for a discussion of "white slavery" in Russia.
[14] A House of Mercy representative faulted what she termed the "moral hypocrisy" of the Russian intelligentsia. Konopleva, "Otdelenie dlia nesovershennoletnikh," p. 307. Tolstoy accused women of "indecency" in The Kreutzer Sonata, p. 27.
Feminists denounced men for corrupting women, but one could also find observers (usually male) who complained that women themselves were to blame, such as Nikolai Zakharov who asserted that it was impossible to force a woman with "strong moral principles" into prostitution.[15] Leo Tolstoy decried male lust in The Kreutzer Sonata, but he reserved his most strident words for women, who, "like queens, hold 90 percent of the human race as prisoners in slavery and hard labor." Women in the upper classes, with their "naked shoulders" and their "shamelessness," differed only in kind from prostitutes in brothels.[16]
Others singled out what they perceived as lax morality within society in general. But depending on the point of view, immorality could be seen as specific to a particular social class: the decadent, self-indulgent, privileged classes with their romantic intrigues and pornography, or the sexually delinquent lower orders, or even both simultaneously.[17] Among working-class and peasant families, communal sleeping arrangements, mixed sex bathing, and poor parental supervision were believed to create situations that prematurely aroused erotic sensations in the young and paved the way for a girl's first "fall."[18] Dmitrii Dril', a legal consultant for the Ministry of Justice, cited "child neglect" for creating an environment ripe for prostitution, juvenile delinquency, and criminality.[19]
Such an analysis was not limited to officialdom; the feminist Raisa Depp also referred to the "close quarters" of the poor as morally pernicious.[20] In their blanket condemnations of capitalism, socialists might also portray the working-class milieu as a ripe breeding ground for prostitution and sexual vice. A Russian social-democratic newspaper published in Geneva, for example, described how a woman who indulged in occasional prostitution to supplement her income would find that "vice gradually sucks her in completely." The author grounded prostitution in economic inequality, but also blamed the communal sleeping habits of the poor and lack of parental supervision among the working
[15] Zakharov, "Prichiny rasprostraneniia prostitutsii nakhodiatsia ne stol' v ekonomicheskikh, skol' v moral'nykh usloviiakh," in Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 201.
[16] Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, pp. 27, 33.
[17] For an example of someone denouncing the moral caliber of both the poor and the rich, see Griaznov, Publichnye zhenshchiny, p. 16.
[18] See, for example, "K voprosu o merakh bor'by s prostitutsiei i sifilisom," Russkii zhurnal kozhnykh i venericheskikh boleznei, no. 2 (February 1901): 327–28.
[19] Dmitrii A. Dril', "Zabroshennost' detstva, kak mogushchestvennaia prichina detskoi prostitutsii," in Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 85. See Neuberger, Hooliganism, pp. 166-98, for a discussion of this issue.
[20] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 141.
classes.[21] The Bolshevik Anna Gurevich maintained that prostitutes' own families often pushed them into commercial sex. She too warned of the dangers from overcrowding and family sleeping arrangements .[22] Such scenarios often reflected the intelligentsia's fears and fantasies, rather than reality.
A more sweeping form of moral explanation sprang from the school of thought that is inextricably linked in Russia with Veniamin Tarnovskii. Tarnovskii, who was born in 1837 to a small landowning family and lived until 1906, was Russia's chief expert on prostitution, at least as far as the tsarist administration was concerned. A world-famous syphilologist, Tarnovskii had studied medicine at Moscow University, begun his medical career in Kalinkin Hospital, and was on the faculty of the prestigious Imperial Academy of Military Medicine. As a strong advocate of women's education, he helped establish an institute in the 1860s for training midwives in the identification and treatment of syphilis in women and children. In 1872, he was instrumental in setting up women's medical courses at the Medical Surgery Academy, and in 1897 he participated in organizing the Women's Medical Institute. Tarnovskii was appointed to the MVD's Medical Council in 1896.[23] Thus, Tarnovskii bridged the worlds of the Russian doctor and bureaucrat.
Anticipating the rise of anti-regulationist sentiment in Russia, in 1888 Tarnovskii had written Prostitution and Abolitionism (Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm ), a heavy tome that articulated his ideas about prostitution as a trade in need of close monitoring. Tarnovskii's ideas had additional "scientific" grounding in the research of his wife, Praskov'ia Tarnovskaia, whose work on female criminality and prostitution was known throughout Europe.[24] Along with Italy's Cesare Lombroso, Tarnovskii
[21] L. Kruchinina, "Prostitutsiia i prestupnost'," Razsvet, nos. 6–7 (June–July 1904): 152–53. See also Gremiachenskii, Sovremennyi stroi i prostitutsiia, p. 19.
[22] Trudy po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 88–89. Another socialist author described how the "corrupting" influence of the work environment caused a woman worker to grow "indifferent to the question of sexual morality and in that way replenish the ranks of prostitutes." See "Nabliudatel'," "Pervyi s"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," p. 4.
[23] For biographical information on Tarnovskii, see S. P. Arkhangel'skii, V.M. Tarnovskii (Leningrad, 1966), esp. pp. 5–22, 74. See also Arkhangel'skii, Gorbovitskii, Pavlov, Podvysotskaia, and Shteinlukht, "Kratkii ocherk razvitiia dermatologii i venerologii," p. 46; P. V. Kozhevnikov, "Veniamin Mikhailovich Tarnovskii," Vestnik dermatologii i venerologii, no. 3 (May–June 1951): 46–48. Kalinkin Hospital would be renamed in his honor.
[24] On Tarnovskaia's influence in Europe, see Corbin, Women for Hire, pp. 301–8. The works of Praskov'ia Tarnovskaia (known in Europe as Pauline Tarnowsky) include "Klassy vyrozhdaiushchikhsia v sovremennom obshchestve," in Vestnik klinicheskoi i sudebnoi psikhiatrii (1887); Étude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Paris, 1889); and Les femmes homicides (Paris, 1908).
and Tarnovskaia were adherents of the school of "criminal anthropology" which held that social deviance derived from inborn genetic characteristics.
Tarnovskii attributed prostitution to a special type of female pathology stemming from a genetic predisposition and imbalance. Some prostitutes might seem physically attractive, but a closer look would reveal evidence of their "physical shortcomings"—improperly formed ears, different skull shapes, and so on.[25] Prostitutes' personalities also betrayed their biological type. Though they could be compassionate and even self-sacrificing, prostitutes were nonetheless "moral cripples," different from "honest" women in their psychological and physical inability to engage in any other labor but commercial sex. "The core of prostitution," he cautioned his colleagues in 1897, "is always comprised of those . . . women who have a sick loathing toward any work and are so morally deadened that the disgrace of venal caresses is relatively less burdensome for them than any other occupation, any other wages."[26] To Tarnovskii, the prostitute was a threat to society, "a morally depraved creature who for the most part is also physically abnormal."[27]
In Prostitution and Abolitionism, Tarnovskii argued that regulation was the only way to keep such women under control. As he confidently entitled one of its chapters, "The Proper Regulation of Prostitution Reduces the Spread of Syphilis and Does Not, As the Abolitionists Believe, Promote Its Development."[28] Tarnovskii drew his aggressive defense of regulation from current European debates over the efficacy of controlling prostitution. Borrowing arguments and statistical data from like-minded physicians in the West, he claimed that regulation's regimen of identification, inspection, and incarceration played a crucial role in preventing prostitutes from spreading venereal disease.
Prostitutes occupied a necessary rung in the social ladder as outlets for uncontrollable male desire, but they could not be trusted to care for their own health, nor had they qualms about infecting clients. Tarnovskii wrote, "Let the do-gooders and the compassionate people who are unacquainted with these matters think that one need only inculcate a prostitute with the principles of morality and give her honest wages, and
[25] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, p. 187.
[26] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii,' pp. 10-11.
[27] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, p. 243.
[28] Tarnovskii, "Pravil'naia reglamentatsiia prostitutsii umen'shaet rasprostranenie sifilisa, a ne sposobstvuet ego razvitiiu, kak utverzhdaiut abolitsionisty," in ibid., p. 10.
she will immediately become a dignified citizen and exemplary family member." Such "hypocrisy" and "naïveté" were contradicted by "history." It was neither ignorance nor insufficient moral guidance that prevented the prostitute from seeking medical treatment; rather, it was her own genetic makeup and evil proclivities.[29]
The head of St. Petersburg's medical-police committee, Aleksandr Fedorov, also relied on a single-faceted moral explanation, but it was one that had little to do with Tarnovskii's convoluted venture into physiology and psychology. According to Fedorov, "statistics" proved that a woman turned to prostitution because she "'wanted to be a lady' or she 'went after the easy money.'" Writing from the standpoint of the committee, he maintained that women became prostitutes for one reason alone: "we from our angle recognize only [laziness]; all the other [motives] scarcely have any kind of significance."[30] Fedorov had little evidence to substantiate his claim, but his conviction about prostitution as a result of sloth probably spared him (and the medical police) any anxiety over burdening desperate girls and women with a yellow ticket.
Fedorov, Tarnovskii, and House of Mercy and ROZZh members were well acquainted with prostitutes through their work in medical-police committees, hospitals, and philanthropic activities. Though it is unlikely that their experiences with prostitutes affirmed narrow models of "laziness," "depravity," "white slavery," or "moral laxity" as plausible explanations for prostitution, they nonetheless gravitated toward monochromatic answers that blamed individual women who either went wrong or were led astray. Other observers, particularly from the socialist and feminist camps, usually rejected views that ignored structural phenomena. Nevertheless, their abstract approach to prostitution and their determination to paint prostitutes as simple victims of capitalism or women's oppression also obscured the true picture. Reliance on one overarching reason to "explain" prostitution both weakened the observers' arguments and deprived prostitutes of their humanity. Privileged society lost sight of the prostitutes as individuals as it groped for rationales that served larger crusades for increased surveillance, political reform, tougher laws, socialist revolution, women's rights, and moral purity.
[29] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 43, 133–40, 243.
[30] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 18.
Speaking for Themselves
God was angry with me—Now I seek oblivion in gaiety and wine.
St. Petersburg prostitute (1910)
When we look at the reasons women themselves gave to observers about their decision to become prostitutes, we develop a more nuanced picture of why they went down that "slippery slope." Although the answers prostitutes gave to interviewers about their motivation can raise as many questions as they answer, at the very least they tell us something about how prostitutes represented themselves to officials and members of the intelligentsia. Abbreviated phrases like "out of isolation" (odinochestvo ) and "I wanted to make money" only reflect one aspect of what was no doubt a large and complex truth, but they are a starting point for an understanding of these women's choices, and they put issues of causality in a clearer perspective.
Fedorov's list of motives from 146 women who were registered in St. Petersburg in 1888 markedly contradicts his assertion that laziness was the only true factor (see table 8). In fact, most of the women cited economic problems as the impetus for their choice. Despite overlaps and repetitions, the answers have been kept in their original form because Fedorov actually reproduced a prostitute's words rather than molded them to fit a predetermined category. I have divided the answers from all four sources into these categories of explanation: economics, personal reasons, external influences, family reasons, physical reasons, and (when relevant) denial.
Fedorov's study, Oboznenko's survey, which collected and synthesized answers from 4,220 prostitutes registered in Petersburg from 1891 to 1893, and the March 1910 House of Mercy survey, distributed to 600 prostitutes in St. Petersburg, suggest that economic factors were dominant (see tables 9 and 10).
The final survey reflects answers given by the 463 prostitutes who registered with the St. Petersburg medical-police committee in 1910 (see table 11). In contrast to the preceding three samples, most of these respondents simply stated a preference for prostitution over other forms of labor. If we take these answers literally, economic reasons (which have been tallied as anything related to need, wages, profit, poverty, and loss of job or breadwinner) assume first place in all but the last sample. In
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Fedorov, although only one woman gave "extreme need" as the reason she became a prostitute, economic circumstances of one form or another influenced most of the stated motives. Essentially, 81 women (55 percent) told the medical-police committee that they became prostitutes because they needed or wanted money. Fedorov's total resembles that of the first House of Mercy sample, where 304 women (51 percent of the prostitutes surveyed) explained the choice of prostitution by virtue of responses related to their economic situations. Though their answers ranged from "poverty" to the more relativistic "it's easy work," economics were a clear motive. A smaller but still significant percentage of
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women (42 percent, or a total of 1,776) provided economic reasons in Oboznenko's study. Thus the figure of just 21 percent (96 women) compiled from interviews of newly registered prostitutes in 1910 stands in sharp relief to the other surveys.
In Fedorov, 40 women (27 percent) provided answers that indicated something more specific about their personalities. These answers ranged from vague assertions of "personal desire," how they "wanted to do so," and "glad to do it" (total of 22 women, or 15 percent), to their statements of a preference for "a gay life" (8 women, or 5 percent), to the self-deprecating "out of stupidity" and "frivolity" (6 women, or 4 percent). Despite Fedorov's association between prostitution and laziness, only 3 women (2 percent) gave answers that directly connoted sloth: they "got out of the habit of working" or "didn't want to work."
Oboznenko's sample also included a noteworthy number of women who worked as prostitutes out of "personal desire" (765 women, or 18 percent) and "stupidity and frivolity" or because they "wanted to lead a gay life" (155 women, or 4 percent). "Laziness" figured more prominently here, with 331 women (8 percent) giving answers categorized in
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that manner. We must recall, however, that Oboznenko's study of 4,220 women was almost thirty times larger than Fedorov's. It made sense, therefore, for Oboznenko to conflate the responses into broad categories. As a result, categories like "personal desire" and "laziness" might incorporate responses that the other surveys conveyed more literally.
By contrast, relatively few of the women from the House of Mercy survey spoke of laziness (16 women, or just 3 percent) or even personal desire (15 women, or 3 percent). Nonetheless, if we add up the remaining answers—freedom or independence, "a wish to rest" (zhelanie otdokhnut '), finery (prel'stilas' nariadami ), "attraction to the depraved life" (vlechenie k razvratnoi zhizni ), "frivolity" (legkomyslie ), "bad tendencies" (durnyiia naklonnosti ), "isolation" (odinochestvo ), "bitterness" (s goriia and ozloblinnost ') and "complicated issues" (zaputannyia dela )—personal reasons account for another 56 women (9 percent) for a total of 87 women or 15 percent.
The greatest percentage of women who gave personal reasons came from the 1910 registration lists. There, 213 prostitutes (a conspicuous 46 percent) asserted their unwillingness to do permanent work (94 women, or 20 percent), their preference for the life of a prostitute (61, or 13 percent), bitterness (26, or 6 percent), feelings of boredom (11, or 2 percent), their tendency toward frivolity (11, or 2 percent), isolation (5, or 1 percent) and their desire for a constant change of men (4, or under 1 percent).
The set of answers from the 1910 registration lists is especially perplexing because of its overlap with the House of Mercy survey. Both were conducted under House of Mercy auspices, both were done in 1910, and both originated in St. Petersburg. Why, then, should the answers reflecting personal reasons appear as discordant as the House of Mercy's 13 percent and the registration list's 46 percent? By the same token, how can we explain the fact that the economic reasons are 51 percent in the House of Mercy sample and 21 percent in the other?
Part of the solution can be found in a consideration of the purpose of each survey. The first was spurred by a request to collect information on women's labor and prostitution from the International Abolitionist Federation (Mezhdunarodnyi soiuz abolitsionistov) to the House of Mercy's Board of Trustees (Popechitel'nyi komitet). The board, along with "many ladies [damy ] from different women's organizations," distributed questionnaires to prostitutes in the capital. Among the ladies who distributed the questionnaires was Raisa Depp, who presented the
results to the 1910 Congress on the Struggle against the Trade in Women.[31] The collection of responses, therefore, involved female activists who had been instructed to determine how labor conditions impinged on the respondents' choice of prostitution. We are not privy to the questions they asked, but the overall focus may have elicited answers more oriented to economic issues. As we saw in the third chapter, these questions concerned the women's work history and experiences in close detail. It is quite possible that the questions themselves, as well as the questioners' expectations and communication of sympathies, affected a respondent's decision about how she would characterize her motivation.
The second survey also involved the House of Mercy's Board of Trustees, but in its capacity as having the right to oversee the inscription of all St. Petersburg prostitutes. Consequently, the answers derived from the information new registrants provided the St. Petersburg medical-police committee. The committee member responsible here was often a volunteer from the House of Mercy or ROZZh whose main role was to apprise new registrants of their option to enter a halfway house and to make sure that no one was entering prostitution against her will.[32] Any woman who emphasized her economic desperation or reservations about prostitution would have been confronted with the (no doubt unwelcome) prospect of dealing with a lady intent on dissuading her from registering. As a member of the ROZZh reminded the city duma in a memo, "not one prostitute in St. Petersburg has been registered until a lady-patroness has had a face-to-face talk with her and has exhausted all her means to shake this girl's decision to break formally with honest labor once and for all."[33] Under such circumstances, a registrant's characterization of her choice as a straightforward, personal decision would have been a less wearing strategy.
Fedorov and Oboznenko compiled their data based on medical-police committee registration lists as well, but their research preceded the permission given to the House of Mercy and ROZZh to attend registration interviews. The House of Mercy had the right as early as 1864 to send a member to medical-police committee meetings, but its opportunity to interview new registrants developed later, in conjunction with
[31] Depp, "O dannykh ankety," p. 137.
[32] Chapter 6 discusses the work of the House of Mercy and ROZZh.
[33] "Zakliuchenie Komiteta Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin po dokladu Obshchago prisutstviia gorodskoi upravy 'ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei,'" Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskago gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2060–61.
a partnership with the ROZZh, which was not organized until 1900.[34] Consequently, the prostitutes in Fedorov's and Oboznenko's samples supplied their reasons to an official with a different kind of stake in their responses.
Factors relating to the setting for the collection of the answers and the prostitutes' attitudes better illuminate these studies, but they do not necessarily help us determine how to weigh the question of economic versus personal reasons. A reminder about the class backgrounds of the respondents should provide some missing perspective: almost all of these women were from the peasantry and working classes. That is, we cannot discount financial motives, whether they were counted as primary or not. Although a large percentage of prostitutes did not trace their decision to economic need, some form of economic need—whether it was the desire for easy money or simply more money—informed most of their choices. The fact that a woman had to choose between a job that would not pay her even a subsistence wage and the "gay life" of a "fallen woman" was clearly an issue of privilege and class. Women at the top of the trade could earn upwards of 500 rubles a month. Even the poorest prostitute would net 40 rubles a month, more than twice as much as most working women.[35] Thus, even when prostitutes would account for their choice with answers like "the life of a prostitute is gay," they were essentially depicting an economic situation. The decision stemmed from their inability as poor women to emulate the elegance of their well-to-do female employers and the wealthy women they admired on the street. In simple parlance, they "wanted to be a lady."[36]
That is not to say that we should read all of the "personal" reasons as economic ones. Instead, we simply need to be aware of the complexity of these women's situations, as well as the circumstances under which they responded to the questions. Could a one-word answer or an abbreviated phrase accurately describe something that was often gradual and resulted from a confluence of factors? A vague response like "personal desire" might indicate a woman's reluctance to discuss her reasons for
[34] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa S.-Peterburga v bor'be s prostitutsiei," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, nos. 11–12 (November–December 1905): 1873.
[35] Fedorov, Pozornyi promysel, pp. 5–6.
[36] Such motivation differs little from that of prostitutes in the late Soviet era for whom, as one writer allowed, prostitution was the "single exit from poverty." Mark Popovskii, "Sovetskaia prostitutka—professiia, kotoroi net," Grani, no. 132 (April–June 1984): 131. I am grateful to Dena Schoen for this reference.
becoming a prostitute, defiance of the questioner, just as easily as it could reflect a plain reticence when it came to answering questions. As Christine Stansell perceptively argues about prostitutes interviewed in nineteenth-century New York City, such answers might also imply a rejection of the "paradigm of victimization," in favor of a woman's "own agency in entering prostitution."[37] For some of these women, prostitution may have been a form of rebellion, one of the few paths that led women in a patriarchal culture somewhere new and exciting. One woman who registered in 1910 called prostitution her chance to live "independently and autonomously" (samostoiatel'no i nezavisimo ). In Richard Stites's words, "Motivations seem to have been a complex mixture of a milieu of poverty, a perception of poverty, rational economic choice, a feeling of hopelessness, and a spirit of rebelliousness against orderly society and its ways."[38] Or, as a prostitute responded to one questioner, the issues were "complicated."
In the third grouping of responses, external influence, we see how many women attributed their choice to the influence and machinations of others—persuasion, bad influences, enticement, seduction, or some kind of coercion. Eleven prostitutes (8 percent) in Fedorov's sample fit this category, and 358 prostitutes (also 8 percent) surveyed by Oboznenko made similar claims. In these two studies, not one prostitute's trade was attributed to force. Conversely, 163 women (27 percent) from the House of Mercy survey answered that they had become prostitutes as a result of external influences, 6 of whom had been forced (1 percent). Ninety-six (21 percent) of those who registered in 1910 also referred to external influences. These respondents did not indicate force per se, but 21 of them (5 percent) noted how they had been "under the influence of madams, prostitutes, and pimps, and unable to refuse."
What can we conclude from these numbers? Most important, they demonstrate that society's fears about "white slaves," women who were sold into prostitution against their will, were way out of proportion to reality. A woman's choice of prostitution could be influenced by peers or even madams and procurers, but in the overwhelming number of cases the decision was within her power.
Third parties who stood to profit from a woman's turn to prostitution as a trade made a significant appearance in the House of Mercy survey only. In Fedorov, only 2 of the 11 women claiming external influ-
[37] Stansell, City of Women, p. 178.
[38] Stites, "Prostitute and Society in Pre-revolutionary Russia," p. 353.
ence (just 1 percent of the total) were "enticed"; in Oboznenko, 54 (also 1 percent) imputed their decision to a procurer; among registrants in 1910 the figure of 5 percent (for 21 women) was significantly higher. If we add the number of women who answered something about enticement, procurers, seduction, or force in the House of Mercy survey, however, we reach a more notable total of 96 (16 percent). Several questions are raised by this incongruity. Did the House of Mercy questioners encourage respondents to claim that their entrance into prostitution was against their will? Was there a difference between the attitudes of medical-police committee registrants and the more general sample of 600 prostitutes? Did women registering at the medical-police committee stress the voluntary nature of their decision so as to avoid further bureaucratic complications?
There were also relatively few women in the House of Mercy survey who turned to prostitution because of what I have classified as family reasons. In Fedorov, 6 percent (9 women) identified something relating to their family circumstances; in Oboznenko, 4 percent (167 women); 5 percent (28 women) in the House of Mercy survey; 6 percent (27 women) among 1910 registrants. Once again, though, economic problems could have been behind the conviction that prostitution represented a viable alternative to their present domestic situation.
A fourth category of answers involves health and alcoholism. Fedorov listed 5 answers of this sort and Oboznenko included 124 (3 percent of each sample), 27 of which covered what he or some women interpreted as "sexual need." The House of Mercy found only 13 women (2 percent) who connected their prostitution with alcoholism and listed another three (half of 1 percent) who became prostitutes because a sexual partner gave them a venereal disease. Thirty-one of the women who registered in 1910 (7 percent) attributed their motivation to alcohol and disease.
Unlike Fedorov, who as chief of St. Petersburg's medical-police committee, had an interest in representing registration as voluntary, Oboznenko and the House of Mercy listed reasons that have been placed into a fifth category of "denial." This included women who provided no reasons, did not identify themselves as prostitutes, or had been registered against their will. Oboznenko's grouping of "unknown reasons" (195 answers, or 5 percent) is an intriguing category. Unfortunately, we do not know whether the respondents provided this answer themselves or it simply reflected Oboznenko's lack of information. As for the 324 women (8 percent) who said they were not prostitutes, it is indeed plau-
sible that some had been inscribed against their will; the State Senate did not rule against involuntary registration until 1892, nor was its ruling consistently obeyed. There is also a possibility that such responses signified some women's way of registering a complaint. Also included here are the 25 women who registered because someone issued them a license, they had no passport, or "just in case." Only two women blamed the police for their yellow ticket in the House of Mercy survey, but one specifically attributed her registration to police persecution.
Regulation played an important role in closing the gap between turning a few tricks for "supplemental" wages and engaging in prostitution as a full-time trade. The medical-police system compelled those women reined in by policemen and medical-police agents to choose between one and the other. Abuses in the registration process eliminated that choice for the women who were given no option but to trade in their passport for a yellow ticket. Judging by the surveys, however, the percentage of women who explained their trade by saying "They took away my passport and gave me a ticket" is negligible compared to women who attributed their profession to more voluntaristic motives.
To attempt to explain why one woman would prefer to sweat for fourteen hours behind a noxious machine rather than work as a prostitute is really to venture into the murky territory of individual personality. It is helpful to consider the turn to prostitution according to what two British prostitutes in 1980 called "poverty and women's refusal of poverty."[39] The second factor is central here for it takes into account the crucial elements of will and perception. Even the most insightful observers in prerevolutionary Russia stopped short, however, before acknowledging that prostitution may have represented a conscious and positive decision for some women—a refusal of poverty, rather than a mere consequence of it.
Prostitution can partly be explained in terms of how women perceived their economic position and how the alternative of prostitution may have looked from their particular vantage point. Desperation may have motivated some, even many women, but we have also seen that dire straits or workplace misery did not lie in every prostitute's past. It is, indeed, difficult to argue that a direct correlation existed between workplace exploitation and prostitution in light of the small percentage of former factory workers among registered prostitutes. The decision of
[39] Margaret Valentino and Mavis Johnson, "On the Game and On the Move," in Prostitutes—Our Life, ed. Jaget, p. 26.
some saleswomen to "increase their budget with evening strolls" also illustrates how prostitution did not necessarily spell the difference between starvation and survival. Instances where women turned to prostitution for reasons as noble or as desperate as those of Sonia, who "sold herself" to keep her family from starving, were not unknown. Nevertheless, they appear much less frequently than situations wherein prostitution was a conscious attempt not simply to survive, but to live what was perceived as a better life. As much as observers may have liked to find a Sonia (or her daughters) among the prostitutes they interviewed, she remained mostly a literary invention.
When one reads about conditions of female labor in tsarist Russia, it is tempting to ask why so few women traded their fourteen-hour jobs for the life of a "fallen woman." If workplace oppression was enough to send a woman to the streets, we might expect to see not tens of thousands of prostitutes, but millions. Relatively few women became prostitutes, though. The vast majority chose to remain at their regular jobs (as long as they could). This should tell us that individual characteristics also helped shape a woman's decision. Perhaps these "characteristics" can be found in a woman's familial background, sexual history, and workplace experiences, but they may also be more elusive.
In explaining prostitution, observers fell along a spectrum that ran from individual volition to coercion. Tarnovskii and Fedorov saw it as the result of individual failings of girls who had fallen, of girls endowed by their heredity with evil propensities, or of girls unable to resist the lure of the streets. These critics gave women full responsibility for their actions, thereby exonerating Russian society and all others who were implicated in the business of prostitution. Socialists like Kollontai and Kuznetsov chose to blame capitalism, while feminists like Pokrovskaia and Depp focused on the oppression of women. In contrast to Tarnovskii and Fedorov, they completely deprived prostitutes of agency. Other observers sought refuge in the most comfortable explanation of all: instead of involving bad girls, prostitution involved bad boys, a few criminals who forced women to trade in sex against their will.
All of these explanations eradicated the choices and constraints felt by women who became prostitutes and those who did not, making it seem as though entering the trade was preordained and random. The evidence, however, suggests that explanations are better found in seeing both the individual and her larger circumstances. Though we cannot
discount poverty and despair as weighty factors in determining how a woman would respond to her work situation, neither can we ignore other less tangible motives. Observers expected prostitutes to represent their motivation by mutually exclusive categories, when in fact prostitution reflected circumstances and perceptions that were mutually influential. Prostitution was not a dot along a linear spectrum; it was a synthesis—of situations, choices, attitudes, and misfortunes.
Chapter 5
"Public Women" in Public Houses
Shabby sofas upholstered in scarlet,
Dusty tassels of doorway hangings . . .
Tradesman, gambler, officer, student
In this room, with the glasses jingling . . .
Hardly human, the hand that glided
Over the nudes in this magazine.
And the hand of a wanton scoundrel
Pressed that bell-push covered with grime .
Hark! Across the thick pile of carpets,
Jingling spurs, laughter muffled by doors . . .
Can this house be truly a dwelling?
Is this inhuman destiny ours?
Aleksandr Blok, "Degradation" (1911)
Tolerated houses of prostitution (doma terpimosti or publichnye doma ) officially came into existence with the 1843 implementation of regulations modeled on those for France's maisons de tolérance . Throughout the nineteenth century, official opinion remained firmly on the side of licensing, with brothels located in around 200 cities of the Russian empire at the turn of the century.[1] Physicians and policemen maintained that state-supervised brothels, with their prohibition against the sale of alcohol and their strict rules governing the relationship be-
[1] Another 200 cities only tolerated independent prostitution. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 64.
tween brothelkeepers and prostitutes, were greatly preferable not only to clandestine bordellos, but to street prostitution. To these and other observers, the brothel fulfilled an important function: in the words of Alain Corbin: "to enclose in order to observe, to observe in order to know, to know in order to supervise and control."[2]
The appeal of brothels was their perceived ability both to cleanse the streets of prostitutes and prevent the spread of venereal disease. Brothels, wrote Veniamin Tarnovskii in Prostitution and Abolitionism, help reduce street crime and curtail the disgraceful sight of street prostitutes beckoning and seducing clients from doorways. According to him, "undoubtedly the more women there are in licensed brothels, the less they will in general commit misdemeanors and crimes, in particular, assaults against public morality." For Tarnovskii, brothels provided an important service to the man "under the yoke of physiological necessity" and the "libertine" (razvratnik ) who awaited "the satisfaction of his sexual fancies."[3] In a similar vein, Aleksandr Fedorov defined the brothel not as a center for vice, "but a place that serves to satisfy the physiological needs of unmarried men."[4]
Brothels' advocates believed that public houses lent themselves more readily than street prostitution to strict medical surveillance. Since committee doctors conducted their examinations of brothel prostitutes in the brothel itself, residents could not evade medical supervision as easily as odinochki. In this spirit, the Riga medical-police committee forbade a woman from leaving her brothel without official permission.[5] Some officials hoped to eliminate the vagaries of street prostitution entirely. In the city of Chenstokhov, for example, local rules prohibited prostitutes from living anywhere but in brothels.[6] Though one physician acknowledged that brothels served as "breeding grounds for syphilis," he nonetheless characterized public houses as the sole environment in which prostitutes' health could be properly monitored.[7]
[2] This referred to the intentions of France's Parent-Duchâtelet. Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 16. The Parisian connection is pertinent because as early as the 1840s the minister of internal affairs had defended brothels to Tsar Nicholas I as necessary to regulation's success by invoking Parent-Duchâtelet's endorsement of brothels. Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 350.
[3] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 52–53, 79–82.
[4] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 57.
[5] Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," p. 171.
[6] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 15.
[7] Petr Gratsianskii, "Iz Russkago sifilidologicheskago i dermatologicheskago obshchestva," Vrach, no. 13 (1896): 376.
Official policy concurred. As late as 1891, a report by the MVD's Medical Department referred to the "shortage" of brothels as one reason for the spread of venereal disease.[8] An MVD Medical Council commission reaffirmed state support for brothels in a declaration that purported to echo resolutions made by the 1897 congress on syphilis: "In a sanitary sense and in the interests of successful surveillance, state-licensed brothels are preferable to street prostitution."[9]
Ironically, however, the Medical Council asserted this at a time when the medical community in Russia had grown more circumspect about the advisability of brothel prostitution. At the 1897 congress on syphilis, participants had in fact given brothels only grudging support. The majority voted to continue state licensing, but with an important qualification: brothels were "undesirable in principle" and could be tolerated "only until the improvement of surveillance of prostitution in general." Even this halfhearted approval went too far for a third of the congress members. They strongly protested their colleagues' approbation of brothels "because we recognize such institutions to be immoral in their very essence and because they do not attain their goals in the struggle against syphilis."[10] In the years to follow, the public would agree, resoundingly protesting government licensing for Russia's public houses.
"White Slaves"?
"How can I give up my mode of life? My mistress [khoziaika] will not let me go. I owe her 17 silver rubles."
The prostitute Kriukova, in Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?
There was much that smacked of hysteria and hyperbole in contemporary descriptions of brothel prostitution. Efforts to inflame public opinion against brothels tended to rely on traditional conceptions of gender roles that left women easily victimized. Instead of being portrayed as individuals who had made conscious choices, brothel prostitutes were sweet young things who had been preyed upon by scheming brothelkeepers and third parties. Products of sensationalistic journalism, moral outrage, and political maneuverings, most sources ig-
[8] Otchet Meditsinskago departamenta, p. 177.
[9] "Svod postanovlenii komissii," p. 52 (emphasis added).
[10] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," pp. xxi, 159–60.
nored and obscured the positive aspects of life in Russian brothels. The readers could thus indulge their self-righteousness and prurient curiosity and, at the same time, feel reassured by descriptions of women as vulnerable and passive.
The umbrella of "white slavery" was a broad one, covering everything from consensual commercial sex in brothels to forced prostitution. By characterizing all aspects of brothel life as slavery, observers conflated the qualitative differences among the various forms that brothel prostitution could take. White Slaves in the Clutches of Infamy (Belyia rabyni v kogtiakh pozora ) was typical of this genre; the title said it all. Though women chose prostitution in the vast majority of cases, forced prostitution did exist; there are too many accounts and there is too much evidence both inside and outside the Russian empire for us to dismiss references to a "white slave trade" as mere fantasy. Taken together, these reports demonstrate that there was some truth to society's fears; women could indeed be sold into prostitution and they could be held in brothels against their will.[11]
One report involved a girl who had been forced into prostitution at the age of 15 and was ordered to steal from her clients. Caught in a double bind, she faced a beating from the brothelkeeper when she refused and risked the same from an angry guest when she went ahead
[11] A partial list of sources that refer to white slavery in Russia includes: Baranov, V zashchitu; Belyia rabyni; L. A. Bogdanovich, Bor'ba s torgovlei zhenshchinami i "Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin" (Moscow, 1903); Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); R. S. Dembskaia, V zashchitu zhenshchin (k prostitutsii) (Tiflis, 1911); V. F. Deriuzhinskii, "Piatyi mezhdunarodnyi kongress po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami," Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii, no. 1 (January 1, 1914): 200–210; Fon-Guk, "Sluchai pokhishchenii zhenshchin v Peterburge"; S. K. Gogel', "Iuridicheskaia storona voprosa o torgovle belymi zhenshchinami v tseliakh razvrata," Vestnik prava, no. 55 (May 1899): 108–19; TsGIA, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, f. 1278, op. 2, d. 3476, Zhurnaly komissii po sudebnym reformam; Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety (1909), tretii sozyv, sessiia 2, zasedanie 109, pp. 887–902; Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh"; N. D. Iavorskii, Politseiskoe pravo (St. Petersburg, 1909); TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, "Po voprosu o bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami v tseliakh razvrata"; Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor"; V. P. Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu padshikh devushek (Moscow, 1888); Pokrovskaia, O zhertvakh; TsGIA, ROZZh, f. 1335, d. 1, "Zhurnal zasedaniia Komiteta Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin" (October 28, 1903); Otchet o deiatel'nosti Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin za 1900–1901; Rubinovskii, "O nekotorykh ustranimykh prichinakh prostitutsii," pp. 133–54; Sofiia Sedovskaia, "O s"ezde pol'skikh zhenshchin v Varshave," Soiuz zhenshchin, no. 9 (September 1908): 11–13; Truly s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vols. 1 and 2; "Mery protiv torgovtsev zhenshchinami na vitemberskikh kazennykh zheleznykh dorogakh," Zheleznodorozhnoe delo, nos. 46–47 (1905): 531.
and robbed him.[12] In Kiev, six men who worked for a brothel owner hunted down a young prostitute who had escaped from the house. When they found her, she was badly beaten, urinated on, and raped.[13] The author of The Sex Market and Sexual Relations described a prostitute who had been punished by being locked in a dark cellar for seven days and fed nothing but bread and water.[14] Another author referred to a huge, illegal brothel in Ufa with a hundred prostitutes of different nationalities. The women here were fed scraps like potato peels and kept half-naked to prevent them from running away. Any transgressions invited a beating from the male owner.[15]
One of the most scandalous incidents took place in 1912 in the Siberian factory town of Dmitrievsk. According to the newspaper report, not only was the district police officer protecting the illegal operations of a brothel owned by a Madame Iakubovskaia, but he and his friends were availing themselves of the brothel's many services. Rumors about the kind of abuses taking place in Iakubovskaia's brothel were the talk of the town, but not until the local priest raised a fuss was this matter brought to official attention. At first, the priest demanded a list of the Russian Orthodox women inside, along with their ages, from Iakubovskaia herself. In response to his second request, she told him, "Go to Sipachev, the policeman. He's our boss!" Siberian Life (Sibirskaia zhizn ') quoted a letter that the priest mailed to Sipachev, accusing him of improper and immoral behavior. It was no secret, the priest wrote, that minors were kept in the brothel and that the madam "tortures the girls and after this lashing sends them to you and you complete the thrashing and throw them into a cell." He declared, "As a priest and a Russian, it is a shame and pity to me that a Russian police official who is under obligation to uphold public morality would renounce his conscience and trample on the people's morals for the sake of despicable money. I am firmly convinced that the tears of those unfortunate girls you have treated so badly will burst over your head." In an action that brings to mind the corrupt officials in Gogol's The Inspector General, the district police officer had the priest arrested to teach him "not to interfere with my business."
When the matter came to the attention of the MVD, the ministry launched an investigation, only to learn that this brothel was part of a
[12] Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 25–29.
[13] Kievskaia mysl', cited in Belyia rabyni, pp. 14–15.
[14] Matiushenskii, Polovoi rynok, p. 100.
[15] Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 40–41.
domestic ring. Among those prostitutes who were not legally registered, the youngest was 13 years old and entertaining up to twenty clients a night. The investigators interviewed one prostitute who claimed she began working there at the age of 14. She charged that Sipachev and his assistants had the privilege of sampling all the girls who were new to the brothel. The MVD investigation also revealed that girls who refused to take clients or who proved difficult were beaten by a policeman. The "stubborn" ones would be taken to the station for still another beating and a few days in a cell. Four minors were said to have committed suicide in Iakubovskaia's brothel.[16]
Even when brothel prostitution was voluntary, prostitutes could easily experience brothel life as oppressive, if not a form of slavery.[17] Certainly, the high rates of venereal disease in brothels, the prostitutes' cycle of financial indebtedness, the gap between brothel reality and government regulations, and the recurring incidents of beatings and abuses warranted exposure and indignation. A prostitute's letter published in The Women's Union (Soiuz zhenshchin ) in 1909 summed up the problems: "There exist some very cruel madams who feed you poorly and beat you. In order to get a little more money from the girls, they force them to take ten and fifteen men a night. The men are for the most part so vulgar, drunken, and likewise depraved that they are repulsive even to us. But worst of all they allow diseased men to come to us and we become infected."[18]
The relentless pace of commercial sex in brothels indeed posed a serious threat to the health of the prostitutes, as well as to their clients. A typical brothel prostitute had sexual relations with a much greater number of men than did a typical odinochka. Most observers agreed that streetwalkers were lucky to find more than two clients a night. Brothel prostitutes, if we can believe the estimates, regularly entertained anywhere from five to ten times as many men. Tarnovskii estimated that they each serviced ten to twelve guests on weekdays, thirty to forty on holidays.[19] One brothelkeeper from a 20-kopeck house in Warsaw that
[16] Sibirskaia zhizn', no. 195 (September 1, 1912): 3; Zhenskii vestnik, no. 11 (November 1912): 242–43.
[17] In the collection of writings by French prostitutes involved in a 1975 strike in Lyons, a 42-year-old woman characterized a regulated brothel in Morocco as a "prison": "You felt you were gradually turning into a sex-machine, a robot, you stopped thinking, you became stupefied. Clients—vouchers, clients—vouchers, non-stop. You no longer existed." A——, "In the End," in Prostitutes—Our Life, ed. Jaget, pp. 64–65.
[18] "Pis'mo prostitutki," pp. 9–10.
[19] From V. V. Avchinnikova, O reglamentatsii prostitutsii (St. Petersburg, 1904), p. 7.
catered to a lower-class Jewish clientele claimed that each of her prostitutes took forty to fifty men daily, sixty to seventy on High Holy Days.[20] When the schoolteacher M. S. Onchukova polled the brothel prostitutes in Odessa's city hospital to find out how many they had relations with each night, sixteen women estimated five clients, thirty-eight women estimated ten, twenty-one estimated fifteen, and seven said up to twenty men or more.[21] By virtue of sheer numbers then, women in brothels had the opportunity to pass infections to (and contract infections from) a much higher number of males. Furthermore, despite medical-police rules to the contrary, most madams did not allow prostitutes in their houses to refuse clients. Such practices greatly increased a woman's risk of contracting disease.
In 1890, in Moscow's 30-kopeck and 50-kopeck houses, more than half the women suffered from syphilis, with a third of them diagnosed to be in its contagious stage. In the brothels that charged one ruble, the proportion of women with syphilis shifted to slightly less than half, but close to the same percentage were contagious. The numbers jumped in the higher priced establishments because the prostitutes tended to be young. Relatively new to the trade, they were vulnerable to syphilis in its primary, most contagious form. As they aged, suffered from various diseases, and became less marketable, prostitutes transferred to cheaper brothels, thereby adding to the numbers of women in these houses suffering from syphilis in its later stages. In Moscow's 2- or 3-ruble brothels, not only were more than half the women syphilitic, but 47 percent had primary (svezhii ) syphilis. In the three brothels that charged a steep five rubles, exactly half also had primary syphilis.[22] If we can believe the 1897 congress's estimate for women in St. Petersburg, a full third of the women who found jobs in brothels were already infected with syphilis.[23]
Medical-police physicians examined brothel women twice a week and inspected the brothels in their divisions at least once a month. Examina-
[20] In Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 65. During World War I, in the French port city of St. Nazaire, brothel prostitutes averaged forty to fifty customers a day. From Brandt, No Magic Bullet, p. 103. Writing of her experience in a Moroccan brothel in the 1950s, a French prostitute asserted that she "must have done over a hundred clients a day." A——, "In the End," p. 63.
[21] Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," p. 52.
[22] Nikolai P. Fiveiskii, "K statistic sifilisa sredi prostitutok domov terpimosti v Moskve," Protokoly Moskovskago venerologicheskago i dermatologicheskago obshchestva za 1892–93 gg., vol. 2 (Moscow, 1894), p. 7.
[23] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. xvii.
tions in the brothels helped save time because prostitutes, wrote Fedorov coyly, can "undress to the costume of Eve."[24] In addition to examining women for symptoms of venereal diseases, the medical police also checked for pregnancy, since committee rules forbade pregnant prostitutes from continuing to accept customers. Apparently, this posed few difficulties, because brothel prostitutes either failed to become pregnant or, familiar with what Fedorov called "the particulars" of their trade, they sought protection from unwanted pregnancies in contraception and abortifacients. In St. Petersburg only one brothel prostitute in 1889 and only eight in 1890 had been discovered to be pregnant (as opposed to seventeen and twenty-three odinochki). Petersburg rules required a madam to send a prostitute in her ninth month of pregnancy to Kalinkin Hospital's maternity ward, but Fedorov confessed that most brothelkeepers either threw a pregnant woman out or broke the rule by compelling her to work.[25]
Even at its most benign, brothel life took its toll, for the constant merrymaking had a powerful effect on prostitutes and brothel workers. Shneider-Tagilets, a brothel musician who was a fifteen-year veteran in these houses, recorded his memoirs in a book entitled Victims of Depravity (Zhertvy razvrata ). According to him, on a typical day brothel prostitutes rose late in the afternoon and prepared for the night by washing and fixing their hair and applying makeup. When the first guests arrived, the women would sing or dance (despite MVD rules that prohibited "any kind of entertainment") and then invite clients to their rooms. They would coax their guests to order something to drink, also against ministry rules (and at prices five to six times the retail cost), and then perform sexual services as requested. Each night would wear on, Shneider-Tagilets wrote, until 4 or 5 A.M., filled with music, singing, dancing, drinking, the creaking of beds, laughter, tears, conversation, and shouting.[26]
Servants often complained about the lack of peace and quiet in these "boiling cauldrons." Nostalgic about peasant life, they would say how they used to "get up at four or five in the morning, go outside, and breathe the fresh air deeply, hungry for breakfast. You'd drink some tea and with healthy delight, throw yourself into your work. It was so good. Then, you'd work some, eat a good lunch of simple, but delicious
[24] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 43; Fedorov, Pozornyi promysel, p. 14.
[25] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 51, 54.
[26] Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 35–37.
food, and you'd go to sleep on time, having pleasant, peaceful dreams. Yeah, those were the good ol' days."[27] In the brothel though, "mornings" did not begin until the late afternoon or early evening, and the daytime hours strangely served as the "night," putting all the workers on an exhausting and artificial schedule.[28]
Living conditions within brothels reinforced accusations of white slavery. In 1901, Onchukova informed the Odessa branch of the Society for the Protection of Public Health (Odesskii otdel Russkago obshchestva okhraneniia zdraviia) that brothel prostitutes lived "in the most ruinous and depraved conditions." She described their rooms as "small and narrow, with soiled wallpaper and pitiful pretenses of luxury. A dirty pink or pale blue lantern hangs in the middle of the room. The bed and dressing table, draped with faded muslin covers, occupy the most prominent place. All sorts of useless things—little boxes, shells, broken perfume bottles, jars with rouge, knick-knacks—are on the table." To her eyes, everything appeared "vulgar, gaudy, colorful, dirty, jaded."[29]
Dr. Arutiun Melik-Pashaev counted twenty-six state-licensed brothels in the Azerbaidzhan capital of Baku in 1913 housing a total of 294 prostitutes. All of these brothels lacked plumbing and electricity and were located on two dirt roads, one of which reached a dead end (despite ministry rules stipulating that brothels be situated on thoroughfares). As for conditions within the brothels, Melik-Pashaev found only sixty bedrooms acceptable. The rest were in an "unsatisfactory sanitary state, and several of these were frankly unbelievable." The "Persian-style" brothels were usually the worst. Distinguished from the "European-style" ones in that prostitutes in the former received room but no board for a daily fee of one ruble, Persian-style brothels tended to contain small rooms, several of which leaked when it rained. Those rooms lacking ventilation had an "oppressive atmosphere," smelling of "various cosmetics, cigarettes, and kerosene." In some, the walls were covered with "dirty, sometimes peeling wallpaper." The courtyards were also messy. "filled with shells from seeds, cigarette butts, and other refuse."[30]
[27] Ibid., p. 48.
[28] According to Harsin, the reversal of day and night "completed the divorce from reality and took its toll on the emotional health of the inmates." Harsin, Policing Prostitution, p. 298.
[29] Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," pp. 56–57. Also in "Prostitutsiia v Odesse," p. 3.
[30] Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," pp. 847–49. "European-style" brothels included room, board, and linen.
According to Konstantin Shtiurmer, the cheap brothels in Moscow contained stuffy, tiny, dark, and dirty rooms with shoddy toilet facilities.[31] One Odessa report stated that most prostitutes lived in tiny bedrooms no larger than two by three meters. Each room had washing facilities, but some had no windows; a glass door to the corridor provided the only source of outside illumination.[32] In St. Petersburg, medical-police committee rules stipulated that every brothel have a common room, a dining room, a bedroom for the madam, and one bedroom containing no less than four square meters for each prostitute, the same amount of space designed for Moscow flophouses.[33] As the prices sank, so did the splendor of the surroundings and the standards of cleanliness. In the houses at the bottom of the heap, the "bedrooms" required by committee rules were frequently just partitioned cubicles (cribs).[34]
Such descriptions were typical of the contemporary literature. To be sure, public houses were squalid and unappealing. Only a few brothels qualified as settings for wild erotic fantasies; most resembled the "ordinary, prosaic, boring" brothels in Anton Chekhov's short story "A Nervous Breakdown." Chekhov's protagonist found everything vaguely familiar—"the lounge, the piano, the mirror with its cheap gilt frame, . . . the dress with the blue stripes, the blank, indifferent faces."[35] Observers like Melik-Pashaev and Onchukova were horrified by what they learned about brothel life, but their point of view obscured some of the more fundamental issues. Lanterns and knick-knacks struck the Odessa teacher as "vulgar" and "gaudy," but they must have represented the height of luxury to a girl from a remote village or urban slum. Brothels, located as many were in apartment buildings, were part and parcel of working-class housing. Surely there was nothing unusual about the kind of courtyards Melik-Pashaev disdainfully referred to as "filled with shells from seeds, cigarette butts, and other refuse." For a poor population
[31] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 31.
[32] "Svedeniia o vrachebno-sanitarnoi organizatsii i epidemicheskikh zabolevaniiakh g. Odessy," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 17 (October 1904): 564–65.
[33] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 20. When the Moscow duma established guidelines for the city's flophouses in 1910, it also ruled that tenants must have four square meters of air each. Robert William Thurston, "Urban Problems and Local Government in Late Imperial Russia: Moscow, 1906–1914" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1980), p. 268.
[34] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 20. Kuprin wrote how the bedrooms in 50-kopeck brothels were "more precisely cribs divided by narrow partitions that did not reach the ceiling." Kuprin, Iama, p. 7.
[35] Anton Chekhov, "A Nervous Breakdown," in The Oxford Chekhov, vol. 4, trans. Ronald Hingley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 159–79.
accustomed to renting corners of rooms, sharing barrack beds in factories, or sleeping under their sewing machines or huddled on the stove in the countryside, the accommodations in brothels were often a big step up.
Mistreatment by clients, brothelkeepers, and their associates also frequently accompanied the trade of brothel prostitution. Petr Oboznenko pointed out that it was only in books that well-behaved young men visited brothels to satisfy their sexual desires. In fact, in the cheaper houses one could find "a crowd of drunken, brutal people who resemble human beings on the outside only. Look at the victims of these visitors who are taken to the hospital beaten, bitten, scratched all over, and you will understand the difference between books and real life."[36] When Onchukova interviewed prostitutes in the Odessa hospital, she learned of coarse treatment by guests and beatings by madams for infractions of the house rules. One prostitute said, "It would have been better to have died young than to wear myself out so from such a life." Another told her, "If anyone knew how your heart breaks from this life. . . . God sees how much I cry after every guest." "How wretched it is here," another exclaimed. "The dancing really tortures you. [You're] dropping like flies from exhaustion, but you have to put up with the drunks."[37] Aleksandr Baranov, a founder of the Kazan Society for the Protection of Unfortunate Women (Obshchestvo zashchity neschastnykh zhenshchin), described a brothel in Kazan known for its vicious boss. In a period of just seven or eight months, several women in this house died of consumption and two committed suicide.[38] In another instance, when a woman who decided to leave the trade returned to her Kazan brothel to collect her possessions, she was beaten and locked in a room. The woman managed to escape, prompting her boss to visit one of the Kazan Society's representatives in order to demand her return![39]The Volga Herald (Volzhskii vestnik ) described in 1900 how a madam had tried to force a consumptive 16-year-old prostitute to drink and take guests. When the girl refused, the madam beat her and tossed her into the snow-covered
[36] Oboznenko, "Po povodu novago proekta nadzora," pp. 347–50.
[37] The fact that all the women interviewed by Onchukova were already in the hospital for venereal disease probably influenced the nature of their responses. Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," pp. 55–56. One author was skeptical of the veracity of any of the prostitutes' answers, writing that Onchukova probably heard a hundred "intricate stories in which much was fashioned romantically." Akvilon, "Kontury," Odesskiia novosti, no. 5216 (February 18, 1901): 3.
[38] Baranov, V zaschitu, p. 117.
[39] Ibid., p. 118.
street.[40]White Slaves in the Clutches of Infamy listed various methods by which prostitutes were disciplined and punished. A common practice involved locking them in rooms where their screams were inaudible and then tying them up and beating them with wet towels. As one author remarked, wet towels were ideal: because they left no obvious marks, they did not deprive the "live merchandise" (zhivoi tovar ) of its "appetizing appearance."[41]
Brothelkeepers also had well-deserved reputations for cheating prostitutes in their houses and inventing ways to saddle prostitutes with heavy debts and obligations. Although brothel prostitutes earned large sums of money for their work, it appears that little went into their own pockets. As prostitutes frequently remarked to Petr Gratsianov, "[Y]ou work and work, but everything goes to what you owe the mistress."[42] According to the author of White Slaves in the Clutches of Infamy, the sole difference between a brothel prostitute and a slave lay in the former's ability to demand a transfer "to another den of depravity (together with her original debt and what she owes her new mistress for the resale)."[43]
Shneider-Tagilets described what was a common arrangement between brothelkeepers and new prostitutes. Often a woman would commit herself for one year in exchange for room and board, half a dozen blouses, three or four dresses, two or three pairs of shoes, underwear, and a coat. If she stayed for the entire term of her contract, these items were supposed to come into her permanent possession, but if she left sooner, all the property reverted to the brothelkeeper. In his words, some madams accrued great wealth and lived "no worse than any landowner with their gold, silk clothes and diamonds." But "the poor woman-prostitute who, like a bee, gathers honey for someone else, collects riches for her employers only to go prematurely to her grave, tormented and suffering from every disease possible."[44]
Shneider-Tagilets published a contract between a Moscow brothelkeeper, Anis'ia Usacheva, and a peasant woman, Mariia Serebriakova, pertaining to the Nizhnii Novgorod summer fair in 1905. (Evidently,
[40] Someone brought her to the district hospital, where she was refused treatment. Finally, members of the Kazan Society for the Protection of Unfortunate Women took her in. One of its members described how the girl died before their eyes, muttering how glad she was at last to be rid of the terrible yellow ticket. Volzhskii vestnik, no. 45 (February 23, 1900): 3; Baranov, V zashchitu, pp. 119–20.
[41] Belyia rabyni, p. 13; M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 42.
[42] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," p. 11.
[43] Belyia rabyni, p. 32.
[44] Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 10–11, 17.
the revolution of 1905 did not inhibit all forms of business in Russia.) For a total of 50 rubles plus room, board, laundry, and transportation, Serebriakova agreed to engage in prostitution at a Nizhnii Novgorod brothel for a period of two months. The illiterate Serebriakova indicated her agreement with a mark certifying that:
Usacheva has the right to use all the money I receive for visits from guests. I am obligated to enter the reception room no later than 9 P.M. every day, and on the days designated by Usacheva for outings [progul'ki ], I, Serebriakova, must return to the house no later than 9 P.M., completely sober. If I, Serebriakova, do not have valid reasons for not appearing in the reception room or if I arrive from my outing later than 9 P.M., then Usacheva has the right to fine me ten rubles from my designated salary each time.
Apparently, a mere five instances of lateness could erase Serebriakova's entire earnings. If we estimate that this woman's work earned the brothel a minimum of five rubles each night for sixty nights, we can see that the madam had the opportunity to profit tremendously. Furthermore, had Serebriakova left Nizhnii Novgorod or entered another brothel before the designated date, all of her earnings would have reverted to Usacheva.[45] Yet Serebriakova did not completely lose according to this agreement. The lateness fines to her madam would be offset by the money she was presumably earning on the side when she failed to show up on time for work.
Brothelkeepers had other ways to exploit the prostitutes in their houses financially. In his report on Baku, Melik-Pashaev described how brothelkeepers succeeded in extorting money from local prostitutes by overcharging transportation fares. According to him, several prostitutes had paid their madams 50 rubles to travel between Baku and Kharkov when the actual fare was only 20.[46] Brothelkeepers and procurers also pocketed money when the prostitutes who worked for them moved to other houses. Madams willingly let them go because the brothelkeepers in their new houses paid off whatever debts had been incurred. (Meanwhile, the new madam would add this to the prostitute's bill along with inflated costs of transportation and related expenses.)[47] Madams would also sell clothes to women in their brothels, raising prices to several times the actual cost. Onchukova described the expensive, elaborate cos-
[45] Ibid., pp. 12–14.
[46] Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," p. 851.
[47] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 6–8, 11–12. Harsin describes a similar situation in regard to transfers between brothels in Policing Prostitution, p. 293.
tumes worn by prostitutes in Odessa. Women would dress as exotic Turks, Tatars, Spaniards, and Italians, having purchased these clothes from their madams at a lucrative 500 percent markup.[48]
In this way, brothel prostitutes chronically remained in debt. Despite rules forbidding a brothelkeeper from using a woman's indebtedness to keep her in the brothel against her will, brothelkeepers were known to claim that the law required a woman to remain until her debt was paid off. This worked because the majority of prostitutes were unfamiliar with the elaborate rules designed to protect them from this kind of servitude. A Moscow physician explained that some madams would threaten prostitutes who wanted to leave by lying that they had to accept a "discharged whore's card" (bilet razriadnoi devki ) in place of their passport. Fear of this card's discovery by parents and friends served to discourage many women from breaking out of brothel life.[49]The Russian Gazette (Russkiia vedomosti ), reporting on the suicide of a prostitute, claimed that a police investigation revealed that she, "like many other prostitutes, was forced into a public brothel." She killed herself when she found she could not leave until she had repaid a debt to the brothelkeeper.[50]
Officials from medical-police committees made some efforts to help prostitutes break the pattern of financial exploitation. In 1898, the medical-police committee of St. Petersburg learned that 605 women in twenty-six brothels owed a total of more than 200 rubles each to their madams. Such indebtedness, wrote the city governor, Lieutenant-General Kleigels, made it virtually impossible for prostitutes to resume "honest work." Instead, the "fallen woman becomes like the personal property of the brothel and is passed from one establishment to another. Gradually she becomes more and more entangled in the cunning web of debt that has been laid out for her." The medical-police committee therefore introduced a savings program which after six months of operation held over 42,000 rubles for Petersburg prostitutes. Whether the funds were actually returned to their owners is, however, unclear. Kleigels meticulously recorded only 9,643 rubles, 35 kopecks, as having been distributed by the committee to prostitutes for "urgent need" (vy-
[48] Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," p. 57.
[49] Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 56, 58. This author melodramatically declared that there were only two ways to escape: by transferring to another brothel or by suicide.
[50] Russkiia vedomosti (May 30, 1887), in Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," p. 406.
dano prostitutkam na bezotlozhnyia nuzhdy ). Did that imply the retention of funds for needs that were not deemed "urgent"? In addition, officials began to inspect brothels more rigorously. As a consequence, the committee summoned 106 madams suspected of violating local rules to appear before them, imposed restrictions on twenty-four brothels, and shut down seven houses of prostitution entirely.[51]
In 1908, St. Petersburg's medical-police committee issued a new set of rules that attempted to guard brothel prostitutes from unfair debts by enabling them to sue for their money and possessions in court. This measure sounded promising, but it often backfired. Whereas prostitutes formerly had the chance to receive aid from the police, they were now compelled to await a court date. In the interim, left without clothes and a place to sleep, many women had no choice but to return to their former madams.[52]
A report from the Smolensk medical-police committee in 1912 acknowledged that despite ministry rules, "brothelkeepers do not consider it their obligation to assume expenses for prostitutes, whereas prostitutes pay brothelkeepers for room and board, as well as laundry and clothes." To rectify the prostitutes' "slavery" (zakabalennost '), Smolensk committee members proposed organizing a system to oversee accounting procedures between local madams and prostitutes. They also ruled that medical-police procedures should be posted in every brothel in order to guarantee that prostitutes were aware of the obligations their madams had toward them.[53] Baku's medical-police committee held the savings of local prostitutes in a police station account. Half of a woman's salary went to her madam and another part of it paid for personal expenses, but the remainder sat "safely" in police hands. Judging by Melik-Pashaev's rendering of their accounts, only 60 of Baku's 147 brothel prostitutes had managed to put aside any money and only 13 succeeded in saving more than 100 rubles.[54]
Part of the problem had to do with profiteering by brothel madams, but prostitutes' own attitudes and habits also played a role in their failure to save money. A detailed account of attempts by Minsk's sanitary
[51] Lieutenant-General Kleigels, "O deiatel'nosti sostoiashchago pri upravlenii S.-Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta," February 15, 1900. Kleigels's report is also mentioned in Baranov, V zashchitu, p. 99.
[52] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 60.
[53] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, contains an April 6, 1912 report from Smolensk province's medical-police committee.
[54] Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," p. 858.
commission to protect local prostitutes from financial exploitation reveals something of how these women interpreted solicitude from officials, as well as the way in which many saw their relationships with brothel madams. Gratsianov's commission began in 1893 by issuing the prostitutes personal account booklets that listed wages, possessions, and goods purchased or borrowed from their madams. This policy failed because brothel prostitutes refused to take these accounts seriously. A typical case involved a brothel prostitute who left Minsk without even trying to collect her money and clothes. As it turned out, the owner of her brothel had confiscated her savings in compensation for the two months this prostitute had spent in a hospital receiving treatment for venereal disease. When Gratsianov informed the woman that hospitalization was in fact her brothelkeeper's responsibility, she responded, "How can that be possible, doctor, sir? Why should the mistress pay? You know, there are a lot of us at her place and she can't pay for everyone who winds up in the hospital."[55]
Minsk's commission went one step further, ruling that it would hold each prostitute's earnings until she wished to leave the brothel, but prostitutes and their madams discovered how to circumvent this precaution as well. To collect her money, a woman would simply appear at the commission and announce that she intended to leave town. In reality, she would return to a local brothel. When questioned by the commission, she would claim that she had lost the money and was compelled to return to work. "Not one of these women was using this money, " objected Gratsianov. "All of it was being paid to the madam ."[56]
Minsk's sanitary commission next decided to withhold a prostitute's money unless she could prove that she was leaving prostitution due to illness, beginning an "honest" job, or getting married. In other words, the commission refused to issue a prostitute her earnings so long as she remained in the trade. Not surprisingly, local brothel prostitutes outwitted this new regulation as well. In the year that followed, the number of marriages among Jewish prostitutes increased tenfold in this city in the Pale of Settlement, the western region of the Russian empire to which the Jewish population was restricted, and, according to Gratsianov, within a couple of months most of the "brides" were back in their former brothels.[57] Nonetheless, when the provincial governor over-
[55] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," p. 15.
[56] Ibid., p. 15 (emphasis in original).
[57] In 1910, a Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw claimed that Jews ran all fourteen houses of prostitution in the city of Minsk. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p.56.
turned the commission's program, the commission had already collected nearly 8,000 rubles over a two-year period. Gratsianov pointed out that only 4,000 rubles had been handed back to Minsk's prostitutes. With the remaining funds, he stated, the commission might have opened a shelter for women who wished to leave prostitution.[58]
Of course, few prostitutes would have taken kindly to suggestions that their hard-earned rubles be put toward opening a halfway house. It is much more likely that they considered Gratsianov and his commission a violation both of their finances and their autonomy. Minsk's regulatory agency believed that it was assisting local prostitutes, but the issues were actually more complicated. For one thing, Minsk officials held too much power over the women's lives. Though the sanitary commission was attempting to "protect" the women's earnings, it was still in the business of the "three I's"—identifying, inspecting, and incarcerating. For another, like a bunch of pimps it had even usurped control over these women's precious rubles.
Gratsianov had enough sense to realize that the prostitutes' obstinacy stemmed not only from coercive tactics of their madams, but from a singular code of ethics. In fact, prostitutes generally believed they had a moral obligation to repay debts to their brothelkeepers. In spite of treatment in the houses that outsiders interpreted as oppressive, prostitutes still identified more closely with their madams than they did with doctors and government officials. It could not be otherwise. Brothel life was too intimate and consuming to resemble the typical workplace. By necessity, work in a brothel was more than a job; it was a full-time commitment. Under these circumstances, brothel prostitutes would naturally form strong attachments to each other and to their madam, who could represent a mother figure as much as an exacting boss.[59] Prostitutes might suffer economic and even physical abuse at the hands of their madams, but this treatment differed fundamentally from what they encountered at the hands of men from government agencies. Brothelkeepers could be cruel, but many had risen from the ranks and all remained social outcasts along with the prostitutes themselves. Consequently, brothelkeepers could not dehumanize the women in their houses quite in the way that even well-meaning, paternalistic bureaucrats could.
[58] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 13–18.
[59] Ruth Rosen has argued that relationships between prostitutes and their madams were "necessarily ambiguous and complex." Brothelkeepers served as confidantes and counselors at the same time as they functioned as exploiters. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, p. 88.
While the charge of "white slavery" was frequently applied to brothel prostitution, the most common slavery within the system was debt peonage. Despite regulations and the intervention of authorities, prostitutes were economically exploited and had little recourse. For some, the bondage imposed by debt seemed unbearable. For others, it was better than a life of toil and starvation. At least the brothel brought them female camaraderie and daily rituals to share, not to mention food, drink, and a warm place to sleep. Yet brothels used women up night after night and often left them diseased and destitute. Most women of the brothel did not fulfill dreams of economic success or romance in their public houses. They were a class of sleepwalkers who lived and breathed apart from most other tsarist subjects, except when they met for a few minutes—on the job.
Antisemitism and Brothel Prostitution
"Nu, what can a poor Jew do in times like this?"
Jewish procurer in Iama
Something that "intensely alarmed" the Jewish community in Russia and Europe was the way Jewish brothelkeepers and procurers kept turning up in accounts of brothel prostitution.[60] This brings us to another aspect of Russia's concern over "white slavery"—how a focus on forced prostitution reinforced the deep strains of antisemitism in Russian society. In fact, the London physician who first coined the term "white slavery" to refer to prostitution in 1839 did so with explicit reference to Jewish involvement in this "infernal traffic."[61]
Jews did not dominate the trade of prostitution in Europe, but they were visible enough in procuring and brothelkeeping—particularly within the Pale of Settlement—to reinforce negative stereotypes. To antisemites in Russia, such activities only confirmed their impression of Jews as clever exploiters of the trusting Russian people. To them, it was not surprising that a "dreadful kike" (strashnyi zhid ) ran a brothel in Sevastopol' or a Moscow gang known as the "Maccabees" tricked inno-
[60] Baron Aleksandr Gintsburg used these words to describe how Jews felt about Jewish participation in the "trade in women." See Gintsburg, "O mezhdunarodnoi evreiskoi konferentsii v Londone po voprosu o bor'be s torgovlei zhenshchin," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 424.
[61] Michael Ryan, Philosophy of Marriage (London, 1839), p. 14, quoted in Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 35.
cent women into prostitution by running phony advertisements for domestic servants and nannies.[62] In Kuprin's Iama, surely the best-known novel about Russian brothels, the "flesh traders" also had Jewish surnames. One, an observant Jew known by the pseudonym "Horizon" (Gorizont ), faithfully supported his old mother in Odessa and observed the Sabbath, but had no compunctions over marrying fifteen girls to sell them into brothels.[63]
The villains in stories about the trade in women that were reported in Russian newspapers and journals often turned out to be Jews as well.[64] A Moscow paper recounted in 1909 how Jews ran an organization in Warsaw known by the name of Ludwig (Liudvig) that ostensibly hired girls to work at food counters, but in reality sent them to "private rooms" to entertain guests. One young woman exposed the operation when her "guest" helped her to escape.[65] Another Jewish "trader" named Sherman was caught transporting three young women in a train station in Podol'sk province. Although Sherman had promised them good jobs in Odessa, it turned out that they were en route to brothels in a more remote seaport.[66]
Russian officialdom did its share in perpetuating the association between Jews and the business of prostitution. As early as the 1840s, when the Medical Department of the MVD solicited opinions from provincial governors on prostitution in the areas under their jurisdiction, Jews were identified as the main purveyors of this trade in western Russia.[67] At the 1899 London Congress on the White Slave Traffic, State Secretary and former Minister of Education Andrei Saburov told his distinguished international audience about Jewish men who sold their wives in Turkey, only to return to Russia with a passport stamped "Wife remaining abroad" or "Divorced" to find new victims.[68] When another tsarist official reviewed the history of regulation before the 1910 Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women, he stated that Jews dominated as "owners and agents" (predprinimateli i komissionery ) in the
[62] M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 42; Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 14–17.
[63] Kuprin, Iama, pp. 104–21.
[64] The antisemitic press is described in Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 45.
[65] Moskovskii listok, no. 145 (June 26, 1909): 7–8.
[66] Novosti dnia, no. 1643 (February 1888), in Belyia rabyni, pp. 8–9. See also S.-Peterburgskiia vedomosti, no. 341 (December 13, 1902), for report about Jews involved in sending women to international brothels.
[67] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.
[68] Congress on the White Slave Traffic, p. 26.
"trade of the female body."[69] The governor of Kherson province despaired of his inability to control clandestine vice in urban hotels because the proprietors were "predominantly Jews." Their "inherent dodginess and skill" (v silu prisushchei im izvorotlivosti i snorovki ) enabled them "to sidestep the law."[70]
Matters in the fourth precinct of Odessa's district court seemed to bear out such inflammatory accusations. A 1902 report to the minister of justice from Odessa's public procurator detailed half a dozen recent investigations, all of which involved complaints from Jews about other Jews who had tricked their female relatives into leaving Russia for brothels in Argentina, Egypt, Siam (Thailand), China, India, and the Philippines. The court had been frustrated in its attempts to prosecute, partly because the laws on the international trade in women were so difficult to enforce, but also because witnesses supplied conflicting stories. Most significantly, when the "victims" were contacted they often reported that they had left home willingly. In one case, a mother did not identify her daughter Shendl as missing until the money that had been sent home to Odessa for four years had stopped coming.[71]
In 1909, when deputies of the State Duma considered a bill to restrict the trade in women, they debated the role of Jews in brothel prostitution. For one Berezovskii, a representative from Volynskaia province, the proposed law provided a welcome opportunity to re-examine the "Jewish question" and "finally cure this horrible ulcer which is eating away at Russia and, according to the prophecy of Dostoevsky, reducing her to ruin." Berezovskii asserted that the "overwhelming majority" of individuals involved in the trade of prostitution belonged to the "Judaic tribe" (k iudeiskomu plemenni ). When a fellow deputy shouted out "That's a lie!" Berezovskii (to "applause from the Right") retorted that "no kind of open or secret Jew-lovers" (iudofily ) could prove otherwise.[72]
In Prostitution and Prejudice, Edward Bristow described famous Jewish courtesans like Sendele Blueffstein of St. Petersburg, who earned money in the second half of the nineteenth century both as a broth-
[69] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.
[70] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter to MVD of December 19, 1911.
[71] TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, report of November 28, 1902.
[72] Gosudarstvennaia Duma, tretii sozyv, pp. 896–97. By the census count in 1889, five of the six madams in Berezovskii's home province were Jewish. See Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. 12.
elkeeper and as an agent of the tsarist police. In Warsaw, a Jewish gangster named Shilem Letzki organized a synagogue for his underworld colleagues of prostitutes, brothelkeepers, pimps, and thieves. The tsarist secret police let "King Shilem I," as he was known, conduct business freely, partly because he was an enemy of the Jewish socialist organization, the Bund.[73]
How accurate was the general impression of brothel prostitution as a uniquely Jewish trade? To be sure, Jews worked in prostitution disproportionately to their numbers in the population, with the percentages of Jewish madams far exceeding the percentages of Jewish brothel prostitutes, and both outnumbering the proportion of Jews in Russia's population. According to an 1897 census, Jews composed only 4 percent of the population in the entire Russian empire (including Poland, with its nearly five million Jews).[74] In 1889, Jews made up 7 percent of the prostitutes registered in the empire's brothels (570 of 7,840 women) and 6 percent of its odinochki (631 of 9,763). In contrast, a full 24 percent of the madams were Jewish (297 of 1,214. women). In 1889, in Minsk, Bessarabia, Kherson, and Tavrichesk provinces, Jewish brothelkeepers reached percentages of 64 (7 of 11 women), 79 (15 of 19 women), 83 (30 of 36 women), and 92 (22 of 24 women) respectively.[75] Within the Pale of Settlement as a whole, Jewish women ran a full 70 percent of the brothels.[76] Jewish brothelkeepers were not in the majority overall, but their numbers were significant enough to raise eyebrows.[77] Though Jews clearly did not dominate brothel prostitution numerically, their disproportionate status, their visibility, and the public's readiness to think badly of them left Jews extremely vulnerable to the image of brothelkeepers as rapacious Jews who profited off the bodies of young Russian women.
Some of the confusion derived from the public's misunderstanding
[73] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 14, 20–21, 24, 60–61.
[74] In the Pale of Settlement, 11 percent of the population were Jews. Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), p. 63.
[75] The percentages of Jews rise when counted by nationality: 27 percent of madams were Jews by nationality. Likewise, in Minsk, the percentage increases to 82 percent; in Kherson, to 89 percent; in Tavrichesk, to 96 percent. Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. xiii, 12–14, 20, 24.
[76] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 55.
[77] Bristow cites police and anti-vice crusaders in Berlin, Hamburg, and London as having found 37 percent of 578 known traffickers to be Jewish. He suspects, however, that this is a low figure since many Jews disguised their Jewish identity. Ibid., p. 52.
of statistics regarding the large numbers of Russian prostitutes abroad. According to data collected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the years 1900 to 1904, among 1,650 registered prostitutes in Buenos Aires, a full 18 percent (293) were Russian. Numbers like these could fuel fears of "white slavery" indeed. Yet in 1905, Petr Oboznenko pointed out that every one of the "Russians" was, in fact, a Russian-born Jew. Rather than falling into some terrible web of international deceit, these women had simply traveled to Argentina with their families under the inducement of Baron Hirsch, who sponsored Jewish agricultural colonies for immigrants. When the heavy agricultural work required of these brand new "farmers" proved beyond them, the women turned to prostitution for the usual reasons. Soon, Oboznenko wrote sarcastically, "white slaves" should be appearing in Uganda; it was after all slated as the promised land for many Zionists.[78]
In a speech to the 1910 Congress against the Trade in Women, Baron Aleksandr Gintsburg suggested that the participation of Jews in the trade in women was "inversely proportional to their legal and social position."[79] When Kuprin's Horizon met a military general on a train, he presented himself as part traveling salesman, part broker. Horizon was not far from the truth about Jewish involvement in the trade of prostitution when he said, "Nu, what can a poor Jew do in times like this?"[80] Edward Bristow perceptively calls white slavery "the sexualization of blood libel." Just as it was believed that Jews required the blood of Christian virgins to make their Passover matzoh, it was easy to accept that Jews gleefully lured naïve gentile girls into brothels and other dens of debauchery. Brothelkeeping, writes Bristow, was an economic necessity in an empire where most professions were closed to Jews. Antisemitism may not have directly caused the trade in women, but it certainly "distorted the Jewish economy and impoverished the people."[81]
Gratsianov singled out the Jews not only as prostitution's chief third parties in western Russia and Poland, but as the ones most adept at
[78] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1675–76. Bristow has also pointed out that Jewish go-betweens dealt mostly with Jewish women. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 47.
[79] Gintsburg, "O mezhdunarodnoi evreiskoi konferentsii," p. 424.
[80] Kuprin, Iama, p. 106.
[81] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 46, 85.
dodging sanitary commission rules.[82] Letters he reproduced, however, provide other, more useful insights into Jews and the business of prostitution. In Mitav, someone named A. I. Simon answered the letter of a woman who had asked to return to Simon's brothel and promised to bring along an 18-year-old "pretty young lady" (khoroshen'kaia baryshnia ). Simon was willing to take them both, so long as they had no outstanding debts. If they lacked the fare for railway tickets, "then send your things C.O.D." Another woman, one in a family of four sisters who ran brothels in Minsk, Kovno, Odessa, and Bobruisk, told a prostitute named Rokhlia that she was welcome, but not for the 15 rubles Rokhlia had requested in payment.[83] Given the high number of Jews in Minsk, not surprisingly, the principals in these letters are obviously of Jewish ancestry. But the letters tell us more than that—they suggest that brothel prostitution was by necessity a close and personalized activity that often extended to large families. Though the trade in women was serious business, it clearly had its human elements as well.
The Jews who engaged in the business of prostitution resembled the women who chose prostitution as the most sensible employment option among the few that were available to them. Coercion and fraud played a role in some instances, but the individuals who traded in women mostly just facilitated the progress of what they looked upon as legitimate business transactions. Alain Corbin has dubbed these activities a logical extension of brothel prostitution itself, with its imperative to find new women to satisfy the customers.[84] Most middlemen and brothelkeepers were not the evil "slave traders" that made the news; rather, they were men and women who ran the brothels, moved women between brothels and cities so that "fresh merchandise" was available to the customers, found new recruits, negotiated agreements, and kept up a circle of contacts. Jewish involvement in the trade of prostitution was an artifact of an antisemitic system that extended quotas to Jews in higher education and the professions, and excluded Jews from owning land. Ironically, this had the consequence of confirming the antisemites in their conviction that Jews were by nature traffickers in flesh and stigmatizing the business of prostitution as a Jewish pursuit.
[82] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 5, 15, 17, 26–27.
[83] Ibid., pp. 12–13.
[84] Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 280.
Bonds and Rituals
So clowns just be careful with me,
It's dangerous to play tricks on an ardent heart.
To fall in love, it's so easy and so likely,
To forget Tania—only that will be hard.
Poem to a prostitute in Kalinkin Hospital
Brothel women are less elusive to the historian than odinochki. Streetwalkers and other independent prostitutes faded in and out of Russia's working class and urban poor, complicating the task of differentiating them. Brothel prostitutes, on the other hand, lived within the walls of their brothel and in so doing created their own communities. As members of unique subcultures within Russian society, brothel prostitutes appear to have formed social bonds tied to their economic backgrounds, their profession, and their shared status as outcasts.
Brothel prostitutes and brothelkeepers retained strong cultural links with peasant and religious folk traditions, even as they tried to boost revenues. To do so, they employed rational means to make more money: prostitutes encouraged guests to buy drinks at inflated prices, madams tried to spice up their houses with an ever-changing supply of young and pretty women, and both did what they could to create an atmosphere appealing to men's libidinal imaginations. But brothel owners and prostitutes also resorted to seemingly "irrational" techniques to enhance their income by consulting with wisewomen and seers on how to purge their brothels of bad luck and following complicated, symbolic rituals to attract more customers and foil competitors. Good luck charms, special rites, and magic were common throughout Russian peasant culture; in the brothel these practices were adapted to the particular conditions of commercial sex.[85]
One brothel rite was known as "drawing the devil." In the hope of bringing in clients, one woman would sketch a representation of the devil by drawing a man with short legs, horns, a ladder in one hand, and a broom in the other. Other women in the brothel would write the names of their favorite guests in the blank space around this picture and then, at the stroke of midnight, stick a burning cigarette in a hole that had been made where the devil's mouth had been drawn. Next, in front of a mirror, each woman would take a puff of the cigarette and slap
[85] Descriptions of rituals are from Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 56–63.
herself on the chest. The brothel's musicians would play a march and the women would then carry the "devil" onto the beds in each of the brothel's rooms, all the while beating his picture with twigs. Finally, the devil would be crumpled up and thrown into the fireplace, as the women shouted the names of their preferred clients into the chimney. According to Shneider-Tagilets, the brothel musician who recorded these practices, if no guests arrived, the woman who initially drew the devil's picture would be shunned as "unlucky" (neschastlivaia ) and she would not be allowed to participate in "this stupid procession" again.
Another ritual involved burning locks of the women's pubic hair with some kindling while each of the women danced around this fire with her dress raised. There were also rites in which women in the brothel would boil the keys to the front door or wash themselves in water that had been used to cook a piece of meat. Another method of attracting customers involved the fashioning of a voodoo doll wrapped in a shroud for delivery to a rival brothel. Superstitious madams might also make a note of the first woman to bed down with a client each night, dubbing her the "starter" (pochin ), someone to be considered good luck. If, however, some scandal erupted that night or something went wrong, the same woman would be branded unlucky and her fellow prostitutes might decide that similar problems would arise should she once again be the first to find a client.
Shneider-Tagilets also wrote down the lyrics of three "heartbreaking" songs that were sung in Russia's brothels. With some caution, we can use the words to provide some clues about how prostitutes thought about themselves and the choices they had made. Judging by all three songs, in their more sober moments brothel prostitutes considered themselves according to categories similar to the ones constructed by privileged society. In "Fallen," for example, the scenario of a girl's ruin corresponds closely with the notion of prostitution as a desperate measure to ward off starvation: a God-fearing girl "unacquainted" with need finds herself in dire straits and throws herself into the "huge abyss of vice." Angered over the way society holds her in disdain, she turns her back on its values and rejects its pity.[86]
Fallen
There once was a time that I looked for
Some brotherly help here in town.
[86] Ibid., pp. 18–19. Songs translated by Laurie Bernstein.
But now my soul has grown callous,
And I'm used to the roaming around!
Not for this was I born and then raised up.
Unacquainted was I with such need.
I once prayed to God, I was faithful.
I once had a soul that knew peace.
But then need set in, and soon after,
The spectre of hunger, it loomed.
The grief, it became a disaster,
And I gave myself up as quite doomed.
So in the huge abyss of vice
I fell with my eyes shut so tight
I forgot what was holy and nice
And succumbed to the terror and fright!
The whore's always held in contempt.
No pity will anyone proffer.
I was lured right into the abyss,
And no help did anyone offer!
I turned to my friends for assistance.
Their advice they gave before long:
"Shame on you! You ought to be working!"
With one voice they all sing this song.
But where there is work they won't tell me;
On that there is nothing to hear.
If someone could help me in that way—
Now that kind of friend I'd hold dear!
So toss all your dirt and your stones.
I can take it, I'm used to all that.
I'm not waiting around for your pity.
No one cares about me, that's a fact!
In the second song, a consumptive seamstress worn out from work and abandoned by her lover at a time when "love and honor . . . don't hold much water," seeks refuge in a brothel. There she need not go hungry anymore, but she must sell sex to "old men" and face the fact that sooner or later she will contract syphilis.[87]
Poor Seamstress
You're already a poor, poor seamstress.
You've suffered for twenty-five years.
[87] Ibid., pp. 19–20.
A kopeck's not easily gotten.
You've survived much misfortune and tears!
With nose pinched, and cheeks all a-sunken,
Hard labor has sucked dry your breast.
Your white hands are now all bony.
Your cough just won't let you rest!
Say goodbye to depression and worry.
For "honor" it's grown much too late.
Forsake sadness and iron needle.
Make peace with a debauched fate.
Love and honor, they don't hold much water,
And old age, it's dry as a bone.
Every rake spoils somebody's daughter,
Then leaves her behind all alone.
So join up with "the institution."
You'll never be hungry while there.
They'll give you a room that's yours only,
And they'll teach you to dance oh so fair.
There you'll drink beer and porter and cognac.
You'll never sleep without a man.
You'll also learn various methods
To steal ruthlessly long as you can.
You'll fondle old men for a ruble,
And laugh to those girlfriends of yours.
And you'll often wind up in hospital,
Suffering from syphilitic sores.
The third song has a more mournful tone. It is narrated by a man whose betrothed has left him to become a prostitute. Unlike the women in the first two songs, she is completely unsympathetic; she has forsaken love and respectability out of greed and a desire to live the gay life. His heart broken, the narrator appeals to his dead mother for pity. Only at the very end does the song arouse any sympathy for the prostitute—but there it is only for her poor damned soul.[88]
Oh Mother!
Oh mother, oh mother, my mother!
Was I born so all this could be?
I curse the fate that has brought me
Such endless and cruel agony!
[88] Ibid., pp. 20–21.
You lie in your grave very peaceful;
My sorrows do not reach your ears.
But listen, oh mother, I'm grieving;
I love her, yet know only tears!
To love her so madly is painful.
She's mistress to some other men.
My heart burns with a flame I can't fathom
And with malice and hatred for them!
She was my betrothed, my beloved,
But she grew restless living with me.
I loved her with all of my senses,
But from her I found cruel mockery.
She left for a den of infamy,
Where she found chandeliers and gold jewels,
Where the heart spills over its own blood,
Where the immortal demon, he rules!
She sits in the arms of another,
Who flatters her so vulgarly.
To her, God and shame are forgotten
Alongside someone as corrupt as he.
In heaven, there aren't any secrets;
It's known who is righteous, amen.
For us, divine judgment is waiting.
The guilty ones will be condemned.
So blessings, my dear, dear mother.
Give me patience to live out my role,
And pray for my poor, poor darling,
For her young and fallen soul!
To analyze these songs with any assurance, we would need to know the spirit in which they were sung, whether the women who sang them took them seriously, whether they were performed during quiet, intimate moments, whether they were sung solo or in unison, whether raucous tempos and sophomoric or clever rhymes subverted the melancholy lyrics, and whether customers demanded such songs for their own reasons. Shneider-Tagilets introduced them as genuinely sad, sung "in moments of depression and consciousness," but the sparks of anger and defiance suggest that they may also have served other functions. Surely a unified chorus of prostitutes' voices would have helped take the edge off whatever feelings of alienation or self-pity or disappointment these women shared.
Life within the brothel encouraged emotional and physical intimacies among residents. Observers, however, remained uncharacteristically silent about sexual relations among prostitutes. Although explicit prurient speculation extended to most aspects of prostitutes' lives, it usually stopped short of a consideration of lesbianism.[89] In France things were different. According to Alain Corbin, in the mid-nineteenth century Parent-Duchâtelet assumed that "tribalism" was part and parcel of relations among women working as prostitutes.[90] Jill Harsin has suggested that French authorities required brothel prostitutes to maintain separate beds in order to discourage sexual acts between the women themselves.[91] In the Russian context, however, nineteenth-century regulations about separate beds in houses of prostitution explicitly fell under the rubric of sanitation and public health.
In western Europe, a conception of "lesbianism" was slow to follow what was a new understanding of homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century. Lesbianism did not even exist according to Russian laws and was not yet a significant topic of social discourse.[92] As with so many aspects of prostitution, perceptions were askew of a more complex reality. In fact, we encounter allusions and even a few explicit references to "perversions" among the girls in the House of Mercy's juvenile division and to a female clientele among the privileged classes that also patronized prostitutes.[93] In Boris Bentovin, we find a lengthy discussion of sexual and loving relationships among prostitutes.
Bentovin discussed lesbianism in a 1904 article based on his experiences as a Kalinkin Hospital physician. In his view, the "depraved environment" of the brothel in particular gave relationships of the innocent, schoolgirl variety "another character." Wrote Bentovin, "The very regime of the brothels, with its prison-like foundation and the constant relations of brothel women, could not do more to promote such in-
[89] Laura Engelstein argues that in the post-1905 atmosphere, educated society was more wont to see "deviance" among prostitutes and other members of the lower classes. See Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness , pp. 288–98.
[90] Corbin, Women for Hire , pp. 4–5.
[91] Jill Harsin, "Crime, Poverty and Prostitution in Paris, 1815–1848" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1981), p. 35.
[92] See Engelstein, "Gender and the Juridical Subject," p. 482 n. 99.
[93] See, for example, Kuprin, who suggested that prostitutes were so repelled by their profession that almost every one engaged in lesbian activities (Iama , p. 88); A. I. Matiushenskii, who asserted that this "unnatural vice" originated in the East (Polovoi rynok , p. 115); Zakharov, "Prichiny rasprostraneniia prostitutsii," p. 202; Konopleva, "Otdeleniia dlia nesovershennoletnikh," pp. 304, 306; Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1990 g. , p. 70.
timacy." Such alliances were not discouraged by madams because they kept prostitutes from the ups and downs of love affairs with men. But, Bentovin argued, because prostitution was a mercenary occupation, these relationships could only have mercenary aspects. In the brothel, they were based on experience, with the new recruits hooking up with the veterans. On the streets, young prostitutes would find "more solid and experienced girlfriends" for mutual exploitation, the former benefiting from the financial security of the established prostitutes and learning the ropes, and the latter attracting more clientele because of their lovers' youth and "freshness."[94]
Bentovin reproduced some letters that had been sent among prostitutes in Kalinkin's infamous venereal ward. It was there that he had seen "affectionate pairs" walking down the hospital corridors, "tenderly embracing and cooing." Though the letters are not necessarily explicit about sexual relations or brothel prostitution, they certainly document powerful emotional attachments between the inmates and women on the outside. In the first letter, a 15-year-old in Kalinkin named Niusha admonished another inmate, her "Dear Mania," for insulting her. Niusha asked her to come see her; Mania's refusal would be read as a signal that "you don't love me." But "whom I love, that you yourself must understand." Niusha acknowledged that she and Mania would soon be separated—Mania was going to enter the House of Mercy. "You'll find yourself another girlfriend where you live, and you'll forget about me." But Niusha closed her letter by sending "endless" kisses to Mania's lips and enclosing a poem that begged her to remember their time together.
Mania wrote back, complaining that she did not have Niusha's address and adding that Niusha was now with another woman and she did not want "to interfere with your happiness." Niusha was still young; it was better for them to stay apart—"If you were 16, then it would be another matter." But Mania also gave her a chance to resume their relationship: "if you don't want to break up, then you must listen and do everything that I want." She closed with the words, "be happy and don't forget me."
Niusha answered, admitting her confusion. "I wanted three girls to make a scandal and break windows so they would transfer me to you in the barracks." Now Niusha decided it was not worth it, since she was going to be discharged on Friday. She promised to come see
[94] Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," pp. 165–66.
Mania before she left, closed with another poem, and signed off, "I kiss you an endless number of times and I passionately embrace You.[95]
One prostitute with the initials "A. A." apologized for not having written in a while and acknowledged her "Dunia's" jealousy over someone referred to as "P." Yet she reminded Dunia "how many times I cried" when Dunia herself was with someone else. "Sweet Duniasha, I beg you, please, don't get yourself a girlfriend in the hospital." In a second letter, she apologized many times over for hurting Dunia's feelings and begged her to reconcile. She explained to her "dear Dunechka": "No, I don't love her. You know that I love only you, and I am your girlfriend, and you are mine until I lie in my grave. I loved you and will love you, but I don't know whether you love me as much." In a third note, she again begged Dunia not to be angry with her. "My dear Dunia, no, we didn't come together in order to fight and argue; no, not for this."[96]
One Katia expressed her horror over the fact that "Taniushka" had wound up in the hospital. She wrote, "Sweet and dear Taniushka. I kiss you endless times on your luscious lips [appetitnyia gubki ]. Sweet Tania, you know that I love you. I love you madly. Tania, when I heard about you, that you were taken in [to Kalinkin Hospital], I didn't sleep for two days and nights. With eyes that were never dry, I cried and pitied you, that such a young thing was perishing." She also forwarded the poem translated at the beginning of this section that ends, "To fall in love, it's so easy and so likely/To forget Tania—only that will be hard." When Tania wrote back, she expressed her gratitude for Katia's concern and told her they would be together when she was released from the hospital. She apologized for not writing a poem: "Forgive me. I can't write verses, I don't know how."[97]
Such letters belie Bentovin's cynicism about the relationships between prostitutes. Though the letters indeed display naïveté and not a small share of histrionics, they also evince deep and serious attachments between these young women. Bentovin, however, could only interpret the writings according to established parameters. From their "illiterate lines," like any good Victorian, he could detect the "sensitive and tender female soul" of someone who, with the proper cultivation, could be "a
[95] Ibid., pp. 167–68.
[96] Ibid., p. 168.
[97] Ibid., p. 169.
good wife and good mother."[98] He did not realize that the women were already fulfilling those roles (and might continue to do so) for each other.
The Movement to Abolish Licensing
Public brothels are official employment agencies of women for the purpose of prostitution, arenas of criminality, and an open provocation to debauchery. [Brothels] are schools in which our youth loses its health, its honesty, and its respect for women and the family hearth. [Brothels] are sources of venereal disease and alcoholism.
Medical Department of Kharkov (1915)
The granting of licenses to houses of prostitution evolved into one of the most controversial aspects of the regulatory system. By the turn of the century, support for continued toleration of brothels disintegrated because of three overlapping factors. First, it had become patently clear that brothels were not fulfilling the prophylactic role that had been assigned them in the nineteenth century. Increasing numbers of studies showed that brothel prostitutes had higher rates of venereal disease than registered odinochki and clandestine prostitutes, and that the majority of men suffering from venereal disease blamed their infections on women in brothels. Soaring rates of syphilis and gonorrhea reinforced claims that brothels functioned as "syphilis laboratories," both for prostitutes and for the men who paid for their services.[99] One Tomsk official provided sobering statistics that traced a third of all syphilis in that Siberian city to its brothels.[100]
Second, growing awareness of "white slavery" and the ways in which brothelkeepers and their associates exploited brothel prostitutes played a major role in shaping public and professional opinion about licensing. Russia's dailies fueled the movement against brothels by publishing sen-
[98] Ibid., pp. 166–69.
[99] Avchinnikova, O reglamentatsii prostitutsii, p. 7.
[100] In the summer of 1896, it was found that 92 percent of brothel prostitutes in Tomsk suffered from some form of syphilis; in 1911 Dr. V. M. Timofeev diagnosed 45 percent of Tomsk's brothel prostitutes as syphilitic. See K. M. Grechishchev, Pritony razvrata (Tomsk, 1913), pp. 4–5; "Protokoly zasedanii vrachebno-sanitarnago soveta," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika g. Tomska, no. 9 (September 1912): 402.
sationalistic articles about beating, rapes, robberies, and kidnapings involving brothel owners and young women. The formation of the ROZZh in 1900 was both a consequence and a mainspring of antibrothel sentiment. International efforts to combat the trade in women inspired the ROZZh's organization, but its well-publicized activities also helped focus educated society's attention on the issue of forced prostitution and the exportation of women to brothels in foreign countries.[101]
Third, the struggle against brothels was one of the growing pains of Russian urbanization. When toleration was originally conceived, officials extended licenses to brothels located on the outskirts of towns. However, as towns expanded and populations and industries grew, former suburbs frequently became incorporated into hitherto small cides.[102] As a result, brothels attained a new visibility. Whereas earlier they may have been seen as a vague annoyance, they had now become a genuine social threat. Brothel opponents in Kharkov, for example, argued that brothels were "anachronistic," that twenty-five years had passed since brothels were licensed for their neighborhood, at a time "when life in our city was not so intense."[103] The presence of brothels hurt property values of surrounding homes and threatened a neighborhood's tranquility and sense of community.
State officials also shifted their position. Even Tarnovskii came full circle, characterizing brothels in 1899 as "the worst form of tolerated prostitution" and claiming that unless medical-police committees started examining the men who visited brothels, brothel prostitution would remain more harmful to public health than prostitution in the streets.[104] In 1901, the MVD explained its decision to forbid women under the age of 21 from living in brothels by asserting that "entry into
[101] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1900 i 1901 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1902), p. 8.
[102] See, for example, Vasil'ev, "O prostitutsii v Libave," p. 14O2.
[103] "Doklad o zakrytii domov terpimosti v gorode Khar'kove," Izvestiia Khar'kovskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 9–10 (September–October 1915): 133.
[104] At the 1897 congress, Tarnovskii still favored brothels, but much less enthusiastically and more guardedly than he had in previous forums. Whereas he had once suggested exempting brothels from state taxes and organizing free, obligatory visits to brothels for the army's lower rank, by 1897 he was more circumspect, hinging his continued approval on the necessity of medical examinations for male guests. When the Medical Council commission that digested the congress's decisions failed to include this measure in its proposals, Tarnovskii submitted a personal protest. Tarnovskii, "O reglamentatsii prostitutsii v Moskve i v Parizhe," Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal (February 1881); Vrach, no. 9 (1899): 260–61; Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 3 (March 1901): 56. See also Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 367; M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 49.
a brothel at such an early age exerts an extremely harmful influence on a woman in physical as well as moral respects."[105] The Medical Council itself made a dramatic about-face in 1906, declaring that "one of the particular measures for the betterment of the population must be the obliteration of state-licensed brothels, whose further existence cannot be justified from a hygienic or prophylactic point of view, and whose existence contradicts basic humanitarian and social demands."[106] Though the MVD never withdrew its policy of issuing licenses to brothels, there is evidence that officials in the upper echelons of the UGVI listened carefully to both the medical profession's disenchantment with brothels and the public's indignant outcry. When dumas and rural councils (zemstva ) throughout the empire ruled to shut down local brothels, the MVD never attempted to overrule their decisions. It appears that even the tsarist administration doubted the wisdom of continuing to sponsor houses of prostitution.
Brothels became anathemas by the early 1900s, perceived as polluting the very men and women they were designed to protect. Feminists and moral crusaders spearheaded Russian society's campaign against state brothels, but government bureaucrats, members of the liberal intelligentsia, and ordinary urban residents also participated in the struggle to halt the government's policy of licensing. Sympathetic reformers and staunch regulationists alike complained of "white slavery" and the inordinately high rates of venereal disease and alcoholism in state-licensed brothels. The clamor against the state's toleration of brothels grew increasing loud, as these houses came to be regarded as "citadels of syphilis and venereal disease" and "dens of depravity" (pritony razvrata ).[107]
[105] MVD circular of June 6, 1901, to provincial governors, published in "Offitsial'nyi otdel," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 9 (September 1901): 165. This ruling, as an "explanation" circulated six weeks later elucidated, did not apply, however, to women already in brothels. See MVD circular of July 16, 1901, published in ibid., p. 166. Another circular attempted to straighten out any "misunderstanding" caused by the first two, reiterating that prostitutes under the age of 21 at the time of the June 6 ruling did not have to leave public houses. If they quit work in a brothel, though, they could not be readmitted until they had reached the legal age. See MVD circular of October 3, 1902, published in ibid., no. 11 (November 1902): 193. In 1910, the MVD complained that these instructions had not been followed. See MVD circular of April 28, 1910, published in ibid., no. 6 (June 1910): 120.
[106] This break with Medical Council tradition was widely quoted, but the most complete version of the decision is in Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 8 (August 1906): 182–85.
[107] A Siberian physician used the expression, "citadels of syphilis," in "Protokoly zasedanii vrachebno-sanitarnago soveta," p. 403. "Dens of depravity" was a common epithet for brothels.
In 1910, although not all 293 representatives to the Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women voted to abolish regulation altogether, they unanimously called for the elimination of state-licensed brothels.[108]
Residents from all over the Russian empire employed various political strategies to move brothels out of their neighborhoods or eliminate them completely. Brothelkeepers and the homeowners who rented out apartments as brothels acted in their own defense, composing what they considered legitimate appeals for consideration and protection.[109] When local authorities failed to deliver, petitioners sought aid from the Department of Police, provincial and city governors, the UGVI, and even the minister of internal affairs himself. The extent of official involvement indicates a system that was governed by many, but ruled by none.
In 1911, residents from the island of Kronstadt wrote to the MVD about transferring a brothel to a more remote location. Showing familiarity with empirewide rules, the petitioners asserted that the house was too close to a military barracks and, surrounded as it was by wooden buildings, represented a potential fire hazard. They also complained of the pernicious moral influence on neighboring families. According to their petition, from early evening until late at night one could hear noise, shouting, and cursing near the brothel. Drunken sailors from the Baltic fleet often harassed female passers-by and there were several incidents involving drunks who had tried to enter the wrong house.[110]
[108] Papers against brothels at the 1910 congress included Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma"; Ekaterina I. Gardner, "Ob unichtozhenii domov terpimosti"; Pavel D. Leskevich, "Khodataistva gorozhan ob unichtozhenii domov terpimosti"; Vera Kliachkina, "Mnenie Kievskago otdeleniiu Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin po voprosu ob unichtozhenii domov terpimosti." For the 1910 congress vote, see Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 575.
[109] In addition to the cities described below, the sources contain and/or mention petitions and letters of complaint from residents in Sevastopol', Iamburg, Mariupol', Irkutsk, Maikop, Kherson, Kobrin, Astrakhan, Elabuga, and Kineshma. There are also letters and petitions from brothelkeepers and landlords in Astrakhan and Ufa.
[110] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition to MVD of October 19, 1911. A 1907 inspection report on the Kronstadt brothel described serious defects in the house's construction and matter of factly mentioned how dancing would naturally take place there (in disregard of regulations that forbade merrymaking). In ibid., November 26, 1907 minutes from building commission in Kronstadt; letter to UGVI from military governor of December 10, 1911. In 1903, a Kronstadt police chief was tried for taking bribes and extorting money from local madams. See "Sudebnyi otchet po delu Shafrova," Novosti (February 4, 1903); Gratsianov, "Po povodu proekta novago 'Polozheniia o S.-Peterburgskom vrachebno-politseiskom komitete,'" Russkii meditsinskii vestnik, no. 1 (January 1, 1904): 5; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 164.
In Narva, a letter to the minister of internal affairs described how brothels "threaten our peaceful and quiet part of the city" and contribute to the "demoralization of our young population." Brothels meant "orgies" and "public whores" providing "a dangerous example to our children."[111]
Such complaints provide evidence of how brothelkeeping violated the social order and how the rules governing brothel maintenance were routinely broken. In a more extreme vein, between 1905 and 1910, charges against the brothelkeeper Gita Dvorkina in the city of Nevel' included robbery, beatings of prostitutes and clients, passing counterfeit money, insulting police officials, selling alcohol, possessing blank passports (presumably for forgeries), and keeping a 14-year-old girl on the premises. Not only were brawls, scandals, and disturbances said to be frequent occurrences at Dvorkina's brothel, but in 1910 it became apparent that she had never even received official permission to run her business.[112] In Dvinsk, prostitutes as young as 16 were living in local brothels and, according to an investigator's damaging report, the local physician conducted his examinations of prostitutes "extremely carelessly." Equally disturbing was an allegation that the chief of police had been bribed by Dvinsk brothelkeepers to overlook breaches of medical-police committee rules. The exasperated investigator concluded that influential individuals "were displaying partiality toward dens of depravity, having an interest in prolonging their existence."[113]
Accusations about lawlessness in brothels did not only originate among neighbors and local authorities. A group of brothel owners threatened with closure in Tver alleged that in their competitors' houses, "musical instruments are played all day long. . . . There is bartering taking place and lanterns are blazing in order to attract the public.
[111] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition of June 16, 1911, to minister of internal affairs.
[112] In 1910, action was taken, possibly related to the fact that charges brought against Dvorkina's brothel had trebled in 1909. TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter of September 10, 1910, from Department of Police to UGVI; letter of February 20, 1910, from Vitebsk governor to Department of Police; letter of June 29, 1910, to Vitebsk medical-police committee from Nevel' district officer; letter of November 10, 1909, to Nevel' medical-police committee from Vitebsk medical-police committee.
[113] When the MVD and local residents pressured the local medical-police committee to find a more "suitable" location for these brothels, the first proposed site turned out to be adjacent to a school and synagogue. A second site was designated in 1911, but it housed the twenty-fifth division of the Russian infantry, as well as the military high command. TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, report of March 13, 1913, to minister of internal affairs.
The people that visit these houses are predominantly drunk; they have no shame before children or the respectable public in general. These visitors constantly behave disgracefully on the street, taking no notice of holidays or the time of day." The brothels in their apartments, they claimed, had been much less troublesome. Music had been forbidden and they never resorted to obvious advertisements. "We ran these houses decorously. These places didn't do any harm. In order not to abandon our homes now, what is to be done?" (A report to the Department of Police from Tver's governor challenged their right to cast the first stone. As it turned out, the petitioners' homes were decrepit: rooms in their brothels were tiny, airless, and often divided only by screens, the floors were rotten, and the heating was grossly inadequate. Not only were these houses ill-suited for brothels, the report declared them illegal as residences for odinochki as well.)[114]
Brothel neighbors complained of noise, disorderly streets, disease, and links between brothels and criminal activities, as well as of lowered property values. The complaints suggest a clash of economic motives, as small-scale business owners—the brothelkeepers and their landlords—squared off against a petit bourgeoisie that had its wealth invested in property. For example, frustrated homeowners from Dvinsk despaired after the local duma ignored their efforts to move public houses to a less-populated part of the city. They wrote not only of an "outraged moral sensibility," but of the depreciation of their property values.[115] Thirty-eight Kharkov homeowners complained that the red-light district on Lantern Lane was "tremendously uncomfortable for everyone who lives there" and that these houses had "a ruinous influence on our children." Moreover, the brothels "have deprived us of the possibility to rent apartments to our own people." In light of the "tremendous harm" these houses had created and in anticipation of "moral and economic betterment," they begged the duma "to free us from a horrible nightmare."[116]
Narva brothelkeepers had their own nightmare to worry about. Peisokh Blokh, an enterprising brothel landlord in that city, was doing everything he could to put his competitors out of business. At one point,
[114] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition to MVD of March 1909; petition to MVD of May 18, 1909; letter of October 20, 1910, from Tver governor to Department of Police; letter of November 7, 1910, from Department of Police to UGVI.
[115] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, quoted in report of March 13, 1913, to minister of internal affairs.
[116] "Doklad o zakrytii domov terpimosti," pp. 133–44.
he paid people to sign his anti-brothel petitions, forged names, and, like Gogol's Chichikov, even added some "dead souls" for good measure.[117] He did his work too well, however. Though the Narva medical-police committee and provincial governor at first decided to transfer the brothels in question to a "weakly populated" area, just one month later, "in light of the unceasing complaints of the population" and the houses' "corrupting influence," licenses for all the brothels in Narva were withdrawn.[118] In 1913, Narva brothelkeepers wrote to the minister of internal affairs to lament their tribulations. Calling themselves "long-suffering, ill-fated landladies," they questioned the legitimacy of the signatures on the anti-brothel petitions and described a fire of mysterious origins that destroyed a building into which they were slated to move. "Not out of a feeling of malice, but for the sake of justice itself," they begged the minister to reopen the brothels in Narva. At the very least, he might give them a year to get their accounts in order.[119]
As much as instructions to shut down public houses pleased brothel neighbors, they threatened the financial interests of brothelkeepers and brothel landlords. Brothels' defenders invoked not only "justice itself" on their behalf, but the value of their tax contributions, the necessity of proper bureaucratic proceedings, and the dangers that lay in store when the prostitutes in their houses were evicted. Twelve Kharkov homeowners argued to the local duma that they had constructed their residences specifically to house brothels. Furthermore, they reminded officials, they paid taxes at a higher rate than anyone else.[120] One madam in Dvinsk called the order to close down her house "unjust—lacking consideration or resolution of the issue according to the appropriate procedures."[121] In 1911, Dar'ia Shcherbinina from the town of Slaviansk informed the MVD that the provincial administration had unfairly given
[117] A. B., "Bor'ba s domami terpimosti v Narve," Narvskaia gazeta, no. 50 (August 8, 1912); TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition of June 16, 1911, to minister of internal affairs; TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, request of January 21, 1913, from brothelkeepers to MVD.
[118] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter of October 12, 1912, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 8, 1913, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 17, 1913, from UGVI to minister of internal affairs.
[119] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition from brothelkeepers, January 21, 1913.
[120] Kharkov's medical department responded by insisting that revenues "could scarcely be a motive of the municipal administration for allowing state-licensed brothels." In "Doklad o zakrytii domov terpimosti," p. 136.
[121] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, quoted in March 13, 1913 report to minister of internal affairs.
her a mere six months to shut down her brothel. She contended that she had ran an "orderly" house for many years. Properly situated on a street far from the city center and sufficiently distant from churches, schools, and factories, her brothel could not "be considered awkward for the public under any circumstances." In her view, the provincial administration was overstepping the bounds of its designated authority by ruling against her brothel and violating her interests in an "irredeemable manner." Demonstrating an uncanny familiarity with the authorities' most dreadful worry, she (or her ghostwriter, for her only visible contribution to this letter was a scrawled signature) warned that the closure of her brothel would lead to a rise in clandestine prostitution.[122]
Campaigns against brothels met different fates, often depending on the willingness of tsarist officials to get involved. When the branch of the MVD in charge of licensing, the UGVI, stayed out of a controversy, dry, district, and provincial authorities could do as they pleased. Sometimes this meant leaving brothels in place; in other cases it meant moving and even abolishing local houses of prostitution. If the UGVI began making inquiries, particularly if it launched an investigation, then local authorities had to obey St. Petersburg in a more direct way.
In Kronstadt, a contested brothel stayed open because the UGVI honored the determination of the military governor to protect it, despite a report that chronicled several violations of ministry rules.[123] In Dvinsk, the brothels in the red-light district were closed, but the process took nearly a quarter of a century. The Dvinsk saga began in 1889, when residents petitioned the provincial governor about finding other locations for neighboring brothels. The governor recommended their proposal to the Dvinsk city duma 12 years later and the council assented to it in 1902, but the brothels stayed put. In 1906, another provincial governor asked the duma what had happened, only to hear brothels defended as permitting "more suitable and better control of prostitutes." The UGVI finally got involved in 1908, dispatching an investigator who submitted a report that revealed numerous violations of empirewide rules. Nonetheless, bureaucratic wheels turned slowly and the houses were not moved until 1913.[124]
The UGVI withdrew from the prolonged and messy controversy in the city of Narva, dumping all materials in the lap of the St. Petersburg
[122] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition of January 26, 1910 [sic], from Dar'ia I. Shcherbinina to minister of internal affairs.
[123] Ibid., letter of December 10, 1911, from Kronstadt military governor to UGVI.
[124] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, report of March 13, 1913, from Koshkin to minister of internal affairs.
provincial governor, who took it upon himself to shut down all Narva brothels.[125] In Odessa, the UGVI left the city governor and duma to battle among themselves over the question of brothels. The Odessa municipal duma ruled against brothels in 1904, affirming that they "debauch youths and serve as the cause for the ruin of many girls. They habituate young people to drunkenness, making them cynical, and turning them into criminals. Brothels destroy the calm and order in those parts of the city in which they are found, depreciate the property values of their neighbors, and offend the morality of nearby residents." But Odessa's ban never came into effect: though the center was prepared to accept the duma's ruling, the duma could not persuade the city governor to ratify it.[126]
The UGVI also steered clear of a struggle in Tomsk that followed the city duma's 1913 decision to revoke all brothel licenses. Though the duma claimed for itself the right of municipal governments to maintain jurisdiction in areas of public health and sanitation, the provincial governor's administration overruled the decision on the grounds that in 1898 the State Senate had ruled in favor of licensing for another city. The duma countered by arguing that the Senate had ruled on the question of regulation per se, not the autonomy of local decision making.[127]
In Moscow, elected representatives and the tsar's appointed authority acted in concert. Residents and homeowners of the Sretenskaia district of Moscow initiated a campaign against local brothels in 1905 and 1906, petitioning the duma and city governor to move them to the city outskirts. The city duma went one step further, ruling brothels to be "completely intolerable" and refusing simply to relocate them. In this case, the city governor supported the duma's decision, closing down all "open dens of depravity" in Moscow's center and allowing just a few brothels in other sections.[128] The UGVI did not question the ruling.
[125] Ibid., letter of October 12, 1912, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 8, 1913, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 17, 1913, from UGVI to minister of internal affairs. The provincial governor of St. Petersburg in 1904 did something similar, maintaining that the medical-police committee in Kolpino and Iamburg and the municipal police in Narva were in charge of determining when to withhold brothel licenses. TsGALO, Vrachebnoe otdelenie S.-Peterburgskago gubernskago pravleniia, f. 255, op. 1, d. 852, letters of May and June 1904.
[126] "Postanovlenie Odesskoi gorodskoi upravy," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 7–8 (April 1905): 951.
[127] For a description of the provincial administration's decision, see Grechishchev, "K voprosu o tom, v prave li gorodskoi dumy vospretit' otkrytie i soderzhanie pritonov razvrata," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika g. Tomska, no. 4 (April 1913): 259–61.
[128] In 1908, the new city governor found a compromise in tolerance for other types of bawdy houses: "furnished rooms" (meblirovannye komnaty ), "houses of rendezvous" (doma svidanii ) and "apartments of rendezvous" (kvartiry svidanii ). Tatarov, "Postanovka prostitutsii," pp. 388–90, 401; "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor za prostitutsiei v gorodakh v Rossii," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914.): 2050–53.
During the next ten years, municipal administrations flexed their local muscles even further. Kharkov residents' battle against local brothels succeeded in convincing the "Black Hundreds" city council[129] in 1915 not only to transfer the brothels out of one area, but to prohibit the operation of bawdy houses and ban them from the city completely.[130] Authorities in Omsk, Archangel, and Tashkent also shut down their cities' public houses. Elected officials in Tashkent noted how brothels failed to protect public health. In their words, "prostitution does not appear to be a necessary institution for society." Irkutsk took its notion of municipal autonomy to a logical extreme, petitioning to shut down brothels as well as abolish regulation altogether. But the fact that the MVD controlled brothels through administrative procedures prevented city dumas from abolishing brothels on any legal grounds.[131]
Local wishes to get rid of bawdy houses were facilitated by the UGVI's limited role. It confined itself to occasional benign inquiries to learn how matters were progressing, thereby providing additional impetus to the struggles in various cities. In most cases, the UGVI simply redirected the petitions it received back to the city where the trouble had originated, allowing decentralization—so unusual for Russia in matters of law and order, but clearly the rule where health was concerned—to take precedence. The UGVI's reliance on local decision making permitted each battle to intensify, encouraging officials, activists, and brothelkeepers alike to push even harder for their interests.
Brothel prostitution clearly engaged the political energies and emotions of many cities in the years prior to the revolutions of 1917. So long as the central government remained quiet, cities could adhere to their own interpretation of existing procedures. Not until January 1917, just a month before the question would be rendered moot by the February revolution that deposed the tsar, did central authorities enter the fray officially. At that time, the State Senate finally decided "whether a municipal duma has the right to participate in the promulgation of compul-
[129] A rightist coalition with this nickname had replaced "Progressives" in Kharkov's city council. Michael F. Hamm, "Khar'kov's Progressive Duma, 1910–1914: A Study in Russian Municipal Reform," Slavic Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 32.
[130] "Zasedanie 23-go oktiabria 1915 g.," "Izvestiia Khar'kovskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 9–10 (1915): 78–79.
[131] Gorodskoe delo, no. 10 (1914): 650; no. 2 (January 15, 1915): 102; nos. 11–12 (June 1–15, 1915): 698. See also "Khronika," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 4 (April 1914).
sory regulations which forbid the opening and maintenance of state-licensed brothels." In a move that avoided true responsibility for this issue, the Senate underlined the 1898 ruling that the Tomsk provincial administration had invoked, reminding Russia's cities that brothels came under administrative rules and were thus outside municipal control.[132]
The slowness with which the Senate addressed this issue and the Senate's reliance on judicial precedent suggest an unwillingness to grace brothel prostitution with further approval. Despite their jurisdiction over this realm, from 1898 to 1917 neither the State Senate nor the UGVI acted to impose their will on those local administrations which saw fit to abolish brothels. Indeed, when Iaroslavl brothels reopened after having been shut for seven years, the UGVI demanded an explanation from the provincial governor.[133] The UGVI also permitted Kiev to close its brothels in the middle of World War I. When the governor requested official permission to abolish Kiev's brothels in November 1916, the UGVI simply asked whether the city had developed concrete plans to combat venereal disease.[134]
By then it had become untenable to uphold licensing on the grounds that brothels prevented venereal disease. The UGVI saw its main role in the business of regulation as that of an arbiter of questions concerning public health. When directly queried regarding permission for a city to act in one way or another, the UGVI relied on ministry rules. However, when confronted with a fait accompli, the UGVI made a measured judgment about its main concern, prevention of venereal disease.
When the Senate ruled in January 1917 that the matter of state-licensed brothels was outside the jurisdiction of city governments, it skirted the real issue. In reality, only the MVD had the power to decide the question of brothel prostitution once and for all. By continuing its policy of toleration, the ministry was flagrantly disregarding the wishes of those members of the public who had so clearly expressed their disapproval of state licensing. At the same time, by failing to demand that municipalities and districts maintain brothels, the MVD was bowing to reality and public pressure. Grassroots organizing had helped to thwart
[132] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, Senate ruling of January 18, 1917.
[133] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, letter of July 3; letter of August 4, 1912, from Iaroslavl governor to Department of Police. See also Birzhevyia vedomosti (June 29, 1912).
[134] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, letter of November 30, 1916, from Kiev governor to Department of Police; letter of February 11, 1917, from UGVI to Kiev governor; letter of February 27, 1917, from Kiev governor to UGVI.
the state's policy of toleration for brothelkeeping, not to mention its long, tangled relationship with brothel prostitution.
Just as the brothels often operated outside the law with their liquor, dancing, and a myriad of other violations, so too could their neighbors, taking vigilante action to cleanse the streets. During the explosive year of 1905, Jewish workers stormed Warsaw's Jewish brothels in an infamous "Alphonsenpogrom" against pimps and prostitutes. According to Reuters, forty brothels were destroyed, 100 people were injured, and 8 were killed, including a prostitute.[135] That same year, residents and workers from the Bekman factory in St. Petersburg attacked a local brothel on a June evening, returning the next night to finish it off. When a barricade of broken glass and other debris kept them out, they went after a neighboring brothel owned by the same madam. The angry crowd broke in, charged up to the house's second floor, and proceeded to destroy everything they could get their hands on, tossing the remains of mattresses, linens, pillows, and furniture out the window. The "horribly frightened" prostitutes and madam succeeded in hiding out in nearby apartments, but the police were not so fortunate. When they arrived, they were met by a shower of stones and it was not until a detachment of mounted cossacks appeared an hour and a half later, long after the destruction had begun, that the crowd was dispersed.[136] The irony of these working men and women rising against the state—as exemplified by the state-regulated brothels—should not be overdrawn, however. They did so for motives that hardly bespoke a revolution, but rather a desire for orderly streets and to distance themselves from the stain of Jewish or working-class vice.
The furor over brothel prostitution provides us with new insights about individuals who have fallen through the historical cracks—homeowners, urban residents, urban landlords. From the petitions and letters on licensing, we learn that these individuals were much more than passive subjects capable of no more than self-defeating extremes of resignation and rebellion. In fact, their articulate protests evince a sense of rights and civic responsibility. Several activists showed a familiarity with anti-regulationist rhetoric and western European and Russian debates on abolishing regulation. But their arguments originated from already
[135] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 58–61.
[136] "Razgrom veselago doma," Priazovskii krai, no. 152 (June 25, 1905): 4. I am grateful to Timothy Mixter for this reference and the microfilm on which I read the article.
existing grievances in specific local situations. This was not a revolutionary movement, yet it did represent a moral and ideological challenge to state authority inasmuch as the state had given its mandate to establishments that affected a neighborhood's quality of life.
The regulationist vision of brothel prostitution as sanitary and easily controlled had little connection to reality. The high rates of venereal disease among brothel prostitutes and their customers advertised the fact that something neither hygienic nor wholesome was taking place in Russia's public houses. Brothels were not about hygiene and the "physiological needs" of which Fedorov spoke; they were about profit and parties and drinking and dancing and sex. Prostitutes knew this; their madams knew this; their customers knew this; even the doctors and policemen knew this. But to admit this officially was to admit that the state was condoning not only commercial sex, but genuine debauchery, something regulationists rejected.
Brothels were an embarrassing but integral part of the Russian urban landscape. Though regulation's intention to keep them under close surveillance proved chimeric, brothels evolved their own raison d'être. For men, they provided an institutional setting for obtaining commercial sex; for brothelkeepers and landlords, they were an excellent source of profit; for some women, they were the torture chambers that privileged society depicted. But for most prostitutes, they meant a roof over their heads, an alternative to walking the streets, and a place in a world among women very much like them. There were serious drawbacks and risks to becoming a public woman in a public house, to be sure, but there were also significant advantages. Degradation, oppression, and disease accompanied brothel life, but so might gaiety and camaraderie. A room of one's own (filled even with broken perfume bottles and little Japanese tables, those "pitiful pretenses of luxury") could indeed seem worth the sacrifice. Nor should it be forgotten that brothelkeepers attended to the brothel prostitutes' material needs. Most madams saw to it that their residents were fed (often, well-fed), clothed, and housed. From the standpoint of a woman from the lower classes, this could be a tempting arrangement. Plus, the promise of constant parties and endless streams of men probably sounded alluring, at least at first. Perhaps many women thought they could escape the common fate of debt, disease, and eventual ejection to the street.
Efforts to abolish brothels stemmed from understandable moral outrage, medical concern, and personal/community interest, but they also revealed contradictions and short-sightedness. Would brothels really
disappear if licensing was withdrawn? Did it make sense simply to drive brothels underground? According to a police inspector in Moscow, the abolition of brothels in Moscow only compelled many women to leave town, put a "mass" of prostitutes out on the streets, and increased clandestine prostitution and rates of venereal disease.[137] In 1915, several prostitutes in Ekaterinoslav wrote directly to the minister of internal affairs, begging him to pay attention to "us unfortunate, fallen women-prostitutes." In rambling prose and deferential language, they described their plight as a result of the recent abolition of state-licensed brothels in their city. Since that time, "we have been compelled to corrupt the streets with our sinful bodies because we haven't any shelter as a result of the multiplication of prostitutes among us. Infectious syphilitic diseases are raging through the whole city of Ekaterinoslav as a consequence of the closing down of the Shantan Apollo brothel." After a thinly veiled threat to infect the men of Ekaterinoslav, these women pleaded with "Your High-Excellency and Merciful Dear Father" to re-open a house for "us unfortunates."[138]
As the women evicted from the Shantan Apollo brothel pointed out, where were they to go now? Uninterested in giving up their trade, the only road they saw for themselves was the one of clandestine prostitution. But privileged society, at any rate, was not worrying about such things. If it was to open a house, the house would not be a public one for prostitution, but a private one for rehabilitation. Russian society had a larger goal—that of "saving" women from prostitution altogether.
[137] Tatarov, "Postanovka prostitutsii," pp. 388–90, 401.
[138] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, letter of February 9, 1915, to minister of internal affairs.
Chapter 6
Saving Fallen Women
"I will sit at my pictures, you shall sit by me and inspire my work, while you are busy with sewing or some other handicraft . . ." "Indeed," [the prostitute] interrupted his speech with an expression pd scorn. "I am not a washerwoman or a seamstress who has to work!"
Nikolai Gogol, "Nevsky Prospect"
Saving prostitutes was a "favorite theme" in medieval Russian ecclesiastical stories. In the seventeenth century, a secular version of the redemption tale circulated in Russia, that of the "pious" man who saved a prostitute from damnation by marrying her.[1] Russian literature and life pursued this motif with a vengeance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet with ever increasing pessimism over the possibility of truly "saving fallen women." As the head of the Legal Department of the ROZZh confessed in 1910, "it is very difficult, almost impossible, to return a woman already infected by prostitution to an honest life."[2]
Educated society's conceptions of prostitutes and prostitution revealed themselves most vividly in the movement to rehabilitate prosti-
[1] Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 74.
[2] Viktor A. de-Planson, "O deiatel'nosti Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin za pervye desiat' let ego sushchestvovaniia," Trudy s'ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 41.
tutes and prevent women from turning to prostitution as a trade. At the turn of the century, feminists, society ladies and gentlemen, moral crusaders, and other members of the Russian privileged classes devoted thousands of volunteer hours and rubles to this goal. By 1905, Russia could boast of a national philanthropic network designed to aid repentant prostitutes and protect women in danger of succumbing to prostitution; almost every major city in the empire had its own branch of the ROZZh. During its heyday, the organization founded women's employment agencies, sponsored lectures to educate the public about prostitution, posted volunteers at urban railway stations to assist newly arriving peasant women, maintained a representative on St. Petersburg's medical-police committee, and administered halfway houses for former prostitutes.
Russian society achieved an unusual harmony of purpose in the movement to rehabilitate prostitutes. Journals and dailies joined the crusade, publicizing the need for philanthropic agencies and running articles about the "trade in human flesh." Stodgy government bureaucrats, radical feminists, members of the high nobility, and liberal professionals found themselves united around the cause to halt prostitution and "rescue its victims." They might quarrel over the roots of prostitution and the utility of regulation, but few would dispute the need for shelters or the necessity of rescuing "white slaves" from pimps and other exploiters.
Indeed, the rehabilitation of prostitutes was such a popular activity that it was not incongruous for the police themselves to join in. The salvation spirit reached even the city governor of St. Petersburg. In 1900, he ruled that copies of religious journals like The Russian Pilgrim (Russkii palomnik ) and The Wanderer (Strannik ) be provided to the capital's brothels.[3] The chief of police in Kazan, influenced by the Kazan Society for the Protection of Unfortunate Women, did his part by distributing a circular to public houses that listed prostitutes' "rights" and referred women in need to the Kazan Society. Apparently, he had heard "rumors" that the "debauched and drunken life" had become burdensome for some prostitutes, but they feared to leave their "dens of commercial love." Could anything be worse, he asked, than engaging in a "hateful" trade that "corrupts their body and soul"? In return for their sexual services, prostitutes received "room, board, seductive clothes,
[3] Kleigels, "O deiatel'nosti sostoiashchago pri upravlenii S.-Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika."
and a gay and disgraceful nickname." In the future, however, only "the hospital and a crippled life" awaited them.[4]
Attempts to save fallen women usually floundered. Though salvationists were sincere in their desire to help, they tended to be as naïve, if not as tactless, as the police chief from Kazan. By condemning prostitution and relying on a dull combination of prayers, drab gowns, and menial work, salvationists underestimated the complexity of the issues and betrayed their own confusion and self-righteousness. Moreover, their identification with official Russia and the regulation system that kept prostitutes in tow cast them more as adversaries than allies.
Houses of Mercy
[F]ar from the noisy streets, there's a house where a girl can find shelter, a bowl of cabbage soup and a piece of bread, and delicious pie on Holidays, when she wearies of her licentious life, of drunken, disgraceful orgies, of all the debauchery that strongly holds her in its clutches.
House of Mercy (1910)
"Aline is in charge of a wonderful asylum for fallen Magdalenes. I went to visit them once. They are disgusting. After that visit I couldn't stop washing myself."
Nekhliudov's aunt in Tolstoy, Resurrection
Philanthropic efforts to aid "the fallen" began in Russia as early as 1833, when two women, S. A. Biller and A. F. Mikhel'son, established the Magdalene Shelter (Magdalinskoe ubezhishche) in St. Petersburg "to promote the return of repentant public women to the path of honest labor." In an institutional structure not unlike Magdalene houses in western Europe, residents (theoretically) redeemed themselves through a strict regimen of hard work and religious devotion. During its first eleven years of existence, this organization reportedly provided 446 women with temporary housing and moral support. In 1844, Biller transformed the Magdalene Shelter into the Holy Trinity Community of the Sisters of Mercy (Sviato-Troitskaia obshchina sester miloserdiia), another institution designed to house and assist former prostitutes. According to one source, Some 700 women had taken ad-
[4] Reprinted in Baranov, V zashchitu, pp. 153–62.
vantage of the agency's charity before it closed in 1863, its services now rendered by an institution organized by the countess E. E. Lambert and Father Stefanovich, a priest who worked at Kalinkin Hospital. The countess and the priest had set up their own women's shelter in 1862, first on hospital grounds and then in a private home on Furshtadt Street. It was also administered according to a formula of salvation through worship and labor. During the next six years, it aided 266 women, half of whom were reported to have returned to an "honest" life. In 1868, it merged with St. Petersburg's newly established House of Mercy.[5]
The House of Mercy had illustrious beginnings indeed. Following in the footsteps of her philanthropic-minded grandmother, in 1857 Tsar Nicholas I's daughter Mariia donated the money necessary to establish a shelter for penitent prostitutes in St. Petersburg. Initially located in a small dacha in a forest north of the city limits, this institution devoted itself exclusively to the care of a few child prostitutes, working in cooperation with the medical-police committee to root out juvenile prostitution where "vice harbors itself" But in 1868, the House of Mercy, already a three-story building with a six-bed infirmary, a church, and beds enough to hold fifty or sixty girls, joined forces with the countess and priest to take in adult women as well.[6] Administrators and wards from the former shelter on Furshtadt Street helped set up the new adult division in a large house on the capital's Petersburg side. By 1873, it had its own church and space for forty women.[7] The House of Mercy continued to expand. One year later, it opened a house designed to care for up to ten aging prostitutes. This agency widened its functions even further in 1877, establishing a new division for girls whose situations appeared to portend "inevitable ruin."[8] Thus, with its clientele of girls and young and old women, the House of Mercy worked both toward preventing vice and redeeming those already perceived as lost.
In the years that followed the assassination of Alexander II (after 1881), the House of Mercy began to suffer from serious financial woes.
[5] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1865, 1867.
[6] Ibid., pp. 1866, 1873–74. Juvenile inmates could not leave until they turned 18. Bentovin, "Spasenie 'padshikh,'" pp. 332–33.
[7] With the help of another member of the nobility, Mariia Nikolaevna secured a dacha for the juvenile division on Bol'shaia Ob"ezdnaia Street at a third of its market value; the adult division was on Barmaleev Street. Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1866–67.
[8] Oboznenko repeated this with a certain amount of irony, following the House of Mercy's word "inevitable" with a parenthetical exclamation mark. Ibid., pp. 1867–68.
Not only did it lose several thousand rubles a year in private and government subsidies, its membership slipped from the twenty-six paying members of 1880 to a mere six in 1890. Despite this loss of crucial income, the board of directors continued to display what Petr Oboznenko termed "an unusual eagerness for construction," building a new church to accommodate 500 worshippers in 1886 and constructing living quarters for a priest in the juvenile division. While attention to what the board viewed as the wards' spiritual needs conformed with House statutes, such unrealistic budgetary priorities proved disastrous. In 1895, funding problems eventually compelled the board to cut back on the number of beds in the adult division.[9] Not until it received financial assistance from the Charitable Society of Kalinkin Municipal Hospital (Blagotvoritel'noe obshchestvo pri kalinkinskoi gorodskoi bol'nitse) in 1899 was the shelter on the Petersburg side revived—albeit now without the ward for aging prostitutes and with fewer beds in general.[10] Funding became more secure when just one year later, the House of Mercy entered a new phase of existence as a sister organization of the fledgling ROZZh.
St. Petersburg was the first, but not the only city in the Russian empire to give birth to institutions designed to wrest prostitutes away from their trade. By the turn of the century, similar organizations could be found in Nizhnii Novgorod, Odessa, Warsaw, Riga, Revel', Kiev, Kazan, Tiflis, and Moscow, where in 1866 Princess Ol'ga A. Golitsyna (née Shcherbatova), a bishop, and several members of the nobility opened their own halfway house.[11] Moscow's Shelter of Saint Mary Magdalene (Ubezhishche sv. Maril Magdaliny) generally drew its clients straight
[9] The board's decision to spend funds on church construction is reminiscent of a similarly disastrous policy decision of Ivan Betskoi, the founder of Russia's foundling home system, in the late eighteenth century. Rather than devoting much-needed funds to infant care, Betskoi spend thousands of rubles on a foundling home's impressive church. See Ransel, Mothers of Misery, p. 53.
[10] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1868–7.
[11] Golitsyna's sister opened her own shelter in Kiev. A partial list of organizations that provided housing for repentant prostitutes includes the Miasnitskaia Hospital Shelter for Women, the Charitable Society of Miasnitskaia Hospital, Moscow's Society for the Improvement of Women's Lot, Nizhnii Novgorod's Society for the Aid of Needy Women, Odessa's Society of Saint Magdalene, Warsaw's House of Care of our Lady the Virgin, Riga's Society of Betabar, Revel's Estonian Society for the Care of People Given to Drunkenness and Prostitution, Revel's Evangelical Society, St. Petersburg's Evangelical-Lutheran Refuge of Saint Magdalene, St. Petersburg's Industrial Home of the Annunciation, St. Petersburg's Evangelical Society for the Protection of Women, Relief to Poor Women in St. Petersburg, and Tiflis's Religious-Philosophical Society.
from the ward in Miasnitskaia Hospital for diseased prostitutes, but the Moscow police and some families could also dispatch girls there for rehabilitation.[12] Women themselves might also apply, such as the one who pleaded in a letter to the shelter, "For God's sake, put me in that house so that I will be able to turn over a new leaf and become a human being."[13] Wards, who had to be under the age of 20, were expected to remain for a full three years.[14]
Dr. Ivan Priklonskii, who worked in Miasnitskaia Hospital, publicized the shelter's work in The Return of Fallen Girls to an Honest Working Life (Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek k chestnoi trudovoi zhizni ) and described the facilities. Just opposite the Church of St. Nicholas on Dolgorukov Street, the main building contained rooms with beds for the thirty residents, several common areas, a kitchen and cafeteria, a laundry, and private rooms for the administrator and her assistant. The shelter also had a well, a garden, outbuildings in the courtyard, good ventilation, and a stove that provided adequate heat. Equating austerity with virtue, Priklonskii wrote, "everything is clean, extremely simple, and without any luxury."[15]
It is difficult to determine precisely where these houses' inmates wound up after their stays, but overall, "redemption" was a rarity. Publicists for the Moscow shelter cited glowing figures about its successes, but these reflected the initial placement of women into jobs, rather than their long-term fates.[16] Priklonskii confessed that the majority of girls who entered the shelter did not remain for the full three years of training: it was the girls' own fault, since many of them "could not be called fully normal."[17] The House of Mercy had a similar attitude, attributing the high incidence of recidivism to the inmates' "deep-rooted habituation to idleness and drunken orgies, as well as their aversion for physical labor." Such proclivities "force them to plunge anew down that well-worn path of debauchery to illness and death."[18]
Veniamin Tarnovskii used the House of Mercy's poor track record to
[12] Ivan I. Priklonskii, Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek k chestnoi trudovoi zhizni i deiatel'nost' ubezhishcha sv. Marii Magdaliny v Moskve (Moscow, 1900), pp. 15, 32.
[13] Quoted in ibid., letter of 1898, p. 33.
[14] To accommodate more inmates, another shelter opened in 1880 Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 6–7, 11; Priklonskii, Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek, pp. 21, 29.
[15] Ibid., pp. 19–20.
[16] See Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, p. 7; Belyia rabyni, p. 34.
[17] Priklonskii, Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek, pp. 22–24.
[18] Quoted in Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," p. 1876.
support his theories about prostitution as a congenital defect. "Just as it is impossible to persuade a seasoned drunk to stop drinking hard liquor voluntarily or to substitute champagne for vodka, so is it impossible," he declared, "for a habitual prostitute voluntarily to change the form of the manifestation of her depravity." His reading of House of Mercy data from 1869 to 1885 allowed him to characterize only 28 percent of 425 residents as genuinely reformed. An 1880 follow-up investigation of ten former residents who had originally been counted among the rehabilitated compelled him to revise this figure downward, for only one had actually succeeded in staying away from prostitution. Extrapolating from these ratios, Tarnovskii estimated that just one in twenty-nine of the House of Mercy's wards could really hope to be "redeemed."[19]
When Oboznenko wrote about the House of Mercy seventeen years later, he estimated more modestly that between one-half and three-quarters of the House of Mercy's wards would eventually wind up back on the streets. For the period from 1878 to 1900, House records showed that almost half of the House's residents had been expelled or had left of their own free will; Oboznenko presumed that most of these women returned to prostitution. While the data characterized 44 percent of the former residents as "rehabilitated" (that is, as having found jobs, returned to their village, or gotten married), such a percentage was deceptively high because subsequent research revealed that half this group ultimately wound up registering as prostitutes. The fact that some of the women signed themselves onto medical-police committee lists for the first time suggested to Oboznenko that their stay at the House of Mercy may have even served to weaken their resolve to keep away from full-time prostitution. He also noted that many others undoubtedly went on to engage in clandestine prostitution, thereby remaining outside of official studies. Oboznenko concurred that the House of Mercy had failed to rehabilitate most of its clients, but he disagreed with his former professor about the reasons. Unlike Tarnovskii, he joined other critics in shifting the blame to the House of Mercy itself, with its alienating and depressing internal regimen.[20]
A look at the daily schedule of the House of Mercy supports Oboznenko's explanation for the high rates of truancy. Girls in the House of Mercy's juvenile division woke up at 6:00 A.M.; stood through morning
[19] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 149–50.
[20] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1873, 1879–94. In marked contrast, the Kazan Society for Unfortunate Women believed that "the less inhibiting the regime, the better." Baranov, V zashchitu, p. 91.
prayers, cleaned their rooms, drank tea, and ate black bread; worked at sewing, laundering, or cleaning between 8:00 and noon; had dinner and took a walk at 12:30; attended classes from 1:30 to 4:00; ate coarse bread and drank tea, worked, or had choir practice from 5:00 to 8:00; ate supper, and then went to sleep. The adults engaged in similar activities, but their work period lasted much longer than the juveniles'.[21] As for the curriculum, it consisted of instruction in elementary reading and writing, housework, training for handicrafts and trades, Bible lessons, and religious-moral conversations.[22] In the words of one resident, the teaching of the "religious-moral" instructor "doesn't allow us to sin in peace."[23]
Moscow's shelter adhered to strict rules as well. Beginning at 7:00 A.M., each day included a full six hours of work; only two hours a week were devoted to studies. Priklonskii nonetheless credited religious and ethical training for playing the most crucial role in effecting a girl's rehabilitation. To rectify the fact that many of the wards possessed only a "primitive understanding about God and His holy commandments" and that they were generally ignorant about the "correct, honest life," authorities at the Moscow shelter conducted talks about the Orthodox faith, religious history, and the difference between good and evil. Like the teaching program at the House of Mercy, the curriculum included only the most rudimentary literary skills and fundamental religious teachings. More attention was paid to job training and busy work. Apart from their spiritual lessons, girls learned crocheting, sewing, laundering, knitting, and cooking. At the close of their three-year stints, graduates would receive between 15 and 25 rubles as a "reward" for their labors.[24]
In June 1902, a prostitute interned in Kalinkin wrote a letter to the medical assistant, Tat'iana Baar, begging for help in entering a halfway house so she could "be a human being." But, evidently, she had quickly become discouraged, for a second letter, written just six days later, asked Baar to ignore her request. "Please forgive me," she wrote, "but I want
[21] While a 1910 description of the adult division asserted that two hours a day were devoted to instruction in reading and writing, Bentovin claimed that the sole literary training lasted only two hours a week and was devoted exclusively to the Bible. Bentovin, "Spasenie 'padshikh,'" pp. 334, 336–37; Elena A. Voronova, "V zashchitu ustroistva domov miloserdiia," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 297.
[22] According to the annual report published in 1911, daily activities for the juveniles consisted of reading, writing, sewing, darning socks, and keeping house and garden. Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta, p. 50.
[23] Quoted in Voronova, "V zashchitu," p. 297.
[24] Priklonskii, Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek, pp. 22, 27–28.
to tell you that I will not become a penitent because I heard that they don't do anything besides sew, wash clothes, and scrub floors. I can't do this. . . . I can repent on my own."[25] The numbers of prostitutes whose previous jobs had been in domestic service and the needle trades should certainly have given administrators pause about their training programs. Oboznenko not only considered the schedules in these institutions "extremely monotonous," he questioned the value of instructing residents in sewing, washing, and laundering. He thought it "dubious" that women lacking work experience would "develop any kind of training for labor here. Scarcely any woman who is accustomed to idleness would willingly and gladly engage in such dirty and wretched labor." Moreover, the majority of inmates knew how to sew and clean before they were admitted. "From personal experience," he remarked facetiously, these women "know just how well these trades can provide them with a tolerable existence."[26]
But physical labor apparently had another role for halfway house authorities. The language and tone of institutional reports suggest that the function of hard work was to repress, discipline, and punish. One annual report referred to manual labor as "the most useful method of distracting [the wards] from recalling their past."[27] At the 1910 congress, the House of Mercy's Nikolai Zakharov named "heavy, physical labor" as vital for the "pacification" of the wards' sexual passions.[28] Serafima Konopleva, who headed the St. Petersburg facility for juveniles, believed that the House of Mercy would help her wards develop a "love for work." If that failed, "at the very least" they would have a "consciousness" of their "debt."[29]
House of Mercy rules almost guaranteed that residents who quit before the administration judged them fully reformed would be left with few options. Most significantly, as though the wards were still prostitutes, their passports were retained by the St. Petersburg police. In this respect, the House of Mercy had several things in common with the brothels that some women were trying to leave behind: both had official relationships with the dread medical-police committees, both could use the absent passports as leverage, and both kept the women locked into grueling schedules. But where brothels contrived to be sensual and gay,
[25] Quoted in Bentovin, "Spasenie 'padshikh,'" pp. 337–38.
[26] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1876, 1888, 1894–95.
[27] Quoted in ibid., p. 1876.
[28] Zakharov, "Istoriia S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia," p. 292.
[29] Konopleva, "Otdeleniia dlia nesovershennoletnikh," p. 303.
redemption houses strove to be solemn and modest. Residents of the House of Mercy were issued identical ouffits—"grey uniforms as grey as their existence," in the words of Bentovin—designed to contrast with their former finery. Inmates enjoyed "neither laughter nor games nor fun. . . . Everything is in order, everything is for the sake of order. Nothing is for joy or for the true needs of young girls' spirits."[30]
Not surprisingly, rigid constraints did less to imbue young women with gratitude than they served to foster resistance and rebellion. Even an 1866 report admitted, "Naturally, [the wards] see the House of Mercy as a prison."[31] For children and teenagers in particular, this grim institution was slated as their "home" until maturity, whether they liked it or not. Zakharov admitted that many juveniles escaped as soon as they could. But he did not trace their behavior to the day-to-day routine of the House of Mercy; rather he attributed it to sexual desires that had been stimulated by "defloration" prior to sexual maturity. The inmates' looks—"small, pale, with a tired appearance"—were deceptive; it was impossible to tell by looking at them how much they desired a "dissolute life." Such sexual "agitation" would cause them to provoke arguments and violent fights, as well as flee "to those dens where they are able to find a man." Sometimes they would satisfy themselves (and here Zakharov had to take refuge in Latin) with masturbatio or cunnilingus .[32] The Moscow shelter apparently suffered from similar problems. Though he was a fervent devotee of the shelter's work, Priklonskii admitted that girls had trouble adjusting to the change from a "disorderly life" to the "quiet and religious one of the refuge." Thus, the administrator had to serve not only as parent and teacher, but as disciplinarian.[33]
Annual reports outlined some of the ways wards resisted. In 1910, Konopleva recounted that the girls under her care refused to work in the garden. Until a new instructor won them over, the girls insulted the gardener and complained that they had no desire "to dig in the dirt" and spoil their hands. An especially difficult nine-year-old appeared in several descriptions of problems besetting the juvenile division. An "expert" (virtuoz ) when it came to escaping, she ran away four times in one year alone, climbing out a tiny ventilation pane and sliding down a drainpipe from the second floor when the institution's doors were
[30] Bentovin, "Spasenie 'padshikh,'" p. 337; rules on uniforms in Ustav S.- Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia (St. Petersburg, 1902), p. 2.
[31] Otchet soveta S.- Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia za 1866 g., p. 6, quoted in Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 154–55.
[32] Zakharov, "Prichiny rasprostraneniia prostitutsii," p. 202.
[33] Priklonskii, Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek, p. 25.
locked. Her behavior also caused problems on the ward itself, for she reportedly encouraged the other inmates to masturbate and engage in other sexual activities. Once, she "maliciously" slammed an instructor's fingers between two doors.[34]
Disorders and rebellions periodically forced the St. Petersburg juvenile division to suspend operations. Sometimes, fights between the girls would snowball into larger battles that pitted the residents against their keepers. The House of Mercy's annual report for 1914 described incidents of open disobedience, damage to property, and threats of violence against administrators, as well as against those wards who refused to participate in the unrest.[35] In 1909, a 14-year-old who ran away told the person who brought her back, "If I had an axe, I'd kill you."[36] According to reports on the behavior of 152 former House of Mercy wards, 68 "behaved well," 14 "kept to the rules," 50 "behaved badly," 10 "tended to drink," and 10 were singled out for laziness. Yet this information gave no indication of a woman's future conduct. Often the best-behaved former wards wound up back on medical-police committee lists and conversely, the biggest troublemakers were able to retain "honest" jobs.[37]
The lack of direct connection between unruly or rebellious behavior in the institution and recidivism suggests that institutional authorities grossly misread the inmates' conduct. Their sense of a woman's reform actually involved something that combined social acquiescence with sexual indifference. In many respects, an active sexuality constituted the wards' worst crime, particularly when it manifested itself within institutional walls. Although the women and girls were worthy of help and pity, their sexual experiences had tainted them in some fundamental way. They had "crossed that border between good and evil, which separates shame from shamelessness, morality from immorality. For the [fallen girl], there is no difference, for she has lost her principles and her life has turned solely toward its physical side."[38] Priklonskii explained that some inmates remained impervious to even the most dedicated efforts because they were "deeply perverse."[39]
[34] Konopleva, "Otdeleniia dlia nesovershennoletnikh," pp. 304, 306; Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 70.
[35] Zakharov, "Prichiny rasprostraneniia prostitutsii," pp. 202. See also Otchet o deiatel'nosti Petrogradskago doma miloserdiia za 1914 g., p. 9.
[36] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 70.
[37] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," p. 1889.
[38] Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta, p. 45.
[39] Priklonskii, Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek, pp. 22–23.
Some descriptions of inmates sound as though their keepers actually believed them to be beyond redemption. As early as 1866, a House of Mercy report complained how the juvenile prostitutes "do not yield to the House's gentle measures. They constantly dream about the time when they will be able to return to their former way of life so attractively painted by them in their sick, depraved fantasies."[40] Nearly fifty years later, Konopleva echoed this sentiment at the 1910 congress. She described the minors in her division as possessing varying qualities of "vulgarity, insolence, utter dishonesty, and laziness." Most remained "indifferent" toward their own fall and still touched by "depravity."[41] Paradoxically, though, the girls had angelic moments. One observer praised the way they "really love" listening to religious stories and "really pray" in the House's church.[42]
Although it is likely that many of the girls and women in these institutions suffered from psychological problems, it appears that their behavior was interpreted according to a single formula: sexual desire and sexual frustration indicated illness; lack of desire indicated health. But this constant emphasis implies that sex was at least as much a preoccupation of the keepers as it was of the wards. Confusing and double-edged attitudes of pity and scorn toward former prostitutes prevented reformers from examining their own attitudes and left them to retreat to convenient explanations about the incorrigibility of girls they could not reach. Ironically, halfway house rules created such a sterile and austere atmosphere that they may have contributed to an equation in the wards' minds between sexual freedom and freedom itself.
Reformers missed the mark by struggling to convince prostitutes to accept their absolute moral visions. For girls and women who chose prostitution, morality was rarely more than a secondary issue, subordinate to much more pressing questions of survival, wages, clothes, and freedom of a sort. A conversation between a 12-year-old prostitute who specialized in "satisfying the unnatural urges of elderly erotomaniacs" and a "lady-patroness" from the House of Mercy illustrates this gap quite well. When the lady admonished her about the "vileness" of prostitution, the girl took it to mean the specifics of her sex with old men.
[40] Otchet soveta S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia za 1866 g., p. 6, in Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, p. 154.
[41] Konopleva, "Otdeleniia dlia nesovershennoletnikh," p. 303.
[42] Voronova, "V zashchitu," p. 298. These contradictory descriptions resemble the characterization of the prostitute created and popularized by Parent-Duchâtelet in mid- nineteenth-century France. See Corbin, Women for Hire, pp. 7–8.
"Why, you know quite well," the girl snapped, "that now I'm making a lot more money than walking the streets like everyone else."[43]
Despite repeated scandals and a high rate of recidivism for wards, the House of Mercy governing board did not attempt to rethink House policies. In 1914, newspapers dubbed the House of Mercy a "torture-chamber shelter" and accused it of "systematic cruel treatment toward the wards." The House's annual report, however, maintained that it was sometimes necessary to isolate new girls and women "with the goal of gradually accustoming them to discipline and to adherence to the institution's established rules of order." When disorders would assume an "especially threatening character," the leaders might be isolated in "makeshift" (sluchainye ) lodgings.[44] An investigative committee convened by the Chief Prison Administration (whose representative, Mikhail Borovitinov, also sat on the House of Mercy's board of trustees in an apparent conflict of interest) exonerated the House of all wrongdoing. Concluded the committee, "All administrative and medical personnel treat the shelter's wards with sincere love and compassion, taking all measures for their moral rebirth." That very year, the trustees proceeded with plans to build a special isolation ward for difficult cases.[45] Rather than examine how the internal structure acted to thwart House of Mercy goals, the trustees emphasized additional discipline and order.
Halfway house administrations failed to recognize the most important reasons for the high rates of recidivism. Even if a woman could endure house rules, at best administrators could promise no more than to send her back to the family situation or the domestic, trade, and factory job she had fled in the first place. With that in mind, it is surprising that any woman over the long run chose to give up prostitution for "honest labor."[46] Wedded to the idea that given a chance to earn an honest wage, prostitutes would willingly give up a life of sin, salvationists avoided several uncomfortable features of the nature of prostitution. Notions of "sin" and "debauchery" often touched a prostitute less profoundly than did the reality of 12- to 16-hour-days hunched over a
[43] Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki, p. 16.
[44] The House of Mercy repeated the newspapers' charges in Otchet o deiatel'nosti Petrogradskago doma miloserdiia za 1914 g., pp. 10–11.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Even the MVD offered its criticism of the ways Russian society treated the problem of salvation. In 1906, it published a pamphlet in which the author argued that Russia needed more than mere palliatives like houses of mercy. What it really needed were "radical reforms of the economic conditions of our life"! Nedesheva, Nevskii prospekt, p. 20.
sewing machine or the endless drudgery and degradation of domestic service. Because most reformers could not think beyond training former prostitutes for low-paying, menial jobs, rates of success were doomed to remain very poor.
Lofty goals about filling a fallen woman with some "understanding about good and evil, about the feeling of debt, honesty, and about the purpose of being a woman," or inspiring residents with a "love for work" could rarely compete with economic realities.[47] Even armed with the 15- or 25-ruble "reward" that three years of hard work yielded her, a woman who completed her stay at the Moscow shelter had little more to offer the labor force than when she came in. Although some women had succeeded in finding work as nurses, experience in washing and sewing clothes pointed women more in the direction of menial jobs as domestic servants, seamstresses, or unskilled factory workers. That is, as Oboznenko recognized, they went right back to the work they had escaped to begin with. Thus, the preoccupation of salvation societies with their graduates' spiritual redemption often served, paradoxically, to guarantee that at least half the women who passed through halfway house doors would eventually find themselves back on the streets.
The Russian Society for the Protection of Women
Sonia sat down, practically shaking with fright, and glanced timidly at the two ladies. It was obvious that she herself did not understand how she could sit beside them.
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
The ROZZh, like the House of Mercy, also incorporated into its ideology and institutions the contradictions that notions of a "fall" and "redemption" engendered. Repeated calls for a "healthy understanding" of morality and an emphasis on sexually segregated activities suggest that prostitution was not the sole "social evil" with which the ROZZh was concerned—illicit sex in general was also a target. Yet the broad definition of what constituted a "fall" also allowed the ROZZh to expand its interests beyond prostitution to include areas of concern to all working women. Efforts to prevent them from turning
[47] Priklonskii, Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek, p. 24.
to prostitution often addressed the very real needs of Russia's female working class.
The largest and most powerful group in Russia to organize around the issue of prostitution, the ROZZh was as socially remote as it could be from the women it attempted to help. A membership roster that included such dignitaries as Princess Evgeniia Ol'denburgskaia, Princess Elena Saksen-Al'tenburgskaia, Princess Mariia Dolgorukova, Countess Vera Tolstaia, and Count Vladimir Musin-Pushkin attests to the enormous social and economic chasm that divided the ROZZh from its clients. The ROZZh made no bones about its class affiliations, charging five rubles as an annual membership fee and holding public lectures in locations as lavish as Prince Aleksandr Ol'denburgskii's Petersburg palace.[48] In the eyes of Social Democrats, the ROZZh was comprised of "lady-philanthropists," of individuals from the "usual cast of ladies' charities with a strongly pronounced bureaucratic aftertaste."[49]
The gap between the ROZZh and the objects of its philanthropic attention hindered many of the organization's best efforts and doomed its weaker ones to dismal failure. At the same time, however, the ROZZh's aristocratic nature ensured the society official recognition and enabled it to engage in activities that the tsarist state might otherwise have prohibited. With so many members in court circles and in government service, the ROZZh was able to venture into broad areas of philanthropy and conduct business more smoothly than social organizations which lacked such illustrious connections. The ROZZh could not free itself from attitudes that bespoke condescension toward prostitutes and working women, but the very origins that made it so high and mighty rendered it effective in ways that other groups in tsarist Russia were not.
The ROZZh developed out of the 1899 London Congress on the White Slave Traffic.[50] Here, various state officials, members of the European nobility, religious leaders (including Quakers from the United States), and anti-vice crusaders met to establish grounds for interna-
[48] Bogdanovich, Bor'ba s torgovlei zhenshchinami, p. 39. By contrast, the Kazan Society for the Protection of Unfortunate Women was founded in 1899 on the contributions of seamstresses, male and female students, teachers, printers, priests, medical assistants, professors, soldiers, lawyers, and the editor of the local newspaper. Baranov, V zashchitu, pp. 6–9.
[49] "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Vozrozdenie, no. 8 (May 15, 1910): 70; Iu. Chatskii, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Nasha zariia, no. 4 (April 1910): 26.
[50] Otchet o mezhdunarodnom kongresse po voprosu o torgovle zhenshchinami, p. 12. Preserved in TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, "Po voprosu o bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami v tseliakh razvrata."
tional cooperation in fighting "the traffic in girls for immoral purposes."[51] In his account of the congress, State Secretary Andrei Saburov retold what was becoming a familiar story in the press: Russia and its neighboring states were under siege by traders who "recruit women, promise them profitable jobs, sometimes marry their victims under assumed names, and, upon transporting them to South America, transfer them to a brothel directly from the ship."[52]
Saburov and the other Russian delegates had fairly tricky roles to play at the congress. As subjects in an autocratic state, they could neither introduce legislation nor speak for the tsar. Characteristic of what would come to typify the ROZZh's approach to political issues, one of its aristocratic founders quoted to the London congress these lines from a German poem—"We must limit ourselves, if we want to accomplish anything."[53] In this spirit, when the other participating countries chose sides over whether to endorse regulation, Russia safely straddled the fence.[54] Upon returning home, Saburov appears to have settled on flattery as the best strategy for winning Tsar Nicholas II's support. In Saburov's account of the congress, Russia's emperor was hailed as "the monarch whom Europe is more and more accustomed to regarding as the leading herald of thankful beginnings for all higher moral issues common to humanity." Other European countries remained indecisive regarding their mission. It was up to Russia, then, to take the initiative.[55]
Thanks to its ties with members from the titled nobility and officialdom, Russia's national committee succeeded in organizing the ROZZh ahnost immediately following the congress. In December of the same year, no less a personage than "Her Highness," the princess Evgeniia Ol'denburgskaia, requested permission from the MVD to establish a philanthropic agency designed to carry out the London congress's mandate.[56] The state moved quickly to approve the ROZZhs statutes. In early 1900, the St. Petersburg organization was cleared "to assist in the protection of girls and women from the danger of being
[51] Congress on the White Slave Traffic, p. 9.
[52] Otchet o mezhdunarodnom kongresse, p. 4.
[53] Congress on the White Slave Traffic, p. 112.
[54] Otchet o mezhdunarodnom kongresse, pp. 6–8.
[55] Ibid., p. 12. Russia's delegation included Andrei Saburov, Sergei Volkonskii, Elizaveta Saburova, Vladimir Deriuzhinskii of the Ministry of Justice; Sergei Iurevich, Baroness Mariia von Engelhardt, Mariia Bubnova, Ekaterina Gardner, Elena Kozakevich-Stefanovskii, Ol'ga Nechaeva, and Anna Artsimovich.
[56] TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, letter of December 17, 1899.
enticed into debauchery and to return already fallen women to an honest life." By 1905, ROZZh branches had been founded in Aleksandrovsk, Vilna, kiev, Minsk, Odessa, Riga, Sevastopol, Rostov-on-the-Don, and Kharkov.[57]
The ROZZh's first annual report reveals grandiose plans to establish an organizational center which would supply needy women with material and moral support. The society committed itself to opening branches in ports and large industrial centers, making contacts with established philanthropic organizations, and sending representatives to international congresses. Most ambitiously, the ROZZh intended to publicize the perils of debauchery and (with the permission of the authorities and in compliance with extant laws—no small feat in tsarist Russia) organize lectures and publish relevant literature toward this end.[58] To its credit, the ROZZh took earnest steps toward fulfilling these goals, approaching the issue of prostitution from various vantage points, not the least of which recognized that working-class women needed legal, social, and economic assistance.
The ROZZh represented Russian philanthropy at its most determined and creative, but the organization's history demonstrates how the best of philanthropic intentions had sharply delineated limits. Even its scope, power, and riches did not mean that the ROZZh could have much of an effect on prostitution. The ROZZh provided important services, but from another perspective the society barely scratched the surface of the problems besetting prostitutes and female workers. On one hand, given the magnitude of the problem of prostitution, it is not surprising that the ROZZh had only limited success. But on the other, the way in which the ROZZh defined and approached prostitution contributed to its failure.
The "most important preventive weapon" in the ROZZh's arsenal was affordable housing.[59] The same year as the society's founding, the princess Elena Saksen-Al'tenburgskaia helped supply its Department of Prevention (Otdel preduprezhdeniia) with funds for a dormitory on St.
[57] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity v 1900 i 1901 gg., p. 8. Plans were underway for expanding to Irkutsk, Plotsk, Poltava, Saratov, Grodno, Zhitomir, Orenburg, Slonim, and Ural'sk. The ROZZh also had corresponding members in several other cities. The Kiev branch is described in Vera Kliachkina, "Deiatel'nost' zhenskikh blagotvoritel'noprosvetitel'nykh obshchestv v g. Kieve," Trudy pervago vserossiiskago zkenskago s"ezda pri Russkom zhenskom obshchestve v S.-Peterburge 10–16 dekabria 1908 g. (St. Petersburg, 1909), p. 49.
[58] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1900 i 1901 gg. pp. 8–9.
[59] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 41.
Petersburg's Ligovskaia Street at which women could stay for a reasonable five kopecks a day. The ROZZh designed this facility especially for women who had recently arrived in the city and had nowhere to turn; its purpose was to keep them from winding up in dangerous flophouses, in "corners" of apartments, and in taverns surrounded by drunks, beggars, vagrants, and prostitutes. One member described the "Ligovka" dormitory as spacious and well-ventilated, with nice beds covered by clean linen and warm blankets. The cafeteria, which served nourishing meals at low prices, earned additional praise.[60]
Another ROZZh section, the Investigative Department (Otdel razsledovaniia), charged with helping women find jobs, dispensing medical aid, and rendering financial assistance, also built a small dormitory. Its quarters housed up to ten women in order "to protect them from the many temptations that at every step confront a woman who settles in single rooms with strange families."[61] If hunger and seamy environments created prostitutes, then the ROZZh would remove their specter from at least a few of the working-class women in Petersburg.
Affiliated organizations built dormitories in other Russian cities. The Kiev branch of the ROZZh proudly reported that its facility housed a total of ninety-three women and one child in 1908. Odessa's sanctuary reached out to a broad clientele of new arrivals, unemployed women, deserted wives, and girls with no means of support. There, bed and board cost 30 kopecks a day.[62] In Vilna, the local facility fulfilled a dual role as both dormitory and halfway house. This lodging accepted not only unemployed women and new female arrivals to the city, but also those who wanted to leave their brothels. For a nominal fee, residents received a bed, dinner, and tea. Under special circumstances, some women even received free room and board.[63]
But serious problems limited these dormitories' effectiveness and appeal. In Vilna, the ROZZh believed it necessary to house the brothel prostitutes separately and remove them to a shelter or to their families as rapidly as possible because they served as a bad influence on the other women.[64] At the Ligovka, residents were segregated according to social class: one section of the building accommodated homeless working
[60] Aleksandra G. Borodina, "Tsel' i zadachi 'Obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin,'" Trudy pervago vserossiiskago zhenskago s"ezda, pp. 57–58.
[61] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1900 i 1901 gg., p. 30.
[62] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., 19, 28.
[63] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1913 g., p. 42.
[64] Ibid.
women, while the other provided more permanent housing for female students. Reinforcing the class divisions, Ligovka administrators fed each group in separate cafeterias.[65] Despite the general shortage of housing for working-class women, observers complained that the working-class part of the Ligovka facility frequently remained only half full. One ROZZh member blamed the high vacancy rate on the difficulty of informing new arrivals about the availability of housing, but even when provided with word-of-mouth information, new arrivals tended, in Petr Oboznenko's words, to be "ignorant and extremely suspicious, inclined to see fraud and traps everywhere. [These women] tended to trust their fellow villagers who already lived in the capital, chance acquaintances they made on the road, and clever landladies at inns more than they did announcements and lady-agents of the society."[66] Apparently it was not always enough to offer assistance. Factors of class and cultural allegiance could also determine how aid would be received.
Despite studies that showed most women who became prostitutes had lived and worked in urban areas for significant amounts of time, members of the ROZZh stubbornly saw peasant new arrivals as the women in the gravest danger. For them, the first moment of arrival constituted an extremely critical "psychological moment" for an ignorant and helpless girl who knew nothing of life beyond her country backwoods (derevenskaia glush ').[67] In the eyes of the ROZZh, pimps, white-slave traders, and procuresses lurked in every railroad car, train station, port, and employment agency, just waiting to lure some wide-eyed country bumpkin (dura derevenskaia ) into the arms of a brothelkeeper.
The Department of Prevention attempted to assist new arrivals by posting announcements about ROZZh dormitories in Petersburg railway stations and third-class train wagons. Since written announcements only helped the literate, the ROZZh also strove to post volunteers at St. Petersburg's various points of entry.[68] Nonetheless, the ROZZh could not find sufficient personnel to staff the capital's railway stations around the clock. One indefatigable philanthropist, Countess Sofiia Panina, campaigned to post full-time, paid staff members at Petersburg train
[65] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zkenshchin v 1909 g., p. 41.
[66] de-Planson, "O deiatel'nosti Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin," p. 40; Oboznenko, "O zashchite priezzhikh devushek," p. 7.
[67] Sofiia V. Panina, "Zaboty o devushkakh, pribyvaiushchikh v gorod na zarabotki," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 234.
[68] Oboznenko, "O zashchite priezzhikh devushek," pp. 5–6.
stations, but she did not receive sufficient funds to carry out her goal until July of 1914, when the duma set aside 2,000 rubles annually.[69]
In conjunction with the House of Mercy, the ROZZh established a facility in 1903 whose functions fell somewhere between that of a halfway house and a dormitory for working women. The "Shelter" (Ubezhishche), located on Petersburg's fashionable Nevsky Prospect, stood to help women "in obvious danger of falling into disgrace," as well as those who were "already fallen" but wished to return to "an honest life." As one report stated, "Neither nationality, nor religion, nor lack of documents, nor even the most humble condition of its finances, prevents the Shelter on holidays, on weekdays, at any time of day, from taking on if need be the protection of a girl who is threatened by the danger of disgrace or moral ruin."[70]
The twenty-five residents at the Shelter took turns doing housework, cooking, laundering, and scrubbing floors. At Christmastime, in keeping with what a trustee called the Shelter's familial character, residents would exchange gifts. They could also receive legal assistance from the Shelter's staff, dowry money, and clothes and shoes to help them when they found jobs.[71] From annual reports, it appears that residents met with more success at integrating themselves into the female work force than did the House of Mercy's former wards, having taken "enthusiastically to the rhythms of a measured life."[72]
Although the ROZZh portrayed the Shelter as one of its most successful ventures, it too had its problems. While it was not a halfway house, its schedule nevertheless resembled the strict regimen at the House of Mercy's other institutions. For one thing, punishments could still be meted out to residents.[73] Moreover, each day brought a full schedule of prayers and work, broken only by the visit of a priest every Tuesday evening, occasional lessons, church on Sunday, and bimonthly visits to families. The success rate for the Shelter's graduates was more promising than that of the House of Mercy, but this is partly explained by the composition of the inmates. In marked contrast to the House of
[69] "Po khodataistvu Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin ob ezhegodnom assignovanii emu 2,000 r.," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 32 (July 1914): 431–36. It is likely that the war, which began the next month, interrupted this service.
[70] Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta, pp. 63–64. Its address was Nevsky Prospect, 139.
[71] Natal'ia N. Fon-Den, "Otchet o deiatel'nosti ubezhishcha dia devushek,' Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 311.
[72] Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta, p. 62.
[73] In the words of the 1910 report, "punishment is almost unknown." Ibid., p. 65 (my emphasis).
Mercy, a significant number of residents were not only not prostitutes, but sexually inexperienced: in 1910, forty of the eighty-four women who sought refuge were classified as virgins. Nonetheless, many Shelter residents left or were transferred to other institutions, including the House of Mercy itself.[74]
The ROZZh's Department of Charity for Unwed Mothers (Otdel prizreniia devushek-materei) also had a facility for Petersburg women, but this one was located in the countryside and designed to provide single mothers with food, shelter, and child care to prevent them from taking "desperate measures" to feed themselves and their children. As an annual report of the ROZZh stated, single parenthood often compelled a woman to resort to infanticide, to abandon her child at a foundling home, or to turn to prostitution, where "the filth dirties not only her, but also her child."[75] The head of this department, Elizaveta Kalacheva, believed that unwed mothers could be redeemed from their moral fall "on the basis of the love for their children."[76]
With the help of a 600 ruble annual grant from the Ministry of Agriculture, Kalacheva set about training her wards in poultry breeding, gardening, and agronomy. Though this program had more potential than the usual routine of sewing and laundering, the attempt to build a thriving agricultural colony of working mothers and their babies did not succeed. The women here evidently looked upon agricultural labor as degrading, a step back to the peasant village from which they or their parents had migrated. Like the girls in the House of Mercy who had refused to plant a garden for fear of spoiling their hands, the women at this facility complained about having to chase after chickens all day. Because the majority of residents were illiterate, it was also impossible to teach them anything more than the most elementary agronomist techniques. Gradually, the emphasis shifted toward training women in kitchen work and laundering for eventual urban jobs.[77]
A "labor colony" (koloniia truda ) for girls aged 11 to 15 in danger of certain "ruin," established by Countess Mariia Orlova-Davydova in 1906, also had a disappointing record. The countess housed her wards on the upper story of a large wooden house on Galernyi Island (near
[74] Of these eighty-four women, twenty-three were sent to other shelters (including both houses of mercy) and ten were thrown out. Twelve women found jobs and another nineteen were in school or apprenticing for jobs. Ibid., pp. 65–70.
[75] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 47.
[76] Borodina, "Tsel' i zadachi," p. 59.
[77] Ibid., pp. 58–59.
Kalinkin Hospital) and helped fund a training program in the trades. She also supplied them with chickens, cows, and a garden so that they might never be "idle." But this venture failed when Orlova-Davydova went abroad and left things in the hands of another ROZZh representative who was unable to handle the responsibility. When the countess returned, she cut off her personal contributions and the colony had to be closed, just two years after its inception.[78]
Although the ROZZh did not overtly discriminate against Jews, its activities unabashedly reflected the ethnic and religious backgrounds of its leading members. For example, at the opening celebration of the Ligovka dormitory, an Orthodox priest blessed the new facility with a prayer. The Shelter was open to women of all religious backgrounds, but its regimen nevertheless included Sunday trips to church and weekly visits from a priest to give the girls "the warm words of the spiritual father."[79] It is unlikely that Jewish women would have felt comfortable in such a Russian Orthodox milieu.
Under the leadership of Baron Goratsii Gintsburg, a philanthropist and leading member of the capital's small Jewish community, a ROZZh branch to provide Jewish women with recreational and educational activities was born. The Department for the Care of Jewish Girls of the City of St. Petersburg (Otdel popecheniia ob evreiskikh devushkakh g. S.-Peterburga, hereafter OPED) committed itself to guarding young women "from those harmful influences surrounding them with respect to the moral conditions of life and to support their moral development."[80] While the OPED was known to help Jewish prostitutes, the bulk of its work was preventive, devoted to creating a wholesome community in which Jewish women would take part. In February 1901, Gintsburg organized day-long Saturday meetings for working-class Jewish girls and women which combined lessons in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Torah, history, geography, literature, and arithmetic, with lectures, music, and dancing. In addition, the OPED sponsored a variety of cultural, recreational, and social services: outings to museums and exhibitions, a camp at which St. Petersburg Jewish women could rest for two or three weeks during the summer months, free medical care, an employment agency for women seeking work, a cheap cafeteria, a
[78] Ibid., p. 60.
[79] Otchet popechitel'nago komiteta, p. 65.
[80] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1900 i 1901., p. 37. The OPED had headquarters on Ofitserskaia Street, 42.
work relief bureau, a library featuring hundreds of books, and free Passover seders for residents of the OPED's two dormitories.[81]
By paying 20 percent of the reportedly well-stocked treasury to its mother organization, the OPED was able to take advantage of its links to the well-placed ROZZh in order to administer an agency that operated to assist, educate, and support Jewish working girls and women in St. Petersburg at a time when the state was clamping down on private Jewish philanthropies.[82] The OPED had great success in drawing young Jewish women under its wing. In 1910, a member of this organization reported that an average 140 girls attended each Saturday meeting and that the OPED's dormitories housed a total of 69 women.[83] But whether it assisted prostitutes is a different matter entirely. Though hundreds of Jewish women in the Russian empire were registered as prostitutes, at least at the time of the 1889 census, very few had yellow tickets to work in St. Petersburg. That year, not one of the empire's 504 Jewish prostitutes officially worked in Petersburg brothels and, of the 351 registered odinochki who were listed as Jewish, only 12 had been registered in St. Petersburg province. No doubt Jewish women earned money at prostitution clandestinely, but they and the great majority of other Jewish prostitutes lived in provinces within the Pale of Settlement.[84] The OPED also restricted the breadth of its clientele by maintaining a strict religious orientation. One observer criticized it for helping only Orthodox Jews and actually turning away girls who did not "spend their Saturdays in synagogue."[85]
In keeping with the general notion of prostitution as an act of desperation rather than a realistic choice, members of the ROZZh's Investigative Department tried to combat what they perceived as two major pre-
[81] For the origins of the OPED, see Otchety otdela popecheniia ob evreiskikh devushkakh g. S.-Peterburga za 1905 i 1906 gg. (1907), pp. 12–13; Dora F. Ziskand, "O deiatal'nosti otdela popecheniia ob evreiskikh devushkakh goroda S.-Peterburga," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 252–55; Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 267–68.
[82] See Adele Lindenmeyr, "Voluntary Associations and the Russian Autocracy: The Case of Private Charity," The Carl Beck Papers, no. 807, pp. 30–31. The MVD shut down the OPED in 1905, but meetings and activities resumed when the restrictions were lifted. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 268.
[83] Ziskand, "O deiatel'nosti otdela popecheniia ob evreiskikh devushkakh," p. 253.
[84] When counted according to religion, Jews had no place in Petersburg brothels. When counted by nationality, one lone Jew appeared. Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. 20–21. Given the relatively low numbers of registered Jewish prostitutes outside the Pale, it does not appear that Jewish women routinely applied for a yellow ticket simply to circumvent residency restrictions.
[85] Borodina, "Tsel' i zadachi," p. 64.
cipitants: workplace harassment and sexual exploitation in workshops and factories. Patrons and staff from nine of St. Petersburg's districts made it their business to visit local work sites to assess conditions and talk with bosses and managers about the treatment of their female workers. In extreme cases, delinquent bosses would be reported to the police.[86] In 1913, the ROZZh turned to the central government for help in alleviating conditions for women in the tobacco industry. Indeed, tobacco workers suffered tremendous oppression, laboring 16- and 17- hour days for between three and ten rubles a month. Prompted by its branch in Sevastopol, the ROZZh wrote to the government about the necessity of creating a female factory inspectorate for all women workers and asking for a law to protect women on tobacco plantations. But the tenor of the request hinted of Great Russian chauvinism and racism. Quoting liberally from an 1899–1900 MVD investigation, the ROZZh referred to how plantation bosses and foremen, many of whom were Turks and Tartars, "boundlessly and arbitrarily" exploited young Russian female workers and "turned to them as instruments for the satisfaction of their unbridled animal instincts."[87]
The Investigative Department duly championed working women's rights, yet its orientation remained extremely narrow and, ultimately, self-defeating. For the ROZZh, sexual temptation and harassment—not low wages and long hours—constituted the greatest dangers to young women workers. The society favored improving conditions for female workers, but it remained mute on the subject of class exploitation and never allied itself with labor organizations. True to the privileged status of its leadership, the ROZZh never issued a comprehensive analysis of the exploitation of labor in general or female labor in particular. Furthermore, the Investigative Department had no real authority over bosses and foremen. Russia's factory inspectorate could not enforce the empire's labor legislation; it was unlikely that the ROZZh could command greater obedience.
One ROZZh program paid tribute to the unique position that the sewing machine occupied in Russian society's views of prostitutes. In 1863, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's influential novel What Is to Be Done ? portrayed three women who had been "leading bad lives," but quit their trade when given the opportunity to join a sewing cooperative.[88] Ever
[86] Ibid., pp. 57, 63; Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1681–82.
[87] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1913 g., pp. 17–22.
[88] Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done ? p. 210.
since then, the sewing machine, that perfect marriage of technology and female labor, figured as a symbol of rehabilitation and hope. Along these lines, in 1901 the Investigative Department began leasing out sewing machines for an initial ruble and then a reasonable 20 to 50 kopecks a month. This way a woman could develop a private business as a seamstress, even buying her own machine at the rate of two or three rubles a month. The ROZZh also opened a sewing workshop that sold goods in a special store on St. Petersburg's Zhukovskaia Street. With material provided by the society and under the supervision of a ROZZh member, unemployed female workers would make blouses, bonnets, undergarments, and children's clothes. Women were also allowed to work at home so that they would not be "torn" from their families, which often included children in need of supervision. In Kiev, the ROZZh branch started a sewing workshop and dormitory for seamstresses in 1906.[89]
By the turn of the century, however, the notion that it took only the provision of honest labor to reform a prostitute seemed less credible than it had in Chernyshevsky's day. Anton Chekhov for one, in his short story "A Nervous Breakdown" (1888), snidely referred to the "regulation sewing machine" in reference to rescuing women from prostitution. When a male student in Iama (1912) coaxed a prostitute from her brothel, his roommate cynically asked, "Are you going to buy her a sewing machine?" Even the well-known abolitionist and feminist (whose name was conspicuously absent from the ROZZh membership roster), Dr. Mariia Pokrovskaia, scoffed at the idea that a sewing machine might play a positive role in the rehabilitation of a prostitute; in a 1901 book Pokrovskaia pointed out that it was the difficult life of a seamstress that often drew women to prostitution in the first place.[90] Sewing machines certainly helped women determined to earn money as seamstresses, but it was unlikely that they would persuade a full-time prostitute to abandon her trade.
An examination of the ROZZh's most powerful arm, the Committee (Komitet), provides a clear gauge of the society's range—and its limitations. At various times, members included such notables as Countess Sofiia Panina, State Secretary Andrei Saburov, Princess Elena Saksen-Al'tenburgskaia, Princess Evgeniia Ol'denburgskaia, Professor Vladimir
[89] Borodina, "Tsel' i zadachi," p. 58; Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1913 g., pp. 88–90; Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., pp. 21–22; Kliachkina, "Deiatel'nost'zhenskikh blagotvoritel'no-prosvetitel'nykh obshchestv," p. 50.
[90] Chekhov, "A Nervous Breakdown," p. 173; Kuprin, Iama, p. 157; Pokrovskaia, 0 padshikh, p. 20.
Deriuzhinskii, Count Vladimir Musin-Pushkin, Petr Oboznenko, and the editor of the MVD's 1910 study of regulation, Nikolai Di-Sen'i. Minutes from a 1903 meeting reflect the ROZZh's broad scope of activities, but they also reveal how closely the Committee remained bound by traditional forms. References to the royal members appeared complete with long titles rendered in upper-case letters to designate "HER HIGHNESS" (Princess Elena) and "MOST AUGUST CHAIRWOMAN" (Princess Evgeniia). Ties between the tsarist administration and the society could not have been closer, given such distinguished members, several of whom held positions in tsarist ministries. These gentlemen and ladies could mix easily with officials from the MVD and Petersburg's city governor, for they would know how to move in high society; more important, they would know when to retreat.
In 1903, the Committee would not even venture to suggest the abolition of brothels; it remained content with recommending to move (udalit ') three that stood too close to a school.[91] By 1912, the Committee was a bit more bold; it was ready to condemn state-licensed brothels, but not to demand an end to regulation. At that time, it submitted a lengthy commentary by the MVD official Nikolai Di-Sen'i to the St. Petersburg duma on a proposal for reforming medical-police nadzor. The comments displayed the ROZZh's concern for prostitutes caught in the regulation system, but also its tacit acceptance of medical-police surveillance. Nadzor, in the Committee's opinion, needed improvement so as to lessen its "insulting significance for the dignity of women." Consequently, nighttime roundups of suspicious women had to be eliminated from the point of view of "public morality and maintenance of women's rights," and the city had to dispense with a clause allowing a woman to be inscribed on the basis of an agent's proof. The Committee wanted to see conscious emphasis on the hiring of women as both doctors and agents and a specific requirement for the use of a microscope to confirm the existence of venereal diseases. That way, the number of women held on "suspicion of illness" could be greatly reduced and fewer women would be incarcerated in the hospital. In keeping with ROZZh concerns for minors, the commentary spoke of the need to separate girls under 18 from other women arrested by medical-police agents and of the impropriety of allowing girls under 18 to register.[92]
[91] "Zhurnal zasedaniia Komiteta Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin."
[92] "Zakliuchenie Komiteta Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin," pp. 2055–56.
The comments acknowledged the existence of strong anti-regulationist sentiment within the ROZZh's ranks, but maintained that the Committee "considered it more appropriate at this time to abstain from any final conclusion on the question of the desirability of retaining registration."[93] On one hand, it made sense for the Committee to use the opportunity to influence the shape of St. Petersburg nadzor. On the other hand, the Committee was proving itself willing to compromise with a system that oppressed, rather than protected women. The OPMD and the St. Petersburg Club of the Women's Progressive Party both refused to submit proposals to the duma because they unequivocally opposed any form of nadzor.[94] To them, there was no way the "protection of women" could be reconciled with a system that persecuted them so blatantly. The ROZZh stood even closer to the regulatory system by virtue of its representative who attended medical-police committee meetings in St. Petersburg.[95]
The right of ROZZh and House of Mercy volunteers to interview every woman who attempted to register as a prostitute furthered the association between the philanthropies and medical-police authorities. According to Zakharov, only 10 percent of new registrants accepted this "helping hand." A common retort to the volunteer was: "You'll find me a permanent job for 20 rubles a month. But now I earn 200–300 rubles and I'm living gaily and carefree like a fine lady [barynia ]."[96] In fact, the real percentage of recruits for the House of Mercy appears to have been even lower. In 1908, only 44 (6 percent) of 756 women refrained from registering; in 1909, 45 (8 percent) out of 545 heeded the representative's advice; and in 1913, only 31 (7 percent) of the 463 women who had attempted to register reversed their decision.[97] Moreover, many of the women who accepted a place in the House of Mercy did not remain there. Prostitution may have seemed a welcome alternative after a sampling of the House of Mercy's schedule and living arrangements.
[93] Ibid, p. 2056.
[94] "Soobshchenie obshchestva popecheniia o molodykh devitsakh," pp. 2054–55; "Zaiavlenie S.-Peterburgskago kluba zhenskoi progressivnoi partii," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2063.
[95] Power, however, was only "consultative," for the city governor could overrule any recommendations. As early as 1902, their priorities clashed when the medical-police committee decided that the landladies of registered streetwalkers should maintain surveillance over their prostitute-tenants. The Legal Department of the ROZZh developed a counter-proposal that finally won approval from the city governor, but it never made its way into committee policy. Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1678–79.
[96] Zakharov, "Istoriia S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia," pp. 278, 290.
[97] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1913 g., p. 98.
One problem may have been related to the fact that a large percentage of new registrants had taken that "fatal step" already. But another reason for the lack of success stemmed from the clash of privilege and poverty, an inevitable consequence of matching a "lady-patroness" with a peasant or working girl. The social dynamics of an encounter between an educated, well-dressed, and well-meaning society lady and someone she defined as a "fallen woman" must have been complicated indeed. Could pleas for morality and decorum from philanthropists really have much impact on women who lacked the privilege to advocate the virtues of chastity? Some individuals in the ROZZh may have been able to blend compassion with their sense of moral superiority, but some may have also approached prostitutes and sexually experienced young women with a combination of pity and contempt. Absolute moral standards are not solely a function of class, but class nevertheless plays a role in determining sexual mores and the way that these values will be interpreted and communicated.
Working-class women who took advantage of the ROZZh's preventive services faced less of an ambivalent attitude from their would-be saviors. So long as a woman conformed to the philanthropist's image of an innocent young girl, she might benefit. Yet all-women dances, women's dormitories, and other female-only activities also represented the ROZZh's attempt to save working-class women not only from prostitution, but from sex itself. Sexually segregated activities may have served to build a community of sorts in the big, frightening city, but philanthropic efforts to remove sexuality from the working women's world in another sense helped foster prostitution. By polarizing women into good girls and bad girls, salvationists helped reinforce the stigmatization of those who did engage in sex. When reformers referred not only to prostitutes but to all girls and women with sexual experience as "fallen," they did more than evoke a metaphor. They also created a world from which few could return unscathed by social disdain and pity.
A review of ROZZh activities between 1901 and 1914 shows that the ROZZh enjoyed moderate success in fulfilling the preventive components of its original goals. It did indeed conduct public lectures, provide aid to young girls in need, build dormitories, establish sister organizations throughout the empire, maintain international contacts, and organize services for new arrivals. Through its most political wing, the Department for the Struggle against the Enticement of Women into Depravity (Otdel bor'by s vovlecheniem zhenshchin v razvrat), the ROZZh convinced the MVD in 1901 to raise the minimum age of
brothel prostitutes to 21 and succeeded in pushing a bill prosecuting "flesh traders" through the State Duma in 1909.[98] But the ROZZH could not boast of much more than this. In fact, its members had to reconcile the contradiction between a law prohibiting the recruitment of women for the purposes of prostitution and the reality of a system that still tolerated brothels. They also could not claim to have lowered the number of registered prostitutes or influenced the rates of disease. Nor could they profess to have instilled in society a "healthy understanding" of morality and the dangers of debauchery.
The ROZZh is not entirely to blame for its failures—prostitution was as much a part of the system as the ROZZh. The majority of prostitutes would have remained beyond the reach of even the most enlightened philanthropic agencies. Furthermore, the extent of urban and rural poverty in Russia defied even the most creative and energetic philanthropic ventures. In 1905 and twice in 1917, revolution seemed like the only possible answer to the misery of the working classes and peasantry. ROZZh members blamed lack of funding and shortage of volunteers for the shortcomings of their program, but the problems went much deeper.[99]
In addition to confronting a socioeconomic reality better suited for revolution than reform, the ROZZh had to operate within a state that obstructed most independent efforts by civil society with enormous administrative obstacles. Despite its exalted station, the ROZZh had to obey the intricate rules of the tsarist bureaucracy and navigate the oceans of red tape. The trouble involved in organizing the 1910 congress is a perfect example. In order to hold the meeting, the princess Elena had to write to the MVD for permission to hold such a meeting several months ahead and delineate all the organizational and programmatic information. The MVD then passed her request between its branches, the Department of Police and the Department of General Affairs, as well as to the St. Petersburg city governor. Because the event was to take place in his area of jurisdiction, the latter required a copy of the congress program and a complete list of participants—in advance. During the congress proceedings, the MVD had an official there, S. P. Beletskii, to make sure that the discussion stayed within the prescribed guidelines.
[98] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 6.
[99] For example, at the 1910 congress Aleksandra Borodina of the Investigative Department complained that the ROZZh had "many speakers, but few workers." Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 232.
And another spy was on hand who reported directly to the city governor.[100]
The ROZZh also defeated itself. Though its members recognized that there was a direct correlation between prostitution and poverty, they could not bring themselves to acknowledge the appeal of commercial sex. To Andrei Saburov, "dens of depravity" were "morally and physically burdensome to such an extreme that the overwhelming majority of [prostitutes] would be glad to be freed from this life."[101] As Priscilla Alexander has suggested in a recent essay, "Any programs set up to help people involved in prostitution must acknowledge and deal with the positive attractions of prostitution."[102] But Russia's salvationists did not attempt to compete with the "wages of sin" and they refused to acknowledge that the prostitute's lifestyle had any redeeming qualities. As we have seen, "salvation" often meant nothing more or less than moral redemption. In order for rehabilitation to be successful, a former prostitute was expected to internalize the moral values of the House of Mercy and the ROZZh, renouncing her past and accepting the definition of herself as a fallen woman.[103] Once in this category, she could only hope for forgiveness; genuine redemption was beyond the grasp of the new Magdalenes.
The ROZZh misread prostitution and the women who engaged in it. Women did not need to be saved from prostitution; they needed to live in a world of economic, social, political, and gender equality. Of course, if the ROZZh had faced up to the enormity of its task, it would have had to admit that the battle was a losing one—and that the members from the Russian elite were standing on the wrong side. It was no wonder that socialists like Lenin repudiated the whole salvationist enterprise as "disgusting bourgeois hypocrisy."[104]
[100] The ROZZh's decision to change the congress date prompted even more correspondence. Documents in TsGIA, Departament obshchikh del, MVD, f. 1284, op. 188, d. 135, and TsGALO, Kantseliariia Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika, f. 569, op. 13, d. 91, "Delo po bor'be s torgom zhenshchin i ego prichinami."
[101] TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, letter of October 9, 1899.
[102] Priscilla Alexander, "Prostitution: A Difficult Issue for Feminists," in Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, ed. Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1987), p. 206.
[103] According to Walkowitz, "It is unlikely that prostitutes fully internalized the notion of being 'fallen' when they knew they could 'rise.' again." Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, , p. 203.
[104] Vladimir I. Lenin, "Fifth International Congress against Prostitution,' from Rabochaia pravda, no. 1 (July 13, 1913), in On the Emancipation of Women (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 32.
Salvationists and Socialists
Return the prostitute to productive work, find her a place in the social economy—that is the thing to do.
Vladimir Lenin (1920)
The first (and last) gathering of its sort in Russia, the 1910 All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women and Its Causes drew together feminists, physicians, bureaucrats, and gentry, as well as representatives from Russia's liberal and radical intelligentsia. To the radical Left, the congress was an "unpleasant opportunity to rub shoulders with assistant-directors, counts, and ladies from high aristocratic circles."[105] As one "Observer" wrote, the congress amounted to "splendidly attired, satisfied ladies" and "careerist officials" obscuring more "important measures" in the struggle against prostitution with "various philanthropic tricks."[106]
As the congress's sponsor, the ROZZh set the tone and tenor for what turned into sharp conflicts with participating social-democratic representatives. To begin with, admission cost five rubles and the official invitations included only other salvationists and representatives from medical organizations, universities, temperance societies, and municipal and district councils. Factory and workshop owners also filled the bill, since they had the "possibility to bring improved sanitation into the workers' midst through judicious measures."[107] The ROZZh reserved the right to invite other individuals, but the approved categories left no room for workers or labor representatives. (As for including prostitutes, the thought never seems to have crossed the organizers' minds.)[108]
Workers received permission to attend only two weeks before the congress's opening. The Social Democrat Aleksandra Kollontai exhorted labor organizations to protest their initial exclusion, caustically remarking that the organizers of the congress seemed determined to arrange things "so that the disturbing voice of life does not infringe on
[105] B——, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Pechatnoe delo, no. 20 (May 6, 1910): 4.
[106] "Nabliudatel," "Pervyi s"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," p. 2.
[107] Quoted in Chatskii, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," p. 27. The author remarked that everyone knew that the "judicious measures" of factory owners only led to "demoralization, not at all to 'improved sanitation.'" A copy of the official invitation is in TsGIA, Departament obshchikh del, MVD, f. 1284, op. 188, d. 135, letter of June 29, 1909.
[108] Aleksandra Dement'eva from the OPMD was the only congress participant to comment on the absence of prostitutes. Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony," p. 506.
the impartiality of its bureaucratic erudition."[109] She was joined in her reproach by two feminist participants. During the organizing phase for the congress, Dr. Mariia Pokrovskaia also criticized the ROZZh's restrictive invitations, asserting publicly that "representatives of workers and their organizations absolutely must be participants in the congress for the struggle against prostitution."[110] Zinaida Mirovich from the League of Equal Rights for Women complained that the congress did not even deserve the title "All-Russian," since participation had been strictly restricted.[111]
Working-class and socialist representation suffered even further when the few Petersburg workers who had received permission to attend declined at the last minute, frustrated by their small numbers and arrests associated with a December congress against alcoholism. The workers had reason to be wary of further exposure, particularly as a leading participant in the upcoming congress was Professor Dmitrii Dril,' a ROZZh Committee member and Ministry of Justice official who had aided the police with the alcohol congress arrests.[112]
The ROZZh did little to assuage worker nerves. When A. A. Kuznetsov, the social-democratic Duma deputy who had mocked the ROZZh-sponsored 1909 bill to suppress the "trade in women," attempted to gain entrance, the congress organizers at first claimed not to recognize him. Then his colleague in the Duma, the Octobrist Vasilii Fon-Anrep, a former head of the MVD's defunct Medical Department and himself a representative on the ROZZh Committee, found specious means to block Kuznetsov's entry—the socialist representative had failed to register in advance. Fon-Anrep, who chaired the congress's general assembly, exacerbated the situation when he refused to read aloud Kuznetsov's protest about his exclusion. Mikhail Borovitinov, another government official with a leading role in the ROZZh, disingenuously defended the
[109] Nikolai I. Letunovskii, Leninskaia taktika ispol'zovaniia legal'nykh vserossiiskikh s"ezdov v bor'be za massy v 1908–1911 gg. (Moscow, 1971), p. 44; Kollontai, "Zadachi s"ezda," p. 16.
[110] Pokrovskaia, "S"ezd po voprosu o prostitutsii,"Novaia Rus ' (April 23, 1909), preserved in TsGALO, Kantseliariia Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika, f. 569, op. 13, d. 91, "Delo po bor'be s torgom zhenshchin i ego prichinami."
[111] N. [Zinaida] Mirovich, "Po povodu pervago vserossiiskago s"ezda dlia bor'by s torgom zhenshchinami," Zhenskoe delo, nos. 17–18 (May 25, 1910): 6.
[112] Chatskii, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," pp. 31–32; B——, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Pechatnoe delo, p. 4; B——, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Golos portnogo, nos. 1–2 (May 10, 1910): 6; Letunovskii, Leninskaia taktika, pp. 37, 42; V. Ezhov, "S"ezd po bor'be s p'iantsvom," Vozrozhdenie, no. 1 (January 10, 1910): 79–90.
exclusion of the Duma deputy by proclaiming the need to keep out the "street."[113] "And so," commented a reporter from a printers' newspaper, "the congress bosses [khoziaiva ] got rid of their first awkward guest."[114]
That left only five working-class delegates—Zinaida M. Ivanova and Georgii M. Bek, from the Moscow trade union of tailors, seamstresses, and furriers; Zinaida A. Golovacheva, trade union representative of Moscow manufacturing workers; Petr G. Goncharov, from a trade union of tea packers; and Pavel S. Pavlov, secretary of the Moscow printers' union—amid nearly 290 members of privileged society. Led by Pavlov, the congress's enfant terrible,[115] the Moscow union representatives more than compensated for their small numbers, waging a fierce ideological battle that sounded the tenets of the minimalist platform of Russian social democracy. Since prostitution was an integral component of capitalism, it could not really be eliminated until the entire social, political, and economic system had collapsed. But workers needed the freedom to organize in defense of their interests in order to bring this about, and therefore they needed to protest the repressive policies of Russia's autocratic state. Accordingly, the Moscow delegates used the congress as a platform to press for radical reforms and to rail against restrictions on speech, assembly, the press, and workers' organizations.
Dmitrii Dril' pleaded for "cooperation" at the congress, but harmony was unlikely given the workers' dedication to revolution, not charity and reform, and their commitment to disrupt the proceedings.[116] yet interactions between the five labor representatives and the majority followed a peculiar pattern of open hostility, conciliation, and occasionally even united defiance of the authorities. Workers and congress participants generally shared a desire for a Russia without autocratic rule, a Russia that enjoyed the civil liberties of most western European states. At times, participants from the upper classes displayed a brand of "radi-
[113] See Borovitinov's statement in Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 559–60.
[114] One article referred to Fon-Anrep as "leader of that unprincipled group, the Octobrists." See Chatskii, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," pp. 27–28. The quote is from B——, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Golos portnogo, p. 6; and B——, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Pechatnoe delo, p. 4. A reporter named Leontina M. Shurpitskaia of Pechatnoe delo was on the city governor's official list. TsGALO, Kantseliariia Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika, f. 569, op. 13, d. 91.
[115] Pavlov was described with these words in Bentovin, "Na s"ezde dlia bor'by s torgom zhenshchinami i ego prichinami," Prakticheskii vrach, no. 20 (May 16, 1910): 339.
[116] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 130; Pavlov, "O polozhenii zhenshchiny-rabotnitsy," pp. 129–30.
cal chic" in their support for workers and labor causes. But when issues breached dangerous boundaries, the congress either opposed the workers outright or retreated safely behind verbal barriers enforced by the police.
Notwithstanding the tactics of tsarist officials like Fon-Anrep, Borovitinov, and Dril', participants at the congress initially seemed to bend over backward to make the worker-delegates feel welcome. The opening session of a section on the causes of prostitution named Pavlov its first chair and supported several of his proposals, even after Pavlov locked horns with Dril' over specific measures to alleviate working-class misery.[117] It took the MVD representative, S. P. Beletskii, to step in and block a vote on Pavlov's "political" resolution to eliminate child labor for those under the age of 15, institute compulsory education, elect factory inspectors from the working class, and mandate an eight-hour workday. A revised version by an official from the railway administration scarcely resembled the original—it spoke only of how the "absence" of an inspectorate for trades, industry, and domestic labor involving women and children contributed to the development of prostitution. As for the eight-hour day, the wording was changed to the more acceptable "normalized workday."[118]
The least ambiguous battle lines stood between the five workers and the police. Two days into the congress, the spy from the city governor's office noted the workers' unexpected presence in a secret memo, spurring a warning to the ROZZh Committee about participants who were not on the advance list.[119] A more blatant confrontation between the authorities and workers took place in the congress's general assembly when Pavlov put to a larger audience several controversial measures that had been voted in by an earlier section, including a revived demand for an elected factory inspectorate "wholly independent and free from police functions." His words earned a sharp rebuke from the police, followed by another for the bold assertion that measures to prevent prostitution depended on the existence of strong trade unions that possessed
[117] See Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 81, 118–20.
[118] Ibid., pp. 118–21. Beletskii, who was named deputy minister of internal affairs in 1915–16, was implicated in a failed plot to kill Rasputin engineered by A. N. Khvostov. In 1918, he would be executed by the Cheka. On Beletskii see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Rovolution: Petrograd 1917 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1981), p. 45; George Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Rovolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 472.
[119] TsGALO, Kantseliariia Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika, f. 569, op. 13, d. 91, report of April 23, 1910; memo to Committee of April 24, 1910.
freedom of agitation and that could unite in an all-Russian trade organization.[120] A worker exit precluded police action, but the very next day Beletskii closed down a session after the worker-delegate Zinaida Ivanova asked support for a resolution stating that the measures against prostitution could only work in the presence of freedom for unions and freedom of speech and assembly.[121]
Moments when participants went out on a limb to defend the workers were few, but occasionally, the heavy-handedness of the police created unlikely comrades. Displaying a peculiar change of heart, in his capacity as chair Fon-Anrep leapt to Pavlov's side in response to one police accusation that "limits" had been transgressed. "I beg you," Fon-Anrep interjected, "to allow me to judge which proposal under discussion oversteps or does not overstep the limits of the congress program." His objection inspired a warning, but the congress proceeded to affirm the embattled demand for an autonomous factory inspectorate.[122] During one section meeting, Beletskii's protest against a demand for freedom of unions and tolerance of ties with international labor organizations met a similar fate when the section voted for the resolution and punctuated its rebellion by designating Pavlov as spokesman for the congress's upcoming general assembly.[123]
Another meeting of the same section yielded similar defiance on behalf of the congress participants. A joint proposal by the Bolshevik Anna Gurevich, Ivanova, and a member of the Women's Progressive Party for eliminating all restrictions on professional, cultural, and social organizations induced Beletskii to assert that a March 4, 1906 law already provided freedom for educational societies. The section showed how little it thought of the law's effectiveness when it voted in favor of the proposal anyway.[124]
Even Dmitrii Dril' defied the police in one instance, protesting censorship of Ivanova's call for free speech on the grounds that it was impossible to deny the "close link existing between the desperate economic position of the woman worker and prostitution." Thus encouraged, the union representative Georgii Bek raised the cry for "civil liberties," only to be cut off mid-sentence by a policeman who insisted that Ariadna
[120] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 576–77.
[121] Ibid., vol. 1, p. 181; S. Bobrinskii, "Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami," Russkii vrach, no. 27 (1910): 963.
[122] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 577.
[123] Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 132–34.
[124] Ibid., pp. 219–20.
Tyrkova, the meeting's chair, deprive Bek of the floor. Tyrkova, a member of the League of Equal Rights for Women, declared herself unwilling to censor anyone, asking facetiously for participants to "control" themselves in deference to the authorities' physical strength. On the grounds that Tyrkova was not fulfilling her responsibilities as chair, the police shut down the section.[125]
A paper by Nikolai Zakharov created strange bedfellows among congress participants. Zakharov antagonized many listeners with his contention that "moral" explanations for prostitution were more pressing than social and economic ones. The conservative House of Mercy secretary attacked not only socialist doctrines of "free love," but secularizing and democratizing trends that followed the French Revolution. Such reactionary ideas did not sit well, even among nonsocialists. Zakharov's outspoken endorsement of censorship and restrictions on minors served, like Beletskii's interference, to inspire spontaneous alliances among his otherwise disparate listeners. Dril' himself retorted that prostitution was rooted in economic problems.[126]
Prior to the congress, Kollontai had claimed that the organizers would retreat to theories about prostitutes' hereditary predilections in order to spare themselves the discomfort of confronting prostitution's economic roots.[127] But she was wrong here: the late nineteenth-century characterization of the prostitute as a "morally depraved creature" had few adherents among congress participants. In fact, issues pertaining to women's "genetic predisposition" to prostitution did not even appear among the list of the causes of prostitution in the program for the congress. These instead leaned toward social and economic explanations.[128]
[125] Ibid., pp. 179–81. According to an account in the St. Petersburg city governor's files, the policeman responded to Tyrkova, "Physical strength isn't an issue here, but the law of March 4 is." TsGALO, Kantseliariia Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika, f. 569, op. 13, d. 91. See also B——, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Pechatnoe delo, p. 6; B—— "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Golos portnogo, p. 8. Zinaida Mirovich complained about police interference when conference participants attempted to link prostitution with the socioeconomic conditions in Russia. Mirovich, "Po povodu pervago vserossiiskago s"ezda," p. 6.
[126] Zakharov, "Prichiny rasprostraneniia prostitutsii," pp. 204–6; Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 214–18.
[127] In an article about the congress, Kollontai devoted several pages to disputing the theory of women's "genetic predisposition" to prostitution. By 1910 this amounted to beating a dead horse. Kollontai, "Zadachi s"ezda," pp. 11–12.
[128] One author for a printers' newspaper admitted that "genetic predisposition" as a "reason" hardly saw the light of day at the congress. Nabliudatel', "Pervyi s"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," p. 4. For the list of causes, see Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 godu, p. 13.
Ironically, Pavlov was one of the few congress participants to resurrect Tarnovskii's school of thought and place himself on the side of those who subscribed to moral and physiological explanations for prostitution when he referred to the prostitute as a "creature extremely ignorant, sick, morally paralyzed." His comments were immediately countered by a male physician who pointedly reminded him of Bebel's description of prostitutes as kind and intelligent in Woman under Socialism .[129]
There were, however, several issues that brooked no compromise. In a congress section devoted to strategies for preventing prostitution and "saving fallen women," the worker-delegates in attendance voiced their disdain for any charitable measures. Bek, for example, made light of a proposal to institutionalize a regular leisure day for domestic servants. "Why in the name of servants," he asked, "when the woman worker has a greater need of it?"[130] In concert with Goncharov and Ivanova. Bek also contemptuously dismissed a proposal by the feminist Anna Miliukova to convene a commission to educate the public about issues concerning prostitution.[131] During a later meeting of the general assembly, Pavlov insulted just about everyone in attendance when he decried the "sentimental hypocrisy" of individuals involved in the struggle against prostitution and called their efforts "insincere and worthless."[132]
Conflicting class and gender issues also challenged congress unity. During the proceedings, the worker representatives mocked not only the participants' reformist proposals, but the entire concept of any special organizations for women. In the words of one worker, the very idea of women's labor organizations was merely an "invention [Vydumka ] of bourgeois ladies."[133] For her part, Ariadna Tyrkova alienated the workers when she came out in favor of a class-based franchise, so long as it included women.[134] She also invited friction by joining another female participant in castigating European trade unions for discriminating against female members. When she reminded the congress that as recently as 1908, women from Moscow had been expelled from unions in the graphics industry, three workers defended the "scientific-socialist" bases of the Russian labor movement and spoke of the "identical inter-
[129] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 149–50.
[130] Ibid., p. 258.
[131] Ibid., p. 231.
[132] Ibid., vol. 2, p. 576.
[133] Ibid., vol. 1, p. 132.
[134] Beletskii backed by Dril' and the session chair terminated this discussion. Ibid., pp. 169–70; Bobrinskii, "Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd," p. 963.
ests" of male and female workers.[135] But Tyrkova supported the workers' proposal to ban women from labor hazardous to their health, while feminists like Mirovich and Mariia Pokrovskaia believed such a practice would restrict women's employment options even further.[136] The prohibition of women's night work, on the other hand, met only a single objection—from Pokrovskaia. Her desire to see gender-blind labor legislation for men and women lost before Pavlov's contention that night work was damaging for women "from the view of sexual morality."[137] On this issue, he was at one with the more conservative congress participants.
The most sparks flew when the worker-delegates pushed for measures that exceeded the congress majority's vision for a free and democratic, but not socialist, Russia. Dril' attempted to narrow one discussion to exclude those measures "obviously impractical under the present state of things." Dril' was all in favor of legislation for the "weak and unprotected," but not of "a war involving everyone against everyone."[138] Fon-Anrep backed Pavlov in regard to the factory inspectorate, but as chair he conspicuously ignored the call for free unions. When Pavlov drew attention to this oversight, thereby provoking a second and final warning from the police, Fon-Anrep silenced him, later explaining that the resolution was political and thus exempted from a vote. At this point, Pavlov announced that the workers were walking out in protest.[139] (Curiously, Fon-Anrep pushed aside the worker-delegates' demand in order to discuss Tyrkova's no less political resolution about opening government organs at all levels to female participation.)[140] On the third evening of the congress, Fon-Anrep refused to put a resolution on the eight-hour day up for a vote. This time, Pavlov, Bek, Ivanova, Goncharov, and Golovacheva made a dramatic and final exit.[141]
But by then their work was essentially done. Not only had they made congress participants aware of the social-democratic program, they had upset the general atmosphere of complacency and privilege. The union representatives raised important questions about the utility of philanthropic approaches to prostitution and the "narrow-mindedness" and
[135] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 131–32.
[136] The resolution won with a vote of 58 to 32. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 577–79.
[137] Ibid., p. 577. On the question of night work, see Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 148, 158–60, 251.
[138] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 130.
[139] Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 579–80.
[140] Ibid., p. 579.
[141] Ibid., pp. 590–91.
"utopianism" of privileged society, and they kept the question of female labor central to the debate. Despite the confluence of many socialist and nonsocialist views, no doubt most congress participants breathed a sigh of relief when the door dosed behind the last worker.[142]
But what had the worker-delegates revealed about socialists and prostitution? First, they had ignored one of the most controversial questions of the day – the issue of government regulation of prostitution. Their proposals and their failure to attend any of the congress sessions devoted to this question suggest an unwillingness to see the question of regulation as significant. Yet as we have seen, through its mechanisms of police interference into working-class communities, regulation served to oppress the young working women who were under constant suspicion of engaging in unlicensed prostitution, as well as full-time prostitutes.
Second, their total rejection of philanthropic aid indicates deliberate insensitivity to the problems facing working women. In reality, charities were the only agencies in tsarist Russia committed to extending helping hands to women from the lower classes.[143] As Rose Glickman has shown and Ariadna Tyrkova pointed out at the congress, labor organizations often excluded women from their membership.[144] Even when membership remained open to women workers, gender-related burdens—domestic responsibilities, sexual harassment, hostility from male coworkers, lack of education, pregnancy and maternity—generally kept women from joining unions or participating in mutual aid funds. Philanthropies at least tried to rectify some of those problems by teaching women to read and write, by providing child care and cheap housing, and by organizing evening and Sunday programs. In contrast, Russian socialist and labor organizations, fearful of feminism dividing the working class and led by men who essentially configured the proletariat as male, offered women only vague promises about a glowing egalitarian future.
Third, Bek and Pavlov contradicted themselves about labor issues
[142] A Soviet author who went so far as to count their number of comments described the tremendous "agitational significance" of the workers' participation. Letunovskii, Leninskaia taktika, pp. 47–49.
[143] On charity, see Adele Lindenmeyr, "Charity and the Problem of Unemployment: Industrial Homes in Late Imperial Russia," The Russian Review 45, no. 1 (January 1986): 1–22; Lindenmeyr, "Voluntary Associations and the Russian Autocracy"; Lindenmeyr, "The Ethos of Charity in Imperial Russia," Journal of Social History 23, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 679–94.
[144] For a discussion of the failure of the Left to address the needs of women workers, see Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 242–80.
affecting women. When Bek rejected out of hand a proposal to help domestic servants, he overlooked the fact that servants too were workers and that most prostitutes actually came from their ranks. Pavlov's aggressive endorsement of restrictions on women's night work and work in hazardous industries evinced his failure to see how the narrowing of women's job options could result in more prostitution, not less. Moreover, Pavlov's claim that a prohibition on night work would protect women's morality demonstrates his failure to challenge the prevailing sexual model of female victimization. Pavlov saw women as in need of protection, rather than as capable co-workers who could make their own choices. At the same time, Pavlov distinguished himself as unusually sensitive to some issues of labor and gender. For example, he made an uncommon admission in a paper he delivered at the congress: unlike the optimists who saw only harmony among a unified working class, he conceded that "cultural backwardness" (i.e., sexual harassment) from male workers could serve to thwart their female co-workers and push them toward prostitution. Twice during the congress, he made an association between prostitution and women's low wages, citing how women workers made 11 rubles to men's 28.[145] Nonetheless, of all the proposals he put forward, equal pay for equal work was never among them.
Fourth, the congress proceedings reveal fundamental points of agreement between the worker-delegates and the majority of participants in several areas. Despite the worker-delegates' professed antipathy for liberal society, they often found themselves on the same side of the fence as reformers, feminists, and philanthropists. Indeed, congress participants demonstrated at least token support for Pavlov by electing him as the chair and spokesman of the section on prostitution's roots. Furthermore, they were in favor of the workers' measures on behalf of labor in general and female labor in particular, they shared the workers' disdain for the authorities' interference, and they also endorsed the expansion of civil liberties. On occasion, Pavlov et al. could even count tsarist officials like Dril' and Fon-Anrep as allies.
Finally, it is obvious that the union representatives were less concerned with prostitution per se than they were with promoting the Social Democrats' general agenda and needling privileged society. Their comments and proposals primarily centered on class oppression and government repression, not commercial sex. Prostitutes and prostitu-
[145] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 127; vol. 2, p. 576.
tion seemed to fade into the background as the worker-delegates dismissed philanthropy, promoted a shorter workday, and decried the obstacles facing unions and other organizations. The fact that prostitution suggested something fundamental about gender, not simply class, eluded the Left completely.
By this reckoning, working men could play no role in prostitution whatsoever. In Kollontai's naïve words, prostitution could not "take root where men and women undergo identical exploitation, where the struggle for joint interests unites both sexes on the principles of comradeship and solidarity."[146] But as we have seen, male proletarians purchased the sexual favors of their proletarian sisters with as great enthusiasm and impunity as men from the privileged classes. Pavlov himself admitted that working men, particularly those with families in the countryside, were patrons of prostitutes.[147]
According to some sources, male socialists could also succumb to the attractions of commercial sex. In 1909, a prostitute who sent a letter to Anna Miliukova mentioned one gentleman who told her that prostitution was a "social evil" that would disappear under socialism. When she asked him what he himself was doing in a "public house," he had no answer.[148] In The Dark, a 1907 novella by Leonid Andreev, a 26-year-old revolutionary hides from the police in a brothel. The protagonist is a virgin and intends to remain one, but in the service of his masquerade he follows a young woman named Liuba to her room. Liuba cannot believe that her would-be client is not interested in sex and responds to his sympathy for her degradation and his protestations of sexual innocence with an indignant slap. Struggling to do the right thing, the confused young celibate lets himself be seduced. But Liuba recognizes this as more of the same "fineness"—just another sample of his deep self-righteousness and superiority. Prostitutes required comradeship in "the dark," not pity.[149]
Andreev based The Dark on a story Maxim Gorky told him about the Socialist Revolutionary Petr Rutenberg who had indeed sought refuge from the police in a house of prostitution.[150] When one of the women
[146] Kollontai, "Zadachi s"ezda," p. 15.
[147] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 127–29.
[148] "Pis'mo prostitutki," p. 11.
[149] Leonid Andreev, The Dark (Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1922), p. 40.
[150] Rutenberg is best remembered as the assassin of Father Gapon. On Rutenberg, see Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 99–100.
there expressed concern for Rutenberg's safety, he countered with a "sermon on morality." The prostitute in turn slapped him—"a smack perfectly deserved," as Gorky put it. Rutenberg "realized the whole crudity of his mistake, apologizing to the prostitute and kissing her hand."[151] Gorky was so disturbed to see this tale appear in print, "distorted" and full of "weird details," that his relationship with Andreev suffered as a result.[152]
But the unfolding of Rutenberg's adventures and their appearance in Russian fiction did more than damage the friendship between two writers. They also reflected the Russian radical intelligentsia's discomfort and lack of insight into prostitutes, prostitution, and sex in general. Radicals were as confused as conservatives when it came to "the dark," and their social analyses were as sophisticated as they were naïve. Lurking close behind comradely good will toward "fallen women" were guilt and condescension. Prostitution made them as flustered as Petr Rutenberg, who answered a smack to his face with an apologetic kiss on the hand that slapped him. As the revolutionary authorities who confronted the problem of Russian prostitution after 1917 would realize, when it came to prostitutes, socialists could be as inept as philanthropists and the police.
"This is your dawn, Liubochka! This is the start of your new life. You will lean bravely on my strong arm. I will load you on the road of honest labor, face to face on the path of a struggle with life!"
Likhonin, in Iama
Outraged by the degradation of prostitution, Chekhov's protagonist Vasiliev in "A Nervous Breakdown" contemplates the things that could be done to save its victims.[153] He rejects the notion of personally taking a woman from a brothel; in such cases the would-be rescuer invariably winds up sleeping with his grateful
[151] From Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences (New York: Dover Publications, 1946), pp.180–81.
[152] James B. Woodward, Leonid Andreyev: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 178.
[153] In Chlenov's survey of Moscow University students, one respondent swore that after having read Chekhov's story, he would never go to a brothel. Chlenov, Polovaia perepis', p. 52.
charge and as soon as he becomes bored, discards her into someone else's arms.[154] Vasiliev also rules out the option of providing a brothel prostitute with her own place and the "regulation sewing machine." Under those circumstances, the woman would become restless and start receiving men again, perhaps returning to her brothel, "where she can sleep till three in the afternoon, drink coffee, and have plenty to eat." Vasiliev realizes that it would be most noble to marry a prostitute—"And when this brazen, crushed, spoilt or stupid animal has become a wife," she could eventually be transformed. But Vasiliev admits to himself that he is not selfless enough to go through with such a marriage."[155] Besides, his sacrifice would rescue only one woman from prostitution; how many more would replace her in the ranks? Frustrated by the magnitude of the problem and his own inability to do the right thing, Vasiliev suffers a nervous breakdown.[156]
As would-be saviors quickly learned, "salvation for the fallen woman" was a tricky business that defied ideologies and good intentions. Prostitution occupied an ineradicable place in Imperial Russia, as the doomed Vasiliev so painfully realized. Although the Russian empire required sweeping reforms before redemption could become more than a dim hope, most salvationists were not prepared to support broad programs of political or social change. At the same time, while fundamental issues concerning the entire structure of gender relations lay at the heart of the problem of prostitution, salvationists also showed little interest in questioning sexual roles or male supremacy. Morality was really besides the point. Rather, both the narrowness of the salvationists' vision and the enormity of their task ensured that the objects of their charity would confound them in one way or another.
Efforts to save fallen women evince the competing definitions of gender that informed Russian views of prostitution. According to the state's interpretation, some women were bad and therefore society needed to contain them to avoid disease and disorder. Regulationists sent this mes-
[154] Kuprin pursued this theme in his 1909 novel by portraying a male student who grew bored with the woman he had "rescued" from a brothel. Although Chernyshevsky's hero, Kirsanov, did not treat the prostitute he rescued quite so heartlessly, he did make her his mistress, later realizing that his primary feeling for her was pity as she was not equal to him in "mental development."
[155] A House of Mercy worker described a man who, inspired by Tolstoy's Resurrection, decided to save a fallen woman by marrying her. But the marriage ended in divorce—the "inequality" of their respective "development" proved insurmountable. Voronova, "V zashchitu," p. 299.
[156] Chekhov, "A Nervous Breakdown," pp. 159–79.
sage through the yellow ticket and the disciplinary mechanisms that it engaged. House of Mercy salvationists reinforced the message by expecting that the prostitutes who were at heart good women would abandon prostitution when given the chance to undergo the institution's purifying regimen. By extension, though, the women who refused salvation had to be as bad as the regulationists made them out to be. Their obstinacy seemed to prove that women could indeed be divided into those who needed supervision and those who did not. Having implicitly asked whether prostitution was the result of a bad society or bad women, House of Mercy salvationists found for the latter. In saving a few women, they condemned the rest to the status of perpetrator, not victim.
The ROZZh did something similar. By establishing preventive services and extending a philanthropic hand, it conceived of itself as giving women an alternative to prostitution. The women who rejected its offers could therefore be seen as having consciously chosen to fall or at least to risk falling. In any case, society was not at fault in this regard. Where society failed to do its part was by leaving women vulnerable in ways that men were not. The ROZZh addressed this inequity by lobbying the state for laws and provisions designed to protect women from abuses. In so doing, it could absolve itself from blame for Russia's overall poverty. Prostitution was an evil thing in an otherwise good world that the ROZZh hoped to make even better.
The socialists went further along the path of examining the role of society by making the economic and social argument that prostitutes were made, not born. They also tackled the role of the autocratic state, inasmuch as it prevented male and female workers from taking the most rudimentary steps toward their own protection. But the ultimate socialist solution involved eliminating the economic roots of prostitution, therein ignoring how prostitution was culturally as well as economically constructed. By expecting prostitution to fade away with the demise of capitalism, socialists ignored issues of gender. Just as the ROZZh circumvented the issue of prostitution by focusing on how to prevent vulnerable women from falling, the socialists sidestepped prostitution by turning their attention to capitalism and the Russian state.
Chapter 7
Reforming an Unreformable System
It would be better to have no obligatory measures relating to prostitution than an entire system of mandatory obligations that does not attain its goal and thereby deceives society.
Dr. Veniamin Tarnovskii (1881)
While civil society wrestled with the problem of how to save fallen women, official Russia worked to find more efficient ways of controlling them. Though many individuals in the tsarist administration acknowledged that prostitution had roots in social and economic ills, they nonetheless approached the issue from a bureaucratic angle—how they might fine-tune, improve, or reform regulation.
Nadzor at its inception was meant to embrace the women who fell between the cracks of the patriarchal system and check the danger they presented to society as perceived carriers of disease and disorder. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, even regulation's supporters admitted that the system did not work; it was riddled with inconsistencies, abuses, mismanagement, and corruption. Yet they refused to believe that these problems were inherent to regulation, that the three-tiered policy of identification, inspection, and incarceration could only engender its opposite—evasion of medical-police authorities. Instead of facing up to the fact that regulation was a losing proposition, tsarist administrators sought to find means for reforming an essentially unreformable system.
But the process of improving regulation was not completely without
results. First, it engaged the professional expertise of Russia's medical community, which distinguished itself by criticizing and ultimately repudiating regulation. Second, just as elected municipal and rural district councils used the issue of brothel licensing to flex their political muscles, so would they seize on regulation as a whole to challenge the central state apparatus. Finally, though the MVD would uphold regulation through February of 1917, it too would redefine its role in relation to prostitution.
The 1897 Congress on Syphilis
In my opinion, all these resolutions about prostitution contain a number of inevitable contradictions, reservations, and scientific errors. They appear to be a dangerous game of hide and seek, both in relation to morality and health, the protection of which the congress was particularly concerned.
Dr. Dmitrii Zhbankov (1897)
The 1897 Congress for the Discussion of Measures against Syphilis marked the most influential moment for the development of both the tsarist administration's and the medical community's perceptions of the regulatory system. Sponsored by the MVD's Medical Department, the 1897 congress was the state's first attempt to address what was perceived as a growing syphilis epidemic. More than 450 zemstvo, military, factory, and private physicians, university professors, and state officials attended, a veritable "Who's Who" of Russia's turn-of-the-century administrative and medical intelligentsia. Despite broad medical participation, the agenda was set by officialdom. The minister of internal affairs was there to introduce business, as were bureaucrats from state agencies that directly influenced the medical profession.
The express purpose of the congress was to discuss the control of syphilis, but because prostitution and venereal disease had become almost synonymous for state officials, prostitution was the implicit theme. The state's understanding of prostitution and commitment to regulation communicated themselves in the choice of the keynote speaker, Veniamin Tarnovskii, on whose initiative the 1897 congress was organized.[1] Tarnovskii set the tone of the congress: the spread of venereal disease, he declared in his speech, could "always" be traced to the urban
[1] Arkhangel'skii, V. M. Tarnovskii, p. 20.
prostitute. "Take any case of syphilis which apparently has nothing in common with prostitution and trace it back through several layers of individuals, sometimes through generations, to its original source. You will always find in the long run a prostitute who has spread the disease."[2] Only through strict supervision might such women be stopped from cavalierly infecting their customers. Tarnovskii warned his audience that measures had to be taken immediately or Russia's population, under the bane of alcohol and syphilis, risked becoming as extinct as the native peoples of Siberia and North America.[3]
The 1897 congress proved loyal to Tarnovskii in its strong defense of nadzor as the best means for stemming the spread of syphilis. Its collective support for the regulation of prostitution set the direction of official policy for the next two decades—no future work in this field would be complete without some reference to the decisions of 1897.[4] Even when evidence accumulated to prove regulation counterproductive, the slow-moving central bureaucracy would adhere to the congress's consensus about regulation as the best means for preventing prostitutes from spreading venereal disease. As for the urban prostitute, Tarnovskii's characterization of her as incorrigible also fixed itself firmly in the administrative mind.
At the same time, however, individuals typical of Russia's "third element"—physicians and medical statisticians employed by zemstvos and dumas—influenced the outcome of the congress. (A breakdown of congress participants in table 12 attests to the numerical dominance of zemstvo physicians and other professionals not directly beholden to the tsarist bureaucracy.) Frustrated by their own subservience to city governors and policemen, these professionals were unusually sensitive to issues of personal freedom and human rights. As a result, they were uncomfortable with solutions that placed intéréts d'état over those of the individual and they tended to be less eager to exert their power over prostitutes and lower-class women than their European counterparts. With their equivocal words about state licensing for brothels and how regulation deprived women in the lower classes of all legal rights, these physicians also affected the administration's perception of prostitution.
On one hand, by inviting doctors employed by agencies of local self-
[2] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. 10.
[3] Ibid., p. 18.
[4] A second congress was planned for December 1914, but the outbreak of war prevented its convocation. V. A. Zaboikina, "Voprosy dermatologii i venerologii na s"ezdakh russkikh vrachei dooktiabr'iaskogo perioda," Vestnik dermatologii i venerologii, no. 6 (November–December 1958): 76.
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government to the 1897 congress, the tsarist state was actively soliciting their voices in determining future policies. On the other hand, the state attempted to limit their influence by having provincial administrators handpick participants. Only after various zemstvo doctors petitioned for consideration were others allowed to attend—at their own expense. Typically, the government seemed to want it both ways, to harvest the knowledge of Russia's emerging civil society while keeping that knowledge under a tight lid. The ambivalent welcome continued in the form of "the usual red tape" (volokita ) and a "bureaucratic handling" of things that blocked, for example, receipt of the congress papers in advance.[5]
Tarnovskii's vision never faced a direct challenge, but congress records indicate the majority's unwillingness to accept it unreservedly. The most revealing discussion centered around Konstantin Shtiurmer's stunning report, "Prostitution in the Cities." Though Shtiurmer was himself a physician associated with St. Petersburg's medical-police committee and in his words at an 1899 conference in Brussels, a "partisan de la réglementation,"[6] his assessment of regulation throughout the empire did not obscure the sorry picture of the system's true conditions—unhygienic examinations in makeshift facilities, arbitrary and corrupt behavior on the part of the authorities, and rampant "clandestine" prostitution.[7]
Shtiurmer, interpreting his findings as evidence that regulation needed to be "improved," made recommendations reminiscent of the drive among European "neoregulationists" at the turn of the century to give regulation legal footing and forsake police methods for more stringent medical surveillance.[8] Confronted with the overwhelming failure of regulation, Shtiurmer nevertheless believed that Russia could alleviate matters by improving sanitation, buying more medical equipment, building more hospitals, and hiring more specialists, among other
[5] Dmitrii N. Zhbankov, "O s"ezde pri Meditsinskom departamente po obsuzhdeniiu meropriiatii protiv sifilisa v Rossii," Vrach, nos. 29–30 (1897): 800.
[6] Conférence internationale pour la prophylaxie de la syphilis et des maladies vénériennes (Brussels, 1899), p. 40.
[7] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 1–119. Shtiurmer's assessment of regulation confirms arguments that MVD directives had little influence on the actual medical operations within the Russian empire. See Nancy Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); John Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1918 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
[8] See Corbin, Women for Hire; Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy; and Harsin, Policing Prostitution for discussions of the neoregulationist bent of European doctors.
things. Like European neoregulationists, Shtiurmer wanted to see additional safeguards built into the system so that "innocent" women would not be registered and prostitutes would have some protection. But like them, he was prepared to trade a prostitute's rights for what seemed to be the prevention of venereal disease. To this end, Shtiurmer devised his own solution to the problem of quarantining prostitutes during syphilis's elusive contagious period: "isolation colonies," self-supporting agricultural camps. Women condemned to these institutions would while away the months engaged in labor meant to prepare them for a future of "honest" work. Shtiurmer envisaged an idyllic setting of English gardens, fruit trees, vegetable plots, cottages, and workshops. His syphilitic prostitutes would maintain the gardens, cultivate vegetables, keep bees and silkworms, cook, launder, sew, and sell the products of their labor. After two years they would be released, ready to face the world with new skills and the 40 rubles they had earned for their agricultural work. "There is no doubt," wrote an optimistic Shtiurmer, "that not one of the prostitutes who has been accustomed to labor would fail to return to an honest life."[9]
Shtiurmer's colleagues approved most of the proposals designed to make regulation more effective and more medically sound, thereby affirming exclusionary, gender-based policies in principle and acting as neoregulationists themselves.[10] Following the lead of Tarnovskii and Shtiurmer, the congress named prostitutes as the "chief agent" in the spread of syphilis and venereal disease, with clandestine prostitutes the most dangerous of all. Regulation thus received a vote of confidence as the best means for protecting public health.[11] Though congress participants recognized that regulation had serious drawbacks, they adhered to its identification of women's bodies as the source of danger and disease. Still, they did not go so far as to endorse Shtiurmer's quarantine sites for syphilitic prostitutes. And, as we saw earlier, they also broke ranks over brothel licensing.[12]
Although loyal to regulation, the congress majority attempted to soften its more oppressive edges and minimize the authority of the tsarist police. Toward these ends, they modified several of Shtiurmer's proposals. Whereas Shtiurmer had mildly suggested advising police departments to exercise "wariness" during their raids, the congress voted to
[9] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 75–76.
[10] For final resolutions, see "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," pp. xvi–xxi.
[11] Ibid., pp. xvii, 52.
[12] Ibid., pp. xxi, 159–60.
eliminate police roundups completely. Odessa's medical inspector called such searches "the most vulgar deed against human freedom and identity!"[13] Shtiurmer had originally recommended using photographs to aid the precise identification of prostitutes. A revised form of Shtiurmer's resolution reflected the congress's hesitation, for it called photographs a "convenient method of identification control," but emphasized their use for "professional prostitutes" only. A lengthy debate over photographs provoked several sharp declarations of concern for how this measure might "brand a woman," including an uncharacteristic note of caution from Tarnovskii who asserted that photography must be eliminated "because it leads to the enslavement [zakabalenie ] of the prostitute forever."[14]
The majority of congress participants displayed a relatively broad and preventive approach to venereal disease that attenuated the reliance on regulation alone. In response to Shtiurmer's paper and to presentations at other panels, they affirmed the need for improvement of empirewide literacy, broad dissemination of medical information, publication of popular pamphlets on syphilis and venereal disease, and a program of public lectures on related themes. The congress examined syphilis from many angles, not the least of which addressed Russia's "backwardness" as an underlying cause of the perceived epidemic.[15] Fears over syphilis as a highly contagious disease steered Russian physicians in the direction of discouraging the use of the peasants' ubiquitous common bowl, the sharing of clothing and eating utensils, and other practices that were far less likely to spread syphilis than actual sexual contact.
Congress resolutions acknowledged that venereal disease in fact had many points of origin—among male workers who traveled home to the countryside at harvest time, among the peasantry, in the army and navy, among laborers in factories, mines, and artisanal trades, among wet nurses, and even among men and women of the privileged classes. "There are no grounds," they allowed, "for thinking that the rate of syphilis among the upper classes is less widespread than among the lower."[16] And yet congress resolutions tended to address the behavior of peasants and workers, rather than that of privileged society.
Despite the participants' broad approach to venereal disease, several
[13] Ibid., pp. xix, 108.
[14] "Protokoly zasedanii otdelov," Trudy Vysochaishe razreshennago s"ezda, vol. 2, pp. 229–31; "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. xix.
[15] See Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon," for a discussion of this issue.
[16] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. 59.
proposals betrayed their desire for a fundamental role in controlling the lower classes. A discussion of syphilis among the working class resulted in qualified support for general medical examinations of all male workers new to a job and after sojourns to their homes in the countryside. Periodic examinations were also urged for servants and service personnel. Their wish to spare "honest" women what they knew to be invasive and humiliating pelvic examinations kept participants from calling for an extension of these procedures to workers' families, but not when the male head of household was found with venereal symptoms. "Treatment" would be free, but compulsory.[17] In regard to the military, the lower ranks (who already underwent medical inspections on a monthly basis) were to have more frequent examinations. Those suffering from the later stages of syphilis would not only be kept from going on prolonged leave, they would have special dishes and separate sleeping quarters. Guaranteed to be unpopular was a proposal to eliminate daily wine rations for men at sea and the practice of paying them in kind with vodka. Apparently the good doctors thought that increased attention to "games, shows, and lectures," along with greater sobriety, might help distract the lower ranks from their baser instincts.[18]
The physicians' strategy also reflected a growing sense of professional identity and the desire to augment their own authority. Consequently, participants affirmed their expertise in the battle against venereal disease. For example, they agreed on the need for positions on industrial staffs and more places for venereal specialists. They also voted on hiring doctors "proportionately" to the number of prostitutes under surveillance. Though Russia suffered from a dearth of medical personnel, the doctors nonetheless maintained that the "independent activity" of medical assistants was undesirable.[19]
Resolutions with a neoregulationist tint surfaced in the form of recommendations with protection for women as their ostensible goal. In solid patriarchal fashion, the congress wanted to penalize husbands, parents, and guardians who had forsaken their custodial role by pushing their female dependents into prostitution. The law was also to be invoked in combating "the trade in human flesh."[20] In addition, partici-
[17] The doctors also recommended charitable aid for those families who had been deprived of a syphilitic's income. Ibid., p. 23.
[18] Ibid., pp. 23, 41, 59.
[19] These were best seen in response to O. V. Petersen, "O podgotovke meditsinskago personala" and L. B. Bertenson, "Sifilis i venericheskie bolezni sredi rabochikh gornykhzavodov i promyslov." Proposals in "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," pp. 23, 52, 109, 115.
[20] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. 52.
pants supported a measure to remand delinquent female minors to corrective institutions.
To Shtiurmer, prostitution was an "inevitable fact of life, an ineradicable element of the social order." The congress, on the other hand, more optimistically termed it "an element of the social order that was difficult to eradicate."[21] The congress also developed a definition of prostitution that broke with Tarnovskii's association of commercial sex with generic depravity. Most significantly, congress participants dubbed prostitution a "social" phenomenon linked to the contemporary economic structure and to general moral standards. Tarnovskii received his due with a comment about prostitution as the reflection of "innate propensities toward depravity that are a consequence of degeneration," but this had last place. It was overshadowed by the congress's initial characterization of prostitution as "promoted chiefly by unfavorable conditions, the fall of social morality, lack of intellectual development, [and] the tendency to seek quick and easy profits."[22]
Regulation in general proved much less contentious, sparking only a few recorded challenges. One came from Dmitrii Zhbankov, a zemstvo medical statistician active in the community medicine oriented Pirogov Society.[23] During a discussion on syphilis among the urban population, Zhbankov spoke out against obligatory medical examinations: no one had the right to force a girl or woman to undergo them because "this can cause very unfortunate consequences."[24] His zemstvo colleague, a Dr. N. N. Maslovskii from Tambov province, attempted to put the very question of regulation's utility to a vote. Three times during the discussion of Shtiurmer's paper, he raised this issue, only to be thwarted by Tarnovskii, who declared his proposal out of order. Maslovskii was seconded by another zemstvo physician from Saratov province, who declared that regulation was failing to meet its goals and insulted the "human dignity" of those placed on police lists. But the congress did not pick up their banner, deciding against taking a vote. Officials finally took matters in hand when the chair of Shtiurmer's section announced that "several of our comrades" had complained that insufficient attention
[21] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 6; "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. 54 (emphasis added).
[22] Shtiurmer diverged from Tarnovskii on this issue, arguing that social and economic conditions "strongly promote" a woman's decision to turn to prostitution. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 27. The congress defined prostitution in "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," pp. xvi–xvii.
[23] On the Pirogov Society, see Frieden, Russian Physicians, pp. 118–22.
[24] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. 74.
had been paid to the issue of whether nadzor was in fact justified. "The erection of such questions of principle would distract us from deciding on more concrete resolutions," he ruled.[25] Time was too short to go off on such a tangent.
Clearly, a ruling on the desirability of regulating prostitutes was fundamental to a discussion of syphilis, but the chair had the weight of the MVD on his side and congress participants did not press the issue. Bureaucratic repression played a role in silencing anti-regulationist sentiment in 1897, but it is also likely that "abolitionism" was not yet widespread or compelling enough to turn the syphilis congress into a litmus test of government policy. Physicians were critical of regulation, but they could not yet envision leaving prostitutes free to conduct their business without at least medical interference. Maslovskii is a good case in point. Despite his advocacy of a vote on regulation, he put himself on record as blaming prostitutes for spreading venereal disease. Maslovskii further undermined his own criticisms of regulation by contradictorily asserting the need for more agents to bring clandestine prostitutes under control and suggesting that this work be left to the police.[26]
The most striking decision reflected the majority's desire to place control of regulation in the hands of elected municipal dumas and zemstvos. In a resolution that was in essence at sharp variance with officialdom's understanding of regulation, the congress resolved, "Surveillance over prostitution must be placed in the hands of special collegial bodies which would manage both its medical and administrative aspects. Everywhere, management of this business must be transferred to municipal governments or institutions which substitute for them."[27]
On the surface, their decision appeared driven by fiscal and administrative imperatives. By delegating responsibilities to municipal agencies, funding for examinations, physicians, and related expenses would have to come from city budgets and municipal personnel could be required to fulfill managerial and medical duties. This solved the problem of the enormous financial liability posed by regulation. Not only did medical-police committees require trained medical personnel, police agents, and an administrative staff, they needed examination facilities, medical
[25] Ibid., pp. 55–56, 58, 94, 96–97, 99–100.
[26] Ibid., pp. 55, 102–3.
[27] Ibid., p. xx. Shtiurmer had originally recommended something more benign—that cities without medical-police committees or some form of established nadzor should establish "collegial institutions" to keep local regulation from having an arbitrary character. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 78.
equipment, and hospital space. In 1872, the Senate ordered St. Petersburg's municipal duma to allot 24,000 rubles annually for the local medical-police committee, but the overwhelming majority of cities had no such instructions and would not, left to themselves, drain their already modest financial resources.[28] In Minsk, for example, "not one kopeck " was allotted toward public health until 1890.[29] Without funding and a qualified staff, local authorities were left to tack the obligations associated with regulation onto those of the already overburdened and underpaid district and municipal doctors.
But the vote for municipal and district control had deeper roots. Physicians believed that their employers, elected local officials, would handle surveillance more competently and lawfully than tsarist officials and policemen. Given the track record of the administration, their assumptions were reasonable. Comments at the 1897 congress demonstrated time and again how the police sabotaged regulation's medical goals by arresting innocent women, accepting bribes, and acting in an arbitrary manner.[30] Doctors deeply resented the way police mechanisms of repression and control interfered with the physicians' self-appointed realm of enlightenment and healing.[31]
Demands for authority over regulation went even further than the allocation of doctors and rubles, and hopes for a well-run regulatory system. In essence, they implicitly challenged the central government. Set in the context of the more general struggle by zemstvo and duma activists for the decentralization of power, they had distinct political implications, with participants striving to make the "police, and indeed the
[28] "Ob obzhalovanii v poriadke st. 7 pol. 8 iiunia 1903 g. otkaza S.-Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika osvobodit' pomeshcheniia v gorodskikh zdaniiakh, zaniatiia vrachebno-politseiskim komitetom," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 20 (May 1907): 1408; Smirnov, "Ob uchrezhdenii vrachebno-politseiskikh komitetov," p. 1; Walter Hanchett, "Tsarist Statutory Regulation of Municipal Government in the Nineteenth Century," in The City in Russian History, ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1975), p. 96.
[29] Gratsianov, "Desiat' let sanitarnago nadzora," p. 20 (emphasis in original).
[30] For physicians' testimony about police interference, see "Protokoly zasedanii otdelov," pp. 241–44. Citizens' committees also supported municipally run police forces "so that the urban population would be safeguarded from arbitrary rule." Hanchett, Tsarist Statutory Regulation," p. 106.
[31] John Hutchinson argues that zemstvo doctors' inability "to come to terms with the existence of the state" left them "out of place in a world which was fast leaving them behind." Hutchinson, "'Who Killed Cock Robin?' An Inquiry into the Death of Zemstvo Medicine," in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Susan Gross Solomon and John Hutchinson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 14–15.
entire administrative apparatus . . . the instrument of the populace, not its overseers."[32] For those with progressive political views, improvement of regulation impinged on a broad spectrum of issues concerning medical care in general, treatment of the lower classes, and abuses of police power. Tsarist interference in all of these things was thought to be keeping Russia backward.
In reality though, surveillance in the hands of municipal sanitary commissions or zemstvo physicians did not necessarily spell an end to oppression. Municipal control could also mean more extensive powers to the regulators, albeit in the guise of a benevolent medical authority. In 1893, Petr Gratsianov's municipally run commission in Minsk found it expedient to register girls aged 12 to 15 and, as we saw earlier, to withhold a prostitute's earnings until she quit her brothel.[33] The Georgian city of Tiflis took the words of the 1897 congress at their most literal. Its Municipal Committee for the Struggle against Syphilis and Other Venereal Diseases far exceeded congress guidelines in the zealous fight against infection.[34] in Tiflis, physicians examined prostitutes as well as factory workers, domestic servants, workers in artisanal shops, wet nurses, and employees of restaurants, taverns, baths, and like institutions in the hopes of abating the spread of venereal disease. The Municipal Committee bypassed the courts entirely to assume the official responsibilities of both judge and prosecutor in the practice of fining prostitutes and brothelkeepers who failed to follow rules. It also provided for compulsory examinations of women suspected of clandestine prostitution. Despite MVD assurances of free treatment for prostitutes, madams were charged for the care of brothel prostitutes who had been hospitalized. This municipally run regulatory system made it clear that local control did not necessarily go hand in hand with humane treatment of prostitutes and lower-class women.[35] It was, indeed, difficult to distinguish such policies from the dirty business of the police.
Congress participants' stress on municipal autonomy, however, reflected their crusade for fundamental political reform. The medical pro-
[32] Neil B. Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and Local Government, 1900–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), p. 111.
[33] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 26, 31; Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 15–16.
[34] Materialy po voprosu ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v gorode Tiflise, pp. 3–12.
[35] See also B. L. Bogopol'skii, "Ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v gorodakh i o neobkhodimosti obshchikh vrachebnykh osmotrov rabochikh i prislugi," Vos'moi Pirogovskii s"ezd, vyp. 4 (Moscow, 1902): 242–44.
fession resented the general state of things in tsarist Russia, such as the lack of freedom of speech. Gratsianov for one, complained to the congress that censorship essentially prevented him from doing his job. "If I would want to talk [to workers] about the most innocent thing concerning hygiene," he maintained, "it would be difficult to receive permission." He was seconded by a dean of the medical school in Kazan who had been blocked in his efforts to organize a local program and, again, by a Kharkov professor who called it a physician's right to educate the lower classes about hygiene and medicine. An opponent of mandatory examinations for prostitutes continued the theme of free speech when he repeated a clumsy, but bold declaration from three previous professional conferences to "complete and regulate the simplification of formalities in regard to the permission for public lectures in order to eliminate the difficulties encountered on this path."[36] Even Tarnovskii acknowledged the problem when he indicated his support for frank conversations between doctors and their patients because "any instruction that a physician gives to the common people always carries a beam of light into the life of the ignorant masses."[37] Such sentiments were reflected in congress resolutions about how discussions between physicians and patients were hindered by "highly difficult formalities" and how it was necessary to "petition about changing all orders which inhibit" such interactions.[38]
Dmitrii Zhbankov went even further in an article he published in a leading medical journal after the congress. In the indirect language familiar to government critics, Zhbankov praised the congress resolutions that addressed the "unfavorable conditions of Russian life" as responsible for interfering with the fight against venereal disease.[39] "Unfavorable conditions" could refer to the shackles on speech that his colleagues explicitly addressed, but to other progressives in the medical profession, this expression was Aesopian language for a broader critique that encompassed everything from Russia's social system to the autocratic state itself.
Jurisdiction over regulation was one step toward the professional autonomy that Russian physicians craved. Politically impotent and still wary of prostitutes as founts of infection, physicians at the 1897 syphilis congress remained on the side of regulation. They failed to push the
[36] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," pp. 28–29.
[37] Ibid., p. 20.
[38] Ibid., p. 40.
[39] Zhbankov, "O s"ezde," p. 832.
issue of abolition and endorsed measures that surveyed and singled out women and the lower classes. Physicians associated with progressive ideas were in a majority, but their usual sympathies for human rights wound up in second place to fears over the spread of venereal disease. To have challenged the tsarist state on regulation would have meant canceling their voices altogether and losing their newfound status as experts whom the bureaucracy seemed ready to consult.[40] But there is no evidence that congress participants felt compromised by their support for medical surveillance. Doctors were in the business of curing disease, and in 1897, inspecting prostitutes and other suspected carriers seemed part and parcel of their duties. As much as physicians opposed statist solutions, they also found common ground with the tsarist bureaucracy. Though dedicated to human rights, Russian physicians could set these aside in the name of paternalistic authority and public health. In this regard, they were at one with the state. At the heart of both responses was still a struggle for control of some sort, with the bodies of the poor, especially of poor women, as the pawns.
The Government Responds
Humane attitudes toward prostitutes are obligatory for all ranks involved in medical-police surveillance because among prostitutes there are many women who have accidentally fallen.
Medical Department of the MVD (1903)
The regulation of prostitution had not been designed to fulfill the dreams of activists like Zhbankov nor could it tailor itself to suit their specifications, but the congress nevertheless forced ministry officials to reconsider some of regulation's more problematic aspects. Although the 1897 congress did not definitively change the power structure of regulation, it did compel the MVD to take a more realistic look at nadzor. The unwelcome recognition of the system's failure forced the MVD to heed what might otherwise have been dismissed as the participants' "senseless dreams."[41] Officials in the MVD, fearful of rising rates
[40] For a comparison with government reaction to a more assertive professional group, see John Hutchinson, "Science, Politics and the Alcohol Problem in Post-1905 Russia," Slavonic and East European Review 58, no. 2 (April 1980): 232–54.
[41] These are the words with which Nicholas II, upon his 1894 ascension to the throne, dismissed the hopes of zemstvo activists.
of venereal disease and forced to rely for support of regulation on local governments, took the congress recommendations very seriously.
Shortly after the congress, the MVD demonstrated its general accord with the congress by distributing copies of the resolutions to all provincial governors. Even more decisively, in 1899 the ministry's own Medical Council organized a special commission to determine the practicality of implementing an empirewide transfer of regulation into the hands of municipal governments and to develop recommendations for reforming regulation on a massive scale.[42] Ministerial support for municipal control did not, however, derive from sympathy for the decentralization of government power. Essentially, the MVD was facing up to reality—as things stood, regulation was a disaster. If city dumas and rural zemstvos were prepared to shoulder some of the weight of implementing nadzor, so be it. That would at least guarantee some attention to both funding and regulation.
The Medical Council commission included both Tarnovskii and Shtiurmer, as well as the chief doctor of Kalinkin Hospital, a representative from the Department of Police, Mikhail Borovitinov, and Leonid N. Malinovskii, the Medical Department's vice-director (who became head of the UGVI when the Medical Department was disbanded). To begin with, the commission studied regulation both in Russia and in Europe. Representatives familiarized themselves with Shtiurmer's materials on "Prostitution in the Cities" and considered the resolutions from the 1897 congress, as well as proposals from provincial officials. They also listened to a report from Shtiurmer about the international congress on the prevention of venereal disease he had recently attended in Brussels.[43]
When the commission made its recommendations, it specifically addressed several matters linked to regulation that had drawn serious criticism at the congress. In the spirit of the congress's solicitude for women involved with prostitution, the commission reinforced an 1897 resolution prohibiting brothelkeepers from keeping indebted prostitutes in their houses against their will. It also proposed building shelters for juvenile and pregnant prostitutes and establishing refuges for women who wished to leave the trade. In addition, the commission repeated a con-
[42] "Svod postanovlenii komissii," pp. 41–55. A Soviet source incorrectly claims that the government prevented medical journals and newspapers from printing accounts of the congress. M. G. Khoroshin, "50-letie s"ezda po obsuzhdeniiu mer bor'by protiv sifilisa v Rossii," Vestnik dermatologii i venerologii, no. 4 (July–August 1948): 42.
[43] "Svod postanovlenii komissii," pp. 41–43.
gress recommendation for strict laws prosecuting third parties who profited from the trade in women.[44]
Other recommendations were less clear and in some cases contradictory. What were medical-police committees, municipal dumas, and zemstvos to make of this broad and nebulous directive?—"Establishments that conduct nadzor over prostitution must, insofar as it is possible, further the elimination of the reasons promoting the development of prostitution."[45] Another recommendation originated in a neoregulationist congress demand for implementation of the law to prosecute prostitutes who refused to register. This in essence made court-ordered registration obligatory. As the congress recommended, street roundups were to be forbidden, yet medical-police agencies were still expected to conduct "searches" for clandestine prostitutes. Rather than acknowledging that lack of funding at the local level was a major impediment to implementing nadzor, the commission quixotically ruled that financial support must come from municipal and zemstvo budgets: "The [Imperial] Treasury win come to assistance only in the case of necessity." Weakened even further was the congress resolution that dubbed bawdy houses temporary evils, when the commission identified state-licensed brothels as the "preferred" form of prostitution.
The Medical Council commission also hedged on the issue of municipal control, allowing Moscow's failed experiment in this direction to sway their hand. Eight years before the congress, the Moscow duma, known for its unusual independence, had assigned regulation's medical duties to the local sanitary commission, thereby "providing another important medical service under municipal direction," rather than "seeing [the city's] money used to finance the state bureaucracy."[46] Under the leadership of Dr. A. I. Pospelov, a professor at Moscow University, the sanitary commission took charge of examinations, issuing licenses to brothels, and hospitalizing prostitutes with venereal disease. But the police's new, limited role of registering prostitutes and rooting out clandestines inspired a backlash. Resentful of the city's intrusion into their realm, Moscow policemen stopped pursuing prostitutes who did not
[44] For the commission's resolutions, see ibid., pp. 51–55.
[45] Tarnovskii found this demand "unsuitable." Ibid., pp. 53, 57.
[46] Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century," p. 410. In regard to the municipal autonomy granted to Moscow for control of venereal disease, Hanchett has argued that "tsarist authorities were urging the city to assume a greater role, not out of desire on the part of the state to strengthen local government, but in an effort to ease the burden on the state budget." Ibid., p. 407.
appear for medical examinations and ceased arrests of women for clandestine prostitution.[47] Spared the compulsion to register for weekly examinations, most Moscow odinochki opted to avoid the regulatory process altogether. Almost immediately the numbers of registered independent prostitutes in Moscow fell sharply.[48]
Moscow's experience did not bode well for municipal control. Instead of losing heart though, some physicians interpreted it to mean that the police should be kept out of regulation completely.[49] Minsk's unique regulatory system served as their guiding light. In 1891, municipal authorities in Minsk had divested regulation of its police component with great success, putting all matters under the authority of Gratsianov's sanitary commission. Though there was little qualitative difference between the operations of the agency in Minsk and committees run by the police, the sanitary commission appeared both more efficient and, most important, relatively free of interference. Gratsianov made much of his commission's unusual independence, dismissing traditional medical-police committees as "purely bureaucratic ."[50] Even the Medical Department referred to Minsk's experiment favorably, lamenting in 1891 that other municipal administrations were a long way from recognizing the "utility and necessity" of organizing local nadzor.[51]
But the Medical Council commission was less enthusiastic. Like the congress commission members supported channeling regulation's sanitary functions through municipal governments. Contrary to the congress's bold recommendation though, they did not rule such transfers mandatory; they only seconded a recommendation by Shtiurmer that collegial institutions be created in every city to supervise police handling of the registration process.
MVD priorities were written all over the commission's final directives. The ministry was sincere about reforming the regulation system,
[47] "O priniatii v vedenie,' p. 1835. Hanchett has also argued that in spite of the fact that the police were funded by the municipal government, the city duma could not rely on the police to enforce its decisions. Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century," p. 73.
[48] Only 349 odinochki were on registration lists in 1894. This number increased only slightly, to 373, the following year. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," p. 475.
[49] A 1901 Moscow commission on public health appeared ready to follow Minsk's lead when it unanimously condemned the surveillance and registration of prostitutes and asserted that full control of all regulation's aspects needed to be in the hands of Moscow's municipal administration. "Obsuzhdalsia doklada Kommissii obshchestvennago zdraviia ot 12 sentiabria 1901 g.," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy (October 1901): 33–34.
[50] Gratsianov, "Po povodu proekta," p. 6 (emphasis in original).
[51] Otchet Meditsinskago departamenta, p. 178.
but it wished to move slowly and cautiously. As much as the Medical Council commission seemed to support and even amplify the decisions of the 1897 congress, in many ways its actions were a bureaucratic ploy to postpone serious action. So many departures from the resolutions of the congress demonstrated flagrant disregard for these labored decisions. In effect, the state was conveying a message to all the physicians and administrators who had taken part in the 1897 gathering—their words could be handily diluted and even ignored if the authorities so chose.
Recommendations from the syphilis congress endured still more filtering. In 1903, the MVD's Medical Department—under the leadership of Vasilii Fon-Anrep—issued a revised set of rules that stemmed mostly from the commission's findings four years earlier. Even more elaborate than the rules of 1861, "Circular 1611" was designed to supersede all previous regulations on prostitution in the Russian empire. It began with the familiar accusation that prostitutes were responsible for the rise of venereal disease and thereby needed to undergo medical-police controls: "Prostitution constitutes the chief source for the spread of syphilis and venereal disease in the cities. Therefore the establishment of proper surveillance over it is an urgent necessity for the protection of the urban population from those diseases spread by prostitutes."[52] But Circular 1611 confessed that the regulatory system, "in its present form yields unsatisfactory results."[53]
The new rules introduced a different tone to regulation. In sharp contrast to Lev Perovskii's original vision of 1843, they asserted that "police measures are necessary in view of securing the success of nadzor's sanitary goals." Circular 1611 addressed earlier concerns for women's safety by acknowledging that needless severity by policemen served to increase the number of prostitutes who sought to avoid regulation altogether. Because police harshness could "needlessly insult an honest woman and subject her to improper harm," street roundups and searches were expressly forbidden. One provision, echoing similar resolutions by the congress and commission, required female doctors and female assistants if a "significant" number of women fell under medical-police control. Under no circumstances were police personnel or medi-
[52] These were the very first words of Circular 1611. Preserved in TsGALO, Vrachebnoe otdelenie S.-Peterburgskago gubernskago pravleniia, f. 255, op. 1, d. 852, "Po tsirkuliarnomu predlozheniiu Meditsinskago departamenta ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei."
[53] The rest of this section derives from Circular 1611.
cal-police agents allowed to remain present during examinations. Medical-police committees were also ordered to assume responsibility for a prostitute's possessions while she was in the hospital. Circular 1611 obliged local committees to care for juvenile prostitutes, pregnant and sick prostitutes, as well as those women who wanted to return to an "honest life." The 1903 rules gave odinochki the new freedom to retain their passports. No longer would the terrible yellow ticket replace an independent prostitute's personal identification; odinochki could come and go as they pleased. (Nevertheless, the ruling did not extend to prostitutes in brothels. These women were still deprived of their passports and therefore were unable to travel, find work, or move without committee knowledge and permission.)
Circular 1611 also came out in favor of local control. However, reminiscent of the Medical Council commission's hesitation, it shied away from requiring municipal governments to assume full administrative responsibility for nadzor. Rather than unequivocally demanding a transfer of power from the police, Circular 1611 gave provincial authorities the option to "choose" the form that best suited their area. Cities could either leave their medical-police committees under police control or split the functions of regulation into their component parts. Only in extraordinary circumstances might local conditions "necessitate deviation from the state rules."[54] These options plainly undermined the 1897 congress's recommendation to place both the medical and administrative aspects of regulation in the hands of city governments and zemstvos. The ministry was not yet prepared to relinquish its authority.
The Failure of Reform
In Petersburg, nadzor over prostitution is constructed in such a way that is difficult to imagine anything more horrible and disgusting.
St. Petersburg duma member (1909)
Given this longer leash, several municipal and district organizations pursued their own visions of regulation. To some degree,
[54] Clause I.3.
duma and zemstvo activist[55] were motivated by a desire to treat prostitutes and women in the urban lower classes more fairly, as well as by a serious commitment to public health. But the assumption of responsibility for nadzor also evinced their wish to wrest power from the long arms of the tsarist state, particularly from provincial and city governors and the MVD-controlled police. Dumas and zemstvos resented their financial obligations for regulation and, more broadly, public health in general; elected organs had been given the responsibility to fund nadzor without any say in how their rubles would be spent. St. Petersburg's municipal administration challenged this provision when it tried to evict the local medical-police committee from the city's three clinics. In the duma's opinion municipal funds covered nadzor's upkeep, not housing.[56] Some cities and districts were very quick to jump at the unusual opportunity for local autonomy. Others retreated—sometimes from the responsibility—but in other instances from regulation altogether.
Immediately following the 1897 congress, St. Petersburg's sanitary commission, an agency under the duma's authority, requested assistance from the Russian Syphilological and Dermatological Society in developing a plan to run regulation under municipal authority and update St. Petersburg rules. Although this attempt predated the distribution of Circular 1611, key figures from the Medical Council commission (including Tarnovskii and Kalinkin Hospital's chief physician) initiated the move, thereby suggesting official endorsement for the capital's intentions.[57]
According to their proposal, local nadzor would be operated under a "Special Office" (Osoboe Prisutstvie) of the sanitary commission. Its staff would comprise not only police representatives and medical personnel, but elected city officials and a member of the board from the House of Mercy. In the neoregulationist spirit, legal representatives would be represented to ensure that decisions about registration had a "joint" rather than an "individual" nature. Special training in venereal medicine would be obligatory for all medical-police physicians and none would be asked to examine more than 100 women in a twenty-four-
[55] Daniel Brower has suggested that the labels of "conservative" and "liberal" have less relevance for municipal politics than "activist." Brower, The Russian City, p. 118.
[56] See "Ob obzhalovanii v poriadke," pp. 1405–121; "Po ukazu pervago obshchago sobraniia Pravitel'stvuiushchago Senata ot 18 sentiabria 1915 za no. 12411 po voprosu ob obiazannosti goroda otvodit' pomeshcheniia dlia smotrovykh punktov Petrogradskago vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta," Izvestiia Petrogradskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 10 (March 1916): 2010–11.
[57] "O priniatii v vedenie," pp. 1831–44.
hour period. The Special Office would also employ twenty-five agents whose job was to ferret out clandestine prostitution. Their salaries were to be 900 rubles annually, nearly three times what the present agents received. In deference to Tarnovskii's recent revelation that brothels had proven themselves "the worst form of tolerated prostitution," male visitors to Petersburg brothels would be subjected to brief medical checkups.[58] By addressing the structure of regulation's administration, its legal status, and medical examinations, and by raising agent salaries to deter corruption, the St. Petersburg proposal spoke directly to problems that had been revealed at the 1897 congress.[59]
Petr Oboznenko, who sat in on several meetings, publicized some of the contradictions and weaknesses of the sanitary commission proposal. For one, the staffing of the Special Office was ill-conceived. Though it was meant to have a broad base, there were too few independent members, elected city officials, and legal representatives. Oboznenko also argued that the introduction of exams for men who visit brothels would be tantamount to shutting down these houses altogether, since clients would simply turn to odinochki in protest. In addition, would brief examinations of these men necessarily reveal whether they were suffering from syphilis or gonorrhea in one of their latent stages? Oboznenko was particularly critical of his colleagues' zeal in discovering clandestinity through expanding the number of agents and paying them higher salaries. Oboznenko accused his fellow doctors of a logical inconsistency in their attitude toward venereal disease. While they were excessively laissez-faire in regard to contagious diseases like the plague, cholera, typhus, and diphtheria, physicians went to the other extreme for syphilis. There, all notions about individual freedom and human rights were discarded, and doctors only pondered how and where "to drag someone off." Physicians readily traded the rights of thousands of "victims" in exchange for almost nothing—certainly not security from infection. For Oboznenko, regulation's "soul" needed to adapt to the conditions of the post-emancipation period. Yet he himself would not let go of regulation altogether—Oboznenko simply advocated leaving registration entirely up to the courts. Otherwise, he wrote, "We will be chasing phantoms and sooner or later all these attempts will undoubtedly deserve a reprimand."[60]
The St. Petersburg duma disregarded both the sanitary commission
[58] Quoted in Vrach, no. 9 (1899), p. 261.
[59] For proposal, see 'O priniatii v vedenie," pp. 1831–44. See also "Protokol zasedaniia sanitarnoi komissii," pp. 409–55.
[60] Oboznenko, "Po povodu novago proekta nadzora," pp. 347–50.
and Oboznenko; it went its own way, denying the sanitary commission's role in fighting prostitution and supporting a slightly more expensive counterproposal by the city governor that put the latter in charge and left the police a more significant role in the regulatory process.[61] The head of the sanitary commission would be a committee member, as would one representative chosen by the duma, but they were only two among a sixteen-member committee dominated by policemen and bureaucrats. Though the Syphilological and Dermatological Society had stressed the need to give regulation a more solid legal footing, legal representatives had been excluded. A House of Mercy representative would sit on the committee, as would a member from the ROZZh, but police chiefs held the "deciding vote."
The city governor's proposal acquiesced to the post-congress mood for a more humane form of nadzor by providing that prostitutes be advised of the "dangers" of prostitution and that assistance be given to juvenile and sick prostitutes, as well as to those who wished to leave the trade. When possible, the committee would hire female physicians to conduct exams. Though the committee was required not to register any prostitutes against their will, first among its obligations, as Oboznenko feared, was the discovery of clandestines.[62]
The MVD approved the city governor's new rules for St. Petersburg regulation at the end of 1908, but the drive for sanitary commission control continued, gaining MVD authorization in 1910. When the commission submitted an updated plan in 1911, the duma continued to drag its feet.[63] During this time, not only was the sanitary commission asked to solicit comments from local charitable organizations, it was instructed to collect information on regulation from most European states.[64] In the meantime, the municipal government refused to release additional funding for St. Petersburg regulation, claiming that nothing
[61] "O priniatii v vedenie," p. 1841; "Svod postanovlenii komissii," pp. 47–50; Gratsianov, "Po povodu proekta," pp. 8–14; "O proekte novago 'Polozheniia o Peterburgskom vrachebno-politseiskom komitete,'" Russkii zhurnal kozbnykh i venericheskikh boleznei, no. 1 (January 1904): 139.
[62] Gratsianov found this disturbing as well. In his opinion, the city governor's committee neglected sanitary goals to focus on treating the prostitute as a "criminal who needed to be subjected to this or that punishment every minute." Gratsianov, "Po povodu proekta," p. 11.
[63] "Polozhenie o S.-Peterburgskom vrachebno-politseiskom komitete," in TsGIA, Departament obshchikh del, MVD. f. 1284, Op. 188, d. 135, 'O pervom vserossiiskom s"ezde po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami."
[64] "Ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914.): 2012–19.
could be done until the sanitary commission assumed authority over the city's medical-police committee.[65] At long last, in 1914 the duma decided to support the commission's plan, but funding was still uncertain. As late as 1916, power over regulation remained where it had always been, with the police and city governor. Needless to say, during all these years regulation in Petersburg went on as before—understaffed, underequipped, and rife with corruption.[66]
The governor of Tomsk province expressed his displeasure with the regulatory system under his jurisdiction in 1892 and directed the municipal government to consider reorganizing regulation under the local medical-sanitary executive commission.[67] The commission obliged, recommending a broad-based medical-police committee with a medical staff of two physicians and two female assistants. The Tomsk city duma, however, only moved to add examinations of prostitutes to the regular duties of the district doctor who until 1900 compensated himself for the trouble by charging fees to odinochki and brothel madams. In response to the recommendations of the 1897 congress, another commission requested more than 5,000 rubles to create a medical-police committee whose medical and sanitary functions would be controlled by municipal authorities. The duma approved this immediately, but stipulated that nothing concrete could be done until a budget review in 1899.
The turn of the century came and went without any further action. Although the provincial governor ordered Tomsk's duma to proceed
[65] In fact, when the medical-police committee requested funding in 1912 for closed carriages to transfer prostitutes diagnosed as having venereal disease to Kalinkin Hospital (something the 1897 congress had ruled on 15 years earlier), the municipal government obstinately decided that it would be better to await the transfer of nadzor's responsibilities to the city itself. When the city governor protested this decision, the city administration overruled him. "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. xx; "Po otnosheniiu S.-Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika," pp. 1744–47.
[66] I was able to ascertain that regulation remained unchanged in Petersburg from a March 1916 duma report concerning a debate over who should fund the city's clinics: "Po ukazu pervago obshchago sobraniia Pravitel'stvuiushchago Senata," pp. 2010–11. The fate of this controversy was revealed in a May 7, 1915 letter from Petrograd's city governor to the UGVI that described the history of jurisdiction over regulation in the capital and requested information from the ministry regarding the duma's budgetary proposal for assuming control of local regulatory procedures. From TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400.
[67] Quoted in A. N. Bogoliubov, "Ob uporiadochenii nadzora za prostitutsiei v gorode Tomske," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika g. Tomska, nos. 5–6 (1908): 136. Discussion of Tomsk nadzor derived from ibid., pp. 134–51; Bogoliubov, "Ob uchastii goroda v bor'be s sifilisom v sviazi s voprosom ob ozdorovlenii prostitutsii," Sibirskaia vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 46 (1909): 545–70.
with its budget review in 1901, the council procrastinated, claiming that it was up to the local medical council to sort matters through. Two more years passed before the medical council made a recommendation: Tomsk did not need a medical-police committee at all. Rather a "medical-sanitary committee" under the municipal administration could conduct regulation in a more "humane" fashion and at a lower cost. This would entail divesting the police of their role in regulation and hiring a "supervisor" (smotritel ') to perform the police's former functions. But the duma hedged here as well, jealously guarding precious municipal revenues. Finally, in January 1906 it allocated a paltry 100 rubles per month to pay a district doctor to examine prostitutes exclusively. In 1908, matters reached a crisis when the overcrowded local hospital turned away some prostitutes who had been diagnosed as having venereal disease.[68]
In the Bessarabian capital of Kishinev, the mayor was the one to forestall reform, withholding his approval at the end of 1903, when the municipal government teamed with the zemstvo administration of Bessarabia province to organize nadzor. Only in 1907, after the provincial governor reprimanded him, did the mayor give his answer. In principle, he supported the organization of regulation under municipal authority, but the budget could not sustain such a program. Consequently, Kishinev developed a medical-police committee run by the police. When this new committee requested the modest sum of 3,250 rubles annually to fund and equip an examination facility, and to pay the wages of two police agents and a secretary, the mayor claimed that the money was unavailable.[69]
The city of Odessa developed the most promising plan for fighting the spread of venereal disease. In contrast to Tomsk, the city duma proved to be the agent of change, while resistance came from the city governor. Ironically though, at the first meeting of the Odessa commission to reorganize nadzor in January 1904, it was a representative from the city governor's office who underscored Circular 1611's warnings about the necessity for humane attitudes toward prostitutes and how
[68] As late as 1911, odinochki were still being examined in their apartments. Timofeev, "Otchet po nadzoru," p. 368.
[69] Kishinev's problems with regulation were described in a March 31, 1912 report from a local clerk to the UGVI. TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332. Also see "Zhurnal: Zasedaniia Kishinevskoi gorodskoi sanitarno-ispolnitel'noi komissii," Vedomosti Kishinevskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 119 (December 4, 1907): 2; "Zhurnal chrezvychainago Kishinevskoi gorodskoi dumy," in Vedomosti Kishinevskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (February 19, 1908): 2.
police measures existed only to secure the success of nadzor's sanitary goals.[70] His sentiments were strongly reinforced when commission members read two works in preparation for their discussions, both highly critical of regulation. One, based on a talk by Dr. L. M. Letnik to Odessa's Dermatological Society and the Society for the Protection of Public Health, castigated nadzor for failing to meet its goals and concluded that there was only one solution: to follow the examples of Minsk and Moscow by operating regulation under Odessa's municipal administration. The other, Regulation and "Free" Prostitution by Manuil Margulies, went even further, demanding that regulation be discarded altogether.[71]
A report on local regulation contrasted the prevalence of prostitution and venereal disease in Odessa with the weakness of nadzor. Only 500 women, the great majority of whom worked in brothels, had registered as prostitutes in the city, though thousands of women worked the streets. Periodic roundups brought in dozens of women, approximately 10 percent of whom were diagnosed as suffering from venereal disease. Meanwhile, a military physician in Odessa repeatedly complained of high rates of venereal disease among the troops—in some squadrons more than half the men suffered from related infections. The report also asserted that many of the clandestine prostitutes were children and that Odessa's notoriety as a popular port for "white-slave traders" had been well-earned. The city governor's office headed a medical-police committee, but it maintained only a "fictitious existence," neither maintaining lists of women suspected of unlicensed prostitution nor examining women in a public facility. According to the report, many prostitutes claimed they would attend examinations voluntarily if someone would only designate a "time and place."[72]
Over the next few months, members of the commission heard equally discouraging reports about conditions in Odessa's brothels and the gross overcrowding in the city's venereal wards.[73] A talk by P. N.
[70] "Svedeniia o vrachebno-sanitarnoi organizatsii i epidemicheskikh zabolevaniiakh g. Odessy," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 17 (October 1904): 555–57. The local branch of the Society for the Protection of Public Health had suggested transferring jurisdiction over nadzor to the city administration in 1899. "Prostitutsiia v Odesse," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 23 (December 1899): 1891
[71] "Svedeniia o vrachebno-sanitarnoi organizatsii," p. 557; L. M. Letnik, Bor'ba s prostitutsiei i mery k umen'sheniiu sifilisa i venerickeskikh boleznei sredi gorodskago naseleniia (Odessa, 1903); Margulies, Reglamentatsiia i "svobodnaia" prostitutsiia .
[72] "Svedeniia o vrachebno-sanitarnoi organizatsii," pp. 559–61.
[73] Ibid., pp. 564–75.
Diatroptov, a bacteriologist who in late 1904 and 1905 would take an active role in Odessa's revolution, also influenced commission members. Diatroptov argued that if Odessa was serious about fighting venereal disease, it had to stop singling out prostitutes and instead organize public education and free, out-patient treatment centers under the authority of the municipal administration. "The very word 'prostitute,'" declared Diatroptov, "is like a brand which positively deprives the feeling of human dignity from any woman or girl who has the misfortune . . . to fall into this professional group." Individuals who refused treatment should be hospitalized, but under circumstances no different from men and women who failed to seek treatment for any other infectious disease. Furthermore, he asserted that Odessa needed to abolish brothels, those houses "at odds with the most elementary understanding of civilization."[74]
When a subcommission made a recommendation in May to transfer authority over nadzor to the municipal administration, the ground had been well prepared. Voting unanimously, the commission condemned regulation in Odessa and ruled that all of nadzor's functions should fall under the purview of the municipal administration. Following Diatroptov's lead, rather than opting for stricter controls over prostitutes, the commission called for the elimination of the term "prostitute" from the city's vocabulary and the abolition of all brothels. Odessa's commission believed that prostitutes and nonprostitutes alike would be more inclined to seek treatment if shame and incarceration had no place in the medical process. In Odessa, prostitutes would be spared compulsory inspections. Instead, the municipal government would establish free medical clinics for all citizens who suffered from any form of contagious disease. As for the police, their role would be limited to maintaining order in clinics and hospitals.
In defense of their radical plan, commission members referred to the clause in Circular 1611 that allowed for some "deviation" in the light of local conditions. On January 25, 1906, the Odessa city council voted its approval, signaling its readiness to make the yellow ticket and the state-licensed brothel things of the past.[75] But this was where the city gover-
[74] Ibid., pp. 576–81.
[75] Ibid., p. 562; "Doklad gorodskoi ispolnitel'noi sanitarnoi kommisii po voprosu o nadzore za prostitutsiei," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 7–8 (April 1905): 943–49. The city administration supported this decision in "Postanovlenie Odesskoi gorodskoi upravy," ibid., pp. 950–52. See also meeting of January 25, 1906, Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 6 (March 1906): 802–4.
nor, who in the last year had witnessed both a revolution on Odessa's streets and a devastating pogrom, stepped in.[76] City Governor A. G. Grigor'ev absolutely refused to sign a measure that "restricted the legal right of the police to observe order and public decency."[77] When he asked the duma to reconsider, its members flatly refused, marking the beginning of a long bureaucratic stalemate. The duma would approve the commission's plan and submit it to the city governor. He would return it, asking them to discard the clause regarding the police.[78] The city duma would read his letter at one of its sessions and then send back its proposal unchanged. Meanwhile, regulation remained under police control and operated much as it had at the time the commission drew up its proposal. It was not until 1913 that a new city governor relented. His assent, however, came too late. By the time the city was ready to act, World War I posed more pressing problems.[79]
During the Russo-Japanese War, the MVD proved how half-hearted its own commitment to regulation could be. In mid-1904, the Ministry of War complained that the lower ranks were contracting venereal disease en route to the Far East, particularly at stations along the Trans-Siberian railroad. At fault was the "weakness" of local nadzor, the "extreme shortage" of hospital beds for sick prostitutes, and the practice of housing troops in private homes when barracks were unavailable. The ministry concluded by citing the 1897 congress on the need to restrict clandestine prostitution, improve surveillance over registered prostitutes, and provide compulsory, free treatment to prostitutes with venereal disease.[80]
Despite the cry for help, the MVD stonewalled. The chief of the new
[76] See Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa .
[77] "Doklad po voprosu ob iskliuchenii iz proekta organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v g. Odesse primechaniia 3 n. st. II," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 11–12 (June 1907): 1205.
[78] For example, in June 1907 the duma refused to honor Grigor'ev's request. In May 1910, Ivan N. Tolmachev, the new city governor, asked them to reconsider. According to the city governor's note, the duma never responded. In the summer of 1912, the current city governor threatened the duma that he would petition the MVD for the organization of a medical-police committee and make sure that it was funded by the municipal administration. See Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 11–12 (June 1907): 1205–9; nos. 15–16 (August 1907): 1635; nos. 17–18 (September 1907): 1980, 2237–39; nos. 13–14 (July 1912): 2101–8; nos. 21–22 (November 1912): 3154.
[79] February 13, 1913 letter from Odessa's city governor to the MVD. See TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400.
[80] Report of May 28–30, 1904, in TsGIA, GUDMKh, f. 1288, op. 12, d. 1622, "O priniatii mer protiv zaneseniia sifilisa i venericheskikh boleznei voiskami v deistvuiushchuiu armiiu, June 1, 1904–April 6, 1906."
MVD branch in charge of local medical and sanitary matters, the Main Administration for Local Economic Affairs (GUDMKh), responded like a tried and true bureaucrat—obfuscating the issues and passing the buck. First, he refuted the Ministry of War's claims. He responded that the congress had attributed the spread of syphilis in the empire's territories not to prostitution, but to nonsexual transmission linked to the common people's way of life. Thus nothing could really be done until both the number of doctors in the outlying areas had been increased and the notion of seeking medical care had become stronger in the "consciousness" of the population. As for the problem at hand, he suggested that doctors in the civilian administration be instructed to "pay special attention" to the troops who suffered from venereal disease, and that instead of quartering troops with civilians, the military should simply house the men in tents.[81]
Eleven days later, the head of the GUDMKh took more decisive steps, issuing a circular to all provincial governors with a warning about the rise in venereal disease among the military. Now he ignored the question of nonsexual transmission and like the Ministry of War, attributed the spread of disease to the weakness of nadzor and the proliferation of clandestine prostitution. Serious as the epidemic might be, the MVD still expected the provinces to handle the problem themselves: nadzor was to be strengthened (but how and with what funds, he never specified), and governors could order physicians from district civilian administrations into the service of the military for examining troops. Aside from a brief reference to something in Circular 1611 about the MVD's role in increasing medical personnel, he had nothing to offer.[82] Not a word was mentioned about concrete aid from St. Petersburg.
That did not stop the provinces from pouncing on the vague offer of assistance. For the next several months, provincial governors besieged the MVD with requests for emergency funds to pay doctors and policemen and provide extra hospital beds.[83] For its part, the GUDMKh ne-
[81] Letter of June 11, 1904, in ibid.
[82] Circular of June 22, 1904, in ibid.
[83] June, 1904 telegram from Irkutsk provincial governor; January 6, 1905 letter to Irkutsk governor; undated letter from Orenburg governor; October 4, 1904 letter to Orenburg governor; July 28, 1904 letter from military governor of Zabaikal region; January 5, 1905 and March 29, 1905 letters to military governor of Zabaikal region; letters from Eniseisk governor of August 28, 1904, November 17, 1904, January 17, 1905, and March 17, 1906; October 16, 1904 and April 15, 1906 letters to Eniseisk governor; January 14, 1905 telegram from Krasnoiarsk; September 28, 1904 letter from Irkutsk military governor, in ibid.
gotiated with other branches of the MVD and various tsarist ministries.[84] In most cases, however, Petersburg authorities attempted to resolve matters by placing the burden on local and provincial authorities. Some areas received emergency policemen, physicians, and space in military hospitals, but the MVD would not extend a helping hand for establishing regular medical-police surveillance. The MVD was concerned about the wartime emergency, but not enough to commit the funds or personnel to the long-term cause of regulation in Siberia. Despite the immediacy of their problems, governors in Zabaikal and Eniseisk were asked to appeal to local zemstvos and city dumas. As the ministry suggested in its first letter, sometimes "consciousness" would have to do the trick.
In 1906, at the same time it condemned brothel licensing, the MVD's own Medical Council admitted that regulation continued to provide fertile ground for abuses. Circular 1611 had not brought regulatory agencies in the Russian empire into compliance with the center's instructions. The Medical Council accused the police of hurting regulation's sanitary and prophylactic goals, and failing to uphold the law and promote public decency. Sounding very much like Dmitrii Zhbankov in 1897, the Medical Council argued that the spread of syphilis could be curbed only through societal, not police, institutions. Therefore, regulation ought to be managed by city and zemstvo administrations as part of their general goals of improving hygiene and public health. To accomplish these objectives, the Medical Council recommended that the ministry once again develop a new set of regulations.[85]
Not one of its statements involved the usual diatribe against the prostitute as a terrible menace to public health. For the first time, objections focused solely on police corruption, incompetence, and bureaucratic neglect. By 1906, in the middle of Russia's first revolution, even an MVD institution was joining ranks with the more progressive physicians in
[84] June 18, 1904 letter to UGVI; June 22, 1904 telegram to UGVI; June 22, 1904 memo to Department of Police; July 20, 1904 letter to UGVI; July 28, 1904 note from Department of Police; October 4, 1904 release to minister of war; October 15, 1904 and January 27, 1906 letters to Department of Public Health; October 23, 1904 letter from the Ministry of War's Chief Military-Medical Administration; January 10, 1905 note from chief of staff; January 28, 1905 note to Department of Police; February 19, 1905 and February 22, 1905 letters to minister of finance; March 4, 1905 letter from minister of finance; March 11, 1905 letter to Department of General Affairs; March 21, 1905 note from Department of General Affairs, in ibid.
[85] A committee headed by L. B. Bertenson published these criticisms in "Iz zhurnalov Meditsinskago Soveta," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 8 (August 1906): 182–85.
calling for the elimination of police interference in the regulation process once and for all.
In 1910, the MVD issued what sounded like a tragic sequel to Shtiurmer's "Prostitution in the Cities," a report entitled Medical-Police Surveillance of Urban Prostitution . Having examined regulation throughout the empire, the editors of this work, Georgii Fon-Vitte and Nikolai Di-Sen'i (who served on the ROZZh's Committee), learned that most cities had paid scant attention to ministry recommendations for reform. Only nine cities had succeeded in carrying out plans to transfer surveillance over prostitution to municipal control (and five of these had only separated nadzor's "police" functions from its "sanitary" ones).[86] Although nearly 150 cities claimed to have organized medical-police committees, more than 800 remained without agencies to regulate prostitution, and most of the cities which did have medical-police committees apparently violated MVD standards. Some committees wrongly taxed women who registered as prostitutes, others allowed women under 18 to register, and many continued to ignore the Senate's ruling in support of voluntary registration.[87] Medical procedures also sounded no more sanitary or careful than those of the late nineteenth century, with persistent reports of exams in makeshift facilities and chronic shortages of equipment and trained physicians. Despite MVD stipulations for broad-based representation on regulatory organs, many lacked personnel from district zemstvos, municipal governments, and the military.[88] Finally, more than two-thirds of the cities with medical-police committees had allocated no funds for them. Of those forty-five cities with some kind of funding, half received less than 300 rubles annually.[89]
A city's failure to carry out ministry rules did not necessarily mean that women who engaged in prostitution were spared the indignities associated with regulation. In those cities without medical-police committees, local policemen simply "regulated" prostitution as they saw fit. Ministry regulation victimized women and provided illusory medical guarantees, but it also established procedures that at least on paper were superior to the usual way that the tsarist police dealt with prostitutes.
Fon-Vitte's and Di-Sen'i's report put an end to any illusions about
[86] Minsk, Aleksandrovsk, Perm, and Tsaritsyn had committees under full municipal control; Moscow, Iur'ev, Bobruisk, Elets, and Tula had divided nadzor between the police and local self-governments.
[87] Di-Sen'i and Fon-Vitte, Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor, pp. 3, 14, 19–25.
[88] Ibid., pp. 1–9.
[89] Ibid., pp. 13–16.
having made progress toward a more effective or humane regulatory system. But like a phonograph needle stuck in a groove, it recommended measures that harkened back to the 1897 congress and the 1899 Medical Council commission. Rather than concluding that regulation was rotten at the core and needed immediate dismantling, Fon-Vitte and Di-Sen'i reaffirmed its necessity. In the tradition of their predecessors, they advocated increased funding for regulatory agencies and sounded the old call for municipal control over regulation. (Contradictorily, they criticized the wide variety of medical-police committee rules throughout the empire and urged their standardization.) On April 28, 1910, an MVD circular reflected their findings. It informed provincial governors that Russia's cities had failed to comply with ministry directives on regulation.[90] Once again, the MVD hoped to spur compliance. Given the fate of regulation prior to 1910, there is no reason to believe that this new directive made much difference at the local level. More likely, it made its way to the circular file containing all the other MVD communiques.
Medical-Police Surveillance of Urban Prostitution is a sterling example of the ministry's willingness to engage in self-criticism and attempt, once again, to assess Russian regulation of prostitution. Perhaps what this report illuminated most clearly was the tremendous gap between ministry goals and their realization. Although the ministry had proven to be quite adept at issuing eloquent orders to provincial authorities, it had not yet found a way to ensure that these orders were carried out. Good intentions could not magically provide funding or training or medical facilities where none had existed before. The ministry could have finetuned regulation ad infinitum; its machinations mattered little to urban and provincial leaders. So long as there were no moves to enforce MVD rules, regulation would ultimately depend on the will of local authorities. As the old saying went, "God and the Tsar were far away."
Why was it impossible to bring regulation into some semblance of conformity with the standards set by the 1897 congress? Evidently, much of the blame rests with the structure of local self-government. Urban and district authorities struggled for autonomy; the state left them with obligations. They were free to staff and fund medical-police committees, but not to control the agencies' administration. Theoretically, Circular 1611 allowed local authorities to
[90] "Offitsial'nye otchety," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 6 (June 1910): 120–21.
assert themselves, but it failed to provide funding and it did not address the problem of how to handle policemen and provincial and city governors who resented incursions into their realm. More fundamental to the failure of reform, though, was the fact that most areas in the empire had no desire to devote energy and money to the cumbersome, flawed system of regulation. It was much easier to ignore the whole business and leave the problem of prostitution to the police. Thus, despite a drive for reform from the central government and from some peripheral loci of political control, regulation of prostitution continued to operate much as it did in the nineteenth century.
As for the MVD, on one hand, concerns about the spread of venereal disease led the ministry to depart from its usually vigorous efforts to control city dumas and zemstvos.[91] This unusual concession was stimulated by the recognition that the MVD's task far exceeded its capabilities and by genuine fears for public health.[92] Indeed, the MVD heeded the voices of reform when it came to regulation, soliciting the input of Russia's physicians in 1897 and acting quickly to convene the Medical Council commission and draft Circular 1611. The latter's distribution attests to the ministry's willingness to lend a sympathetic ear to the suggestions of the medical profession, as much as it demonstrates a changed attitude toward prostitutes. Women would still be singled out as dangerous and disease-ridden, but in principle, "police measures [were] necessary in view of securing the success of nadzor's sanitary goals." Consequently, the ministry was even prepared to let Odessa realize the radical program that removed elements of gender bias, stigmatization, punishment, and coercion from the treatment of venereal disease.
Yet on the other hand, although the ministry appeared open to change, it did little to push its mandates through in Russia's hundreds of cities. It was prepared to back almost any policy that purported to reform regulation, but on paper only. As the introduction to a recent work on Russian public health states in relation to the tsarist government, "The problem was not a lack of good intentions but, rather, that
[91] See Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia, and Edward H. Judge, Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902–1904 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985) for discussions of MVD efforts to decentralize local government while strengthening ministerial control.
[92] Neil Weissman has warned in relation to Petr Stolypin's post-1905 emphasis on legality that such MVD efforts should not be interpreted as a sign of "liberalism," but as a "potential vehicle for the more effective exercise of state bureaucratic power." Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia, p. 136.
so many of the proposed avenues to better health conflicted with the traditions, ideology, and structure of the autocracy."[93] It was one thing not to block Odessa's elected duma. It was quite another to intervene in favor of local representative government.
For municipal activists and most physicians any sort of regulation had begun to represent an unmitigated evil sometime after the turn of the century. In the tradition of anti-regulationists in Europe, Russia came up with its own brand of an "abolitionist" movement that countered ministry designs to find a better way to regulate prostitutes.
[93] Susan Gross Solomon and John Hutchinson, "Introduction: The Problem of Health Reform in Russia," in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, p. x.
Chapter 8
Society and the Yellow Ticket
Medical-police nadzor is not only agent social evil, it is the greatest infamy of the twentieth century.
V. V. Avchinnikova (1904)
Sentiment against regulation did not attract a significant following in Russia until the turn of the twentieth century. Though a few voices in favor of eliminating the yellow ticket could be heard in the 1880s and 1890s, they were overwhelmed by those of the proponents of regulation. During this period, the majority of experts stood firmly in the regulationist camp. When Veniamin Tarnovskii launched his spirited defense of regulation with the 1888 publication of Prostitution and Abolitionism, he in fact faced only glimmerings of a native abolitionist movement.[1] Nevertheless, he accurately prophesied that educated society would pick up the banner of abolishing nadzor much as it had supported the abolition of serfdom in the 1850s.
The abolitionist campaign moved from vague criticisms of nadzor to specific demands and from defiance of local authorities to an attack that challenged the core of the state apparatus. Until 1910, most political fights over regulation involving Russian players took place in limited
[1] In 1904, Tarnovskii was accused of having "nipped the so-called abolitionist party in the bud." The anonymous (female) author of Professor Tarnovskii's View of Prostitution claimed Tarnovskii had abused his authority with the government to brand abolitionist ideas "harmful anti-government doctrine (!!!) ." M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 32 (emphasis and exclamation marks in the original).
arenas. Only in the latter stages of the abolitionist drive did opponents of regulation tackle the tsarist administration at the center. Earlier attempts less ambitiously focused on local brothels (though not all brothel opponents endorsed abolition) and the specific policies of a city or district. It was much simpler to rail against "dens of depravity" and to take on a local medical-police committee than to challenge the MVD, the state's central organ of law and order.
For the most part, there was little to distinguish the arguments of Russian abolitionists from those of their European counterparts. Russians engaged in wholesale borrowing of the statistical data and conclusions of European opponents of regulation and echoed the questions that Europeans had been debating since the 1860s: did state controls of prostitution curb or promote the spread of venereal disease? did administrative rules governing prostitution encourage or deter licentious sexual conduct? did regulation protect or oppress women?
Opponents of regulation, however, did not simply adopt the Russian cognate for the term "abolitionism" to describe their cause (as had Tarnovskii in the title of his book). Instead, they used a Russian word, otmena . Just as use of the term "abolition" for the campaign against regulation in England had suggested parallels with freeing the slaves in the United States, use of the word "otmena" harkened back to the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. This relationship was not left unexploited; abolitionists in Russia frequently reminded the public that the regulation of prostitution indeed resembled serfdom, albeit in a form directed exclusively at women. Regulation's most dedicated adversary, Mariia Pokrovskaia, asked in 1906, "Isn't it time we gave up this remnant of serfdom?"[2]
It was no coincidence that the abolition movement found an audience at a time when the intelligentsia was beginning to discover its political voice. Though abolition never became a priority of the major political parties or of the radical Left, it nonetheless attracted many supporters. The question of regulation transcended prostitution to illuminate broader problems impinging on the very organization of society. Abolitionism encompassed a wide variety of issues, permitting individuals of very different political orientations to come together in their opposition to regulation. Just as they stood united about brothel licensing, conservatives who were worried about the "moral fiber" of society and feminists who were outraged by the way medical-police committees
[2] Pokrovskaia, "Iarmarochnaia prostitutsiia," p. 16.
treated women could join forces for this particular cause. Political progressives supported abolition for their own reasons; they considered deregulated prostitution, with its reliance on individual choice and voluntarism. more appropriate to the modern, liberal society they envisioned for twentieth-century Russia.[3] Lines between the various groups that supported abolition remained relatively fluid because abolitionists in Russia never coalesced into a specific political organization (like Britain's Ladies' National Association). As a result, they lacked an ongoing forum in which to exchange, debate, and sharpen their ideas.[4] Opposition to regulation thus remained amorphous, allowing liberals, radicals, and conservatives to consider themselves like-minded on this issue and combine to oppose government policy.
Nevertheless, contradictory and conflicting notions infused their concepts of abolition. They could easily concur that regulation was rotten to the core, but what was to be done once medical-police nadzor was dismantled? Then they would have to choose from a wide range of policies that betrayed more fundamental allegiances and attitudes. Russia could deregulate prostitution, but how would deregulation work? Would it mean leaving prostitutes to work as they pleased? Did it entail permitting 12-year-old girls to stand on the street and solicit clients? Would the line be drawn at the age of consent (14.)? Or would it be raised to 18? Or 21? Whose responsibility would it be to "save," or penalize, or educate, or retrain the children and young women who worked in the trade? What was to be done when prostitutes stood on a busy sidewalk, dressed in provocative clothes and uttering lewd proposals to attract customers? If prostitutes were to be confined to certain parts of the city or allowed to appear only after dark, was not that in itself a form of regulation? How would society (or the state) deal with the individuals who profited from prostitution and exploited prostitutes, such as pimps and procurers? What of the associations between prostitution and crime? Finally, what was to be done with prostitutes (or even non-prostitutes) suffering from contagious sexual diseases who persisted in having sex? Were they to be prosecuted? Incarcerated? Forced to undergo medical intervention? And who was to pay for their treatment?
Responses to such thorny questions differed radically among sup-
[3] Richard Evans argues that abolition's liberalizing tone blocked the movement's success in Imperial Germany. See Evans, "Prostitution, State, and Society in Imperial Germany," Past and Present, no. 70 (1976): 123–24.
[4] For a discussion of internal conflicts within the British Ladies' National Association, see Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 93–147.
porters of abolition, depending on where they stood in relation to the tsarist state and how they interpreted issues of gender, social class, and disease. But abolitionists did not have to choose; the tsarist state remained loyal to regulation, thereby postponing the issue of deregulated prostitution to a later date. Never having gotten their way, opponents of the yellow ticket could focus on its "infamy" rather than on the problems that lay ahead.
The Origins of Abolitionism
The Medical-Police Surveillance of Prostitution Promotes the Degeneration of the Nation.
Title of a work by Dr. Mariia Pokrovskaia (1902)
Russia's medical community was the first to articulate criticisms of regulation. By the turn of the century, physicians had already condemned regulation for its harsh treatment of women, and an increasingly vocal minority was beginning to call for abolition. No single scientific discovery irrefutably debunked the value of regulation in halting the spread of venereal disease, but medical developments worldwide, the growth of abolitionist sentiment in Europe, and reports attesting to the problems facing Russia's medical-police committees contributed to the medical profession's disenchantment with regulation. While not all physicians advocated eliminating the system altogether, many came to agree that the coercive nature of the three I's of identification, inspection, and incarceration defeated regulation's ostensible goal, the protection of public health. Some regulators even institutionalized their medical doubts by certifying prostitutes on their yellow tickets as "not having any obvious symptoms of venereal diseases," instead of with the less verifiable stamp of "healthy."[5]
Regulation proved one of the staging grounds for the self-assertion of Russian physicians. In matters related to the examination and medical treatment of prostitutes, physicians could flaunt their professional ex-
[5] Moscow, for example, developed a stamp that read "no symptoms of venereal diseases." Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 42; "Ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei," p. 2016. In recognition of the fact that she could not guarantee the health of the prostitutes under her care, Dr. Zinaida El'tsina only stamped their tickets to reflect whether they had appeared for their examination. See her remarks in Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 523.
pertise, as well as their indispensability. In Britain, France, and Italy, doctors were quick to find a niche within the regulatory system and parade the many reasons why a gender-based examination system that violated women's civil rights was worth the trouble. In Russia, however, physicians had a more ambivalent view related to the disparities among their professional self-image, their Western-oriented education, and their position as subjects in an autocratic empire still divided into legal estates.
The kind of political and professional dissatisfaction that surfaced at the 1897 congress informed the critique of regulation that emerged among Russian physicians. Doctors primarily opposed regulation because of its failure to live up to goals of protecting public health and because they could not reconcile their role as medical professionals with the state's meddling in public health. Above all, doctors attacked regulation for its medical shortcomings: its one-sided nature, the hastiness with which exams were carried out, the elusiveness of the contagious stages of venereal diseases, diagnostic inaccuracies, prostitutes' freedom to contract and spread disease between exams, and poor hygiene in clinics and hospitals.
By championing abolitionism, Russian doctors were not undermining their professional position. In fact, they imagined an important, perhaps more powerful role for themselves in a system of deregulated prostitution. Their brand of abolitionism predicated itself on a broad-based system of treatment centers and an aggressive program of education and prevention. As directors of these out-patient clinics and purveyors of public health information, Russia's physicians would have the best of both worlds—freedom to practice medicine and full control over their patients.
Medical experts had long understood the problems inherent in regulation. As early as 1864, five years before British abolitionists began their campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts that regulated prostitution in several English cities, a V. I. El'tsinskii published a work critical of regulation.[6] In 1871, Dr. Petr Gratsianskii, a venereal disease specialist associated with the Imperial Academy of Military Medicine, accused the system of depriving a woman of her "citizen's rights and personal freedom."[7] In 1883, the year that the British government responded to pub-
[6] V. I. El'tsinskii, Ob otnoshenii pravitel'stva k prostitutsii, kak istochnik sifilisa (1864), described in Arkhangel'skii, V. M. Tarnovskii, p. 70.
[7] Gratsianskii, O stepeni rasprostraneniia venericheskikh boleznei v prostitutsionnom klasse v S.-Peterburge (St. Petersburg, 1871), pp. 57–59.
lic pressure by suspending its own legislation mandating regulation, a public health committee in the district of Novozybkovsk made contact with European opponents of regulation, sending a report to an International Abolitionist Federation congress in The Hague. Two years later, a Professor A. I. Iakobii raised the issue of abolition at a meeting of a medical society in Kharkov. Dr. Dmitrii Akhsharumov also spoke out against regulation that year in Poltava, preaching that venereal disease could only be prevented by following "one's conscience, morally, honestly," and living "according to the laws of Christianity."[8] Abolitionist ideas reached Moscow not long after. In 1887, Dr. V. P. Okorokov, himself associated with the International Abolitionist Federation, spoke in favor of abolition at a Moscow physicians' meeting, apparently convincing them to support the form of nadzor that Moscow implemented in 1889 (removing the police from the identification procedure).[9]
In 1895, in his capacity as chief physician of Kalinkin Hospital, Eduard Shperk called regulation "the spread of syphilis with medical sanction."[10] But it was Konstantin Shtiurmer who inadvertently reinforced and popularized the abolitionist position when he delivered his talk "Prostitution in the Cities" to the 1897 congress on syphilis. Though Shtiurmer did not intend to discredit regulation, his findings provided raw material for a scathing denunciation of the system and caused more damage to regulation in Russia than the most eloquent piece of abolitionist propaganda. Over the next few years, foes of the regulation system would repeatedly cite this "partisan de la réglementation" to substantiate their own arguments.[11]
Duma and zemstvo activists constituted a second strain of the abolitionist movement. They used abolition to assert their autonomy and underscore the ways their style of governance differed from that of the tsarist administration's. By the time the ministry issued Circular 1611 in 1903, local officials and elected representatives in a few cities had been sufficiently influenced by growing sentiment against regulation to cast votes on behalf of abolition. Their abolitionism initially manifested itself as a refusal to participate in the MVD's invitation (via Circular 1611) to revamp local procedures. For example, when the sanitary commission in Yalta met to discuss Circular 1611, it wound up ruling that Yalta had no need for regulation and that the absence of medical-police controls
[8] In Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 31–33.
[9] ibid., pp. 33
[10] Quoted in "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie,' p. 2079.
[11] For example, Shtiurmer is cited extensively in Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny .
would harm neither the health nor the morals of the local population.[12] Similarly, in 1904 the Chernigov duma claimed that only "the elimination of economic contradictions and ignorance and the provision of medical aid to everyone will help matters."[13] Emboldened during the revolutionary year of 1905, Kazan's duma refused to participate in regulation on the grounds that it was "immoral and useless," and the district zemstvo in Tiraspol' asserted that nadzor "promotes debauchery, the degeneration of the population, and women's lack of rights."[14] The very refusal of local self-governing institutions to countenance regulation could make abolition their city's or district's de facto policy. (Paradoxically, though, it could also result in free rein for the local police to do as they pleased without the duma's or zemstvo's restraining influence.)
The organization of the ROZZh in 1900 served to focus broad public attention on regulation. The ROZZh refused to take a stand on this question, but its founding nevertheless gave abolitionism an unintentional boost. In particular, ROZZh efforts "to save fallen women" attracted extensive press coverage after the society's formation and spurred many observers to reason that it was impossible to carry out the ROZZh's goal of fighting the trade in women without abolishing regulation. Despite having trained under Tarnovskii, Petr Oboznenko was, one physician and ROZZh member who ultimately repudiated nadzor. In 1905, he approvingly cited researchers who had concluded that regulation was "useless" from the point of view of sanitation and, "from a social standpoint, harmful."[15] Prostitution and "white slavery" were so much in the limelight that educated society could not help but engage in Europe's passionate debate, with most taking what they believed to be the only principled position—against regulation.
Though the ROZZh did not challenge government policy, abolitionism sat well with the ideas of its members who looked at prostitution from a primarily moralistic point of view. From their angle, regulation represented nothing less than state-sanctioned debauchery. Moralists both inside and outside the ROZZh saw regulation as a "diploma" for
[12] Russkii vrach, no. 50 (1903), cited in "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie," p. 2078. As early as 1891, a Medical Department report complained of the Astrakhan duma's refusal to disgrace its dignity by participating in regulation. Otchet Meditsinskago departamenta, p. 178.
[13] Quoted in G. A. Kovalenko, "Reglamentatsiia prostitutsii," Fel'dsher, no. 19 (October 1, 1904): 585.
[14] Russkii vrach, no. 4 (1905): 175; no. 19 (1905): 644.
[15] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," p. 1874.
engaging in licentious sex. Without it, men might develop a sense of self-preservation and save their passions for the "proper" place, within a marriage.[16] The prominent psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev coupled his brief remarks against regulation in the keynote speech to the 1910 congress with a long paean to the necessity of licit, procreative sex as society's only hope. In an admonition that Lenin himself might have seconded, Bekhterev maintained that sexual restraint provided energy for more productive activities.[17] For moralists, the abolition of regulation was a means to broader goals of premarital chastity and marital fidelity for both men and women.
Characteristically, they had little use for deregulated prostitution; instead they recommended full-scale repression. Moralists leaned toward policies that suppressed not only commercial sex, but any form of extra-marital sexual conduct. For example, Bekhterev invoked the need for tough legal measures against violations of "public decency" and "any sort of provocative actions which spread and promote street debauchery." Not surprisingly, he also advocated bans on pornography and alcohol. Society, Bekhterev suggested, would benefit by finding ways to prevent nonprocreative sexual relations.[18]
The formal organization of Russian feminism provided abolitionism with its greatest stimulus and its most volatile mixture of radical and conservative ideas. Almost as soon as they began to coalesce into an organized movement, feminists included demands for abolition alongside their demands for equal rights. In May 1905, at the first organizing congress of the All-Russian League for the Equal Rights of Women, participants called for "the abolition of all exceptional laws concerning the issue of prostitution which degrade the human dignity of women."[19] Feminists particularly loathed the way regulation institutionalized the sexual double standard by enforcing medical-police procedures against women while permitting men to go free. One woman called regulation a measure that enslaved half the human race for the benefit of the other half.[20] To feminists, vulnerability to medical-police nadzor essentially
[16] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 537.
[17] Bekhterev, "O polovom ozdorovlenii," pp. 56–76. For Lenin's words reminiscent of this sentiment, see Clara Zetkin, "My Recollections of Lenin," in Lenin, On the Emancipation of Women, pp. 104–5.
[18] Bekhterev, "O polovom ozdorovlenii," pp. 74–76. On the drive for "social purity" within Great Britain's abolitionist movement, see Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 246–52.
[19] N. (Zinaida) Mirovich, Iz istorii zhenskago dvizheniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1908), p. 10.
[20] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 52.
symbolized the lowly political status of women in Russian society. The notorious yellow ticket caused a woman to undergo "civil death, lose her rights to a legal defense from tyranny, wind up at the full disposal of the police, and become a 'police thing.'"[21]
On one hand, feminist attitudes derived from a radical concept of sexual equality. Unlike pure moralist opposition, feminist resistance to regulation incorporated laissez-faire elements in favor of deregulation. In accord with what she termed principles of freedom and equality before the law, the feminist Anna Miliukova (whose husband, the historian Paul Miliukov, led Russia's Constitutional Democrats after 1905) supported policies of nonintervention toward prostitutes. But on the other hand, Miliukova and feminists like her still saw a role for state authorities. They reserved authority for the state in regard to juvenile prostitutes, third parties, and individuals who knowingly spread venereal disease.[22] In this sense, though opponents of regulation met under the umbrella of "abolitionism," in effect they were seeking regulation in a more tolerable form. The physicians who opposed nadzor sought rules that would reinforce their medical expertise, moralist opponents hoped to control sexuality, and feminists wanted to regulate prostitution when it appeared among the young, in public, and in commerce.
Mariia Pokrovskaia provides us with an excellent example of how feminist opposition to regulation could involve both radical and repressive elements. Because of her key role in the abolition movement, it is worth discussing her contribution and its implications in some detail. Richard Stites has noted that women like Pokrovskaia prompted a "sarcastic reference" in Iama to women doctors who complained, "Ach, regulation! Ach, abolition! Ach, living merchandise! Slavery!"[21] In Pokrovskaia's eyes, the regulatory system stood as a cruel monument to the oppression of women. In the press, in lecture halls, and at public conferences, she campaigned tirelessly for its abolition. The first woman in Russia to challenge the regulation system, Pokrovskaia would keep up this struggle for a full fifteen years.
Born in Penza province in 1852, Pokrovskaia received her basic education at home and then taught school until she enrolled in a zemstvo doctors' course at the age of 24. She worked in Pskov after earning her
[21] Pokrovskaia, Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor za prostitutsiei sposobstvuet vyrozhdeniiu naroda (St. Petersburg, 1902), p. 28.
[22] Anna Miliukova, "O zadachakh nastoiashchago s"ezda," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 226–27.
[23] Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 225; Kuprin, Iama, p. 63.
medical degree, but moved to St. Petersburg to work as a municipal duma physician in 1886.[24] A passionate feminist who leaned politically toward Tolstoy's brand of socialism, Pokrovskaia apparently practiced what she preached, eschewing the hiring of servants and maintaining a spartan existence in a two-room apartment.[25]
Because of her intense commitment to both social justice and women's rights, Pokrovskaia antagonized many of her potential allies. Her relentless demands for women's rights alienated her politically from the Left, as we saw when she opposed the Moscow workers' contingent at the 1910 congress on the issue of limiting night work for women (see ch. 6). Yet her unswerving commitment to working-class women placed her to the left of most Russian feminists, as when she criticized the congress organizing committee for excluding workers from participation. From 1904 until 1917, Pokrovskaia almost singlehandedly published the organ of her Women's Progressive Party, The Women's Herald (Zhenskii vestnik ). Its pages covered women's political concerns—suffrage, job discrimination, divorce, and inheritance laws—but they also tackled the more intimate, controversial issues of abortion, sex, alcoholism, prostitution, and regulation.[26]
Pokrovskaia's dedication to abolishing regulation stemmed in part from her personal experience. As a doctor who worked among Petersburg's urban poor, Pokrovskaia, unlike most feminists, had firsthand knowledge of the degradation and disease that so often accompanied the trade of prostitution. She sincerely believed that the yellow ticket "promoted" both the professionalization of prostitution and its spread. But Pokrovskaia's commitment to abolition, as well as her ideas about prostitution and sexuality, also derived from her strong feminism. In her eyes, the regulation of prostitution symbolized a state decision to sacrifice women in order to protect men. She scoffed at the regulationist "fairy tale" (skazka ) that regulation actually protected "respectable" women. Regulation, asserted Pokrovskaia, had no effect in decreasing
[24] A Soviet historian lists Pokrovskaia as one of fourteen female physicians among a total of twenty-four municipal duma doctors in 1893. The women were said to have done the hardest work for the least pay. E. Ia. Belitskaia, "Ocherk razvitiia sanitarnoi statistiki v Peterburge-Petrograde v dorevoliutsionnyi period," Ockerki istorii otechestvennoi sanitarnoi statistiki, ed. A. M. Merkov (Moscow, 1966), p. 196.
[25] Rochelle Lois Goldberg, "The Russian Women's Movement, 1859–1917" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1976), pp. 123–28.
[26] On Pokrovskaia, see Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 250–52; Linda Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984.), pp. 29–31.
male or police harassment of women in public nor had it reduced rape. Rather, the policy of rounding up suspected clandestine prostitutes endangered all women.[27] Pokrovskaia had personal experience with regulation's excesses; walking unescorted one night in 1905, she barely avoided arrest.[28]
In principle, Pokrovskaia agreed that the police should hold prostitutes legally responsible only for creating scandals on the streets. However, because of her abhorrence for prostitution in general, she also supported more repressive measures. For example, she believed it was necessary to arrest juvenile prostitutes in order to offer them help and "save" them.[29] Pokrovskaia ventured even further—into the moralists' territory of legal proscriptions against unbridled sexualities. In 1908, she contended that "humanity is making a tremendous mistake by not regulating sexual relations" for their abuse "destroys mental health, promotes degeneration, and stimulates mental illnesses."[30] Men, she once recommended, should refrain from any sexual relations until their organisms were "sufficiently mature." (She placed male sexual maturity at around the age of 25.)[31] In 1913, Pokrovskaia published a pamphlet on sex education in which she invoked Rousseau and Tolstoy to substantiate her contention that society created sexual depravity through "bad education and ignorance." Sex, she claimed, ranked as only a secondary human need, far behind the requirements for air, warmth, food, drink, and sleep.[32]
Pokrovskaia's comment about humanity's "tremendous mistake" had a particularly ominous ring to it. As she suggested in an article entitled "A Single Sexual Standard" ("Edinaia polovaia nravstvennost'"), there were really only two ways to eliminate prostitution: by promoting premarital and extramarital chastity for both sexes or engaging in "free love."[33] At the turn of the century, the latter alternative could only bring forth more disease and millions of unwanted pregnancies. Essentially, Pokrovskaia saw only one realistic path to follow.
[27] Pokrovskaia, O zhertvakh, pp. 64–65.
[28] "O zhenskoi prestupnosti," Zhenskii vestnik (October 1905): 293–94, in Goldberg, "The Russian Women's Movement," p. 319.
[29] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 538.
[30] Trudy pervago vserossiiskago shenskago s"ezda, p. 243. See also Pokrovskaia, O zhertvakh, pp. 38–41.
[31] Pokrovskaia, O zhertvakh, p. 49. Chlenov also believed that men did not reach sexual maturity until the age of 24 or 25. See Chlenov, Velikoe zlo, p. v.
[32] Pokrovskaia, O polovom vospitanii i samovospitanii (St. Petersburg, 1913), pp. 7, 9.
[33] Pokrovskaia, "Edinaia polovaia nravstvennost'," Zhenskii vestnik, no. 4 (1910): 90.
Pokrovskaia's deep-felt revulsion for prostitution caused her to pursue inconsistent and repressive agendas. Although she never directly proposed suppressing prostitution per se, she certainly longed for a world in which prostitution did not exist. Thus, without seeing the inherent contradiction, she could protest the yellow ticket's binding nature at the same time that she could lambaste the one medical-police committee in Russia (in Nizhnii Novgorod) that issued temporary licenses for officially sanctioning prostitution as a supplementary trade.[34]
Like many other abolitionists, Pokrovskaia could not imagine a world where the state did not have a prominent function in dealing with prostitution. In light of prevailing fears about the spread of venereal disease and sincere concerns about the exploitation of young women, her reluctance to deny the government a role was understandable. At the same time though, several measures she and other feminists supported involved mechanisms that would have rivaled the worst features of regulation. For example, Pokrovskaia recommended that "young wretched girls" be rounded up for their own good.[35] It is difficult to see much of a difference between this proposal and the standard practice of conducting police sweeps for clandestine prostitutes.
Pokrovskaia struggled hard for the hearts and minds of Russian society. In 1901, in a short book entitled About the Fallen (O padshikh ), she argued that the regulation system had transformed Dostoevsky's saintly Sonia into a full-time prostitute. "Without the yellow ticket," wrote Pokrovskaia, "perhaps she would have sacrificed herself only a few times to save her family from hunger."[36] One year later, Pokrovskaia published two more works on prostitution, On the Victims of Social Temperament and The Medical-Police Surveillance of Prostitution Promotes the Degeneration of the Nation, her most lucid and complete study on the need to abolish regulation.
In conjunction with her vituperative written campaign against regulation, Pokrovskaia engaged in active political organizing. Her battle began in 1899 when, addressing the Petersburg branch of the Society for the Protection of Public Health, she called for abolition as a crucial weapon in the fight against prostitution.[37] In 1908, she spoke out for abolition at the first All-Russian Women's Congress. That same year,
[34] See Pokrovskaia, "Iarmarochnaia prostitutsiia," p. 15.
[35] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 538.
[36] Pokrovskaia, O padshikh, p. 14.
[37] Pokrovskaia, Bor'ba s prostitutsiei: Doklad II otdeleniiu Russkago obshchestva okhraneniia narodnago zdraviia 10 dekabria 1899 g. (St. Petersburg, 1900); Vrach, no. 51 (1899): 1523.
her Women's Progressive Party petitioned the MVD to abolish nadzor.[38] At the 1910 congress against alcoholism, she tried to convince a women's subsection to vote against regulation. They refused, but she won support for a less contentious proposal to close down state-licensed brothels.[39] When St. Petersburg's duma was developing plans to assume control over local regulation in 1912, Pokrovskaia and the Women's Progressive Party reminded it that the 1910 congress had condemned regulation. A letter to the duma quoted the congress resolution in full.[40] In fact, Pokrovskaia herself had composed this eloquent call for abolition and its strong affirmation by delegates to the congress signaled her greatest victory.
Abolitionism at the 1910 Congress
[M]edical-police nadzor of prostitution does not attain its sanitary goals, enslaves women to prostitution, increases the number of prostitutes, acts in a fashion demoralizing to youths of both sexes, the whole population, and agents of surveillance, and degrades and insults the human dignity of women.
Resolution from the 1910 congress
Though a vote in favor of abolition at the 1910 Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women was likely from the start, Pokrovskaia and other abolitionists faced some potentially significant opposition (see table 13). Of the 293 participants, only 58 were associated with feminist groups. Women accounted for two-thirds of the assembly, but many had no political affiliation or were associated with more conservative organizations such as the ROZZh and the House of Mercy. Furthermore, as a consequence of the ROZZh's cautious and restrictive invitations, officialdom made up almost 10 percent of the participants, all of whom were male, hailing from various state bureaucracies including the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Justice, Trade, Internal Affairs, and Education. Male and female physicians also participated, making up 14 percent of the attendees. The majority of participants might be expected
[38] Vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 19 (1908): 599.
[39] Pokrovskaia, "Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd po bor'be s p'iantsvom," Zhenskii vestnik, no. 2 (1910): 52–53.
[40] TsGALO, Gorodskaia sanitarnaia komissiia, f. 210, op. 1, d. 585, letter from Pokrovskaia of December 20, 1912.
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to have abolitionist sympathies, but that they would challenge government policy in such an unequivocal, aggressive manner was by no means inevitable. As we have seen, the congress against alcoholism that met earlier in 1910 failed to support an abolitionist proposal. Moreover, participants like Zinaida El'tsina, Mikhail Chlenov, and Nikolai Di-Sen'i were sincere believers in regulation and thus bound to defend nadzor with vigor, passion, and the combined weight of their expertise.
The dominating presence of Mikhail Borovitinov, with his impressive credentials from the Ministry of Justice, Medical Council, Chief Prison Administration, House of Mercy, and ROZZh, also countered the numerical strength of the abolitionists in attendance. At an organizational meeting in his Petersburg apartment prior to the congress, he endorsed a proposal to abolish state-licensed brothels, but stopped short of advocating the dismantling of nadzor. From the time of this meeting to the final abolitionist vote, Borovitinov strove by various tactics to prevent the congress from rejecting regulations.[41]
[41] Borovitinov also initially opposed a congress section devoted to the causes of prostitution. See Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 13; Pokrovskaia, "Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami," Zhenskii vestnik, nos. 5–6 (1910): 115–16.
His goal appeared a lost cause when the congress opened its doors on April 21, 1910. Most of the opening day speakers called abolition an integral component of the struggle against the trade in women. Not unexpectedly, the most virulent denunciations of regulation came from leaders of feminist groups. Dr. Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, speaking on behalf of the League for the Equal Rights of Women, declared that if the congress participants could succeed in convincing society that regulation was slavery, they would be taking a giant step forward in the fight against prostitution. Ariadna Tyrkova expressed similar sentiments when she announced her hope that the congress would resolve the issue of regulation once and for all. A delegate from the Women's Progressive Party, Mariia Vakhtina, blamed regulation for the "young, drunk, and amoral women" who walked Petersburg's streets.[42] Although she too represented the Women's Progressive Party, Pokrovskaia amplified her party's voice by addressing the congress as the editor of The Women's Herald . In a brief speech, the 58-year-old Pokrovskaia revealed her uncompromising feminism and abolitionism, her deep sympathies for the lower classes, her distrust for the intelligentsia, and her opposition to the "contemporary social structure." For her, the congress provided an opportunity for the "broad masses" to grasp prostitution in all its "horror and infamy." The very word "prostitution" involved notions "about slavery and women's lack of rights, about their degradation and disgrace, about the cruelty, callousness, and egoism of contemporary people, about the inequality, poverty, and ignorance of the masses, and the imperfections [o nesovershenstvakh ] of the contemporary social structure." After this far-reaching criticism of state and society, she continued, "The congress must set an example and support the abolition of medical-police nadzor over prostitution, punishment for procurers and buyers of women's bodies, a single sexual standard, and equal rights for women."[43]
The congress divided into three sections following the opening speeches. The first section, which we examined in chapter 6, focused on the roots of prostitution. The second examined salvationist strategies. The third and most popular section, however, addressed issues concerning the trade in women and the government regulation of prostitution. On the morning of April 22, the eighty-three men and women who attended the third section's first meeting no doubt came not only to cast
[42] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, pp. 48–49, 52.
[43] Ibid., p. 53.
their vote on one side or the other of the abolition question, but to watch the anticipated verbal fireworks.[44] They would not be disappointed.
The issue of brothel prostitution proved consentaneous in keeping with the general social repugnance for "dens of depravity." On the very first day, participants unanimously voted against state licensing and their vote was soon echoed at the congress general assembly. But though all enemies of regulation rejected the toleration of brothels, not all opponents of licensing were against regulation. It was one thing to demand an end to licensing and quite another to advocate dispensing with all medical controls. Brothel opponents could agree that brothels were a blight on society, that they corrupted the women who worked in them, and that houses of prostitution should not be the recipients of government endorsement, but not all were convinced that medical-police surveillance was wholly without merit. Borovitinov provided the first hint of the battle to come when he chastened abolitionists for complicating what could have been a simple question. By linking the demand for the abolition of brothels with the call for abolition in general, regulation's opponents were interfering with the first issue's prompt resolution. He also advised his audience not to attach demands for women's political rights to questions about prostitution. Controversies over equal rights for women, claimed Borovitinov, obscured the whole issue of abolition.[45]
On the following day, April 23, close to too men and women in the third section listened to Pokrovskaia, Arkadii Elistratov, and two ROZZh members deliver papers on the "trade in women.[46] In the debate that followed, several participants spoke in defense of government regulation. Iurii Tatarov, a doctor who supervised Moscow's regulatory agency, reminded his audience that life did not always imitate theory. The congress could vote to abolish brothel licensing (as had his city's municipal government) and regulation, but that did not mean bawdy houses or prostitution would automatically disappear. A physician from Moscow's Miasnitskaia Hospital agreed. Prostitution was inevitable so
[44] For comparison, forty-one and fifty participants attended the first and second sections respectively.
[45] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 336–37; Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 370.
[46] See Elistratov, "Rol' prava i nravstvennosti v bor'be s torgom i kupleiu zhenshchin v tseliakh razvrata"; Pokrovskaia, "O zakonodatel'nykh merakh protiv torga zhenshchin v tseliakh razvrata"; Artemii K. Baliev, "O merakh bor'by s torgom zhenshchinami"; Gintsburg, "O mezhdunarodnoi evreiskoi konferentsii." In Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 405–24.
long as early marriages were discouraged, for men needed to find a way to satisfy their "uncontrollable sexual instinct."[47] El'tsina, who worked at Kalinkin Hospital, remarked that the vacillation of syphilis's contagious period necessitated compulsory treatment.[48] Participants postponed their vote on regulation to the following day.
When the meeting of the third section resumed on April 24, attendance reached a new high (106). Nikolai Di-Sen'i of the MVD started things off by summarizing his recent official report on nadzor, Medical Police Surveillance of Urban Prostitution .[49] The persistence of shortcomings and abuses within the current system would have come as no surprise to those familiar with the literature on regulation and prostitution, but the majority of the audience were neither medical experts nor activists. They must have been shocked and appalled to hear Di-Sen'i chronicle how several cities (including their own St. Petersburg) still registered women as young as 16 and how some areas carried out pelvic examinations of prostitutes in flophouses, jails, and morgues. Like Shtiurmer, whose 1897 report had a similar effect, Di-Sen'i advocated reform instead of outright abolition. In the explicit tradition of Tarnovskii, he characterized prostitutes as the main carriers of syphilis. Compulsory examinations were necessary because the prostitute, "especially the Russian prostitute, with her low intellectual level," would never hospitalize herself voluntarily.[50]
Several pro-abolition papers followed, as did a reading by Borovitinov of a petition to the congress submitted in the name of sixty-three prostitutes. After a break for lunch, Pokrovskaia, Manuil Margulies, Zinaida Mirovich, Aleksandra Dement'eva, and Arkadii Elistratov one after another systematically challenged regulationist claims and castigated nadzor for failing to safeguard public health, oppressing women, and contributing to the expansion of prostitution and spread of venereal disease.[51] Their arguments elicited a spirited defense of regulation from
[47] Trudy s"ezda po borbe s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 431, 436.
[48] Ibid., p. 438. At the congress opening, El'tsina spoke as a representative of the Society for the Struggle against Contagious Diseases, reminding her audience that as early as 1885 she had publicly stressed the need to examine the clients of brothel prostitutes. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 46.
[49] Di-Sen'i, "O sovremennoi postanovke," pp. 460–77.
[50] Ibid., pp. 472–73, 476. The audience reacted with both jeers and applause. See Bentovin, "Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd dlia bor'by s torgom zhenshchinami," Vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 18 (1910): 596; Pokrovskaia, "Pervyi vserossiiskii s'ezd po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami," p. 118.
[51] See Pokrovskaia, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor za prostitutsiei"; Margulies, "Reglamentatsiia ili svobodnaia prostitutsiia?"; Mirovich, "O reglamentatsii prostitutsii v Anglii"; Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony"; Elistratov, "Meditsinskaia statistika zashchitnikov politsii nravov." In Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 477–523.
several angry audience members, including Zinaida El'tsina. So disturbed was she over some disparaging comments by Margulies about her recently deceased mentor, Veniamin Tarnovskii, that El'tsina asked the audience to "censure" him. Tarnovskii's work did not display a lack of common sense, as Margulies suggested. Rather, Tarnovskii was a "great social activist" to whom women owed their right to receive higher education. (El'tsina credited Tarnovskii for her own professional success. According to her memoirs, she entered venerology because of one of his lectures and subsequently worked with him in the Higher Women's Courses, the university equivalent for women in the northern capital. When the government shut them down, she continued to study in his office.)[52] EI'tsina challenged several of the abolitionists' points and then appealed to populist sympathies by pointing out that it was "our peasant sisters" who contracted venereal disease from men who were infected by prostitutes. Regulation, in other words, did not protect the male population alone.[53]
Mikhail Chlenov, the Moscow University professor who had recently published the results of his 1905 sexual census, spoke in defense of regulation as well. Identifying himself as a "neoregulationist," he called for a transfer of responsibility for regulation to the courts so that no woman could be registered without a legal judgment. But Chlenov also made some comments bound to infuriate many of his feminist listeners. First, he (correctly) pointed out that the prostitutes' petition said nothing about abolition, only about regulation's more odious aspects. Why, he asked, was it necessary for the congress to abolish something that the prostitutes themselves did not reject? Second, he disparaged his female audience by suggesting that abolition would put their husbands, brothers, and sons in great danger.[54] Finally, he patronized them; never having witnessed the ravages of syphilis, they were only listening to the "voice of emotion." Surely no doctor could agree with them.[55]
Like Chlenov, Borovitinov also invoked the "voice of reason" in his comments. The congress, he maintained, must recognize that the ques-
[52] Ibid., p. 523; Arkhangel'skii, V. M. Tarnovskii, pp. 63–64.
[53] Trudy e"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 523–24. After the 1917 revolutions, El'tsina would head a hospital for children with venereal and skin diseases. Frolova, "Istoriia stareishei v Rossii," pp. 10–11.
[54] Ariadna Tyrkova later commented, "Such an appeal will hardly find a response among us." Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 535.
[55] Ibid., pp. 524–25.
tion of abolition is "not as simple as the individuals who spoke from this rostrum today depicted." Although Russia's medical-police committees were nothing to be proud of, it would be premature to eliminate them before creating a viable alternative. In Borovitinov's eyes, regulation represented a "compromise" between repression and unbridled freedom. If regulation were abolished, the state would have to choose between prosecuting prostitution in all its manifestations or allowing it to exist. Such an issue lay outside the "competency" of the congress. The 1910 congress had a duty to criticize regulation in its present form as "indefensible," but not to demand its abolition. What the congress could do though, was convene a commission composed of representatives from medical, legal, and women's societies to consider the matter further and present recommendations to the "next congress."[56]
Borovitinov's "voice of reason" provoked a storm of reaction from opponents of nadzor in attendance. Tyrkova questioned how Borovitinov could so readily criticize regulation and then "perform a logical somersault" by denying the necessity of abolition. She acidly advised Borovitinov to go to the public library in order to become better acquainted with the real issues.[57] Pokrovskaia also leapt into the fray, articulating some of the concrete alternatives to regulation. As for Borovitinov's proposal for a commission, there was no need for this; a commission would probably "bury" the issue. "For all of us," she argued, "the sham of the regulatory system is already completely clear." In a dramatic moment, Pokrovskaia pulled out her trump card. Invoking the name of nearly every women's group in attendance, she proposed the very resolution that she would one day wave before the Petersburg city duma:
Recognizing that medical-police nadzor of prostitution does not attain its sanitary goals, enslaves women to prostitution, increases the number of prostitutes, acts in a fashion demoralizing to youths of both sexes, the whole population, and agents of surveillance, and degrades and insults the human dignity of women, this section proposes that the congress petition the government and legislative institutions for the immediate abolition of medical-police nadzor of prostitution and also rejects in general the introduction of special sanitary surveillance for prostitutes alone.[58]
[56] Ibid., pp. 528–32.
[57] She later denied having meant him personally. Ibid., pp. 535–36, 543.
[58] Ibid., pp. 538–39. This proposal was supported by the St. Petersburg Club of the Women's Progressive Party, the Russian Women's Mutual-Philanthropic Society, the All-Russian League of Equal Rights for Women, the Moscow Women's Club, the Society for the Protection of Women's Rights, the Union of Polish Women in St. Petersburg, the Religious-Philosophical Society in Tiflis, the Moscow section of the Russian League of Equal Rights for Women, and the Society for Mutual Aid to Women Doctors.
Borovitinov quickly established himself as Pokrovskaia's chief adversary, struggling desperately to keep the third section from ratifying Pokrovskaia's proposal. Though he claimed that an abolitionist vote would not affect government policy, he clearly feared the political consequences of such a challenge both to his authority as a congress organizer and to the tsarist administration in particular. Therefore, as the vote drew closer, Borovitinov grew increasingly combative. Were the abolitionists "afraid" to support a commission because they could not refute the evidence of regulationists outside the congress? Had Pokrovskaia so little faith in the women who signed her proposal that she believed a commission in which they would actively participate would fail to condemn regulation?
Initially, despite his government connections, Borovitinov down-played the connections between his philanthropic activities and his position in the tsarist administration. The congress's concerns have "no sort of relation to my work," he declared. "If I have repeatedly taken part in discussions of them in government commissions, then it was exclusively in the capacity of a representative of the Russian Society for the Protection of Women." Nonetheless, toward the end of his comments Borovitinov reversed himself by hinting that he possessed sufficient influence to involve women in the decision-making process about the fate of regulation. Deprived as they were of any government voice, Russian feminists must have been attracted to such seductive bait. In a thinly veiled threat, he warned his audience that lack of support for his proposed commission would deprive women of their only serious opportunity to influence the course of events.[59]
Pokrovskaia stood her ground, denying that she lacked faith in representatives from other women's organizations. She feared only that women would constitute a minority in Borovitinovs commission and that plans for abolition would go the way of previous reform efforts. As for Borovitinov, she made short shrift of his intentions, reminding the section that he had participated in the 1899 Medical Council commission that had endorsed regulation.[60]
Pokrovskaia's resolution surmounted its first hurdle with an impressive vote of 62 to 14. But further ratification awaited its acceptance by the congress at the next day's general assembly. By then, the battle had
[59] Ibid., Pp. 542–43.
[60] Ibid., p. 544.
crystallized into a war between Borovitinov, the male official, and Pokrovskaia, the feminist physician. When the general assembly convened on April 25, Borovitinov resurrected his proposal for a commission, complaining that emotion, not reason, had guided the third section's vote. "My voice and the voices of several like-minded people," he said, "were not heard in the [third] section." They had been "devoured" by Pokrovskaia with her support from nine women's organizations. In a last-minute bid to rally support, Borovitinov argued that there was little difference between the contested resolutions—both condemned regulation in principle. His, however, left the details to a qualified commission of experts.[61]
In the hope of discrediting Pokrovskaia, Borovitinov recklessly suggested that her writings about sex in The Women's Herald had "compromised" the issue of abolition. To substantiate this charge, he quoted out of context her article about how only the adoption of a single sexual standard could lead to the eradication of prostitution. Borovitinov read aloud a damaging passage from an excerpt in New Times (Novoe vremia) —"Whether this is in the sense of full freedom of sexual relations or the strict rules of Leo Tolstoy . . . does not matter." Such writings, Borovitinov warned, could only harm the principle of a single sexual morality, convincing those unacquainted with the issues that advocates of women's rights only wished to attain the equal right to engage in debauchery.[62]
But Borovitinov had neglected to cite the original article's conclusion that society should opt for "sexual purity," instead of having free relations like "animals." As we have seen, Pokrovskaia was hardly an advocate of free love. (In fact, calls for a single standard of sexual freedom for both sexes were as singularly absent from discussions of prostitution as prostitutes were from the 1910 congress.) It must have been embarrassing to be publicly accused of something she found so abhorrent. With uncharacteristic restraint, Pokrovskaia responded by pointing out how "Mr. Borovitinov resorted to a newspaper clipping to prove his case. . . . It is a pity that he was satisfied with a clipping and did not bother to read the whole article. As the editor and publisher of The
[61] Ibid., p. 596.
[62] Ibid., p. 597. For original see Pokrovskaia, "Edinaia polovaia nravstvennost," p. 90. In reference to her 1913 pamphlet, "About Sex Education and Self-Education" ("O polovom vospitanii i samovospitanii"), New Times again accused Pokrovskaia of advocating promiscuity. This time she sued the editor. Zkenskii vestnik (November 1910): 227; (February 1913): 63, from Goldberg, "The Russian Women's Movement," p. 316.
Women's Herald, I must protest against his accusation that it is a call to debauchery."[63] Whether Borovitinov's ploy backfired (as Pokrovskaia later alleged) is unclear, but the minutes of the 1910 congress show that most of the subsequent speakers reasserted the necessity of a clear statement against regulation. And when the congress chair put "Pokrovskaia's resolution" to a final vote, it passed by an "overwhelming majority."[64]
The abolitionist vote represented more than the consensus of a segment of educated society that it could no longer uphold the false guarantees and curtailment of civil liberties inherent in the regulation of prostitution. As it played itself out, the battle between Pokrovskaia and Borovitinov also symbolized a rare female victory in the classic battle of the sexes, as well as the triumph of Russia's professional intelligentsia over the tsarist state. Pokrovskaia lacked the experience and authority of Borovitinov, but the congress participants felt compelled to follow her unyielding path. When Beletskii from the MVD silenced the five Moscow workers in attendance, very few congress members batted an eye. The majority, however, would not compromise with regulation. Their support for Pokrovskaia's resolution essentially amounted to a vote of no-confidence in state authority.
In the best traditions of the 1897 congress and the Russian intelligentsia, participants looked to improvements in education and the establishment of treatment centers as more effective and enlightened means to deal with venereal disease. Anna Miliukova for one, realistically acknowledged that after abolition resolution of these issues would "to a significant degree, fall into the hands of society."[65] But congress participants were less canny about prostitution itself and, in some respects, they kept pace with the government in their advocacy of legal and societal intervention. Miliukova herself advocated penalizing prostitutes who engaged in street provocations and "obnoxious behavior."[66] Precisely who would determine what constituted obnoxious behavior was not addressed. The congress resolved not only to tighten measures against the trade in women, but also to recommend criminal punishments for prostitutes' clients. (Mirovich prudently withdrew her pro-
[63] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 590.
[64] Pokrovskaia, "Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami," p. 119; Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 602.
[65] Miliukova, "O zadachakh nastoiashchago s"ezda," p. 230; Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 540, 548.
[66] Miliukova, "O zadachakh nastoiashchago s"ezda," pp. 226, 230.
posal that clients of child prostitutes be punished with hard labor and exile for life.)[67] Though they failed to endorse one suggestion that an inspectorate composed entirely of women bring the "buyers of women's bodies" to justice, there was significant support for such a measure.[68] The congress repudiated nadzor, but nonetheless advocated mandatory treatment for individuals with venereal disease (albeit not necessarily in hospitals).[69] When Boris Bentovin sought approbation for a proposal to extend philanthropic help only to those juvenile and adult prostitutes who wanted aid, he was flatly rejected. The congress opted instead for compulsory internment of child prostitutes under the age of 17 in "educational-correctional" institutions.[70] As for the other questions that would come up in a deregulated system, the congress ignored them.
The victory for abolitionism proved Pyrrhic. As Borovitinov predicted, the tsarist regime would never heed society's voice on this issue. A "special opinion" from 11 influential male participants—including Chlenov, Tatarov, Di-Sen'i, Beletskii, the doctor from Miasnitskaia Hospital, and five government officials—decried the abolitionist vote and called for a commission made up of medical and judicial personnel, representatives from social organizations, and members of the government administration to consider the issue further. As if to confirm Borovitinov's threat, they made no mention of participants from women's organizations.[71]
Soon after the congress, its female majority became a target for criticism and derision. Chlenov, for example, reported to the Moscow Society of Physicians that the 1910 congress had been important, but thanks to the numerical dominance of women (which he exaggerated as "three-fourths" of the congress) and the prominent role of feminists, it had not dealt properly with practical matters. Just one week after the congress, the Moscow Society of Physicians, while rejecting brothel prostitution, concluded that the regulation of streetwalking could still be tolerated.[72] Chlenov was not the only disgruntled observer. Bentovin, bristling over the rejection of his proposal, vilified the "nine-tenths female" audience as hostile to outside opinions.[73] He claimed that even a slight suggestion
[67] Trudy s"ezda po bor'bes torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, pp. 551, 556–57.
[68] Ibid., pp. 439–40.
[69] Ibid., p. 602.
[70] Ibid., pp. 457, 554.
[71] Ibid., p. 604.
[72] Vrachebnaia gazeta, no. 33 (1910): 977.
[73] Bentovin, "Na s"ezde dlia bor'by s torgom zhenshchinami," p. 341.
of the utility of regulation brought forth hisses from all sides. "Stormy, impassioned intolerance—precisely intolerance—enveloped the auditorium" every time a speaker tried to say something on regulation's behalf. Conversely, all the phrases in favor of abolition or "extending a hand to our fallen sisters" inspired applause.[74]
Zinaida El'tsina composed her own separate statement. She did not criticize the female majority in attendance, but she did argue that it was her duty to disagree with the congress's resolution. While the current system of regulation failed to guarantee the health of registered prostitutes, it could be improved so as to conform with "contemporary science" and follow more "humane principles." Regulation was necessary because it protected the peasantry "who for me are dearer and whose interests are higher than that numerically insignificant portion of them, the prostitutes.[75]
Though the political Left opposed nadzor, it too had little sympathy for the abolitionist vote. A printers' newspaper mocked how "equal-righters and progressives" at the congress could do no more than repeat, "Down with the double standard! Down with regulation!"[76] A Bolshevik author found it "strange to place any hope" in the congress vote to abolish regulation in a land "where parents sell their daughters into infamy out of hunger, where 'tarts' are brought from the countryside to earn money at fairs, and where unemployment and difficult labor conditions for many ranks of female factory and mill workers have made prostitution a supplemental trade."[77]
Even the members of the Pirogov Society, the physicians' organization that promoted the cause of community medicine, did not actively support the 1910 congress. When Dr. Anna Shabanova, the distinguished president of the Russian Women's Mutual-Philanthropic Society, urged a section of the Pirogov Society's own annual congress to add its name to the petition calling for abolition, the participants demurred. Though her fellow physicians "expressed sympathy" with the abolitionist resolution, they would not join in petitioning the government.[78]
[74] Bentovin, "Pervyi vserossiiskii S"ezd," p. 596.
[75] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 604.
[76] B——, "S"ezd po bor'be s prostitutsiei," Pechatnoe delo, p. 4.
[77] S. S. Spandarian, Novaia rech ' (1910), from his Stat'i, pis'ma i dokumenty (Moscow, 1958), p. 179, quoted in Letunovskii, Leninskaia taktika, p. 48.
[78] Russkii vrack, no. 27 (1910): 957. Shabanova glossed over the Pirogov Society members' refusal to sign the petition in her report to the 1910 congress, referring only to their greetings and expressions of solidarity. Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 610. When the Club of the Women's Progressive Party asked the Pirogov Society in 1913 for support of a State Duma bill favoring abolition, it also remained noncommittal. "Rabota zhenskikh organizatsii," Zhenskii vestnik, no. 11 (1914): 242. John Hutchinson characterized the 1910 Pirogov congress as "a spiritless and indecisive affair that made few decisions and avoided politically dangerous topics." Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health, p. 63.
For its part, not only did the government ignore the 1910 congress's abolitionist vote, it failed to convene the commission that Borovitinov promised would reform nadzor. In 1913, though forty-four representatives to the State Duma signed a bill to abolish regulation, the MVD essentially reasserted its commitment to controlling prostitution by organizing its commission to develop a new set of medical-police rules. The ministry had, once again, acknowledged regulation's many shortcomings, but once again, planned only to reform the system, not eliminate it completely. Typically, both the ministry commission and the Duma bill failed to produce results. Despite intentions to revamp regulation still another time, the ministry never issued any rules to replace Circular 1611. As for the abolitionist proposal, after the Duma transferred consideration of the 1913 bill to a commission on public health, it disappeared from the public record and apparently was never heard from again.[79] In 1914, the ROZZh began putting in motion the bureaucratic machinery to organize a second congress in 1916, but the first All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women also turned out to be the last.[80]
Despite strong opposition, regulation as a policy survived. Educated society may have advocated abolition, but experts like Di-Sen'i, El'tsina, Chlenov, and Tatarov had reasons to believe that venereal disease would increase without medical-police controls of street prostitutes. Opposition to brothels had reached as high as the Medical Council, but the tsarist administration had a less ambivalent view of regulation in general. Although officials in the MVD realized
[79] The head of the UGVI mentioned this new commission in a letter of February 20, 1913. From TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332. For the Duma bill, see Prilozheniia k stenograficheskim otchetam Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, no. 28, chetvertyi sozyv, sessiia 2 (St. Petersburg, 1914).
[80] TsGALO, Kantseliariia Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika, f. 569, op. 13, d. 91, "Delo po bor'be s torgom zhenshchin i ego prichinami," February 20, 1914 letter from Major-General Drachevskii; April 25, 1914 letter from the MVD to the city governor. At the fifth international congress against the trade in women (held in London, June 1913), it was agreed to hold the next congress in St. Petersburg in 1916. We can assume that the onset of war disrupted plans for European-wide cooperation. Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1913 g., p. 16.
that regulations had serious drawbacks, they thought it more dangerous to release prostitutes from state surveillance.
Part of their reluctance can be linked to the failure of abolitionists to prove to the government's satisfaction that prostitutes would behave responsibly in a system of deregulated prostitution. Tarnovskii was not the only one to characterize prostitutes as indifferent (at best) to their own health and their clients' welfare. Even sympathetic portrayals of prostitutes left the reader with an image of sullen, vengeful. and ignorant women. To explain the prostitutes' own failure to demand an abolitionist vote from the 1910 congress, Aleksandra Dement'eva described them as having an "ignorant, unenlightened consciousness."[81] If she, a participant who had actually worked with prostitutes in Kalinkin Hospital prior to the congress, did not trust their judgment, how could the government expect "fallen women" to quit trading in sex when they suffered from contagious diseases?
Reports from deregulated areas in western Europe were mixed, with experts publishing scientific data to support both sides of the regulation question. When Shtiurmer reported on the 1899 Brussels international congress on the prevention of venereal disease to an audience that included the director of the Medical Department, Lev Ragozin, and his assistant, Leonid Malinovskii, the future head of the UGVI, he assiduously reiterated the European arguments that "proved" regulation's effectiveness.[82] He told them that in Naples, for example, the number of syphilitics more than trebled when regulation was abolished and that physicians from Milan, Nancy, Brest, Geneva, and Hamburg also charted rises in syphilis under abolitionist systems. According to Shtiurmer, "almost without any exception the prominent syphilologists" at Brussels supported regulation.[83] As head of the UGVI, Malinovskii had to take such numbers into consideration when he pondered the virtues of abolition, just as he could not afford to ignore the regulationist arguments of experts like Di-Sen'i, El'tsina, Chlenov, Tatarov, and others. Moreover, he was well aware that regulation was still in force in most countries of continental Europe. Without tangible guarantees that deregulation worked, it would have been an untoward risk for the tsarist government to relinquish control.
[81] Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 534.
[82] Malinovskii would become the head of the UGVI in 1907. See Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 12 (December 1914): 22–23.
[83] "Trudy komissii po razsmotreniiu dela o vrachebno-politseiskom komitete v Moskve v sviazi s proektom obshchei organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v Imperii," in offprint from Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 12 (December 1899): 2–3.
Abolitionists had intelligent and far-reaching criticisms of regulation, but their own solutions to the public health dilemma posed by prostitution must have sounded unrealistic, if not preposterous, to the ears of state officials. At the 1910 congress, Manuil Margulies reminded the audience that the upper classes sought prompt medical care for the treatment of venereal diseases. From this he concluded that members of the lower classes would act similarly if they had equal access to medicine and that prostitutes would gladly seek medical help under a voluntary system, particularly if treatment were made more "pleasant." After all, a syphilitic prostitute would welcome her hospital stay as a good chance to rest.[84] In reality, prostitutes, just as other members of the working class and peasantry, tended to fear physicians out of a combination of distrust of the urban intelligentsia and peasant traditionalism. The oppressive nature of the regulation system was not solely at fault here. As we saw in chapter 2, the treatment for syphilis often did more apparent damage than the disease. The likelihood of it being transformed into something "pleasant" in the near future was remote. Furthermore, since prostitutes were not compensated for their loss of income when they stayed in hospital beds, it was also doubtful that they would perceive internment as restful.
Regulation's opponents predicated many of their recommendations on a radical transformation of Russia's entire health care structure. To prevent the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea, free clinics that treated all infectious diseases would be organized throughout the empire. Yet as late as World War I, this was still a country that lacked medical care in general and in which municipal and district governments bore the burden of providing public health and education. In this light, the abolitionists' vision of smooth-running, accessible clinics appeared as utopian as demands for economic justice.
"Moral instruction" played an important role in abolitionist thought. In 1910, Miliukova proposed the formation of an organization to educate Russian society about the hazards of venereal disease by convening periodic congresses, publishing reports, writing articles for the press, developing special courses and lectures, and distributing relevant brochures.[85] But although she was correct in recognizing that education was absolutely vital to any struggle against syphilis, Miliukova assumed
[84] Margulies, "Reglamentatsiia ili svobodnaia prostitutsiia?" p. 499; Margulies, Reglamentatsiia i "svobodnaia" prostitutsiia, pp. 36–37.
[85] Miliukova, "O zadachakh nastoiashchago s"ezda," p. 230.
a degree of public initiative and freedom that was still largely unheard of in Russian society. Moral instruction was also slated to extol the virtues of abstinence. While there is no question that men's adherence to premarital chastity and marital fidelity would have virtually eliminated prostitution, the potential for such behavior appeared slim.
Another reason for the persistence of regulation stemmed from society's failure to develop an abolitionist campaign comparable to the movement against Britain's Contagious Disease Acts in the 1870s and 1880s. Russian feminists included abolition in their political agenda, but they never organized a native equivalent of the Ladies' National Association—that is, an organization which would devote its energy to abolitionism alone.[86] Pokrovskaia tenaciously fought regulation, yet dedicated as she was to the cause of abolition, it remained one among several of her passionate commitments. And while abolition attracted strong support from many individuals, they did not unite to make it their first political priority. It may have been a compelling cause, but other issues clearly took precedence: for socialists and the working class, the position of labor loomed much larger; for the liberal intelligentsia, political representation assumed greater significance; and for feminists, equal rights and the vote understandably drew stronger support.
The failure of abolitionism also reflects the political impotence of Russian society. Without clear channels through which to lobby, civil society lacked the potential to effect the kind of political change accomplished by Josephine Butler and the English Ladies' National Association. In Britain, advocates for the repeal of regulation organized "branch associations, mass public meetings, petition campaigns, and electoral leagues. They also distributed mountains of propaganda."[87] Without the freedom of speech and assembly, not to mention a truly representative legislature, Russian society could only appeal to the autocratic government in its time-worn fashion—via petition. Moreover, as in France, Germany, and Italy, regulation existed outside the channels of the Russian judiciary or legislature; it remained the province of the MVD. In essence, the regulation of prostitution was a medical-police operation outside of the law and beyond the power of the Duma. The State Duma's inability to push through its bid for abolition only underscores this situation.
The mass mobilization of troops in 1914 raised new problems in rela-
[86] Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 90–136.
[87] Ibid., pp. 90–91.
tion to the army's health. In England, regulation of prostitution had found its original rationale in an effort to control venereal disease among navy personnel in port cities. As Allan Brandt has written in reference to the United States military, "In the charged atmosphere of world war, venereal disease threatened military efficiency and health and, equally important, symbolized moral failure and social decay."[88] The Russian government was not about to shy away from its traditional method of control under conditions of war. Nor was it unreasonable, years before the development of penicillin, to fear that syphilitic prostitutes presented as serious a threat to soldiers as the enemy's guns.[89]
The number of prostitutes in Petrograd is said to have increased dramatically during World War I, with venereal disease reaching "epidemic proportions, particularly near the soldiers' barracks."[90] In February 1916, a venereal specialist from Tomsk complained that the closing of brothels in several Siberian cities had resulted in an increase in clandestine prostitution and a concomitant rise in the rates of venereal disease among the lower ranks. Prostitutes apparently posed as laundresses and maids in order gain entrance to the barracks. Siberia, he wrote, desperately needed more stringent medical-police controls.[91]
The most inflammatory letter came from a chief of staff of the Military High Command in the southwestern front. In 1915, he reported to the MVD that rates of venereal disease among the military had recently increased. (He attributed this to a wealthy German-Jewish organization that was sending syphilitic women among the troops.) Increased police surveillance was one among many "decisive and severe measures" he recommended to combat the alleged onslaught. Others included fines and imprisonment for procurers and compulsory treatment for women who spread venereal disease, followed by exile to remote provinces (preferably coupled with imprisonment). In extreme cases, women would be subject to corporal punishment under martial law.[92]
[88] Walter Clarke of the American Social Hygiene Association declared in 1918, "That army and navy, which is the least syphilized will, other things being equal, win." Quotes from Brandt, No Magic Bullet, pp. 52, 62.
[89] Public health publicists in the United States apparently subscribed to similar logic during World War II. Brandt reprinted a poster showing a skull-faced woman in a low-cut evening gown, marching between a Nazi soldier and Japanese officer. The caption read, "V. D. Worst of the Three." See ibid., cover; fig. 14.
[90] Hasegawa, The February Revolution, p. 69.
[91] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, February 25, 1916 request from Dr. K. Kupressov of Tomsk to UGVI.
[92] Ibid., June 29, 1915 copy of report no. 8872 from Nachal'nik Shtaba Verkhovnago Glavnokomanduiushchago na imia Glavnago Nachal'nika snabzhenii armii iugozapadnago fronta.
Opponents of brothels often argued that street prostitution represented the lesser of two evils. But abolitionists had no such moderate alternatives for fighting prostitution and venereal disease. Instead, their proposals involved mass education campaigns, public initiative, morality crusades, and curtailments of police power. To Russian officialdom, these plans must have seemed impractical at best, subversive at worst. As one speaker at the 1910 congress ventured, the "struggle against evil" will go nowhere until "public opinion is all powerful" and the state "must consider it out of necessity ."[93] True abolitionism, with its formula for voluntary medical examinations, free and accessible health care clinics, mass education, and an end to police controls would have entailed significant restructuring of Russian society. It would also have meant the supremacy of the individual, that is, liberalism, something that went against the grain of autocratic policies.[94] This is precisely what the autocracy wanted to avoid. A serious commitment to such reforms would have to await the tsar's downfall in February 1917.
[93] Mirovich, "O reglamentatsii prostitutsii v Angli," pp. 499–500 (emphasis added).
[94] As one doctor put it, "Abolitionist scholarship . . . is not only mistaken, but criminal because it places the rights of the individual higher than the interests of society and the state." Moskalev, "Abolitsionizm ili-zhe reglamentatsiia prostitutsii?" p. 37.
Chapter 9
Epilogue
"Comrade! Let the Proletarians of all countries unite. Come home with me."
Petrograd prostitute (1917)
The yellow ticket was one of the many trademarks of tsarism that the Provisional Government discarded after the fall of Nicholas II in February 1917. Like so much else about the old regime, regulation symbolized unbridled authority, class and gender inequality, and—perhaps the worst sin of all—a failure to heed the demands of modern medicine. Beset by war and revolution, not all the cities and towns in the Russian empire complied, but the word from the new authorities in Petrograd was to cease issuing yellow tickets.
Of course, an end to the yellow ticket did not mean an end to prostitution. The social and economic conditions that contributed to prostitution persisted, exacerbated by the hardships of war. Wartime deprivations among the civilian population increased the supply of prostitutes, while the enormous presence of soldiers and sailors in large cities like Petrograd augmented the demand for commercial sex. More fundamentally, gender inequality and the ideology of gender remained intact to nurture the overall system of male consumers and female commodities.
Now that regulation was a thing of the past, the time had come to confront the tough questions about prostitution that a seemingly united abolitionist front had obscured. But the problem of how to treat deregulated prostitution was short-lived—at least for the Provisional Govern-
ment. In less than eight months, it itself was overturned. Hoisted by popular dissatisfaction, the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917. The task of what was to be done with prostitution fell to them.
Not only did regulation of the trade have no place in the Soviet system, but in keeping with socialist theory linking prostitution with capitalism, for the first time it seemed possible to forecast prostitution's demise. Indeed, in 1918, at the Bolshevik-organized All-Russian Congress of Working Women, the elimination of prostitution was high on the agenda.[1] In the meantime though, prostitution endured, forcing socialist theory to confront a complex and painful reality. A utopian streak within the socialist movement had prevented consideration of how to cope with such stubborn "remnants" of "bourgeois" culture. The Bolsheviks, like most European social democrats, refused to imagine anything other than social class as an organizing principle for society. As Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders learned, however, the roots of prostitution were sunk even more deeply than those of capitalism. Continuing economic hardships, gender inequality, the sexual double standard, and the simple fact that commercial sex paid better than other forms of female labor, combined to keep prostitution a profitable trade for women.
During the period of War Communism (1918–21), Lenin's pithy admonition—"Return the prostitute to productive work, find her a place in the social economy"—partially materialized, as draconian labor and military conscriptions affected all of the Russian empire that fell under Bolshevik rule. To Aleksandra Kollontai and the 1919 Interdepartmental Commission on Prostitution, incorrigible prostitutes fell in the same category as labor deserters.[2] But when Lenin and the government retreated from the radicalism of War Communism in 1921, open prostitution predictably resurfaced, enlivened by social and economic dislocation and widespread unemployment during the New Economic Policy of the 1920s.
The Bolshevik leaders perceived the prostitute as a victim of economic and social oppression; she was a good woman who went bad because of circumstance. In that sense, she deserved pity and government solicitude. This took the form of policies directed against prostitu-
[1] Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 330. Quote from Petrograd prostitute on p. 371.
[2] Elizabeth Waters, "Victim or Villain: Prostitution in Post-revolutionary Russia," in Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Linda Edmondson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 163.
tion as a business, not prostitutes as individuals: theoretically the state targeted pimps, procurers, and brothelkeepers for prosecution. But local authorities understandably had trouble distinguishing between prostitutes and prostitution. They were known to "borrow the methods of struggle practiced by the tsarist police," such as roundups and arrests.[3]
Despite the sympathy that came her way, the prostitute was still considered a fount of disease and disorder, much as she had been seen by the Bolsheviks' tsarist predecessors. The presence of prostitutes on Soviet streets was an embarrassment to the socialist regime, just as the contagious sexual infections with which prostitutes were associated seemed to require active intervention. Soviet authorities fulfilled goals that had been articulated by doctors and abolitionists during the late Imperial period: they tackled venereal disease through broad programs of education and strove to make treatment accessible and nonstigmatizing. Yet the vision of prostitutes as serious dangers to public health did not abate.
As Richard Stites and Elizabeth Waters have suggested, the Soviet state vacillated between regarding the prostitute as a victim and treating her as a villain.[4] Both images were reflected in Bolshevik policies, which ranged in the 1920s from the paternalistic to the punitive. "Prophylactories"—sanitariums designed to train prostitutes in useful labor like the needle trades—were one example of the former.[5] Ironically, these institutions were reminiscent of the houses of mercy that the prerevolutionary socialists had scorned. Many of the inmates responded in kind, such as the woman who declared, "Who needs your sewing machines?"[6] As the House of Mercy and ROZZh had discovered and as the Soviets were beginning to realize, not all bad women were eager to be good.
By the beginning of Stalin's first five-year plan, official attitudes shifted in favor of repression. The "designation of the prostitute as a socially-dangerous element deserving punishment had triumphed."[7] Intolerance of prostitutes and broad employment opportunities during the period of rapid industrial growth (1928–41) did not fully eliminate prostitution, but they did succeed in driving it underground for several
[3] Volf M. Bronner, La lutte contre la prostitution en URSS (Moscow, 1936), pp. 30–31.
[4] See Waters, "Victim or Villain." The dichotomy is posed as "parasite" or "victim" in Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 373.
[5] See Bronner, La lutte, pp. 44–47.
[6] L. S. Fridland, S raznykh storon: prostitutsiia v SSSR (Berlin, 1931), pp. 60–61, quoted in Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 374.
[7] Waters, "Victim or Villain," p. 173.
decades. On the surface, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia appeared justified in its boast of having "liquidated" prostitution. The trade in women apparently took place only in the capitalist world, where female labor meant exploitation and abuse. In the optimistic tradition of The Communist Manifesto, the encyclopedia maintained that conditions which "engendered and nourished" prostitution had "disappeared" in socialist states.[8] But the glossy picture hid the fact that prostitution had not really vanished. One of the first revelations during Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure was the falsehood of that claim.
The twin polices of glasnost ' and perestroika gave rise to a more realistic assessment.[9] During the 1980s, it was acknowledged that prostitution in a variety of forms had not only survived under socialism, but had earned status among the young as a "prestigious" occupation.[10] At present, prostitutes in post-Soviet Russia can count their weekly earnings in valuable foreign currency or in millions of rubles, while other working women are lucky to earn wages in the thousands.[11] The gap in income spells the difference between access to nice clothes, home appliances, food, and foreign travel, and a life waiting in long lines for the bare necessities. With wages low and prices rising in the current Russian economy, prostitution is one of the few exits from a life of poverty and deprivation.[12] That, coupled with the persistence of a double standard of sexual morality and gender inequality in the workplace, gives it much in common with prostitution in the late Imperial period.[13]
[8] See "Prostitutsiia," Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (1970). According to Marx and Engels, "[T]he abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of . . . prostitution both public and private." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel H. Beer (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), p. 29.
[9] On recent views of prostitution, see Elizabeth Waters, "Restructuring the "Woman Question': Perestroika and Prostitution," Feminist Review (1989): 3–17; Waters, "Changing Views on Prostitution in the Gorbachev Era," Soviet Social Reality in the Mirror of Glasnost, ed. James Riordan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).
[10] A. A. Gabiani and M. A. Manuil'skii, "The Price of 'Love': A Study of Prostitutes in Georgia," The Soviet Review 30, no. 3 (May–June 1989): 71.
[11] A prostitute working in the hotels for foreign tourists can earn 200 dollars (as of mid-1994, 360,000 rubles) for one trick.
[12] Two Soviet women interviewed in a 1990 documentary for British television described prostitution as the sole means at their disposal for attaining happiness. Lichtenstein, "Prostitutki."
[13] Discussions and examples of the sexual double standard can be found in Lynne Atwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 109; Sergei Golod, "Sex and Young People," in Sex and Russian Society, ed. Igor Kon and James Riordan (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 138; Carola Hansson and Karin Liden, eds., Moscow Women (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 171; Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 238–39, 259.
The emergence of prostitution from the socialist underground poses a great dilemma for current authorities. In accord with longstanding traditions, they too view prostitutes as a threat to both public health and public order. The specter of syphilis has been supplanted by that of AIDS, whose incurable status is often invoked to justify active intervention, that is, policies recalling the three I's of identification, inspection, and incarceration.
Recent responses contain many familiar elements. A deputy minister of internal affairs, for example, added his voice to a chorus in favor of the forced testing of suspected carriers of disease.[14] To date, although the Russian government has not mandated statewide regulation, many local officials in and out of Russia have taken the initiative to deal with prostitution precisely in that way. In 1987, Soviet Russia (Sovetskaia Rossiia ) reported that the operations chief from Moscow's sixty-ninth precinct had a card catalog containing files on some 3,500 alleged prostitutes.[15] In Moscow, the police stage periodic roundups of the Russian women who frequent the expensive hotels. The women they haul in on suspicion of prostitution are brought to a local venereal disease clinic for mandatory medical inspections.[16] (Sadly, in a society where disposable needles are generally unavailable, blood tests for syphilis and AIDS pose at least as great a risk as unprotected sexual relations.) In Belarus, the Minsk police maintain a "special album containing photographs of all the [local] 'ladies.'"[17] Authorities in the Latvian capital of Riga have revived the three I's fully with their policy involving the registration of all women believed to be prostitutes, regular medical examinations, and forced treatment for women with sexually transmitted diseases.[18]
[14] Ted Koppel, "Sex in the Soviet Union," ABC production aired on December 19, 1990. A Lieutenant-Colonel V. Mikliaev has also promoted the establishment of a "morals police" (militsiia nravov ) in Moscow. L. Kislinskaia, "Prostitutsiia vyidet iz podpol'ia?" Moskovskii komsomolets (November 1, 1990).
[15] "A Hard Look at Prostitution in the USSR," The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 39, no. 11 (April 15, 1987): 1–5. I am grateful to Paul Goble for this reference.
[16] See Lichtenstein, "Prostitutki." Moscow registrations numbered 974 according to a 1989 interview conducted by A. Mosesov, "Poryv liubvi?" Sovetskaia kul'tura, no. 79 (July 4, 1989). An article later that year referred to 1,126 registered "elite prostitutes." See "Interdevochki 'v zakone,"' Moskovskaia pravda, no. 28 (November 28, 1989). My thanks to Sara Mebel' for these clippings.
[17] "Manners and Morals," The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 38, no. 41 (November 12, 1986): 21. Paul Goble also provided me with this reference.
[18] A "morals police" has been organized in Yalta as well. See "Moskva tozhe rekordsmen," Moskovskii komsomolets, no. 108 (June 7, 1991).
The resurrection of regulation in Russia and areas formerly in the Russian empire and Soviet Union reveals the way gender ideology has outlived some 150 years of stormy history. A huge circle has been closed—from the start of regulation in 1843 to its resumption in recent years. The convictions that undergirded the MVD's initiation of regulation in the mid-nineteenth century and sustained the yellow ticket until 1917 never disappeared completely; the best that can be said is that they met challenges in the revolutionary era. Even when regulation was abolished, the concept of bad women lived on, mitigated only by optimism in the early Soviet period that socialism would eventually make them good. Prostitution's tenacity suggested to Soviet authorities that something else was called for. In the 1920s, showing a singular lack of vision, they returned to the sewing machine as a means of salvation. Prostitution decreased during the Stalin and post-Stalin era, but given widespread poverty, the persistence of inequality at the workplace, the conditions of female labor, the sexual double standard, and the readiness of men to pay for sex, it has made a stunning comeback—and there is no more talk of it withering away. In trying to cope with prostitution as a social problem, contemporary Russian society is ignoring the lessons of history to repeat questions that were posed by tsarist officials of the late Imperial era. Ironically, economic want, gender ideology, and gender inequality are acting in concert to elicit similar answers.
Conclusion
In the 1840s, prostitution in Russia went from a moral offense to a frowned upon, albeit tolerated, activity. Fears for public health, a bureaucratic tradition of emulating central and western Europe, the ambitions of the minister of internal affairs, and the desire to manage women no longer under direct patriarchal controls all contributed to the development of regulation. The rules that governed it were based on ones created in Paris, but they also reflected peculiarly Russian circumstances, particularly the existence of serfdom and the need to maintain distance between the hallowed tsar and commercial vice. Regulation also evinced gender inequalities within Russian society and unquestioned acceptance of a double standard of sexual behavior that allowed for the regular quenching of what was seen as men's compelling sexual thirst.
From its inception, regulation was a confusing and contradictory system. Rules for "public women" were meant to protect public health, but they crossed over into moral territory when they proffered advice on how much makeup and perfume prostitutes should wear and when they attempted to protect prostitutes from exploitation by brothelkeepers. Though there were some efforts to survey the male clients of prostitutes, these attempts at disease prevention from more than one angle were subverted by an unwillingness to subject men from the upper classes to uncomfortable and embarrassing procedures. Similarly, prostitutes from the upper classes also tended to escape the strictures of the regulatory system. Moreover, the desire to protect "innocent" women of any social class from what was considered the humiliating pelvic exam interfered with regulation's mandate to monitor the "guilty." Perhaps
the best indicator of the contradictions inherent to regulation was the tsarist policy toward child prostitutes. Juveniles who engaged in prostitution were many at the turn of the century, judging by the anecdotal and statistical evidence. Yet authorities stopped short of subjecting underage women to regulation, for fear of yoking them to a life of prostitution and because they did not want to appear as party to the registration of children and young teenagers. As much as their moral reticence made sense, age limits on regulation necessarily left many prostitutes outside what were supposed to be the system's safeguards for public health.
The regulation of prostitution occurred in the context of a state that was both modernizing and, at the same time, attempting to retain its timebound political and social structure. Given these inherent contradictions, insofar as the effort to regulate prostitution was an expression of modernization, it was restrained by the dogged inefficiencies of a state that had not fully perfected its bureaucratic control. Difficulties in administering state policies in a country of such enormous size, poor communications, and relative technological backwardness strongly affected the nature of regulation in the Russian empire. One consequence was that, although it adhered to the general form of European-wide regulation, Russia's medical-police system operated in a context reminiscent of Gogol's play The Inspector General . Municipal and rural agencies in tsarist Russia had specific orders from St. Petersburg about how to control prostitution, but they often improvised policies that seemed best suited to local reality. As though they had taken lessons from Gogol's corrupt officials, policemen and doctors solicited bribes from prostitutes and brothelkeepers, harassed and took advantage of women in the lower classes, and administered medical examinations that worked to spread diseases as much as detect them. Where else but Russia could one find a morgue doubling as an examination point or a clinic in which the temperature would drop to five degrees Celsius during the winter?[1] Not unexpectedly, local officials also attempted to avoid the prying eyes of tsarist bureaucrats whenever possible.
Ill-conceived and inconsistent, regulation nevertheless defined how all women who engaged in commercial sex (and many who did not) would live their lives. Regulation, with all its onerous aspects, had a profound influence on the contours that prostitution in the Russian empire assumed, how prostitutes experienced their trade, and the way society viewed prostitution. When it came to women from the lower classes,
[1] Di-Sen'i and Fon-Vitte, Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor, p. 35.
the regulationist vision divided them into "clandestines" and "registered" prostitutes, a reflection of the suspicion that all women who worked for a wage sold sex along with their labor. The desire to bring all women who engaged in prostitution under the regulationist umbrella meant that many women who did not work as prostitutes were treated as such. Furthermore, the coercive and punitive nature of the regulatory system meant that most women who supplemented their wages with prostitution or even earned money at full-time commercial sex strove to stay outside regulation's purview.
In partial recognition of this, regulationists favored the state-licensed brothel as an ideal site for commercial sex. For them, the brothel was a controlled environment that made the women inside accessible not only to clients, but to physicians and policemen. For prostitutes, the brothel was a warm place to sleep and a source of rich food, plentiful drink, and even companionship. At the same time, brothel life involved sacrificing one's freedom, submitting to the brothelkeeper's schedule, encountering a greater risk of contagion, and facing oppression in the form of beatings and indebtedness. Critics at the turn of the century publicized the ugly aspects of brothel life, characterizing brothels as "dens of debauchery" and centers of disease, white slavery, debt peonage, alcohol abuse, and moral bankruptcy. The state had little ammunition to combat such accusations, and even showed signs of wavering its policies of toleration in response. Nonetheless, the rules for licensing remained on the books, a reflection both of bureaucratic lethargy and the fact that many cities had found ways to circumvent them on their own.
Regulation created a framework for prostitution prior to the advent of industrialization and urbanization in Russia. But it stood ready to greet the burgeoning male demand and female supply that accompanied these phenomena at century's end. Male demand for prostitution crossed class boundaries; its fulfillment was documented in surveys of student sexual behavior, in data on venereal diseases and their origins, and in demographic information attesting to the number of men without women in Russia's cities. But if demand transcended class, supply was firmly rooted among the female poor. Women who engaged in prostitution came from the peasantry and urban lower classes. They were conspicuous for their youth, for their lack of education, and for their general vulnerability. Prostitution for women was a choice, but social and economic factors usually determined who would have to make that choice.
When contemporary observers of prostitution asked why women be-
came prostitutes, it reflected their own incredulity over a woman's ability to engage in sex for money and their political attitudes toward regulation and larger political issues. Despite the statistical evidence on the poverty working women faced, some observers—most notably Veniamin Tarnovskii—rooted prostitution in a woman's tendencies toward vice and depravity. Others took the opposite tack, freeing women of any responsibility by blaming third parties like "white slave traders." Socialists blamed socioeconomic structures, and feminists added gender analysis to the equation, but so much so that these two groups overlooked a woman's own agency in her decision to engage in prostitution. That agency was nonetheless a key factor, as was seen in surveys that quizzed prostitutes about why they had entered the trade. Given the unrewarding conditions for women in the workplace, instead of asking why some women turned to prostitution it would have been more useful to ask why some did not. Though observers were well aware of the social and economic backgrounds of prostitutes, they nonetheless focused on their sexual histories, linking prostitution with questions of defloration, rather than labor.
Saving young women not only from prostitution but from illicit sex proved a popular activity at the turn of the century that could attract all but the radical Left to its bandwagon. Houses of mercy and branches of the Russian Society for the Protection of Women sprang up in cities all over the empire, with grand ambitions to prevent women from becoming prostitutes and to return prostitutes to a more "honest path." But the number of prostitutes who changed direction was small, particularly in comparison to the herculean effort of reformers. Part of the failure stemmed from the attractiveness of prostitution, given socioeconomic realities. The salvationists also hurt their own cause—by treating prostitution as a moral disease, not an economic option, and expecting their values to bridge the social gaps between themselves and young lower-class women. Also a hindrance was the connection between many salvationists and officialdom, which blurred the line separating friend and enemy. The socialist opposition was quick to point all this out, accusing salvationists of hypocrisy, but their approach proved equally bankrupt. Though they understood that prostitution was not a moral question, they overlooked its more sticky roots in gender inequalities.
Salvationist enterprises were well intended, but they also served to deepen the divisions that regulation made among lower-class women. By providing women in some Russian cities with alternatives to prostitution, salvationists could congratulate themselves for having opened
the door for all women to redemption. The ones who did not step through it seemed to prove what the regulationists were saying all along—that some women were indeed in need of monitoring and supervision.
Regulation became a focal point for general dissatisfaction with the state of things in Imperial Russia. Though educated Europeans had begun to focus on the problem of prostitution in the 1830s, Russia's intelligentsia did not address this question until the 1860s, and prostitution only became a major object of concern to the educated public after the turn of the century.[2] Society responded to prostitution and regulation partly because industrialization and urbanization were accompanied by the increased visibility of prostitutes in cities and towns. But the response also stemmed from the newfound voice that the intelligentsia was claiming for itself.
Not until the late nineteenth century had physicians in Russia become prominent as either supporters or opponents of regulation. Their late entrance reflects conditions peculiar to Russian history. Like everyone else in Russia—from the lowliest peasant to the richest noble—doctors were defined as servitors who owed their loyalty and livelihood to the state. Until the 1860s, virtually their sole source of income was the tsarist bureaucracy. It was only after the emancipation of the serfs and the creation of local bodies of self-government charged with, among other things, protecting public health, that physicians could begin to develop a professional sense independent of their role as servants of the state. Doctors had gained experience asserting themselves at medical congresses, as well as in their professional journals and at regional conferences organized by various specialists. According to Nancy Frieden, "By the 1880s, [Russian] physicians had emerged as a corporate group. They no longer accepted a traditional relationship to the state and to society at large, and sought new ways to assert their rights and gain prestige and status."[3]
In Russia, prostitution and regulation were perfect issues to engage the concern of physicians. The association between prostitution and venereal disease gave physicians an opportunity to claim professional expertise. Because venereal disease was perceived as a dire threat to public health, prostitution also gave rise to major policy implications. Physi-
[2] The various approaches to prostitution paralleled the way different groups within educated society dealt with the issue of alcohol abuse. See Hutchinson, "Science, Politics and the Alcohol Problem in Post-1905 Russia," pp. 232–54.
[3] See Frieden, Russian Physicians, p. 5; see also Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health .
cians hoped to see a form of regulation that conformed with more enlightened principles and adhered to the words of scientists about the transmission and prevention of diseases. On the strength of this one issue, physicians gained a rare opportunity to influence the state on broader questions. A similar phenomenon took place in Europe: physicians there also involved themselves in the "medicalization" of regulation, wresting it from the control of police officials.[4] Russian physicians, however, had less success in this area; control of regulation remained outside their grasp. Their attempts to reform regulation met peculiarly Russian obstacles—an uphill battle against the slow-moving bureaucracy and widespread ignorance about health care. In Russia, the contradiction between the ideals of public health and the reality of the regulation system loomed particularly large. To the Russian medical community, the government's role in regulation represented more interference from a bloated state that had never given doctors the professional autonomy they deserved.
Activists in municipal and district self-governing institutions also wanted to see the great fist of St. Petersburg lifted from local affairs so that they could be free to govern more humanely and efficiently. For them, the issue of prostitution served as an ideal rallying point in this regard. Although the central government ostensibly administered the regulation system, lack of funding and personnel gave district and city councils a relatively free hand in determining its local form. Debates over the implementation of regulation transpired under the umbrella of concern for pubfic health, but fundamental questions of political power and cultural values were often at stake. In concert with physicians, elected city officials sought ways to remove jurisdiction over the regulation of prostitution from the local police.
Like feminists in Europe, Russian feminists defined prostitution as the most extreme example of women's exploitation; to fight prostitution meant to fight male supremacy and the sexual double standard. But in Russia, women were especially constrained by laws that virtually prohibited divorce and blocked female independence. Feminists believed that legal restrictions not only increased the oppression of women in Russia, but also nurtured the growth of prostitution. Regulation, in particular, became a target of feminist indignation. By singling out
[4] One author has argued that the Italian public health bureaucracy succeeded "in partially 'medicalizing' the social control of prostitution, that is supplanting the police." Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, p. 250 n. 85.
women for medical inspections and "enserfing" them to prostitution, regulation represented an especially heinous form of sexual oppression. Consequently, when the Russian women's movement organized in 1905, the abolition of regulation was central to its agenda.
At the turn of the century, in an unusual convergence of thought, members of the Russian educated public saw fit to criticize regulation for failing to protect public health and binding women to prostitution. Many members of Russian society subscribed to European ideals of abolitionism, concluding that the whole system of medical-police controls should be dismantled in favor of deregulation. The attack on the regulatory system was well grounded, yet their proposed alternatives sounded naïve, if not subversive, to the ears of officials in the tsarist administration. In 1910, most of the participants at the congress against the trade in women vetoed regulation, but their voice fell on deaf ears. Although the state was no longer prepared to uphold brothel licensing, it would not countenance a complete end to the supervision of prostitutes. The alternative—participation by civil society in a mass education campaign—reeked of everything the autocratic system deplored and could not withstand.
It was not that the Ministry of Internal Affairs harbored any illusions about regulation's effectiveness. For one thing, it was embarrassing for an Orthodox Christian state to have involved itself in the sanction of open prostitution. For another, regulation's shortcomings had become obvious even to its most loyal advocates. With this in mind, tsarist officials solicited assistance from the medical profession and gave dumas and zemstvos unusual jurisdiction in the hopes of seeing regulation meet scientific and humanitarian standards. But the officials' attitude was one of slow and cautious reform. The deep conviction that women who engaged in prostitution had to be subjected to control underlay all efforts in the Ministry of Internal Affairs designed to reform the regulatory system. Wedded to the ideology of gender that launched regulation in the first place and fearful of losing control over prostitutes and confronting even greater epidemics of venereal disease, they instead sought to rid the system of its more abusive aspects and improve its medical side. Yet here they met peculiarly Russian obstacles—the impossibility of motivating the tremendous bureaucracy of which they were a part, the lack of funding for public health, and the woefully inadequate system of hospitals and medical care. They also faced a political predicament. As soon as they officially acknowledged regulation's failures, they had to enlist the assistance of civil society, thereby finding themselves
negotiating and compromising with some of the autocracy's most implacable enemies. Consequently, regulation hobbled along, neither protecting public health nor saving society from what was perceived as the moral danger of prostitution. The failure of both the opponents of regulation and the government reformers to realize their goals attests to the difficulties of enacting reforms in Imperial Russia.
While doctors, local representatives, moralists, feminists, bureaucrats, and socialists debated the meaning of prostitution and regulation, the prostitutes simply went about their business. They knew instinctively what their social betters failed to realize—that prostitution was a job, and that so long as there was an Ivan who was looking to pay for sex, there would be a Sonia—or her daughter—ready to sell it.
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Kantseliariia Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika, f. 569: op. 13, d. 91, "Delo po bor'be s torgom zhenshchin i ego prichinami"; op. 13, d. 726, "Ustav S.-Peterburgskago doma miloserdiia"; op. 13, d. 1272, "Otchet o deiatel'nosti Petrogradskago doma miloserdiia (1915)."
Vrachebnoe otdelenie S.-Petersburgskago gubernskago pravleniia, f. 255: op. 1, d. 852, "Po tsirkuliarnomu predlozheniiu Meditsinskago departamenta ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei."
Tsentral'Nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (TSGIA)
Gosudarstvennaia Duma, f. 1278: op. 2, d. 3476, "Zhurnaly komissii po sudebnym reformam"; op. 114, d. 225, "Delo o ravnopravii zhenshchin."
Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405: op. 542, d. 671, "Po proektu polozheniia o povodakh k razvodu"; op. 542, d. 1303, "Po voprosu o bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami v tseliakh razvrata."
Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (MVD), Departament obshchikh del, f. 1284: op. 188, d. 6, "Ob ustavakh utverzhdennykh mestnymi gubernskimi vlastiami"; op. 188, d. 9, "Po raznym predmetam i khodataistvom"; op. 188, d. 135, "O pervom vserossiiskom s"ezde po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami"; op. 194,
d. 62, "S kopieiu vsepoddaneishago otcheta po S.-Peterburgskomu gradonachal'stvu za 1902 g."
MVD, Glavnoe upravleniia po delam mestnago khoziaistva (GUDMKh), f. 1288: op. 12, d. 1622, "O priniatii mer protiv zaneseniia sifilisa i venericheskikh boleznei voiskami v deistvuiushchuiu armiiu, June 1, 1905–April 6, 1906"; op. 13, d. 4, "Ob organizatsii bol'nichnago dela v S.-Peterburge 1907–1913 gg."; op. 13, d. 5, "Ob izdanii programmy dlia fel'dsherskikh i akushersko-fel'dsherskikh shkol (1906–1910 gg.)"; op. 14, d.74, "O naznachenii denezhnago posobiia S.-Peterburgskomu obshchestvu popecheniia o molodykh devitsakh"; op. 14, d. 108, "Po proektu E. I. Karachunskago ob uchrezhdenii pravitel'stvennykh spravochnykh kontor o prisluge (May 31, 1905–January 13, 1906)"; op. 14, d. 144a, "O vydache denezhnago posobiia popechitel'nomu obshchestvu o trudovom ubezhishche dlia besprizornykh devochek v S.-Peterburge"; op. 14, d. 152, "Po voprosu o soobshchenii Ministerstvu Inostrannykh Del razlichnago raba svedenii kasaiushchikhsia obshchestvennago prizreniia v Rossii"; op. 14, d. 166b, "O vydache denezhnago posobiia popechitel'nomu obshchestvu o trudovom ubezhishche dlia besprizomykh devochek v Petrograde."
MVD, Meditsinskii departament, f. 1297: op. 278, d. 100, "O predstavlenii vrachebno-politseiskimi uchrezhdeniiami svedenii o chisle zhenshchin vol'nago povedeniia domov terpimosti"; op. 291, d. 7, "Po meditsinskomu otchetu S.-Peterburgskoi gubernii za 1892 g."; op. 291, d. 19, "Po meditsinskomu otchetu S.-Peterburgskoi gubernii 15 avgusta 1894–12 maia 1895."; op. 292, d. 29, "Po meditsinskomu otchetu Moskovskoi gubernii 1894. g."; op. 292, d. 66, "Po meditsinskomu otchetu S.-Peterburgskoi gubernii 1884 g."
MVD, Meditsinskii sovet, f. 1294: op. 10/3, d. 269, "Zhurnaly Meditsinskago soveta."
MVD, Upravlenie glavnago vrachebnago inspektora (UGVI), f. 1298: op. 1, d. 1730, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," June 1910–December 1911; op. 1, d. 2332, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," January 1912–March 1913; op. 1, d. 2400, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," January 5, 1915–February 7, 1917.
Popechitel'nyi sovet zavedenii obshchestvennago prizreniia v S.-Peterburge, f. 760: d. 1557, "O vvedenii ambulatornago lecheniia pri Kalinkinskoi bol'nitse (1879)"; d. 1771, "Ob uvelichenii chisla sifiliticheskikh bol'nykh i o merakh protiv sego."
Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin (ROZZh), f. 1335: d. 1, "Zhurnal zasedaniia Komiteta Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin 28-go oktiabria 1903 g."; d. 2, "Otchet o deiatel'nosti ROZZh za 1900–1901 gg."; d. 3, "Otchety otdela popecheniia ob evreiskikh devushkakh g. S.-Peterburga za 1905 i 1906 gg."; d. 4, ROZZh v 1909 g."; d. 27, "Pis'ma na imia kaznacheia obshchestva E. A. Vattela o sbore chlenskikh vsnosov"; d. 28, "Anketa otdela bor'by s vovlecheniem zhenshchin v razvrat."
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Index
A
Abolitionist movement:
feminist stance on, 273 -74, 280
intelligentsia's support of, 11 , 266 , 267 -68
as modified regulation, 274
moralist sentiments of, 272 -73, 292 -93
opposition to, 11 , 278 -79, 281 , 282 , 283 -84, 285
physicians' role in, 269 -71
and Pokrovskaia's resolution, 284 , 285 , 287 , 290
reasons for failure of, 291 , 292 -93, 295 , 308
See also Anti-licensing movement
Abortions, 76 , 103 n
About the Fallen (O padshikh, Pokrovskaia), 277
Acton, William, 17 n
Age:
at defloration, 105
of prostitutes, 98 -100, 149
AIDS, 300
Aizenshtein (salesclerk), 118
Akhlestyshev, Major-General, 19
Akhsharumov, Dmitrii, 271
Alcoholism, 76 -77
Aleksandrovsk, 205 , 262 n
Alexander, John, 14 n
Alexander, Priscilla, 218
Alexander II, 192
All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women and Its Causes (1910):
abolitionist opposition at, 278 , 279 , 281 , 282 , 283 -84, 285
abolition resolution of, 123 -24, 280 , 284 , 285 , 287 , 290
anti-licensing sentiment at, 178 , 281
Borovitinov vs. Pokrovskaia at, 284 -87
characterizations of prostitutes at, 224 -25, 282 , 291
on client issues, 49 -50, 287 -88
disregard for, 11 , 288 -90
participants at, 278 -79
police confrontations at, 222 -24
problematic organizing of, 217 -18
on women's labor issues, 113 , 223 , 225 -26
working-class representation at, 219 -22, 223 , 226
See also Working-class delegates
All-Russian Congress of Working Women, 297
All-Russian League for the Equal Rights of Women, 59 , 220 , 224 , 273 , 280 , 284 n
All-Russian Women's Congress, 277
Alphonsenpogrom, 186
Andreev, Leonid, 74 , 229 , 230
Anna, Empress, 14
Anti-licensing movement:
basis of, 175 -76
brothelkeepers' reaction to, 178 , 179 -80, 181 -82
bureaucratic support of, 176 -78
and clandestine prostitution, 188
neighborhood residents in, 178 -79, 180 , 183 , 184,186 -87
UGVI's role in, 182 -83, 184 , 185
See also Abolitionist movement
Antisemitism, 10 , 161 -62, 165 , 166
Archangel, 184
Arkhangel'skaia, Vera I., 76 n
Artsimovich, Anna, 204 n
Astrakhan, 61 , 73 , 100 , 272 n
B
Baar, Tat'iana, 69 , 196 -97
Baku, 60 -61, 77 , 152 , 158
Baltic regions, 98
Baranov, Aleksandr, 154
Bebel, August, 121 , 225
Bek, Georgii M., 221 , 223 -24, 225 , 226 , 227 -28
Bekhterev, Vladimir, 46 -47, 273
Bekman factory, 186
Belarus, 300
Beletskii, S. P., 217 , 222 , 223 , 225 n, 287 , 288
Bentovin, Boris:
on brothel lesbianism, 172 -73, 174 -75
on child prostitution, 42 , 43 -44
on female abolitionists, 288 -89
on hospitalization, 55 , 69
on prostitute's decline, 77
on ROZZh, 196 n, 198
Berezovskii (Duma deputy), 163
Berlin, 25 n, 98 , 108 n
Bertenson, L. B., 261 n
Bessarabia province, 164 , 256
Betskoi, Ivan, 193 n
Biller, S. A., 191
"Black Hundreds" city council (Kharkov), 184
Blok, Aleksandr, 86 , 98
Blokh, Peisokh, 180 -81
Blueffstein, Sendele, 163 -64
Bobruisk, 166 , 262 n
Bolsheviks, 289 , 297 -98
See also Socialists
Borodina, Aleksandra, 217 n
Borovitinov, Mikhail:
abolitionist opposition by, 279 , 281 , 283 -84, 285
on Medical Council commission, 247 , 282
at 1910 congress, 220 -21
Pokrovskaia vs., 284 -87
on ROZZh scandal, 201
Brandt, Allan M., 8 n, 294
Brinkman, J. P., 16 n
Bristow, Edward, 163 -64, 165
Brothelkeepers (soderzhatel'nitsy ):
anti-licensing reaction by, 178 , 179 -80, 181 -82
background investigations of, 27
beatings by, 148 , 154 -55
financial exploitation by, 155 -58, 159 , 161
Jews as, 161 -66
prostitutes' identification with, 160
responsibilities/obligations of, 22 -23, 26 -27, 159
Brothel prostitutes:
advantages of, 187 , 304
age of, 99 -100, 149
beatings and rape of, 148 , 154 -55
brothelkeepers' relationship with, 23 , 26 -27
clients per night of, 149 -50
enslavement of, 10 , 147 -49
financial exploitation of, 155 -58, 159 , 161
financial protection measures for, 157 -60
lesbianism of, 172 -75
literacy of, 100
medical examinations of, 23 , 145 , 150 -51
public perception of, 146 -47
venereal disease of, 150 , 175
See also Clandestine prostitutes; Odinochki; Prostitutes; Registered; prostitutes
Brothels:
alcoholic beverages in, 76 , 151
anti-licensing sentiment against, 175 -76, 177 -80, 281
client types in, 90 , 154
competition between, 179 -81
congress on syphilis on, 146
daily schedule of, 151 -52
during fairtime, 114 n, 155 -56
living conditions in, 152 -54
location/function of, 15 , 27 -28
male needs and, 92 , 145
MVD rules on, 22 -23
neighborhood residents and, 178 -79, 180 , 183 , 184 , 186 -87
non-Russian prostitutes in, 98
Odessa's proposal on, 257 , 258 -59
official support of, 144 -45
repressive laws against, 13 -15
rituals and songs in, 167 -71
white slavery's link-age to, 10 , 147 -49
Brower, Daniel R., 30 n, 90 , 252 n
Brussels international congress (1899), 45 , 237 , 291
Bubnova, Mariia, 204 n
Buenos Aires, 165
Butler, Josephine, 293
C
Capitalism: prostitution and, 106 -7, 121 -22, 125 -26, 128 , 142 , 232 , 299
Catherine the Great, 8 , 15 , 16 n
Cauterization treatment, 66
Chancroid, 88 -89
Charitable societies. See Rehabilitation institutions
Charitable Society of Kalinkin Municipal Hospital (Blagotvoritel'noe obshchestvo pri kalinkinskoi gorodskoi bol'nitse), 193
Chekhov, Anton, 11 , 153 , 213 , 230
Chenstokhov, 145
Chernigov, 272
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 212 , 213 , 231 n
Chevalier, Louis, 17 n
Chichikov (from Dead Souls ), 181
Chief Prison Administration, 201
Child prostitution:
compulsory internment for, 276 , 277 , 288
eroticism of, 43 -44
House of Mercy for, 192
MVD policies on, 44 -46, 83 , 99 , 214 , 303
reasons for, 42 , 44
Chlenov, Mikhail, 75 , 89 , 230 n, 276 n, 279 , 283 , 288 , 290 , 291
Circular 1611: procedural reforms of, 250 -51, 256 -57, 260 , 263 -64, 271 -72
Clandestine prostitutes (tainye prostitutki ):
brothel abolition and 188
children's status as, 45
fear of infection from 48 , 50 , 52
housing exploitation of, 32
recruitment of, 54 -55
as statistically widespread, 47 -48
wage earners as, 52 -54
See also Brothel prostitutes; Odinochki; Prostitutes; Registered prostitutes
Clarke, Walter, 294 n
Class structure: regulation and, 4 , 9 , 21 , 24 , 38 -39, 303 -4
Clients:
medical examinations of, 49 -50, 253
per night, 149 -50
proposed prosecution of, 287 -88
socialists as, 229 -30
upper-class, 106 -7
working-class, 90 , 91
Clinics, 57 -60, 63
See also Hospitals
Committee of Ministers, 18 -19
Committee of the ROZZh (Komitet), 213 -15, 220 , 222
The Communist Manifesto,299
Congress against alcoholism (1910), 220 , 278 , 279
Congress for the Discussion of Measures against Syphilis in Russia (1897):
on brothels, 146
on hospitalization, 66 , 69
on medical examinations, 52 , 240 , 241
Ministry of War and, 259 , 260
MVD's reaction to, 247 -48, 250 -51
participants at, 234 , 236 table
regulation recommendations by, 237 -38, 242 -45
on venereal disease, 234 -35, 238 , 239
Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women. See All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women and Its Causes
Congress on the White Slave Traffic (1899, London), 36 , 70 , 162 , 203 -4
Contagious Diseases Act (Great Britain), 270 , 293
The Contemporary Structure and Prostitution (Sovremennyi stroi i prostitutsiia, Gremiachenskii) 114
Corbin, Alain, 17 n, 27 n, 51 -52n, 145 , 166 , 172
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 114
The Cruel City (Zhestokii gorod, Dneprov), 91 -92
D
The Dark (Andreev), 229
Death rates, 77 -78
Defloration, 102 -6
Dement'eva, Aleksandra, 73 , 76 , 219 n, 282 , 291
Department of General Affairs, 217
Department of Police, 30 , 178 , 217 , 247
Depp, Raisa, 117 , 123 , 125 , 136 -37, 142
Deriuzhinskii, Vladimir, 204 n, 213 -14
Dermatological Society (Odessa), 257
Diatroptov, P. N., 257 -58
Di-Sen'i, Nikolai, 214 , 262 , 263 , 279 , 282 , 288 , 290 , 291
Dmitrievsk 148 -49
Dolgorukova, Princess Mariia, 203
Domestic servants:
as clandestine prostitutes, 52 , 53 -54
as former occupation, 107 -8, 116 , 228
working conditions of, 108 -10, 111 , 225
Dormitory housing, 205 -9
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 11 -12, 114
Drawing the devil (rite), 167 -68
Dril,' Dmitrii A., 125 , 220 , 221 , 222 , 223 , 224 , 225 n, 226
Dubrovskii, A.:
demographic survey of, 74 , 96 , 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 , 103 -4
on former occupations, 107 , 111 , 114
Duma activists, 252 , 255 -56, 271 -72, 307
Dumskaia Square (Kiev), 42
Dunia (hospital inmate), 174
Dvinsk brothels, 179 , 180 , 181 , 182
Dvorkina, Gita, 179
E
Earnings:
from prostitution, 119 , 138 , 244
of working-class women, 108 , 112 , 113 , 115 , 118
Education level, 100 -101, 113
Ekaterinoslav, 188
Elets, 262 n
Elistratov, Arkadii I., 14 n, 49 , 72 -73, 106 , 109 , 116 , 281 , 282
El'tsina, Zinaida, 69 , 78 , 79 , 269 n, 279 , 282 , 283 , 289 , 290 , 291
El'tsinskii, V. I., 270
Engel, Barbara, 103 n, 105 n, 116 , 117
Engelhardt, Baroness Mariia von, 204 n
Engels, Friedrich, 121
Engelstein, Laura, 18 , 29 n, 75 n, 172 n
English Ladies' National Association, 293
Eniseisk, 260 n, 261
Erazm, Ermolai, 76 n
Estate system, 6 , 7
Estliand (now Estonia), 100
Europe:
abolitionist movement in, 267
regulation in, 4 -5, 15 , 16 n, 17 , 30 n, 238 , 291
Evans, Richard, 268 n
Evening Times (Vechernee vremia ), 59
F
Fairtime, 114 , 155 -56
"Fallen" (brothel song), 168 -69
Fedorov, Aleksandr:
on brothels, 145
on defloration, 104 , 105
on medical examinations, 51 -52, 57 , 59 , 151
on medical-police agents, 55
prostitute motivation survey by, 128 , 129 , 130 -31 table, 134 , 137 -38, 139 -40, 142
on prostitutes, 30 , 44 , 77 , 81 , 92 , 96 , 97 -98, 101
Female factory workers, 51 -52, 53 -54, 114 -17, 141 , 142 , 212
See also Working-class women
Female trade labor, 53 , 111 -14, 117
See also Working-class women
Feminists:
abolitionist stance of, 273 , 274 , 280 , 293
on causes of prostitution, 123 , 124 -26, 128 , 142 , 305
regulation criticism by, 280 , 307 -8
Flexner, Abraham, 25 n, 58 n
Fon-Anrep, Vasilii, 122 -23, 220 , 223 , 226 , 250
Fon-Vitte, Georgii, 262 , 263
Foucault, Michel, 19 n, 71 n
Fournier, Alfred, 74
France:
medical examinations in, 57 n, 58 n
prostitution in, 16 -17, 72 , 145 n, 150 n, 172
regulation rules in, 4 , 21 , 270
Fridlander Pharmacy (St. Petersburg), 67
Frieden, Nancy, 306
G
Gapon, Georgii, 229 n
Gardner, Ekaterina, 204 n
Garment trades, 112 -13
Gender system:
male unification under, 92 -93
prostitution's expression of, 9 , 85 -86, 231 -32
regulation's institutionalization of, 3 , 9 , 18 , 27 , 38 -39, 85 , 273 -74, 302
Germany, 98
Gibson, Mary, 51 , 307 n
Gintsburg, Baron Aleksandr, 161 n, 165
Gintsburg, Baron Goratsii, 210
Glasnost', 299
Glickman, Rose, 93 , 108 n, 112 -13, 117 , 118 n, 227
Gogol, Nikolai, 2 , 11 , 303
Golitsyna, Princess Ol'ga A. (née Shcherbatova), 193
Golovacheva, Zinaida A., 221 , 226
Goncharov, Petr G., 221 , 225 , 226
Gonorrhea, 40 , 62 , 74 , 88 -89
See also Venereal disease
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 299
Gorky, Maxim, 229 -30
Gratsianov, Petr:
on child registration, 45 -46
humane treatment by, 70 , 71
on Jewish prostitution, 159 , 165 -66
medication by, 67
municipal authority of, 244 , 249 , 254 n
on physician autonomy, 245
on prostitutes, 31 , 32 , 94 -95, 155 , 159 -60
Gratsianskii, Petr, 270
Great Britain, 17 n, 25 n, 270 -71, 293 , 294
The Great Evil (Velikoe zlo, Chlenov), 75
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia,299
Greg, W. R., 17 n
Grigor'ev, A. G., 259
Grodno, 205 n
GUDMKh (Main Administration for Local Economic Affairs), 260 -61
Gurevich, Anna, 126 , 223
H
Hague, The, 271
Halfway houses. See Rehabilitation institutions
Hanchett, Walter, 248 n, 249 n
Harsin, Jill, 62 , 152 n, 172
Hirsh, Baron, 165
Holy Trinity Community of the Sisters of Mercy (Sviato-Troitskaia obshchina sester miloserdiia), 191 -92
Horizon (from Iama ), 162 , 165
Hospitals:
conditions in, 63 -66
prostitutes' resistance in, 65 -66, 67 -69, 70 -71
reform programs in, 69 -70
treatment in, 66 -67
House of Mercy (St. Petersburg), 79
disciplined lifestyle at, 195 -96, 197 -98, 201
financial problems of, 192 -93
former occupation statistics from, 97 , 108 -9, 111 , 112 , 114 -15, 117 , 118
inmate resis-
tance at, 198 -99
judging inmate behavior at, 194 , 199 , 200
as registration alternative, 73 , 215 , 232
rehabilitation record of, 194 , 195 , 199
House of Mercy's Board of Trustees (Popechitel'nyi komitet), 136
House of Mercy Survey (1910):
economic focus of, 136 -37
on prostitute motivation, 44 , 129 , 131 , 133 -34
table, 139 , 140
House of Mercy Survey from Medical Police Registration Records (1910):
on prostitute motivation, 135
table, 136 , 137 , 139
Houses of prostitution (doma terpimosti or publichnye doma ). See Brothels
"How Prostitutes Are Manufactured" ("Kak fabrikuiutsia prostitutki," Balabanova), 112
Hutchinson, John, 243n , 290 n
Hutchinson, Jonathan, 74
Hygiene rules, 21 , 22 -23, 26
I
Iakobii, A. I., 271
Iakubovskaia (brothelkeeper), 148 , 149
Iama (Kuprin), 50 , 74 -75, 162 , 213 , 274
Iamburg, 68
Iaransk, 73
Iaroslavl brothels, 185
Imperial Academy of Military Medicine, 36 n, 38 , 126 , 270
Imperial Russia:
anti-brothel sentiment in, 177 -79
and Congress on the White Slave Traffic, 203 -4
health care system in, 292
industrialization in, 7 , 17 , 90 -91
patriarchal traditions of, 6 , 17 -18
peculiarities of prostitution in, 6 -9
tenacity of regulation in, 3
Independent prostitutes. See Odinochki
India, 43
Industrialization:
prostitution and, 4 , 5 -6, 8 , 90 -91
in Russia vs. Europe, 7 , 17
The Inspector General (Gogol), 148 , 303
Intelligentsia, 11 , 266 , 267 -68, 287 , 306
Interdepartmental Commission on Prostitution (1919), 297
International Abolitionist Federation (Mezhdunarodnyi soiuz abolitsionistov), 136 , 271
"In the Fog" ("V tumane," Andreev), 74
Irkutsk, 56 , 184 , 205 n, 260 n
Italy, 51 , 98 , 270
Iur'ev (now Tartu), 89 , 262 n
Iurevich, Sergei, 204 n
Ivanova, Zinaida M., 221 , 223 , 225 , 226
J
Jews:
defloration of, 103 -4
and prostitute marriages, 159
prostitution and, 10 , 161 -66
ROZZh facilities for, 210 -11
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Radishchev), 15
K
Kalacheva, Elizaveta, 209
Kaliagina, Anna, 67 -68
Kalinkin Hospital:
conditions in, 57 , 58 n, 64 -65
discipline at, 70 -71
origins of, 14
prostitutes at, 55 , 173 -74
reform programs in, 69
transfer to, 63
Kalmykov, M. A., 78 , 79
Kamenskii (medical-police agent), 34
Katia (hospital inmate), 174
Kazan, 34 , 78 , 154 , 193 , 245 , 272
Kazan Society for the Protection of Unfortunate Women (Obshchestvo zashchity neschastnykh zhenshchin), 154 , 155 n, 190 , 203 n
Kharkov, 66 , 88 , 176 , 180 , 181 , 205 , 245 , 271
Kherson province, 163 , 164
Khvostov, A. N., 222 n
Kiev, 42 , 148 , 185 , 206 , 213
Kishinev, 256
Kleigels, Lieutenant-General, 157 , 190
Kobrin, 92
Kollontai, Aleksandra M., 46 , 121 -22, 142 , 219 -20, 224 , 229 , 297
Konopleva, Serafima, 197 , 198 , 200
Kostroma, 117
Kovno, 166
Kozakevich-Stefanovskii, Elena, 204 n
Krasnoe Selo, 92
Krasnoiarsk, 56 , 260 n
The Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy), 125
Kronstadt, 92 , 178 , 182
Kuprin, Aleksandr, 50 , 74 -75, 98 n, 153 n, 231 n
Kuznetsov, A. A., 122 , 123 , 142 , 220 -21
L
Labor colony (koloniia truda ), 209 -10
Labor unions, 8 , 225 -26, 227
Ladies' National Association (Great Britain), 268 , 293
Laferm tobacco factory, 115
Lambert, Countess E. E., 192
Law Code of 1649, 13 n
League for the Equal Rights of Women. See All-Russian League for the Equal Rights of Women
Lenin, Vladimir, 218 , 273 , 297
Lesbianism, 172 -75
Letnik, L. M., 257
Letzki, Shilem, 164
Ligovka dormitory, 206 -7, 210
Literacy, 100 -101, 113
Liuba (from The Dark ), 229
Lombroso, Cesare, 126
Lower-class women. See Working-class women
Ludwig (Liudvig) organization, 162
M
Maccabees, 161
Madams. See Brothelkeepers
Magdalene Shelter (Magdalinskoe ubezhishche), 191
Males:
gender system's unification of, 92 -93
medical examinations of, 24 , 38 -39, 240
premarital/extramarital sex by, 86 -88, 91
as prostitute's first partner, 106 -7
prostitution dependency of, 86 , 145 , 304
as sexually active students, 88 -90
sexual maturity of, 276
Malinovskii, Leonid N., 247 , 291
Mania (hospital inmate), 173 -74
Margulies, Manuil, 83 , 257 , 282 , 292
Mariia Nikolaevna, 192
Mariupol', 68
Martynov Hospital (Nizhnii Novgorod), 65
Marxists. See Socialists
Maslova (from Resurrection ), 110 -11
Maslovskii, N. N., 241 , 242
Masturbation, 87
Matiushenskii, A. I., 77
Maza, Sara, 51 -52n
Medical Council (Ministry of Internal Affairs), 16 n, 36 , 146 , 177 , 261
Medical Council Commission (1899):
regulation recommendations by, 247 -49, 250 -51, 252 , 285
Medical Department (Ministry of Internal Affairs), 19 , 20 , 146 , 162 , 220 , 249 , 250 -51
Medical examinations:
avoidance of, 59 -60
in brothels, 23 , 145 , 150 -51
of clients, 49 -50, 253
as congress on syphilis topic, 240 , 241 -42
of elite prostitutes, 33 , 302
following deregistration, 73
in hospitals/clinics, 56 -59
MVD rules on, 21 , 23 -24
in post-Soviet Russia, 300
of working class, 23 -24, 51 -52, 240
Medical-police agents:
avoidance of, 53
European tradition of, 15 -16, 303
reduced role for, 238 -39, 248 -49, 250 -51, 258 , 259 , 261 -62
registration tactics of, 28 -29, 30 -31, 33 -36, 37 -38, 55 -56
salaries of, 35 -36, 253
Medical-police committees (vrachebnopolitseiskie komitety):
child prostitution policies of, 44 -45
under Circular 1611, 251
creation of, 20 , 255 , 256
financial protection measures by, 157 -60
MVD violations by, 262
philanthropies and, 215
role of, 2 , 29
Medical-police lists. See Registration
Medical-police physicians. See Physicians
The Medical-Police Surveillance of Prostitution Promotes the Degeneration of the Nation (Pokrovskaia), 277
Medical-Police Surveillance of Urban Prostitution (Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor za gorodskoi prostitutsiei , Fon-Vitte and DiSen'i, eds.), 61 , 262 , 282
Melik-Pashaev, Arutiun, 152 , 153 , 156 , 158
Menstruation, 21 , 75 -76
Mercury treatment, 64 , 66 -67
Miasnitskaia Hospital (Moscow), 65 , 194
Mikhel'son, A. F., 191
Military, 90 , 92 , 240 , 257 , 259 -60, 294
Miliukov, Paul, 274
Miliukova, Anna, 4 -9, 225 , 229 , 274 , 287 , 292 -93
Ministry of Agriculture, 209
Ministry of Education, 278
Ministry of Finance, 30 , 90 , 92
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 165
Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD):
on abolitionist resolution, 290
anti-licensing campaign and, 176 -77, 185 -86
child prostitution policies of, 44 , 46 , 83 , 99 , 176 -77, 216 -17
and Circular 1611, 250 -51, 264
cities' noncompliance with, 262 -63
compromise policy of, 2 , 29 -30
corruption investigations by, 35 -36, 148 -49
and 1897 congress recommendations, 246 , 250 -51, 259 -60
on prostitution
cause, 123
reform stance of, 247 , 264 -65, 308 -9
regulation rules of, 9 , 20 , 21 , 22 -24, 26 , 33
on rehabilitation, 201 n
toleration policy of, 15 -16
venereal disease reports to, 19
wartime emergency response by, 260 -61
Ministry of Justice, 220 , 278
Ministry of Trade, 278
Ministry of War, 259 , 260
Minsk, 31 , 166 , 205 , 243 , 262 n, 300
Minsk municipal hospital, 70 , 71
Minsk province, 164
Minsk sanitary commission, 34 , 37 , 67 , 71 , 158 -60, 243 , 244 , 249
Mirovich, Zinaida, 220 , 224 n, 226 , 282
Miule, Anna, 68
Moralists: anti-regulation stance of, 272 -73, 292 -93
Moroccan brothel, 25 , 149 n, 150 n
Moscow:
abolitionist movement in, 271
brothels in, 150 , 153 , 183 , 188
municipal duma, 248
prostitution in, 1 , 32 , 91 , 108 , 110
regulation issues in, 35 -36, 248 -49
ROZZh in, 193
Moscow Society of Physicians, 288
Moscow Women's Club, 284 n
Municipal jurisdiction:
abuses under, 244
Circular 1611 on, 251 , 263 -64
MVD's recommendations on, 247 , 248 -50, 254 , 262 , 264
Odessa's proposal on, 257 -59
physicians' support of, 242 -43, 244 -45
St. Petersburg's proposal on, 252 -55
Tomsk's proposal on, 255 -56
Musin-Pushkin, Count Vladimir, 203 , 214
Musin-Pushkina, Countess Elizaveta, 69
MVD. See Ministry of Internal Affairs
N
Nadzor (supervision or surveillance), 19
See also Regulation
Narva, 57 , 62 n, 68 , 179 , 180 -81, 182 -83
Nationality statistics, 97 -98
Nechaeva, Ol'ga, 204 n
"A Necessary Institution of the Capitalist World" (Bebel), 121
"A Nervous Breakdown" (Chekhov), 153 , 213
Nevel' brothel, 179
New Aleksandrovsii Market, 118
New Economic Policy, 297
New Russia (Novaia Rus '), 118
New Times (Novoe vremia ), 286
Nicholas I, 16 , 17 , 28 , 192
Nicholas II, 204 , 246 n, 296
Nikolaevsk, 61
Niusha (hospital inmate), 173 -74
Nizhnii Novgorod, 33 , 35 , 67 , 69 -70, 114 , 155 -56, 193 , 277
Northwest Word (Severno-zapadnoe slovo ), 33 -34
Nötzel, Karl, 106 -7n
Novozybkovsk, 271
O
Oboznenko, Petr:
on brothel clients, 154
on clinic examinations, 59 -60
on defloration, 104 , 105
on former occupations, 107 , 111 -12, 114
prostitute motivation survey by, 117 , 129 , 132
table, 134 , 136 , 137 -38, 139 , 140 -41
on prostitutes, 53 , 54 -55, 79 -81, 96 , 98 , 103 , 165
on regulation, 272
on rehabilitation, 193 , 195 , 197 , 202 , 207
in ROZZh, 214
on venereal disease, 62 , 74 , 253
Odessa:
alcohol consumption in, 77
housing dormitories in, 206
prostitution in, 153 , 162 , 163 , 166 , 183
regulation in, 31 , 257 , 258 -59, 264 , 265
ROZZh in, 193 , 205
Odessa city governor, 19 , 31 , 183 , 257 , 258 -59
Odessa Society for the Protection of Public Health, 152 , 257 , 277
Odinochki (independent prostitutes):
age/education of, 99 -100
under Circular 1611, 251
number of clients per night, 149
housing exploitation of, 32
Jews as, 164 , 211
medical examinations of, 21 , 59 , 60
See also Brothel prostitutes; Clandestine prostitutes; Prostitutes; Registered prostitutes
"Oh Mother!" (brothel song), 170 -71
Okorokov, V. P., 271
Ol'denburgskaia, Princess Evgeniia, 203 , 204 , 213 , 214
Ol'denburgskii, Prince Aleksandr, 203
Onchukova, M. S., 101 , 150 , 152 , 153 , 154 , 156 -57
On the Binding of Women to Prostitution (O prikreplenii zhenshchiny k prostitutsii , Elistratov), 72 -73
On the Victims of Social Temperament (O zhertvakh obshchestvennago temperamenta , Pokrovskaia), 123 , 277
OPED (Department for the Care of Jewish Girls of the City of St. Petersburg, Otdel popecheniia ob evreiskikh devushkakh g. S.-Peterburga), 210 -11
OPMD (Society for the Care of Young Girls, Obshchestvo popecheniia o molodykh devitsakh), 49 , 57 , 116 , 215
Orel, 61
Orenburg, 205 n, 260 n
Orlova-Davydova, Countess Mariia, 209 -10
Orlovsky, Daniel, 16 n
Orphans, 101
Otmena , 267
See also Serfs
P
Pale of Settlement, 159 , 161 , 164 , 211
Panina, Countess Sofiia, 207 -8, 213
Parent-Duchâtelet, Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste, 16 -17, 28 , 72 , 95 n, 145 n, 172 , 200 n
Paris, 4 , 15 , 21 , 58 n, 72 , 108 n, 145 n
Passports, 25 , 33 , 34 , 49 , 197 , 251
Paul I, 15 , 18 n
Pavlov, Pavel S.:
labor issues focus of, 221 , 222 , 223 , 226 , 227 -28
on prostitution, 113 , 114 , 225 , 229
Peasantry:
prostitutes from, 96 , 97 , 138 , 304
romanticized image of, 6 -7, 151 -52
ROZZh's view of, 207
urban migration of, 91 -92, 93 , 97 , 113
Peiss, Kathy, 54
Penza province 274
Perestroika , 299
Perm, 262n
Perovskii, Lev, 16 , 18 , 21 , 28 , 29 , 38 , 250
Peter the Great, 8 , 13 -14
Petrograd, 294
Philanthropies. See Rehabilitation institutions
Photographic identification, 239
Physicians:
in abolitionist movement, 269 -71
autonomy issue of, 245 -46, 269 -70, 306 -7
at congress on syphilis, 235 , 236
table, 237
medical examinations by, 23 , 57 -58, 60 -62, 150 -51
moral vs. medical issues for, 75 , 76 -77, 78 , 79
on municipal jurisdiction, 242 -43, 244 -45
reform recommendations by, 237 -39, 240 , 241 -42
on regulations ineffectiveness, 269 , 270 , 272 , 306 -7
venereal disease overreaction by, 75 , 239 , 253
Pirogov Society, 241 , 289
Platonova (peasant woman), 35
Plotsk, 205 n
Podol'sk, 162
Pokrovskaia, Mariia:
abolition resolution of, 284 , 285 , 287 , 290
Borovitinov vs., 284 -87
contradictory agendas of, 276 -77
on factory women, 116 , 118 n
on labor issues, 220 , 226 , 275
on prostitution, 123 , 142 , 213 , 276 , 277 , 280
regulation opposition by, 274 , 275 -76, 277 -78, 282
Poltava, 205 n, 271
Ponevezh, 73
"Poor Seamstress" (brothel song), 169 -70
Pospelov, A. I., 248
Poverty: and prostitution, 102 , 125 -26, 141 -42, 217 , 218
Pregnancy, 103 , 105 , 151
Press, the, 33 -34, 35 , 154 -55, 162 , 175 -76, 190 , 201
Priklonskii, Ivan, 194 , 196 , 198 , 199
Professor Tarnovskii's View of Prostitution (Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago na prostitutsiiu , anonymous), 266 n
Prophylactories, 298
Prostitutes:
aging, 80 -81
characterizations of, 94 -96, 224 -25, 282 , 291
child, 41 , 42 -46, 303
circumscribed movements of, 25 -26, 27 , 145
death rates of, 77 -78
earnings of, 119 , 138 , 244
elite, 32 -33
on examination policy, 49 -50
general health of, 75 -76
hospitalization resistance by, 63 , 65 -66, 67 -69, 292
hospital reform programs for, 69 -70, 71
housing dormitories for, 205 -7
hygiene rules for, 21 , 22 -23, 26
Jewish women as, 159 , 164 , 211
lower-class predominance of, 4 , 96 , 138 , 304
male students with, 88 -89, 90
medical examinations of, 21 , 23 -24, 56 -62, 145 , 150 -51
nationalities of, 97 -98
in post-Soviet Russia, 299 -300
in rehabilitation institutions, 194 , 195 , 196 -97, 198 -99, 200
in Russian literature 1 , 11 -12, 50 , 110 -11, 113 -14, 125 , 229 -30
subjective observers of, 120 -21, 142
suicides by, 78 , 149 , 157
in survey situations, 94 -96, 138 -39
with venereal disease, 62 , 74 , 234 -35, 238
wartime demand for, 296
See also Brothel prostitutes; Clandestine prostitutes; Odinochki ; Registered prostitutes
Prostitution:
and alcoholism, 76 -77
capitalism and, 106 , 107 , 121 -22, 125 -26, 299
feminists on causes of, 123 , 124 -26, 128 , 142 , 305
and gender ideology, 3 -4, 9 , 85 -86, 231 -32
genetic predisposition theory on, 127 -28, 142 , 194 -95, 224 -25
industrialization and, 4 , 5 -6, 7 , 8 , 17 , 90 -91
international cooperation against, 203 -4
Jews' association with, 10 , 161 -66
male dependency on, 86 , 145 , 304
morality issues and, 13 -14, 78 , 79 , 124 -26, 305
peculiarities of Russian, 6 -9
Peter the Great on, 13 -14
Pokrovskaia's hatred of, 276 , 277 , 280
poverty's correspondence with, 102 , 125 -26, 141 -42, 217 , 218
pregnancy leading to, 103 , 105
rape and, 104 -5
sewing machine cooperatives and, 212 -13
socialist view of, 227 , 228 -29, 297 -298
Soviet repression of, 298 -99, 301
as supplemental trade, 114 , 119
toleration of, 16 -17, 18
wage labor's link with, 4 , 51 -53, 96 , 113 -16, 141 -42, 304
Prostitution and Abolitionism (Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, Tarnovskii), 126 , 127 , 145 , 266
Prostitution and Prejudice (Bristow), 163 -64
"Prostitution in the Cities" ("Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," Shtiurmer), 237 , 247 , 271
Provisional Government, 296 -97
Pskov, 274
Q
Quakers, 203
R
Radishchev, Aleksandr, 15
Ragozin, Lev, 291
Ransel, David, 109
Rape, 104 -5
Rasputin, 222 n
Registered prostitutes:
defloration of, 102 -6
demographics of, 96 -100
deregistration of, 73 , 79 , 81 -82
first partners of, 105 -7
as former domestic servants, 107 -11
as former wage laborers, 111 -18, 197
information sources on, 93 -96
involuntary registration of, 140 -41
prostitution motives of, 129 , 130 -31 table, 132 -34 table, 135 table, 136 -40
in survey situations, 94 -96, 138 -39
time spent as, 79 -80
yellow ticket certification of, 2 , 22 , 25
Registration:
advantages of, 48
cancellation of, 73 , 79 , 81 -82
of elite prostitutes, 32 -33
medical-police tactics of, 28 -29, 30 -31, 33 -36, 37 -38, 55 -56
prostitution career status of, 39 , 48 -49, 72 -73, 141
as temporary listing, 114
Regulation:
abolitionist campaign against, 11 , 266 -68
in autocratic society, 17 -18, 21
as compromise, 2 , 284
in Europe, 4 -5, 17 , 238 , 291
feminist criticism of, 123 -24, 273 -74, 275 -76, 280 , 307 -8
as institutionalization of gender hierarchy, 3 , 9 , 18 , 27 , 38 -39, 85 , 273 -74, 302
legal status of, 29 , 293
impact on lower classes, 4 , 9 -10, 21 , 24 , 303 -4
Medical Council commission on, 247 -49, 250 -51, 252 , 285
and municipal control issue, 242 -43, 244 -45, 247 , 248 -51, 254 , 262 , 264
MVD's reform stance on, 247 , 264 -65, 308 -9
MVD's rules on, 9 , 20 , 21 , 22 -24, 26 , 33
as 1910 congress topic, 178 , 227 , 278 , 280 , 282 , 283
noncompliance with, 83 -84, 262 -63
physicians on, 237 -39, 240 , 241 -42, 269 , 270 , 272 , 306 -7
police's reduced role in, 238 -39, 248 -49, 250 -51, 258 , 259 , 261 -62
in post-Soviet Russia, 300 -301
as public health program, 16 -17, 39 -40, 49 -50, 83 , 187 , 233 , 234 -35, 269 , 270 , 302
ROZZh's reform proposals on, 214 -15
See also MVD
Regulation and "Free" Prostitution (Reglamentatsiia i "svobodnaia" prostitutsiia, Margulies), 83 , 257
Rehabilitation institutions:
daily schedule at, 195 -96, 197
early, 191 -92
as empirewide movement, 189 -90, 193 -94
moral redemption stance of, 216 , 218 , 272 -73, 305 -6
reasons for failure of, 191 , 201 -2, 231 -32
rebellious behavior in, 198 -99, 200 , 201
sewing machine cooperatives and, 212 -13
working-class rejection of, 215 , 225 , 226 -27
See also House of Mercy ROZZh
Resurrection (Tolstoy), 110 -11
The Return of Fallen Girls to an Honest Working Life (Vozvrashchenie padshikh devushek k chestnoi trudovoi zhizni, Priklonskii), 194
Reuters, 186
Revel' (now Tallinn), 61 , 65 , 193
Riga, 145 , 193 , 205 , 300
Rituals of brothels, 167 -68
Rokhlia (prostitute), 166
Rosen, George, 16
Rosen, Ruth, 78 n, 160 n
Rostov-on-Don, 78 , 205
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 276
Rozhdestvo clinic (St. Petersburg), 58 , 62
ROZZH (Russian Society for the Protection of Women, Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin), 10 , 190 , 305
abolitionists' ties to, 272 -73
on brothels, 176
development of, 203 , 204 -5
dormitory housing of, 205 -9
membership of, 203 , 213 -14
moral redemption stance of, 2 , 216 , 218 , 272 -73
and 1910 congress, 217 -18, 219 , 290
prostitution questionnaires from, 42 -43, 104
as registration alternative, 73 , 137 -38, 215 -16, 232
working women as concern of, 212
ROZZh Department for the Struggle against the Enticement of Women into Depravity, 216 -17
ROZZh Department of Charity for Unwed Mothers, 209
ROZZh Department of Prevention, 205 -6, 207
ROZZh Investigative Department, 206 , 211 -12, 213
ROZZh Legal Department, 189 , 215 n
Russia, post-Soviet, 299 -301
Russia (Rossiia ), 35
Russian literature:
brothels in, 86 , 153 , 162
prostitution in, 1 , 11 -12, 50 , 110 -11, 113 -14, 125 , 229 -30;
rehabilitation in, 212 -13
syphilis in, 50 , 74 -75
Russian Physician (Russkii vrach ), 36
Russian Pilgrim (Russkii palomnik ), 190
Russian Society for the Protection of Women. See ROZZh
Russian Syphilological and Dermatological Society, 38 , 252 , 254
Russian Women's Mutual-Philanthropic Society, 284 n, 289
Russo-Japanese War, 56 , 259
Rutenberg, Petr, 229 -30
S
Saburov, Andrei, 162 , 204 , 213 , 218
Saburova, Elizaveta, 204 n
St. Petersburg:
brothels in, 15 , 153
child prostitution in, 44 -45
clinic/hospital conditions in, 57 -60, 64
cotton industry in, 117
domestic servants in, 108
dormitory housing in, 205 -9, 210 -11
municipal jurisdiction issue in, 243 , 252 -55
peasant migration to, 91 -92, 97
prostitute motivation survey in, 129 , 130 -31 table, 132 -34 table, 135 table, 136 -40
prostitute savings plan in, 157 -58
registration tactics in, 32 -34, 35 , 37
statistics on prostitutes in, 28 -29n, 46 -47, 78 , 97 -99, 100 , 106
venereal disease rates in, 25 , 33 , 74n, 150
St. Petersburg city governor, 36 n, 157 , 190 , 214 , 215 n, 217 -18, 222 , 224 n, 254 -55
St. Petersburg Club of the Women's Progressive Party, 124 , 215 , 284 n
St. Petersburg sanitary commission, 252 -55
St. Petersburg Society for the Protection of public Health, 277
Saksen-Al'tenburgskaia, Princess Elena, 123 n, 203 , 205 -6, 213 , 214 , 217
Salvationists. See Rehabilitation institutions
Saratov, 61 , 205 n
Sennaia Square's Haymarket (St. Petersburg), 1 , 77
Serebriakova, Mariia (prostitute), 155 -56
Serfs, 25 , 28 , 111 , 267 , 302
Sevastopol, 161 , 205 , 212
Sewing machine: as symbol, 212 -13
The Sex Market and Sexual Relations (Polovoi rynok i polovjia otnosheniia, Matiushenskii), 77 , 148
Shabanova, Anna, 289
Shantan Apollo brothel, 188
Shcherbinina, Dar'ia, 181 -82
Shelter, the (Ubezhishche, St. Petersburg), 208 -9, 210
Shelter of Saint Mary Magdalene (Ubezhishche sv. Marii Magdaliny, Moscow), 193 -94, 196 , 198 , 202
Sherman (Jewish trader), 162
Shikhman, Robert, 47 , 51 , 52 , 109 , 111 , 113
Shishkina-Iavein, Poliksena, 59 , 62 , 280
Shneider-Tagilets, A. I., 151 , 155 -56, 168 , 171
Shperk, Eduard, 70 , 71 , 271
Shtiurmer, Konstantin:
on brothels, 153
on examinations/treatment, 60 -61, 65 -66
on prostitutes, 58 -59, 99 , 241
regulation recommmendations by, 237 -39, 242 n, 247 , 271 , 291
Shurpitskaia, Leontina M., 221 n
Siberia, 14 , 15 , 18 n, 294
Siberian Life (Sibirskaia zhizn '), 148
Simbirsk, 34
Simon, A. I., 166
"A Single Sexual Standard" ("Edinaia polovaia nravstvennost,'" Pokrovskaia), 276
Sipachev (policeman), 148 , 149
Slaviansk brothel, 181 -82
Slonim, 205 n
Smirnov, Professor, 65
Smolensk medical-police committee, 158
Socialists:
on philanthropic aid, 225 , 226 -27
on link between prostitution and capitalism, 106 -7, 121 -22, 125 -26, 128 , 142 , 232 , 299
as prostitution patrons, 229 -30
prostitution solutions of, 123 , 297 -98
on women's issues, 225 -26, 227 -28
Society for Mutual Aid to Women Doctors, 285
Society for the Protection of Women's Rights, 284 n
Soldatki (soldiers' wives), 18
Songs in brothels, 168 -71
Sonia Marmeladova (from Crime and Punishment ), 1 , 12 , 39 , 113 -14, 277
Sosloviia (system of estates), 6 , 7
Soviet Union, 298 -99, 301
See also Socialists
Special Office (Osoboe Prisutstvie), 252 , 253
Stalin, Joseph, 298 , 301
Stansell, Christine, 44 , 54 , 139
State Council, 29
State Duma, 33 , 36 , 47 , 122 , 163 , 217 , 290 , 293
State Senate, 37 , 184 -85, 243
Stavropol, 45
Stefanovich, Rev., 192
Stites, Richard, 139 , 274 , 298
Stolypin, Petr, 264 n
Study of Medical-Police Surveillance of Prostitution in St. Petersburg (Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora za prostitutsiei v S. -Peterburge , Fedorov), 59
Suicides, 77 -78, 157
Surh, Gerald, 97 n
Syphilis. See Venereal disease
T
Tailor's Voice (Golos portnogo ), 112
Tambov province, 241
Tania (hospital inmate), 174
Tarnovskaia, Praskov'ia, 126 -27
Tarnovskii, Veniamin:
on brothels, 145 , 149 , 176
El'tsina's defense of, 282 -83
genetic predisposition theory of, 127 -28, 142 , 194 -95, 225 , 241 , 291
on infected prostitutes, 50 , 51
on male sex urge, 87
On physician autonomy, 245
on registration, 38 , 39
on regulation necessity, 126 , 127 , 234 -35, 266
Tashkent, 184
Tatarov, Iurii, 281 , 288 , 290 , 291
Tavrichesk province, 164
Tiflis (now Tbilisi), 37 , 193 , 244
Tiflis Municipal Committee for the Struggle against Syphilis and Other Venereal Diseases, 244
Tiflis Religious-Philosophical Society, 285
Timofeev, V. M., 175 n
Tiraspol', 272
Tobacco industry, 212
Tolmachev, Ivan N., 259 n
Tolstaia, Countess Vera, 203
Tolstoy, Leo, 11 , 86 , 110 -11, 125 , 275 , 276 , 286
Tomsk, 68 n, 89 , 110 , 175 , 183 , 255 -56, 294
Trade unions, 8 , 225 -26, 227
Trans-Siberian railway, 56 , 259
Tsaritsyn, 262 n
Tula, 61 , 262 n
Tver brothels, 179 -80
Tyrkova, Ariadna, 223 -24, 225 , 226 , 227 , 280 , 283 n, 284
U
Ufa brothel, 148
UGVI (Office of the Chief Medical Inspector, Upravlenie glavnago vrachebnago inspektora), 45 , 60 , 82 , 177 , 182 -83, 184 , 185
Union of Polish Women in St. Petersburg, 284 n
United States military, 294
Unregistered prostitutes. See Clandestine prostitutes
Upper class, 106 -7, 110 , 111 , 239 , 292
Ural'sk, 205 n
Urbanization, 5 -6, 90 -91, 93 , 176
Usacheva, Anis'ia (brothelkeeper), 155 , 156
V
Vakhtina, Mariia, 124 , 280
Vasiliev (from "A Nervous Breakdown"), 230 -31
Venereal disease:
under abolitionist system, 291 , 292
in brothels, 150 , 175
Catherine the Great on, 15
diagnosis of, 5 , 39 -40, 58
disguising symptoms of, 62
fear of, 50 , 51 , 52
high rates of, 2 -3, 48 , 73 -74, 150
male students with, 88 -89
medical examinations for, 21 , 23 -24, 57 -58
in military, 257 , 259 -61, 294
vs. occupational injuries, 118 -19
physicians' overreaction to, 75 , 239 , 253
regulation's failed control of, 49 -50, 83 , 257 -58, 269
societal control of, 261 , 287
source of, 14 , 19 , 88 -89, 238
treatment of, 40 , 64 , 66 -67, 238 , 288
as wartime emergency, 259 , 260 -61
Victims of Depravity (Zhertvy razvrata , Shneider-Tagilets), 151
Vilna, 205 , 206
Virginity, 31 , 43 , 102 -3
Volga Herald (Volzhskii vestnik) , 154 -55
Volkonskii, Prince Sergei, 36 , 70 , 204 n
Volynskaia province, 163
Voronezh, 68
Vvedenskii, Aleksandr, 74
Vvedenskii School (St. Petersburg), 86
W
Walkowitz, Judith, 25 n, 71 , 102 , 106 , 117 n, 218 n
Wanderer (Strannik ), 190
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 86
War Communism (1918-21), 297
Warsaw, 30 -31, 32 , 61 , 149 -50, 162 , 186 , 193
Waters, Elizabeth, 298
Weissman, Neil, 264 n
What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky), 212
White Slave: From the Diary of a Fallen Woman (Belaia rabynia: Iz dnevnika padshei zhenshchiny ), 50
White slavery, 10 , 147 -49, 161 , 165
See also Brothel prostitutes; Brothels
White Slaves in the Clutches of Infamy (Belyia rabyni v kogtiakh pozora , Baranov), 147 , 155
Woman under Socialism (Bebel), 225
Women's Cause (Zhenskoe delo ), 46
Women's Herald (Zhenskii vestnik ), 275 , 280 , 286 -87
Women's Municipal Free Clinic (Moscow), 57 , 58
Women's Progressive Party, 275 , 278 , 280 , 289 -90n
Women's Union (Soiuz zhenshchin ), 149
Working-class delegates (to 1910 congress):
contested attendance of, 219 -21
police confrontation with, 222 -24
on women's issues, 225 -26, 227 -28
Working-class women:
earnings of, 108 , 112 , 113 , 115 , 118
in factories, 114 -17, 212
housing dormitories for, 205 -9
Jewish philanthropies for, 210 -11
labor's discrimination against, 225 -26, 227 -28
night work, 226 , 228 , 275
prostitution's link with 4 , 51 -53, 96 , 113 -16, 138 , 141 -42, 304
registration of, 28 -29, 30 -31, 33 -34, 37 -38
regulation's impact on, 4 , 9 -10, 21 , 24 , 275 -76, 303 -4
ROZZh's concern for, 212
in trades, 111 -14, 117
working conditions of, 112 -13, 115 , 212
World War I, 185 , 235 n, 290 n, 293 -94, 296
Y
Yalta, 271 -72
Yellow ticket (zheltyi bilet), 2 , 22 , 25
See also Registered prostitutes; Registration
Z
Zabaikal, 260 n, 261
Zakharov, Nikolai, 105 -6, 125 , 197 , 198 , 215 , 224
Zamost', 61
Zemstvo activists, 252 , 271 -72, 307
Zhbankov, Dmitrii, 64 n, 241 , 245 , 246 , 261
Zhenia (from Iama ), 74 -75, 78 n
Zhirnov, Vasilii, 35
Zhitomir, 205 n
Znamenskaia Square (St. Petersburg), 42
Compositor: Graphic Composition, Inc.
Text: 10/13 Galliard
Display: Galliard
Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Preferred Citation: Bernstein, Laurie. Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9199p2dt/