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.

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.