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.