Chapter 1
The State and the Yellow Ticket
Churches, icons, crosses, bells, Painted whores and garlic smells, Vice and vodka every place—This is Moscow's daily face.
Quoted in Olearius, Travels (1647)
The Birth of Regulation
The first official government policies in Imperial Russia treated prostitution as a serious crime against both public decorum and morality. As early as the seventeenth century, an order lumped "whoring" with fighting and robbery, stipulating that "streets and alleys should be strictly patrolled day and night" to prevent such occurrences.[1] In 1716, Tsar Peter the Great proclaimed that "no whores [bludnitsy ] will be permitted near the regiments." Women who violated his order ran the risk of being taken under guard and driven out of the area—naked. Two years later, Peter directed the police chief of the new city of St.
[1] I. E. Andreevskii, Politseiskoe pravo, vol. 2, p. 17, in Veniamin M. Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm (St. Petersburg, 1888), p. 98; Mikhail M. Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma i razlichnye fazisy v istorii otnoshenii k nim zakonodatel'stva i meditsiny v Rossii," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 337. According to the Law Code of 1649, a beating from a knout awaited anyone who arranged "lecherous relations" between men and women.
Petersburg to stamp out "all suspicious houses, namely taverns, gambling parlors, and other obscene establishments."[2] His niece, the empress Anna, also refused to tolerate prostitution, ordering all "debauched" women kept by "freethinkers and innkeepers" to be beaten with a cat-of-nine-tails and thrown out of their homes.[3]
The prohibition of commercial sex assumed another character in the middle of the eighteenth century, now influenced by fears that linked prostitutes with the spread of venereal disease. In 1762, a home designated by St. Petersburg authorities "for the confinement of women of debauched behavior" became Kalinkin Hospital, an institution that would develop into Russia's most prestigious center for the treatment of venereal diseases.[4] The next year, women who had been named by soldiers as the source of their venereal infections were ordered confined within its walls. After "treatment," the ones with no visible means of support were deported to labor in Siberian mines.[5]
[2] Voinskie artikuly of April 30, 1716, cited in Arkadii I. Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii do revoliutsii 1917 goda," in Prostitutsiia v Rossii, ed. Volf M. Bronner and Arkadii I. Elistratov (Moscow, 1927), p. 13. Peter's second decree is described in Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 337–38. Another source quotes a decree against houses suspected as sites for various "obscenities." See R. L. Sabsovich, "Reglamentatsiia prostitutsii i abolitsionizm, in O reglamentatsii prostitutsii i abolitsionizm (Rostov-na-Donu, 1907), p. 1.
[3] Ukaz of May 6, 1736, quoted in Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii," p. 14.
[4] There is some confusion in the sources over the origins of Kalinkin Hospital. A nineteenth-century Russian physician dates Kalinkin from the 1750s, but admits that the hospital's history is obscure because records were not kept until after 1830. According to one Soviet source, from 1765 to 1774, women with venereal disease were treated not in Kalinkin, but in two merchants' homes on the Vyborg side of St. Petersburg. Others, however, name as the place to which such women were sent. John Alexander mentions a Kalinkin Institute that had been founded in 1783 to train German surgeons, but asserts that it had little significance until an 1802 merger with the Medical-Surgical Academy Mikhail Ia. Kapustin, Kalinkinskaia gorodskaia bol'nitsa v S.-Peterburge (St. Petersburg, 1895), pp. 3, 7; A. M. Kopylov, "Iz istorii pervykh bol'nits Peterburga," Sovetskoe zdravookhranenie, no. 2 (1962): 58–59; M. A. Frolova, "Istoriia stareishei v Rossii Kalinkinskoi kozhno-venerologicheskoi bol'nitsy," Autoreferat dissertatsii (Leningrad, 1960), p. 4; A. A. Martinkevich and L. A. Shteinlukht, "Iz istorii Kalinkinskoi bol'nitsy (175O–1950)," Vestnik dermatologii i venerologii, no. 1 (January–February 1951): 43–44; John T. Alexander, "Catherine the Great and Public Health," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2 (April 1981): 195, 198. There is a brief description of Kalinkin Hospital in S. P. Arkhangel'skii, S. E. Gorbovitskii, S. T. Pavlov, O. N. Podvysotskaia, and L. A. Shteinlukht, "Kratkii ocherk razvitiia dermatologii i venerologii v Peterburge-Leningrade," Vestnik dermatologii i venerologii, no. 4 (July–August 1957): 45.
[5] This is called an ukaz by the empress Elizabeth in Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii," p. 14, but it is dated more than a year after her death. In Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny k prostitutsii (Kazan, 1903), p. 23, the State Senate is listed as the author. See also Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," Real'naia entsiklopediia meditsinskikh nauk, vol. 16 (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 469; Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 339.
Syphilis was of such concern to Catherine the Great that in her famous "Instructions" she referred to it as a disease that "hurried on the Destruction of the human Race." The empress urged that the "utmost Care ought to be taken . . . to stop the Progress of this Disease by the Laws."[6] During her reign, new regulations on public order made it illegal "to open one's own home or to use a rented home day or night for indecency [nepotrebstvo ]; to enter a home day or night for indecency; to support oneself or another through indecency."[7] Catherine's son, Paul I, decreed in 1800 that all women "who have turned to drunkenness, indecency, and a dissolute list" should be exiled for forced labor in Siberian factories. One source mentions how Tsar Paul compelled prostitutes to wear yellow dresses as a sign of their "shameful trade."[8]
Yet despite repressive laws, there is no doubt that prostitution thrived in Imperial Russia, sometimes with the permission of the authorities. In the mid-seventeenth century, a German observer of Russian life commented on the "insolence" of Moscow women and the scandalous public brothels. Aleksandr Radishchev, Russia's first "repentant nobleman," in his 1790 Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, complained of the "painted harlots on every street in both the capitals," and blamed the government for allowing prostitution to take place. Indeed, in direct contradiction to the Catherinian regulations, authorities in the late eighteenth century apparently designated certain sections of St. Petersburg for the operation of "free houses."[9]
Prostitution remained illegal, but in the 1840s the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del; hereafter MVD) initiated a policy of official toleration after the fashion of the Parisian police des moeurs . The state's decision to regulate prostitution had roots in the continental European tradition of the "medical police" that had associated public health with public order as early, as the eighteenth cen-
[6] Basil Dmytryshyn, ed., Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700–1917, 2d ed. (Hinsdale, IL: The Dryden Press, 1974), pp. 76–77 (emphasis in original).
[7] Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 21 (St. Petersburg, 1830), p. 480.
[8] N. I. Solov'ev, "Presledovanie prostitutok v tsarstvovanii Imperatora Pavla Pervago," Russkaia starina (February, 1916): 363–64; Belyia rabyni v kogtiakh pozora (Moscow, 1912), p. 48. For yellow dresses, see Griaznov, Publichnye zhenshchiny, p. 110.
[9] "Olearius's Commentaries on Muscovy," in Basil Dmytryshyn, ed., Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 900–1700 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 241; Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 170. See also S. Bogrov, "Prostitutsiia," Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' t-va F. Granat i K, vol. 33, p. 582. A Baku physician claimed that the first brothels were permitted in Russia during Catherine's reign. Arutuin A. Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," Svedeniia mediko-sanitarnago biuro goroda Baku (November–December 1913): 846.
tury.[10] But the regulation of prostitution was also one among many of Tsar Nicholas I's efforts to standardize and bureaucratize Russian society. Lev Perovskii, the tsar's ambitious new minister of internal affairs, reckoned the regulation of prostitution as part of his numerous programs of medical and police reforms.[11]
Like the prefect of the Paris police and many other nineteenth-century European administrators, Perovskii equated the control of venereal disease with the control of prostitution. Prostitutes were "public women," dangerous founts of disease whose very existence necessitated state intervention. But it was considered futile for the state to prohibit prostitution entirely; rather, authorities were now to recognize prostitution as an inevitable and necessary evil. It no longer sufficed to send prostitutes and women suspected of prostitution to Siberian mines, to beat them or to stigmatize them with yellow dresses; they were now to be tolerated for the sake of monitoring and control.
Perovskii's decision was influenced by the recent triumph of Dr. Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet's formulation about prostitutes and prostitution in France.[12] According to a historian of French prostitution, "The nineteenth-century view of the prostitute was essentially that of Parent-Duchâtelet." This influential French physician published a major tome in 1836 that hailed toleration as a necessary evil engendered by the inevitability of prostitution.[13] Essentially, whether
[10] Catherine's concerns about syphilis mirrored central European notions of a "medical police." Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, J. P. Brinkman, author of Patriotische Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Medicinalanstalten (1778), served as the personal physician for two Russian grand dukes. An advocate of a medical-police system, he believed that "the moral behavior of the people must be regulated by law so that dissipation will not sap their vital energies." George Rosen, "Cameralism and the Concept of Medical Police," in From Medical Police to Social Medicine (New York: Science History Publications, 1974), p. 140.
[11] Perovskii is characterized as a dynamic and ambitious administrator in Daniel Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 30. Perovskii attempted to eradicate crime in St. Detersburg by organizing police raids and dispatching spies and agents provocateurs among the city's population. See Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 247. Perovskii was also instrumental in centralizing medical affairs under the recently organized Medical Council. Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del: Istoricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1901), p. 54. One year after Perovskii was appointed, a "medical-police regulation" called for the identification and isolation of urban residents with contagious diseases. Statute 562, Ustav meditsinskoi politsii, izd. 1842 g., quoted in Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 78.
[12] See Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 342.
[13] Harsin, Policing Prostitution, p. 102. To Parent-Duchâtelet, prostitution was an "indispensable excremental phenomenon that protects the social body from disease." Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 4.
prostitution was tolerated or not, men would continue to seek commercial sex, women from the lower classes would continue to oblige them, and venereal disease would continue to spread as a result. Thus, reasoned Parent-Duchâtelet, it was necessary to intervene, if only to stem the damage.
The advent of industrialization and the rise of a bourgeois class coincided with the evolution of regulation in western Europe. Russian regulation, however, was not connected with a perceptible growth in industry. In fact, Nicholas I was hostile to industrialization because he feared the social dislocation it produced. Until the late 1880s, Russia industrialized slowly and cautiously, ever wary of fostering a landless proletariat that would threaten the social order.[14] Nor had a bourgeoisie emerged in Russia to strive for political, economic, social, or cultural hegemony. Rather, regulation emerged in a more narrow stratum, the result of one ambitious individual's desire to make his mark during the reign of a tsar justly known as the "gendarme of Europe." Though European systems and ideas inspired Russia's toleration of prostitution, regulation emerged in a peculiarly Russian milieu and in a peculiarly Russian context. In other European states, the ground had to be prepared in order to launch regulation.[15] By contrast, no one paved the way in Russia for regulation; in an autocracy one had only to convince the tsar.
Whereas French regulation was tied to fear of the lower orders in the early part of the nineteenth century—when the "laboring classes" and "dangerous classes" were essentially synonymous to the bourgeois observer[16] —Russian cities involved a different kind of social geography. Free workers were an anomaly in a society mostly divided into lords and their serfs. Neither the worker nor the bourgeois "owned" the cities. With the exception of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and other provincial capitals, cities and towns within the Russian empire were mostly administrative centers for the execution of state duties. The great influx of rural migrants did not really begin in Russia until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there were evidently enough women on the fringes of the patriarchal system in Nicholas I's Russia —
[14] See Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford: University Press, 1971).
[15] For example, during the 1850s the writings of William Acton and W. R. Greg served this function in Great Britain. British attention to this issue also followed a sanitary movement that linked public order and public health. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 42, 70–71.
[16] Alain Corbin ties support for French regulation to the phenomenon described in Louis Chevalier's classic work, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century . See Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 111.
daughters of artisans and tradesmen, daughters of serfs who had been sent to the cities to work, former serfs, domestic servants, soldiers' wives (soldatki )[17] —to warrant official concern. As Laura Engelstein has pointed out, "The original program of syphilis control targeted groups that had escaped the traditional, patriarchal institutions supposed to keep the dependent orders in line: peasants who left the village, women who had left the family."[18] An early twentieth-century tsarist bureaucrat characterized the shift to a policy of tolerating prostitution this way: "The interests of public morality fell victim to the interests of public health."[19] But regulation clearly represented more than a public health measure; it was also informed by the desire for an orderly social body, as well as a distinct interpretation of gender and sexuality. Despite peasant wisdom that saddled women with reputations as insatiable temptresses,[20] the authors of regulation tacitly accepted a more bourgeois vision of sexual desire—one that associated it exclusively with males. Male desire was considered so irresistible as to require gratification; female desire remained beneath mention or consideration. Regulation thus institutionalized this sexual order by monitoring the women who would cater to male sexual needs. Regulators also reasoned that by sanctioning the existence of a class of prostitutes, they were clearing the way for most women to remain virgins until marriage. As long as prostitutes were available, it was believed men would keep their hands off non-prostitutes.
Using Parisian regulation as its guiding light, an advisory commission organized by Perovskii in 1843 recommended establishing a trial system of toleration in St. Petersburg. The central government's Committee of Ministers approved the proposal before the year was out, but made it clear that it would not accept a plan for funding regulation from the prostitutes themselves. In the committee's words, a tax on "public
[17] Married to men with twenty-five-year obligations in the army, soldatki had reputations for loose morals. They constituted half of the women Paul I sent to Siberia, and they figured prominently among the women who turned children over to Russia's foundling homes until military reforms in the 1870s. David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 154–60.
[18] Engelstein also argues that regulation was "[i]n the classic tradition of enlightened despotism and the domestic tradition of paternalistic rule." Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon," pp. 189, 194.
[19] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 341–52.
[20] On peasant images of female sexuality, see Christine D. Worobec, "Temptress or Virgin? The Precarious Sexual Position of Women in Postemancipation Ukrainian Peasant Society," Slavic Review 49 (Summer 1990): 227–38.
women would not conform with the spirit of our laws because it would seem as though the government for its part was permitting the earning of a living through indecency."[21] Thus, the Committee of Ministers was careful to have the government's hands appear clean, even as those same hands signed the papers that countenanced state sponsorship of commercial vice. Though the system was frequently referred to by a cognate of the French réglementation (reglamentatsiia in Russian), the administration and eventually the public employed the native word for supervision or surveillance, nadzor .[22]
To establish nadzor on an empirewide basis, in October of 1843 the MVD's Medical Department requested all provincial governors to provide it with information on rates of venereal disease among the "common people" in their area of jurisdiction and to propose measures to halt the spread of these diseases. Interestingly, though many governors sounded an alarm about the rise of venereal disease, they did not attribute it solely to prostitutes; they also blamed military personnel, serfs who engaged in seasonal labor, and soldiers' wives. Suggestions to protect public health included ordering Russian Orthodox priests to admonish their flocks and instituting a regimen of periodic medical examinations for men, not women. One provincial governor, for example, proposed broad surveillance of the military, factory workers, shops, and taverns. But the Medical Department responded by asserting that women were in fact the chief source of venereal disease.[23]
Particularly influential was a report from a Major-General Akhlestyshev, the city governor of Odessa. The Black Sea port, it appears, had already implemented a program with policies reminiscent of Paris's police des moeurs . In Odessa, prostitutes were registered on police lists, obligated to undergo weekly examinations, and, if physicians diagnosed them as suffering from a venereal disease, incarcerated in the hospital.[24]
[21] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343. Quote from Mariia I. Pokrovskaia, "Iarmarochnaia prostitutsiia," in Prostitutsiia, ed. Ape (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 12; "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie ob otmene reglamentatsii prostitutsii," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2074.
[22] Such an interpretation of the government's duty is well suited to Michel Foucault's analysis of other nineteenth-century disciplinary procedures. See, for example, Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977).
[23] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 344–45.
[24] Ibid., p. 345; Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 74–76; Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (hereafter TsGIA), Upravlenie glavnago vrachebnago inspektora MVD (hereafter UGVI), fond 1298, opis' 1, delo 1730, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," June 1910–December 1911, report of July 15, 1910, by privy councillor Mollerius.
Those three I's—identification, inspection, and incarceration—would ultimately serve as the linchpin of the empire's new system, guiding Russia's treatment of prostitution until the collapse of the tsarist regime in February 1917.
The Medical Police and Yellow Tickets
"Danger of disease? . . . A solicitous government looks out for that. It looks after and regulates the activity of brothels and makes lewdness safe. And doctors for a consideration do the same."
Pozdnyshev, in Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
In the autumn of 1843, tsarist authorities organized a trial medical-police committee (vrachebno-politseiskii komitet ) for St. Petersburg under the MVD's Medical Department and in 1844 created a similar committee for Moscow.[25] By fits and starts, other Russian cities followed suit. The MVD issued specific rules pertaining to the regulation of prostitution several times: for Petersburg in 1844, 1861, 1868, and 1908, and for the entire empire in 1851 and 1903. Several cities, including Moscow, Minsk, and Nizhnii Novgorod, developed their own locally tailored systems of regulation, but at least theoretically, most of the Russian empire conformed to the model created by the ministry.
An investigation and comparison of the rules for "public women" reveal how the tsarist administration conceived of its role and the way that it understood prostitutes and prostitution. Though regulation had a simple raison d'être, that of protecting society from likely carriers of venereal disease, taking its cue from Paris it quickly assumed other guises as well. In the regulators' view, women who worked as prostitutes needed not only medical screening, but protection and management. As a "necessary evil," prostitution was considered a receptacle for the male desire that could not be contained within the sexual status quo. Thus, prostitutes were both "victims of social temperament" (as Russians euphemistically referred to them) and "temptresses" who corrupted and ruined young men. Prostitutes were scorned as fallen women, but they were also seen as requiring paternalistic care. Such care was assigned to the medical police in the form of strict monitoring
[25] Derived from "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie," pp. 2072–77; Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.
of dress and behavior in addition to physical health. Yet, as the MVD realized its own limitations and how the regulations themselves were inadequate in terms of their original rationale and the epidemiology of venereal diseases, the rules changed.
The minister of internal affairs, Lev Perovskii, conceived of nadzor when the vast majority of Russia's population was still made up of serfs. As a result, the rules that Russia had borrowed from Paris assumed a different aspect, for they were no longer designed for the urban lower classes of a constitutional monarchy, but for an autocratic society divided into legally defined estates. In Paris, the rules limited a woman's freedom; in Russia, they simply placed new constraints among a population accustomed to living in bondage. The MVD made explicit the estate-based nature of regulation in an 1844 administrative circular. "It goes without saying," wrote the ministry, that these measures must apply to "only those individuals who by their way of life, as well as their rank and other communal [obshchezhitel'nye ] circumstances, can be subject to them" (i.e., serfs and the urban lower classes).[26]
The first set of rules, designed for St. Petersburg in 1844, began unequivocally: "A public woman is obliged with all conscientiousness to carry out the rules that have been enacted and shall hereafter be enacted by the committee."[27] Violators risked indeterminate sentences in the workhouse. Medical examinations were to be undergone "unquestioningly" once a week for independent prostitutes (odinochki ) and twice weekly for women in brothels. If a prostitute or her examining physician noticed any signs of venereal disease, she was to report immediately to the hospital. The rules rewarded a prostitute's compliance by promising free treatment to women who reported voluntarily.
When it came to disease prevention and personal hygiene, a prostitute's obligations became vague, of dubious benefit, and impossible to enforce. For example, the rules required her to wash "certain parts" of her body as often as possible with cold water. "After relations with a man," she could not take another client before having washed and, if possible, changed the linen. As for actual baths, though, she need take only two per week. Because physicians believed that blood served as an ideal conduit for infectious diseases, a prostitute was not to practice her trade during menstruation. A spartan note crept into the rules with
[26] Quoted in Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 23.
[27] Rules in Sbornik pravitel'stvennykh rasporiazhenii kasaiushchikhsia mer preduprezhdeniia rasprostraneniia liubostrastnoi bolezni (St. Petersburg, 1887), pp. 49–51. See also Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," p. 470.
cautionary words against too much makeup and perfume. In the realm of extreme administrative fantasy was a rule asserting that "public women are obliged to examine the reproductive parts and underwear of their visitors in order to protect themselves from infection." Needless to say, the dark, hasty, and often drunken encounters between clients and prostitutes rarely leant themselves to such clinical beginnings.
Reflecting the dual nature of regulation as both a police and hygienic measure was a rule that demanded prostitutes carry their "medical ticket" at all times. Commonly known as the "yellow ticket" (zheltyi bilet ), this was a card issued to all registered prostitutes as certification of their trade and a handy medical guarantee for the interested client.[28] In its original form, the medical ticket listed a woman's name, age, and address, and left room for a physician's stamp or mark regarding her state of health.[29] While it appeared innocuous, the yellow ticket in fact created a new social category in tsarist Russia, that of the "public woman." Divided from those women who were practicing prostitution on a casual or clandestine basis, bearers of the yellow ticket were protected from police harassment as much as they were fully subject to police controls. Unlicensed women avoided the obligation to appear for examinations, but they remained vulnerable to arrest during the police raids that periodically swept through the working-class districts of Russia's major cities.
A set of regulations even more exacting than those directed toward prostitutes governed brothelkeeping (soderzhatel'stvo ), a profession limited to women between the ages of 30 and 60 who had no children living with them.[30] Whereas prostitutes had only eleven rules to obey, brothelkeepers were subject to nearly three times as many. These rules combined ministry concerns about order and public health with a new element—evident discomfort over licensing houses of vice. Consequently, a madam (soderzhatel'nitsa ) had to be more than a mere landlady; she had to "restrain" the women in her charge from abusing alcohol, to "demand" that they remain "tidy," to "observe" that they
[28] Yellow tickets appear to have existed even prior to the introduction of regulation. In 1835, an "Imperial command" provided for free treatment at the police ward of Kalinkin Hospital for women with "distinctive yellow tickets." Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 341; Kapustin, Kalinkinskaia gorodskaia bol'nitsa, p. 13. In 1909, the MVD's Medical Council ruled that yellow tickets should be replaced by white ones that contained photos of their bearers. From "Usilenie nadzora za prostitutsiei," Populiarnyi literaturnomeditsinskii zhurnal doktora Oksa (April 1909): 53.
[29] Sbornik contains a sample copy of the 1844 medical ticket on p. 51.
[30] For the rules pertaining to brothelkeepers, see ibid., pp. 35–39.
followed the regulations about modestly applied makeup and personal hygiene (such as making sure that their underwear was clean). It was also her responsibility to maintain not only "quiet" in the bordello, but an atmosphere of "decency" (blagopristoinost '). Accordingly, brothel doors were to remain shut on Sundays and holy days until after the midday meal, and male minors and students could not be admitted "under any circumstances." As for the "whores" themselves, none of whom could be under 16 and all of whom had to be registered with the police, they were not to be "exhausted" by "excessive use." Nor could they be held in a brothel any longer than they wished. Should a woman wish to quit, any debts she owed the brothelkeeper could not serve as an obstacle.
Rules gave the brothelkeeper medical responsibilities as well. Although the medical-police physician made regular visits, madams were expected to examine the women in their houses on a daily basis and dispatch those with venereal symptoms to the hospital. Monetary incentive was added: women who appeared voluntarily would be treated without charge, while treatment for those whose illness had been discovered by a doctor would be charged to the brothelkeeper. If a prostitute missed an examination, the brothelkeeper herself would be liable to prosecution. The madam upon suspicion of vice had to submit to medical examinations, as did her grown daughters, female relatives, and female servants. Finally, severe penalties could be imposed for aiding a pregnant prostitute in securing an abortion, turning to unlicensed medical practitioners, or using home remedies to treat sick prostitutes.[31] (This proscription no doubt referred to the common practice of brothelkeepers and their associates of dabbling in folk medicine to cure various illnesses, as well as to their custom of terminating unwanted pregnancies.)
The St. Petersburg experiment proved auspicious enough for the MVD to order provincial authorities throughout the empire in 1851 to follow the capital's rules in their home provinces by keeping "full and accurate lists of public women, that is, those women who regard debauchery [rasputstvo ] as a trade."[32] But provisions for the control of venereal disease were broadened here to include the potential male carriers whom regulation had, at first, ignored. Prevention of venereal disease
[31] Statutes 25–32 in ibid., pp. 37–39.
[32] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," pp. 13–14; Nikolai Di-Sen'i and Georgii Fon-Vitte, eds., Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor gorodskoi prostitutsiei (St. Petersburg, 1910), p. 11.
now meant surveillance in the form of general periodic examinations for male factory workers as well as for prostitutes. The examinations of factory workers did not, however, succeed in discovering venereal disease with any great accuracy. A Russian worker described how these examinations proceeded in his Moscow factory prior to Easter and Christmas holidays:
On payday, in the paymaster's office, a doctor would be seated next to the bookkeeper while he paid us. We would line up, undo our pants, and show the doctor the part of our bodies he needed to see. The doctor, after tapping it with a pencil, would tell the bookkeeper the results of his "examination," whereupon the bookkeeper would hand us our pay. Although there were probably quite a few workers at the factory who were infected with venereal disease, I do not know of a single instance when the doctor found such a person during these medical examinations.[33]
Men suffering from venereal disease were also to be interviewed to determine the source of their contagion, with examinations obligatory for those whom they named.[34]
Although empirewide nadzor fell under the aegis of public health protection, it is obvious that regulation and related measures were aimed at the lower classes. The rules betrayed the administration's willingness to stop short of subjecting female workers to invasive medical procedures. Yet, when it came to women identified by diseased males or women about whom "strong doubts" existed as to their state of health, scruples gave way to intervention. The ministry also mandated medical examinations for "all persons of both sexes from the lower class who had been arrested by the police for deeds against public decency [blagochinie ]." Tsarist authorities had granted themselves the prerogative to determine which women exhibited "debauched" behavior and thereby represented a threat to public health. Essentially, the state inscribed society on a grid of class and gender that divided the "good" women from the "bad," and the rich men from the poor.
The MVD approved a new, more explicit set of rules for Petersburg's
[33] Reginald E. Zelnik, trans. and ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 51–52.
[34] From A. I. Smirnov, "Ob uchrezhdenii vrachebno-politseiskikh komitetov," Trudy Vysochaishe razreshennago s"ezda, vol. 1, p. 3. When a military commander of troops in Kaluga province ordered examinations for twenty women who had been named as sexual partners of soldiers with venereal infections, only two turned out to have visible signs of venereal disease. Otchet Meditsinskago departamenta Ministerstva vnutrennikh del za 1891 god (St. Petersburg, 1908), p. 177.
medical-police committee just a few months following the emancipation of Russia's serfs in February of 1861. Although most of the revised rules simply reiterated earlier ones, some painstakingly elaborated prior rulings and softened a few others. Police-oriented regulations were now expanded to counter the serfs' newfound freedom, creating a novel dimension for the government regulation of prostitution, the substitution of medical licenses for prostitutes' internal passports. Deprived of the identification required of all Russian subjects, women who registered with the medical-police committees after 1861 had nothing to show prospective landlords or employers but their embarrassing yellow tickets. At the end of the century, critics would charge that this policy doomed thousands of women to treat prostitution as their permanent and irrevocable career, and removed any cloak of anonymity that women who turned to this trade on a casual or clandestine basis may have maintained within their communities.[35] Though only Petersburg's rules specified the confiscation of a prostitute's passport, most cities and districts adopted similar policies.
The new rules also circumscribed prostitutes' movements in ways that the original regulations did not.[36] Now prostitutes had to conduct themselves "as modestly and decently as possible, not displaying themselves from windows in an unseemly state, not touching passers-by on the street, and not calling them over." If they appeared in public, they could not "do anything indecent and were not to walk together in a group." Furthermore, in the name of propriety, public women were forbidden from occupying in box seats in local theaters.[37] To guard against the existence of unlicensed bawdy houses and to make sure that groups of prostitutes remained under a watchful eye, odinochki could not live
[35] This is called the "first terrible instrument of bondage" in Elistratov O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 7. In Prostitution and Victorian Society, Walkowitz argues that the promulgation of regulation in Great Britain accelerated the creation of a professional class of prostitutes. A prostitute who participated in a 1975 prostitutes' strike in Lyons described how she felt when she accepted Morocco's version of a yellow ticket for work in a licensed brothel: "[The police] issued you with a special card with all your particulars and your photo on it. They took away all your papers—your passport, your identity card, absolutely all your papers. That bit was terrible. You felt well and truly . . . BOOKED." A——, "A Woman's One Asset," in Prostitutes—Our Life, ed. Claude Jaget (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1980), p. 61.
[36] For the 1861 rules, see Sbornik, pp. 52–55.
[37] In a more extreme vein, Berlin rules from 1911 prohibited prostitutes from visiting "theatres, circuses, or exhibitions, or the concert gardens connected with them, the Zoological Gardens, the Museums, the railway stations . . ., or, finally, any places that may be named in later orders of the police authorities." Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, p. 416.
more than two to an apartment and could expect periodic home visits from committee doctors and police agents.
From a hygienic point of view, the new rules adhered to the former principles, but with some curious additions, such as recommendations for weekly baths only. No longer were prostitutes obliged to examine their clients' underwear and genitals; this was now a "right," not a requirement. Between clients, a prostitute had to add douching to her routine of cold-water washing. In a more propitious direction, a new statute guaranteed free treatment for all diseased prostitutes. But women who did not enter Kalinkin Hospital within two hours from the time a physician diagnosed them as contagious risked being brought there by police agents.
The final four rules were designed to regulate the relationship between prostitutes and brothelkeepers. Brothelkeepers could not keep more than three-fourths of a prostitute's income and in return they were obligated to provide lodging, light, heat, plentiful and healthy food, sufficient linen, and clothes. If a woman remained in a brothel less than one year, she was compelled to return those items given to her by the brothelkeeper; otherwise, everything remained in her possession. The rules of 1861 for prostitutes also contained a statute reminding them of their right to leave a brothel at any time, specifying that any obstruction by the brothelkeeper constituted a criminal offense.
The new rules for brothelkeeping narrowed the age limit to women between the ages of 35 and 55, and spelled out their obligations with much more detail.[38] Although the early rules had specified how debts could not obstruct a woman's desire to quit her brothel, several of the 1861 regulations addressed this issue more explicitly, suggesting that indebtedness had turned out to be a highly contentious area. For example, 1861 regulations granting brothel prostitutes the right to maintain separate account books for recording their earnings and personal possessions indicate that brothelkeepers had been guilty of keeping their own (dishonest) records. Illiterate prostitutes (the overwhelming majority) were even permitted to request assistance in this endeavor from their friends or from police agents and, as further protection, the police kept their own record of a prostitute's possessions. Every week, a prostitute and her brothelkeeper were supposed to review their accounts and sign them; failure to do so meant that the prostitute did not have to pay anything. Yet, significantly, a prostitute could no longer leave at will: the
[38] In 1844, there were thirty-two statutes for brothelkeepers. In 1861, this number increased to fifty-eight. See Sbornik, pp. 36–49; Baranov V zashchitu, pp. 158–62.
new rules obliged women to pay their debts unless they demonstrated a sincere desire to reform by entering a halfway house for "fallen women."[39]
The 1844 regulations had been silent about a brothelkeeper's past. The medical-police committee, however, now required a police investigation of a prospective madam's background to find out whether she had a criminal record and whether she was prone to drunkenness or "unruly conduct" (k buistvu ). Along the same lines, brothelkeepers were to treat their prostitutes "gently" and refrain from beatings. That the committee believed it necessary to include rules designed to prevent the "oppression" of prostitutes in 1861 suggests that brothelkeepers and their associates had earned reputations of brutality.
On paper, the rules transmuted bawdy house revelries into sterile encounters designed only to satisfy the client's "physiological needs." New regulations carefully setting exact limits on the brothel's location, appearance, and functions signaled the committee's desire to mask brothel activities and render these houses invisible.[40] In the paradoxical formulation of a medical-police inspector at the end of the nineteenth century, "The committee does not regard the brothel as a place for debauchery, but as a place which serves the physiological needs of unmarried men. As a result of this view, it is impossible to tolerate any kind of facilities in these houses which would induce debauchery."[41] Accordingly, brothels could not open onto the street like stores. Brothel windows facing the street had to be kept permanently shut and covered with white muslin curtains during the day, wooden shutters or some heavy, opaque material at night, and most brothels could not be within 320 meters of churches or schools.[42] Rules also advised brothelkeepers to restrain prostitutes from unspecified forms of immodest behavior in theaters and other public places. The same rule applied within the brothel: gambling was prohibited, and brothelkeepers were forbidden from selling
[39] Though there were frequent accusations about collusion between brothelkeepers and local authorities, this rule more likely reflected fears that former brothel prostitutes would continue to engage in prostitution without any official supervision.
[40] When a university student in the novel Iama read the rules posted on a brothel wall, he commented ironically, "What a serious and moral view of things!" Kuprin, Iama, p. 198. In relation to similar rules in Paris, Alain Corbin has remarked, "Like corpses, carrion, and excrement, prostitution must remain as hidden as possible." From Corbin, "Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France: A System of Images and Regulation," Representations, no. 14 (Spring 1986): 215.
[41] Aleksandr I. Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora za prostitutsiei v S.-Peterburge (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 57.
[42] A brothel could be closer than this distance if the entrance was off the street on which the religious or educational institutions were located. However, sufficient light had to be available to conduct medical examinations. Sbornik, p. 40.
alcohol and tobacco, and from allowing music other than from a piano. Any disorders had to be reported to the police.
Eloquent testimony to the need to distance the autocracy from houses of prostitution was a rule prohibiting the display of portraits of the imperial family on brothel walls. Though the tsar had agreed to tolerate the existence of these institutions, it would have been awkward to remind patrons of the link between his station and commercial sex. As the embodiment of God on earth and the "little father" of the Russian people, the tsar had a distinct role to play as guardian of the Russian Orthodox religion and morality. Indeed, in 1843 Nicholas I had hesitated before extending his "favor" to brothelkeepers. Only when Perovskii invoked Parent-Duchâtelet's conception of brothels as the most suitable vehicle for surveillance, as well as assured Nicholas that brothels were "relatively useful for society" since madams could function as agents of the police, did he relent.[43] Brothels would be tolerated, but they would not be blessed.
The MVD approved three additional sets of rules for Petersburg in 1861, one of which established a whole new category of "vagrant women of debauched behavior" who could not be considered professional prostitutes, but were still to be treated as a danger to public health and order.[44] Coinciding as they did with the serfs' emancipation, these rules evince the state's determination to keep as tight a handle as it could on unattached women who were no longer under the patriarchal controls of their former lords or husbands. Citing statistics on the rise of venereal disease in St. Petersburg, the rules directed local police to investigate public baths, flophouses, hotels, and bars and subject "suspicious" women to examinations at medical-police headquarters to identify all women who were practicing prostitution without a license.[45] The rules remarked that the ranks of women apprehended for unlicensed debauchery often comprised "kitchen maids, governesses, and domestic servants," but the desire to hide their occasional prostitution from families and friends prevented them from registering onto police lists. The MVD advised the police to treat these women justly, but nonetheless do their utmost to register all prostitutes.[46] In essence, the medical-police
[43] Quoted by Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," pp. 349–50.
[44] Sbornik, pp. 61–69.
[45] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebnow-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 33–35, describes how St. Petersburg handled this regulation.
[46] Sbornik, pp. 66–67. The number of registered odinochki in Petersburg did not necessarily reflect the committee's success at increasing the ranks of registered prostitutes. Although 866 odinochki were on police lists in 1861, a full 129 women more than the previous year, in 1862 the number was only 869. Mikhail Kuznetsov, "Istorikostatisticheskii ocherk prostitutsii v Peterburge s 1852 g. po 1869 g.," Arkhiv sudebnoi meditsiny i obshchestvennoi gigieny (March 1870): 5–38. I am grateful to Reginald Zelnik for his notes on this article.
committee was institutionalizing a system of surveillance over urban lower-class women by means of periodic raids and roundups.
Prostitutes and Policemen
Sanitary madzor . . . scarcely exists. What has remained is simply police surveillance, which pursues some kind of uncertain goals.
Dr. Petr Gratsianov (1902)
As conceived by the tsarist administration, the regulatory system strove to balance health and morality. Yet the authority given to the police in supervising the lower classes and registering suspicious women meant that the coercive and punitive aspects of nadzor could easily tip the scale. Regulation's ambiguous legal status was partly responsible: although the MVD had seen fit to regulate prostitution, commercial sex still remained officially illegal.[47] Medical-police committees functioned in the administrative realm, neither inside the law nor wholly outside of it, much like the tsarist military courts that would deny political prisoners due process after 1872.
It was no wonder that many local authorities were perplexed by the ministry's new rules. In July, 1845, the tsarist administration instructed the empire's police to refrain from prosecuting prostitutes who were guilty of no other crimes. This order apparently met with resistance, for one year later the minister of internal affairs found it necessary to remind provincial governors to ignore the laws against debauchery and stop arresting prostitutes for simple vice. In 1848, Perovskii enlisted the aid of the minister of justice to clarify matters in a joint declaration pertaining to prostitution's altered status.[48] The confusion persisted, however. Twenty years later, the State Council pondered the contradiction of regulating an illegal trade, only to withdraw from the quandary completely by concluding that the law, "without obviously contradicting
[47] Laura Engelstein has explained, "technically speaking the Russian system allowed for competing legalities, in which statutes, regulations, imperial decrees, and ministerial instructions jointly occupied the disciplinary field." Engelstein, "Gender and the Juridical Subject," p. 484.
[48] "Zakonodatel'noe predpolozhenie," pp. 2074–76, contains the best description of the legal muddle created by Russian regulation.
itself," could not consider matters pertaining to the organization of prostitution.[49] As late as 1912 the Ministry of Finance was still writing to the Department of Police for clarification of the contradiction between the law forbidding brothels and the fact that such houses "in reality exist."[50]
Despite an 1858 MVD circular calling for collective administration of regulatory agencies, the fate not only of Russia's prostitutes, but of thousands of women whose behavior could be construed as improper, essentially lay in the hands of the MVD's agents, the notorious tsarist police.[51] There, corruption and abuse mere, in the words of one critic, "business as usual" (obychnyi poriadok ).[52] With their carte blanche to penetrate working-class communities, policemen blackmailed, harassed, and arrested prostitutes and nonprostitutes alike, threatening young, lower-class women in particular. "Improper" behavior was a broad, arbitrary rubric that could include women whose conduct was not to the liking of the local police or simply women who walked alone after dark. Dr. Aleksandr Fedorov, chief inspector of the St. Petersburg medical-police committee, named as targets "all women of too free morality who have given grounds for suspicion of trading their sexual pleasures."[53] Not surprisingly, such wholesale pronouncements afforded the police plenty of latitude.
The ramifications for social class were all too obvious. In the Baltic city of Riga, the local police were ordered to arrest individuals suspected of spreading venereal disease when "the source belongs to . . . the ranks of artisans, servants, male and female workers, etc." The Warsaw police had instructions to bring before the medical-police committee any
[49] Pokrovskaia, "Iarmarochnaia prostitutsiia," p. 12; "Ob"iasnitel'naia zapiska" Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2086.
[50] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "O nadzore za prostitutsiei," January 1912–March 1913, letter of April 30, 1912.
[51] The author of a turn-of-the-century work on European prostitution pointed out that regulations differed throughout Europe, but all "have been generally developed by more or less arbitrary action on the part of the police and without the deliberate and express sanction of a competent legislative authority." The sole exceptions were Great Britain (which had already abolished regulation), Belgium, and Hungary. Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, p. 136.
[52] Petr E. Oboznenko, "Po povodu novago proekta nadzora za prostitutsiei v Peterburge, vyrabotannago Kommissiei Russkago sifilidologicheskago obshchestva," Vrach, no. 12 (1899): 348. A recent work describes the urban police as "often [taking] advantage of their considerable powers to ensure themselves immediately personal profit." Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 15.
[53] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 6.
lower-class woman arrested for vice, vagrancy, drunkenness, robbery, or sleeping in a public place. When women from the more privileged classes committed similar offenses, their names would be entered in medical-police files, but they were spared the degrading personal appearance. Warsaw policemen also hauled in women found in "suspicious places" at odd hours. Included here were the "outskirts of the city," that is, the working-class neighborhoods.[54] Often, technical virginity was the sole evidence a woman could use to prove that she was not a prostitute. But this "proof" was predicated on an intimate mortifying examination in police headquarters and obviously was of no help to single women with sexual experience.
Lacking a passport to show prospective landlords, odinochki were restricted to living in only certain parts of the city. Concerned that "fallen women" were insulting public morality and disrupting order, in 1893 the city governor of Odessa instructed the police to issue to odinochki special booklets describing committee rules. Included among these was a prohibition against walking or living in the city's fashionable Boulevard district. Any prostitutes who lived there had to move immediately or face prosecution.[55] Minsk's municipal council (duma ) went one step further, forbidding anyone from renting to a prostitute without first securing permission from the city's sanitary commission. Most rules forbade more than two prostitutes from occupying a single apartment, and several cities adhered to an even stricter policy requiring prostitutes to live alone. Such rules could have sad consequences for prostitutes unable to afford single rents. During the summer, prostitutes were known to abandon their apartments in order to sleep in fields, near camps, in cemeteries, and in abandoned, decrepit homes. Even in winter, poverty-stricken prostitutes would loiter in taverns during the day and spend the nights in shelters.[56] The head of the Minsk sanitary commission, Dr. Petr Gratsianov, recalled a scandalous incident involving four prostitutes who had been sleeping in a town square milk booth during the winter.[57]
In Minsk, women were prohibited from soliciting on the streets
[54] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 24–31.
[55] Vedomosti Odesskago gradonachal'stava, no. 214 (September 30, 1893), in Adres kalendars' Odesskago gradonachal'stva na 1898 g., pp. 39–40. I am grateful to Bob Weinberg for this reference.
[56] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 14.
[57] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," Russkii meditsinskii vestnik, no. 4 (February 15, 1903): 9.
openly. Consequently, odinochki had to rely on pimps and other middlemen to drum up potential clients. Hotel owners found the leasing of rooms for hasty trysts extremely profitable, as did the enterprising landlords who would rent rooms at inflated prices. Prostitutes would thus have to divide their earnings among procurers, hotel managers, and apartment owners. "It's a pity, mister doctor," Gratsianov would hear in his capacity as head of the sanitary commission, "the client gave me five rubles, but the pimp [faktor ] took them away."[58]
With only a yellow ticket for identification, prostitutes could not hide their trade from landlords and landladies. In Warsaw, the very residency lists in gateways of apartment houses signaled which women were working as prostitutes, with conspicuous blanks next to the space designated for a person's occupation and marks underlining a woman's last name. On occasion, the word "prostitute" would even be filled in.[59] Unregistered prostitutes also had much to fear, should nosy neighbors or concierges discover their activities. As a result, both groups were vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation when it came to housing. Apartment owners could turn a sizable profit by allowing a "secret den" (tainyi priton ) to operate on their premises, exploiting the prostitute-tenants by charging exorbitant rents.[60]
Unregistered prostitutes tended to live in areas familiar to women of their own social classes. If they were registered, prostitutes had to rent apartments in the parts of town designated by medical-police committee rules. In other words, both groups lived among the urban poor. In Moscow, for example, university students (known for their poverty) and prostitutes were concentrated in the same sections.[61] When some 7,500 Moscow students were surveyed about their housing situation in 1907, more than one-third complained that noisy neighbors prevented them from studying. "Prostitutes live next door," responded one student, "[and] there are constant scandals, screams, and sometimes fights."[62]
St. Petersburg's medical-police committee further institutionalized the class-based nature of regulation by developing special procedures
[58] Ibid., p. 6.
[59] P. Pushkin, O polozhenii nadzora za prostitutsiei v Varshave (Warsaw, 1895), p. 12, quoted in Elistratov, "Prostitutsiia v Rossii," p. 18.
[60] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 4–5, 9.
[61] Those parts of Moscow with the highest percentage of inhabitants living in basement quarters were the same as those with many of the university students and prostitutes. Walter Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study in Municipal Self-Government" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1964), p. 38.
[62] M. Benasik and V. V. Sviatlovskii, Studenchestvo v tsifrakh (St. Petersburg, 1909), pp. 51–52.
for "educated and well-off prostitutes." Unlike the vast majority of prostitutes in the capital, this elite group of prostitutes was allowed to retain its passports and had the prerogative to appear for periodic examinations at a separate section of a committee clinic.[63] In cases of "valid reasons," these women could appear on a biweekly rather than a weekly basis. They might also be treated for venereal disease at home rather than in the hospital. In 1912, an MVD commission acknowledged the existence of sixty such "cleanly dressed" individuals, all able to conduct themselves more "decently" than the rest of the registered prostitutes.[64] Nizhnii Novgorod adhered to a similar practice, allowing some women to visit private doctors for private fees. These doctors would then send the results of their examinations to the local medical-police committee.[65]
Rules directed at "vagrant woman of debauched behavior" gave official recognition to regulation's most controversial and mishandled practice, that of examining and registering women involuntarily. A commission of the State Duma admitted in 1909 that inscription lists could include women "who were under no circumstances earning a living through depravity."[66] The MVD itself acknowledged in circulars to Russia's provincial governors in 1896 and 1910 that policemen and medical police personnel frequently inscribed women against their will.[67] The press, eager for scandals and often delighted to find ways to embarrass the tsarist authorities, repeatedly publicized incidents involving "innocent" young women who had been abused by the police. One daily maintained that Petersburg medical-police committee agents would register women without informing them. In this article, the registration process was described as a simple exchange: "Can you [ty ] read and write?" Upon an affirmative reply, they would bark, "Sign!"[68]The North-west Word (Severno-zapadnoe slovo ) reported in 1910 how a 25-year-old
[63] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, 27–29. Shtiurmer refers to these women as kabinetnye prostitutes in "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 39.
[64] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 17; TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "Doklad kommisii, izbrannoi vrachebno-politseiskom komitetom dlia proverki pronikshikh v pechat' i osnovannykh na doklade doktora P. N. Shishkinoi-Iavein svedenii o deiatel'nosti ispolnitel'nykh organov komitetov."
[65] A. A. Chagin, "Otchet po Nizhegorodskoi iarmarochnoi zhenskoi bol'nitse dlia venericheskikh boleznei za 1900 g.," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoi meditsiny, no. 2 (February 1901): 166.
[66] TsGIA, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, f. 1278, op. 2, d. 3476, "Zhurnaly komissii po sudebnym reformam."
[67] MVD circulars of July 18, 1896, and April 10, 1910, to provincial governors published in Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 8 (August 1896): 16; no. 6 (July 1910): 120.
[68] V. G——llo, "Zloupotrebleniia v Peterburgskom vrachebnom komitete," Vechernee vremia, no. 132 (April 30, 1912): 3.
woman had been brought to a municipal hospital on the basis of "rumors" that she practiced clandestine prostitution. There, doctors soon discovered that she was a virgin.[69] One critic accused medical-police committee agents in St. Petersburg of recruiting "any girl who lacks the means to survive," because they were paid "by the piece" (po-stuchno ) for anyone they could induce to register.[70] This particular allegation was unfounded, but it was nonetheless true that the St. Petersburg committee pressured agents to register all clandestine prostitutes. In 1910, the sanitary commission in Minsk had its operations temporarily suspended because of the agents' improprieties in arresting "respectable" women.[71]
One scandal implicated Kazan's chief of police. According to newspaper reports, he had forced a married woman who was walking after dark to replace her passport with a medical ticket. When her husband protested, the police beat him up.[72] In 1889, a Simbirsk policeman, distressed by reports about the prevalence of syphilis among the local military, ordered his underling Kamenskii to subject all the women in one section of the city to medical examinations. The zealous Kamenskii not only picked up women on the streets, he even went into people's homes, dutifully hauling in female children, girls, married women, and old women. One nursing mother, forced to leave behind several unsupervised children, filed a complaint against him that resulted in a ten-day jail sentence for Kamenskii and a three-month salary deduction for his superior.[73] A few years earlier, newspapers reported how an Odessa police inspector had tried to blackmail a woman into having sex with him by threatening to issue her a yellow ticket if she refused. Unable to find any protection against his persecution, she went after the inspector with a knife.[74]
An author in 1906 told of an educated but unemployed young
[69] Severo-zapadnoe slovo (February 9, 1910): 3.
[70] Ape, "Moia zametka," in Prostitutsiia, ed. Ape (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 5.
[71] Vrachebnaia gazetta, no. 30 (1910): 3.
[72] Boris I. Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 12 (December 1904): 147–48; D. L. Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," Zhizn', no. 10 (October 1899): 399–40. Cases involving arrests and examinations of virgins by medical-police agents are also in Ezhenedel'nik zhurnala "prakticheskoi meditsiny," no. 8 (1901): 149.
[73] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 44–45; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 150; Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," p. 408. A policeman in a Siberian village ordered all women to submit to pelvic examinations as well. V. D. Mitrich, "K voprosu o tainoi prostitutsii," Sibirskaia zhizn ' (September 19, 1899), cited in Vrach, no. 40 (1899): 1187.
[74] Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 147; Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," p. 397; A. L. Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," Vestnik prava, no. 8 (October 1905): 157.
woman in St. Petersburg who was harassed incessantly by a medical-police agent. According to this account, she wound up fleeing her apartment and suffering from some nervous disease.[75] St. Petersburg was the scene of another episode involving the daughter of a state official who had been arrested by a medical-police agent, Vasilii Zhirnov. The newspaper Russia (Rossiia ) described how the official's daughter had been walking at midnight with an actor friend. When Zhirnov saw her smoking a cigarette and talking loudly, he assumed that she was a "nocturnal butterfly" (nochnaia babochka ) and took her to the police station. The St. Petersburg police released the young woman when her identity was established, but that was only after Zhirnov had confiscated her personal documents and begun filling out her yellow ticket.[76]
Another incident involved an accusation of extortion which merited an investigation by an MVD privy councillor. Upon returning from a wedding in Nizhnii Novgorod, two peasant couples were stopped by a pair of policemen on night duty. The policemen accused one of the women, a certain Platonova, of theft and "very likely, according to habit, treated her rudely so that Platonova raised a fuss." When the two drunken peasant men tried to assist her, they were arrested. The privy councillor concurred with the opinion of the assistant police chief that the policemen probably solicited a bribe to keep the men out of jail, since "everyone knows that Nizhnii Novgorod's arms of the law [bliustiteli poriadka ] allow themselves to accept gratitude in the form of festive gifts and the like." Apparently, there had been recent accusations of bribes from brothel owners as well.[77]
Low salaries almost invited agents to supplement their income through bribery and blackmail. In 1912, when a commission appointed by the MVD investigated charges of corruption leveled against St. Petersburg's committee, its members concluded that the 30-ruble per month salary of committee agents created "highly receptive grounds for the tendency to add to one's living through illegal means."[78] Prior to an 1889 reform of Moscow's committee, local agents also earned only 30
[75] Ape, "Moia zametka," p. 5. Dr. Petr Oboznenko, who conducted a major study of the capital's prostitutes prior to the turn of the century, in response to Ape's allegations pointed out that all abuses were punished with the utmost severity. Oboznenko, "O zashchite priezzhikh devushek," in Prostitutsiia, ed. Ape (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 8.
[76] Zhirnov was found guilty in the circuit court and sentenced to three months in prison, but the sentence was dropped upon appeal. Rossiia, no. 162 (October 7, 1899): 3; Vrach, no. 42 (1899): 1251.
[77] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, report of July 15, 1910, by privy councillor Mollerius.
[78] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, "Doklad kommisii."
rubles a month. As the chair of the Moscow duma put it, "these officials themselves must need inspection."[79] The police were not the only ones who took advantage of their authority: in 1910, The Russian Physician (Russkii vrach ) divulged, "not without disgust," that a fire had taken place in a Petersburg building containing two brothels. It turned out that the house belonged to a district police physician.[80]
Prince Sergei Volkonskii, a member of Russia's aristocratic elite, reporting to the 1899 Congress on the White Slave Traffic held in London, argued that there were scarcely any rules to protect prostitutes "from the abuse of power on the part of those into whose hands they fall. Their position is one of utter helplessness, and they are considered as being beyond the pale of the law, undeserving of protection from the authorities, who are, as it were, only called upon to protect others from their injurious influence."[81] Government observers often reached similar conclusions. A commission organized by the MVD's Medical Council noted in 1899 that medical-police agents came from the "lowest ranks" and were hired "without any kind of discrimination."[82] Moscow went so far as to dispense with agents entirely, arguing in 1908 that "it is highly difficult to find people suited for an occupation of this sort."[83] The debate over the morals of medical-police committee agents also reached Russia's short-lived legislative body, the State Duma. During a discussion of a proposed bill on the "trade in women," a Duma representative spoke of how agents protected brothelkeepers for mercenary reasons.[84]
[79] M. P. Shchepkin, Opyt izucheniia obshchestvennago khoziaistva i upravleniia gorodov, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1884), pp. 237–38, quoted in Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century," p. 265 (emphasis added).
[80] Russkii vrach, no. 19 (1910): 679.
[81] Congress on the White Slave Traffic: Transactions of the International Congress on the White Slave Trade (London: Office of the National Vigilance Association, 1899), p. 108. His gloomy analysis was confirmed several years later by prostitutes undergoing treatment at Petersburg's Kalinkin Hospital who reported to a member of the Society for the Care of Young Girls that committee agents frequently demanded money from them and prevented them from leaving the trade. Even when someone quit prostitution officially, she still had to endure surprise visits from agents. Aleksandra N. Dement'eva, "Otritsatel'nyia storony vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora po pokazaniiam prostitutok," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchianami, vol. 2, pp. 508–9.
[82] "Svod postanovlenii komissii po razsmotreniiu dela o vrachebno-politseiskom komitete v Moskve, v sviazi s proektom obshchei organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v Imperii," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 3 (March 1901): 44.
[83] "Zhurnal soveshchaniia po voprosu o nadzore za prostitutsiei v gorode Moskve," Izvestiia S. -Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914): 2068.
[84] Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety, p. 891. In 1910, an assistant professor from the Imperial Academy of Military Medicine referred to a bribery scandal involving gifts from brothelkeepers to the city governor, other municipal authorities, and medical-police agents. Mikhail P. Manasein, "Obshchii vzgliad na sovremennoe polozhenoe voprosa o prostitutsii i sviazannykh s neiu voprosov," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 1, p. 200.
The State Senate, the tsarist government's chief judicial organ, addressed the problem of abuses in the registration process as early as 1892, ruling that women could not be registered as prostitutes against their will and that medical-police committees which administered examinations to women against their wishes were criminally liable. Prostitutes who refused to register risked legal prosecution under a statute that prescribed penalties for the defiance of administrative rulings regarding indecency, but they could not be compelled to register.[85]
From the police's viewpoint, however, leaving uncertified women free to practice prostitution contradicted the very essence of regulation. The Senate's 1892 ruling seemed like needless interference with normal police procedures, particularly because legal proceedings against suspected prostitutes tended to mean time wasted in court, collection of a small fine, and a woman's quick return to the streets. Most local police and regulatory agencies continued to follow the more logical procedure of registering and requiring exams of all known and suspected prostitutes. Disregard for the Senate's ruling was built into many committees' rules. Minsk's sanitary commission, for one, called for the immediate registration of all women whose names had been reported to the commission or to the police. In the Georgian capital of Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the rules stated that a woman could be inscribed on the basis of her free will or according to the local police's decision. Prostitutes who arrived in town and refused to register could be subjected to immediate exile.[86] St. Petersburg required all vagrant women to undergo medical examinations and, as Aleksandr Fedorov confirmed, committee agents indeed signed women into the ranks of prostitutes against their will.[87]
When medical-police committees named women to the ranks of registered prostitutes, more often than not they were inscribing all suspects, instead of heeding the Senate's ruling. Police would routinely drag in the women they suspected were engaging in prostitution, question them, examine them, confiscate their passports, and issue them yel-
[85] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 33; Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," p. 157; Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia," p. 478.
[86] Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," pp. 156–59; statute 56, Materialy po voprosu ob organizatsii nadzora za prostitutsiei v gorode Tiflise i bor'be s venericheskimi bolezniami (Tiflis, 1909), p. 9; Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 37–38.
[87] "O priniatii v vedenie goroda vsego dela po nadzoru za prostitutsiei," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 38 (December 1902): 1842.
low tickets.[88] While this did not guarantee that a woman would adhere to the responsibilities accompanying her license, she was seen as at least subject to some kind of controls.
Dr. Veniamin Tarnovskii was the first president of the Russian Syphilological and Dermatological Society and a professor at the Imperial Academy of Military Medicine. Russia's leading venereal specialist and regulation's greatest advocate, he estimated that one in five women was registered involuntarily.[89] This was probably a modest guess. An empirewide survey of 1889 showed that 78 percent of all registered prostitutes were illiterate.[90] Written safeguards were therefore virtually useless for more than three-quarters of the women who held yellow tickets, some of whom were as young as 11.[91] Despite the modicum of protection provided by the central tsarist government, most girls and women knew only those procedures followed by their local police.
On the surface, medical-police regulation of prostitution fulfilled Perovskii's desire to keep prostitutes "under surveillance" (podnadzornye ) and it gave the tsarist state an additional mechanism of (ostensible) control over the urban lower classes. Though regulation had been implemented in the nineteenth century in the name of public health, it perpetuated earlier traditions that treated prostitutes as threats to public order. Women who were perceived as dangerous were subject to supervision over both their whereabouts and their bodies. Regulation also supplied policemen, doctors, and tsarist officials with additional authority. Not only did it give them an institutional structure through which to exercise their power, at the most basic level it provided opportunities for monetary and sexual exploitation.
Though the regulation of prostitution built itself on established concepts of class and gender, it also served to reinforce and further institutionalize class and gender hierarchies in Russian society. As we have seen, regulation explicitly targeted the lower classes and thus excluded women of more privileged strata from its regimen. Even the state's broader efforts to stop the spread of venereal disease by inspecting male
[88] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, pp. 37–38.
[89] Quoted in Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," p. 156. See also Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 228–29.
[90] Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. xxvi.
[91] Seven of a Baltic city's ninety-one registered prostitutes had registered between the ages of 11 and 15. A. M. Vasil'ev, "O prostitutsii v Libave," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 10 (October 1911): 1423.
workers left men from the upper classes free from surveillance. Toleration enshrined the sexual double standard which declared male desire uncontrollable and female desire nonexistent or, in any case, irrelevant. Theoretically, it involved recognition of a peculiar sexual arrangement: prostitutes would ply their trade so that a class of "respectable" and "virtuous" women would be available for marriage and reproduction.
Medical-police rules made it extremely difficult for a woman to extricate herself from the ranks of registered prostitutes. Contemporary economic conditions involved slow periods and layoffs, times when many women would take to the streets temporarily in order to make ends meet. The yellow ticket, however, could transform prostitution into a career, for the rules governing this license required its holder to break ties with her work, family, and children. Dostoevsky's Sonia Marmeladova herself was forced to move out of her family's home when she was issued a yellow ticket.[92] As soon as a woman registered with the police, prostitution became her full-time vocation. Whereas formerly she may have resorted to streetwalking as an occasional and supplemental trade, casual prostitution was no longer an option. Even Veniamin Tarnovskii, in an effort to describe the seriousness of the registration process, acknowledged that registration amounted to "a strict, unappealable sentence which deprives [a woman] of equal rights, circumscribes her freedom of activity, and sullies her honor." The yellow ticket condemned a woman to a "shameful life" and cut her off from the "honest" working world.[93]
When critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assailed regulation, its defenders claimed that the system was warranted by nadzor's medical value. Restrictions on a minority of women, they argued, could spare hundreds and thousands of men, women, and children the ravages of syphilis and other venereal diseases. Said one physician in reference to nadzor, "we must consider the facts of real life" and look out for "the people's highest good, their health."[94]
But, as many critics retorted and medical science has indisputably confirmed, regulation's very claim to guard public health was highly dubious. From a scientific standpoint alone, physicians faced diseases that were difficult to diagnose accurately and did not yet possess reliable
[92] Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, p. 20.
[93] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii s"ezda," Trudy Vysochaishe razreshennago s"ezda, vol. 2, p. 11
[94] N. A. Moskalev, "Abolitsionizm ili-zhe reglamentatsiia prostitutsii?" O reglamentatsii prostitutsii i abolitsionizme (Rostov-na-Donu, 1907), p. 30.
cures. Without microscopic analyses of vaginal discharge, doctors could easily confuse gonorrhea with simple infections. Because syphilis traveled back and forth between contagious and latent periods, prolonged hospitalization did not necessarily mean that a woman would be isolated during her most infectious phase. Regulation also suffered from a one-sided approach to disease prevention, since few serious measures provided for examinations of the customers who visited prostitutes. These men were left free to seek treatment of their own volition or to continue to infect their sexual partners. As a British opponent of regulation wrote in 1870, "As well might we attempt to stop a river in its course by damming it halfway across."[95]
The regulation of prostitution had very little to recommend it as an effective prophylactic against the spread of venereal disease. Without serious attention to clients and with no reliable diagnostic procedures or cures, the best that the government could hope for was the removal of prostitutes from their trade for limited periods of time. Though this appears to be small compensation for the system's inherent injustices, the tsarist government nonetheless remained committed to registering, examining, and incarcerating prostitutes. In turn, most women who engaged in prostitution did their best to stay beyond the reach of medical-police clutches.
[95] C. B. Taylor, The Contagious Diseases Acts (Women) (London, 1870), p. 32, quoted in E. M. Sigsworth and T. J. Wyke, "A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease," in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 96.