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.