1. Although some of the best European historians have studied crime as an aspect of social and cultural history, it is only now beginning to receive attention from Russian scholars. See Stephen Frank, “Cultural Conflict and Criminality in Rural Russia, 1861–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1987); id., “Popular Justice, Community, and Culture among the Russian Peasantry, 1870–1900,” Russian Review, vol. 46, no. 3 (1987); Laurie Bernstein, “Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitution and Society in Russia” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1987); Richard Sutton, “Crime and Social Change in Russia after the Great Reforms: Laws, Courts, and Criminals, 1874–1894” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1984); Bruce Adams, “Criminology, Penology, and Prison Administration in Russia, 1863–1917” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1981); Cathy Frierson, “Crime and Punishment in the Russian Village: Concepts of Criminality at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (1987); Eric Naiman, “The Case of Chubarov Alley: Collective Rape, Utopian Desire, and the Mentality of NEP,” Russian History, vol. 17, no. 1 (1990).

2. I use the word discourse to signify the whole gamut of hooligan behaviors and the diverse messages they sent, the construction of public images of hooliganism in the media, the preconceptions those images tapped and articulated, and the uses to which those images were put, as well as the hooligans’ continuing ability to destabilize and influence the published discourse even as the printed images classified and ostracized hooligans. This usage obviously derives from Michel Foucault’s work, but I give more weight than he would to the social facts of hooligan offenses and to the hooligans’ ability to shape and reshape the discourse even while being subjected to its power. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980); and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (New York, 1973); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1988).

3. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London, 1972), 9.

4. In Great Britain and the United States, hooliganism has come back as a label for the violent acts of sports fans; but in Russia the term has been used without interruption since the beginning of the century. For contemporaneous hooligans, see Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford, 1981); Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London, 1983); Christopher Stone, “Vandalism: Property, Gentility, and the Rhetoric of Crime in New York City, 1890–1920,” Radical History Review 26 (1982); Eve Rosenhaft, “Organizing the ‘Lumpenproletariat’: Cliques and Communists in Berlin during the Weimar Republic,” in The German Working Class, 1888–1933, ed. Richard J. Evans (London, 1982); Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984).

5. On the transformation of the social structure, see Gregory Freeze, “The Estate (Soslovie) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 1 (1986); James H. Bater, “Between Old and New: St. Petersburg in the Late Imperial Era, ” in The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986); Daniel Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley, 1990); id., “Urban Russia on the Eve of World War I: A Social Profile,” Journal of Social History, vol. 13, no. 3 (1980); Daniel Orlovsky, “The Lower Middle Strata in Revolutionary Russia,” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. E. W. Clowes, S. D. Kassow, and J. L. West (Princeton, 1991), 248–68. On confusion about social status and social roles see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, 1985), 355; Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 415–17; Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 1–4, 173–74.

6. For a discussion of the ways the concept of culture is used in this study, see below.

7. Exceptions include Mark Steinberg, “Culture and Class in a Russian Industry: The Printers of St. Petersburg, 1860–1905,” Journal of Social History, vol. 23, no. 3 (1990); Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford, 1982); and Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985). Bradley also discusses attempts to reform the unruly lower classes by imposing on them notions of “respectability.”

8. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford, 1967), 64.

9. Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), 11.

10. See Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 317–33, for a definition of Russian culturalism, which I adopt here, although I would add that often Russian culturalism included a heavy dose of Western Enlightenment rationalism and scientism, which is important in understanding perceptions of the “irrational” component of hooliganism.

11. Roger Chartier, “Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France,” in Understanding Popular Culture, ed. Stephen Kaplan (Berlin, 1984); id., “Text, Symbols, and Frenchness,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 57, no. 4 (1985).

12. The best introduction to the history of the concept is Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1983), 87–93; see also A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York, n.d.).

13. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985), 6; Daniel Brower makes a similar argument in The Russian City, 85–91; as does Leopold Haimson in “Civil War and the Problems of Social Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Russia,” in Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War, ed. D. P. Koenker, W. G. Rosenberg, and R. G. Suny (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).

14. For examples, see Reginald E. Zelnik, ed. and trans., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986); id., “Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher,” Russian Review, vol. 35, no. 3 (1976) [Part 1]; vol. 35, no. 4 (1976) [Part 2]; Victoria Bonnell, ed. and trans., The Russian Worker: Life and Labor under the Tsarist Regime (Berkeley, 1983); P. Timofeev, Chem zhivet’ zavodskii rabochii (St. Petersburg, 1909); Aleksei Buzinov, Za nevskoi zastavoi (Moscow and Leningrad, 1930); Ivan Babushkin, Recollections (1893–1900) (Moscow, 1957). On the worker intelligentsia see Mark Steinberg, “Consciousness and Conflict in Russian Industry: The Printers of St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1885–1905” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1987); Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley, 1983); Allan K. Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903 (Chicago, 1967). See also the profiles of “mass” and “conscious” workers in Tim McDaniels, Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia (Berkeley, 1988), 164–212.

15. Jeffrey Brooks, “Popular Philistinism and the Course of Russian Modernism,” in History and Literature: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed. Gary Saul Morton (Stanford, 1986), 90ff. On the culture of upward social mobility within this group, see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 269–94. On fears of falling and the “fallen,” see Joseph Bradley, “ ‘Once You’ve Eaten Khitrov Soup, You’ll Never Leave,’ ” Russian History, vol. 11, no. 1 (1984); and chapter 5 below.

16. For a turn-of-the-century Russian view, see “Kul’tura,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauz-Efrona, vol. 17 (St. Petersburg, 1895), 6, where kul’tura is assumed to be a translation of the English and French “civilization.” On the evolution of concepts of “culture” and their uses, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 92–114, 215–52; Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990).

17. On the foreignness of the poor in Western Europe, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society, 2d ed. (New York, 1984), 239–315; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (New York, 1983), 307–70.

18. On the dawning recognition of working-class culture as separate and legitimate, see E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971); Gareth Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), 182–83.

19. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London, 1975); E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 1959); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959); E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York, 1968); Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Princeton, 1973).

20. For a concise definition of social crime, see E. J. Hobsbawm et al., “Distinctions Between Socio-Political and Other Forms of Crime,” Society for the Study of Labor History Bulletin 25 (1972).

21. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance (London, 1975); Richard L. Henshel and Robert A. Silverman, eds., Perception in Criminology (New York, 1975). See also Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1963); David E. Kanouse, “Language, Labeling, and Attribution,” in Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior, ed. Edward E. Jones (Morristown, N.J., 1971).

22. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975); Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1983); id., The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York, 1982); Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978). Inspiration for this group came from two directions: the work of Clifford Geertz, among which especially The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), and that of Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind., 1984).

23. This much-debated concept is discussed throughout Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), in particular 12–13 and, in reference to Russia, 238. For a view of Gramsci that outlines the strength of the model and shows Gramsci’s understanding of cultural interaction, see T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review, vol. 90, no. 3 (1985).

24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977); and on the use of language and the control of knowledge for ordering social life, Foucault, The Order of Things.

25. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, esp. 77–114. Other historians have studied specific ways that people use the paltry tools at their disposal to resist, subvert, or circumvent power; studies range from Richard Hoggart’s examination of popular songs and newspapers in England in the 1950s, in The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957) to James C. Scott’s treatment of “weapons of the weak,” used in covert economic and political protest by peasants in Malaysia, in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985) to Dick Hebdige’s analysis of punk style as an expression of rebellion, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979).

26. My thanks to Bill Todd for pointing out the similarity.

27. For a general history of the boulevard press going back to its origins in the 1860s, see Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991), 52–72; Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 117–23.

28. With the exception of the well-thumbed police department archive in TsGAOR (fond 102), archival sources on hooligan crimes were not made available to me.

29. Readership profiles will be discussed in chapter 1. It was not until after 1905 that boulevard newspapers specifically for lower-class readers appeared. Both Peterburgskii listok (PL) and Peterburgskaia gazeta (PG) had circulations of around 30,000 in 1900, approximately equal to the Petersburg edition of Birzhevye vedomosti (The Stock Exchange News), a moderate political and financial newspaper, and Moscow’s Russkoe slovo (The Russian Word), a national general-interest newspaper, and smaller only than the conservative Novoe vremia (New Times), and Moskovskii listok (The Moscow Sheet), at 40,000. But PL and PG were newspapers of the street, and more people bought PL on the street than through subscriptions. PL had the highest street sales of any newspaper, with about 10 million copies sold in 1905. Peterburgskaia gazeta sold 3.5 million copies on the street in 1905, and Novoe vremia just over 5 million. After the 1905–1907 Revolution increased the public’s appetite for news and eliminated most censorship restrictions, circulations rose quickly, doubling, trebling, and in the case of Russkoe slovo increasing fivefold. Gazeta-kopeika, a new, cheap, working-class newspaper achieved a remarkable subscription of 250,000. Peterburgskii listok’s circulation and street sales remained steady, suggesting that it had found its audience before 1905. It neither acquired new readers from the growing mass of literate, urban readers nor lost readers to other, newly popular newspapers. (Figures cited were compiled by McReynolds, The News, Appendix A, Tables 4–6).

30. McReynolds treated Peterburgskii listok as an important cultural institution but emphasized the newspaper’s “sensationalist” elements (The News, 140, 226, 237, 248); Brooks also treated the boulevard press seriously, but he used newspapers as a source for fiction rather than for news about life in the city (When Russia Learned to Read, 117–30). Brooks’s characterization of Moskovskii listok as conservative and anti-Semitic should not be attributed also to Peterburgskii listok, which was neither.

31. B. I. Esin, Russkaia dorevoliutsionnaia gazeta, 1702–1917: Kratkii ocherk (Moscow, 1971), 47.

32. N. A. Skrobotov, Peterburgskii listok za tridtsat’-piat’ let, 1864–1899 (St. Petersburg, 1914), 3.

33. Esin, Russkaia dorevoliutsionnaia gazeta, 50–52.

34. McReynolds, The News, 60, 143, 237; Brower, The Russian City, 177.

35. In this regard Peterburgskii listok compares favorably with its rival, Peterburgskaia gazeta. While Peterburgskaia gazeta generally avoided the blood-and-guts type of sensationalism, it provided much less “serious” news and analysis and fewer of the lessons in respectable culture that Peterburgskii listok offered: where Peterburgskii listok published outraged examinations of the origins of hooliganism, Peterburgskaia gazeta presented amusing and informative interviews with gang members.

36. All boulevard newspapers occasionally reported a bloody crime in lurid detail before 1905, but the contrast between the two periods is unmistakable in terms of both the number reported and the graphic language used after 1905, as is discussed in chapter 5.

37. The exceptions were the illegal newspapers of revolutionary parties, which focused almost exclusively on political theory, tactics, and local practice during this period. However, in the last few years before the outbreak of World War I, in an effort to win readers, even revolutionary party newspapers bent to capitalist market forces and conceded to popular taste by including crime columns and other information of a less explicitly political nature.

38. For a discussion of the problems of “reflecting” and “shaping” for historians, see Michael MacDonald, “Suicide and the Rise of the Popular Press in England,” Representations 22 (1988); and Reginald E. Zelnik, “From Felons to Victims: A Response to Michael MacDonald,” Representations 22 (1988): 36–59.

39. It was not always so. For a history of the belief in newspapers’ “objectivity” see Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia, 1981).

40. Steve Chibnall, Law-and-Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press (London, 1977), 207 and passim.

41. Joseph Bensman and Robert Lilienfeld, “The Journalist,” in Craft and Consciousness: Occupational Technique and the Development of World Images (New York, 1973), 209–10.

42. Benjamin Rigberg, “The Efficacy of Tsarist Censorship Operations, 1894–1917,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 14 (1966); id., “The Tsarist Press Law, 1894–1905,” JfGO 13 (1965).

43. Circular dated November 22, 1903, cited in M. K. Lemke, “V mire usmotreniia,” Vestnik prava, vol. 35, no. 7 (1905): 156; B. I. Esin, Russkaia gazeta i gazetnoe delo v Rossii (Moscow, 1981), 113.

44. Pchela, “Den’ za den’,” PL, November 10, 1903.

45. Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto, 1982), 221–26; McReynolds, The News, 218–22.

46. M. N. Gernet, ed., Prestupnyi mir Moskvy (Moscow, 1924), xxii; S. S. Ostroumov, Ocherki po istorii ugolovnoi statistiki dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 1961), 159–60, 240–41. Statistician A. Kaufmann wrote at the time that “the statistics of the Ministry of Justice constitute a branch in which Russia occupies, if not the first place, at least one of the first places among European states” (“Russia,” in The History of Statistics, ed. John Koren [New York, 1970], 517).

47. V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden, “Criminal Statistics and Their Interpretation,” in Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data, ed. E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge, 1972).

48. Efforts to pass laws against hooliganism will be discussed in chapter 3. On laws against hooliganism after the revolution, see M. Isaev, “Khuliganstvo: Iuridicheskii ocherk,” Khuliganstvo i khuligany: Sbornik (Moscow, 1929).

49. Abdul Quiyum Lodhi and Charles Tilly, “Urbanization, Crime, and Collective Violence in Nineteenth-Century France,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973); Eric Johnson and Vincent E. McHale, “Socioeconomic Aspects of the Delinquency Rate in Imperial Germany, 1882–1914,” Journal of Social History, vol. 13, no. 3 (1980); John R. Gillis, Youth and History (New York, 1981).

50. Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917,” Slavic Review, vol. 23, no. 4 (1964) [Part 1]; vol. 24, no. 1 (1965) [Part 2].