Chapter 5
"Public Women" in Public Houses

Shabby sofas upholstered in scarlet,
Dusty tassels of doorway hangings . . .
Tradesman, gambler, officer, student
In this room, with the glasses jingling . . .

Hardly human, the hand that glided
Over the nudes in this magazine.
And the hand of a wanton  scoundrel
Pressed that bell-push covered with grime .

Hark! Across the thick pile of carpets,
Jingling spurs, laughter muffled by doors . . .
Can this house be truly a dwelling?
Is  this inhuman destiny ours?
Aleksandr Blok, "Degradation" (1911)

Tolerated houses of prostitution (doma terpimosti or publichnye doma ) officially came into existence with the 1843 implementation of regulations modeled on those for France's maisons de tolérance . Throughout the nineteenth century, official opinion remained firmly on the side of licensing, with brothels located in around 200 cities of the Russian empire at the turn of the century.^[1] Physicians and policemen maintained that state-supervised brothels, with their prohibition against the sale of alcohol and their strict rules governing the relationship be-

[1] Another 200 cities only tolerated independent prostitution. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 64.

tween brothelkeepers and prostitutes, were greatly preferable not only to clandestine bordellos, but to street prostitution. To these and other observers, the brothel fulfilled an important function: in the words of Alain Corbin: "to enclose in order to observe, to observe in order to know, to know in order to supervise and control."^[2]

The appeal of brothels was their perceived ability both to cleanse the streets of prostitutes and prevent the spread of venereal disease. Brothels, wrote Veniamin Tarnovskii in Prostitution and Abolitionism, help reduce street crime and curtail the disgraceful sight of street prostitutes beckoning and seducing clients from doorways. According to him, "undoubtedly the more women there are in licensed brothels, the less they will in general commit misdemeanors and crimes, in particular, assaults against public morality." For Tarnovskii, brothels provided an important service to the man "under the yoke of physiological necessity" and the "libertine" (razvratnik ) who awaited "the satisfaction of his sexual fancies."^[3] In a similar vein, Aleksandr Fedorov defined the brothel not as a center for vice, "but a place that serves to satisfy the physiological needs of unmarried men."^[4]

Brothels' advocates believed that public houses lent themselves more readily than street prostitution to strict medical surveillance. Since committee doctors conducted their examinations of brothel prostitutes in the brothel itself, residents could not evade medical supervision as easily as odinochki. In this spirit, the Riga medical-police committee forbade a woman from leaving her brothel without official permission.^[5] Some officials hoped to eliminate the vagaries of street prostitution entirely. In the city of Chenstokhov, for example, local rules prohibited prostitutes from living anywhere but in brothels.^[6] Though one physician acknowledged that brothels served as "breeding grounds for syphilis," he nonetheless characterized public houses as the sole environment in which prostitutes' health could be properly monitored.^[7]

[2] This referred to the intentions of France's Parent-Duchâtelet. Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 16. The Parisian connection is pertinent because as early as the 1840s the minister of internal affairs had defended brothels to Tsar Nicholas I as necessary to regulation's success by invoking Parent-Duchâtelet's endorsement of brothels. Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 350.

[3] Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, pp. 52–53, 79–82.

[4] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 57.

[5] Rubinovskii, "Povinnost' razvrata," p. 171.

[6] Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 15.

[7] Petr Gratsianskii, "Iz Russkago sifilidologicheskago i dermatologicheskago obshchestva," Vrach, no. 13 (1896): 376.

Official policy concurred. As late as 1891, a report by the MVD's Medical Department referred to the "shortage" of brothels as one reason for the spread of venereal disease.^[8] An MVD Medical Council commission reaffirmed state support for brothels in a declaration that purported to echo resolutions made by the 1897 congress on syphilis: "In a sanitary sense and in the interests of successful surveillance, state-licensed brothels are preferable to street prostitution."^[9]

Ironically, however, the Medical Council asserted this at a time when the medical community in Russia had grown more circumspect about the advisability of brothel prostitution. At the 1897 congress on syphilis, participants had in fact given brothels only grudging support. The majority voted to continue state licensing, but with an important qualification: brothels were "undesirable in principle" and could be tolerated "only until the improvement of surveillance of prostitution in general." Even this halfhearted approval went too far for a third of the congress members. They strongly protested their colleagues' approbation of brothels "because we recognize such institutions to be immoral in their very essence and because they do not attain their goals in the struggle against syphilis."^[10] In the years to follow, the public would agree, resoundingly protesting government licensing for Russia's public houses.

"White Slaves"?

"How can I give up my mode of life? My mistress [khoziaika] will not let me go. I owe her 17 silver rubles."
The prostitute Kriukova, in Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?

There was much that smacked of hysteria and hyperbole in contemporary descriptions of brothel prostitution. Efforts to inflame public opinion against brothels tended to rely on traditional conceptions of gender roles that left women easily victimized. Instead of being portrayed as individuals who had made conscious choices, brothel prostitutes were sweet young things who had been preyed upon by scheming brothelkeepers and third parties. Products of sensationalistic journalism, moral outrage, and political maneuverings, most sources ig-

[8] Otchet Meditsinskago departamenta, p. 177.

[9] "Svod postanovlenii komissii," p. 52 (emphasis added).

[10] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," pp. xxi, 159–60.

nored and obscured the positive aspects of life in Russian brothels. The readers could thus indulge their self-righteousness and prurient curiosity and, at the same time, feel reassured by descriptions of women as vulnerable and passive.

The umbrella of "white slavery" was a broad one, covering everything from consensual commercial sex in brothels to forced prostitution. By characterizing all aspects of brothel life as slavery, observers conflated the qualitative differences among the various forms that brothel prostitution could take. White Slaves in the Clutches of Infamy (Belyia rabyni v kogtiakh pozora ) was typical of this genre; the title said it all. Though women chose prostitution in the vast majority of cases, forced prostitution did exist; there are too many accounts and there is too much evidence both inside and outside the Russian empire for us to dismiss references to a "white slave trade" as mere fantasy. Taken together, these reports demonstrate that there was some truth to society's fears; women could indeed be sold into prostitution and they could be held in brothels against their will.^[11]

One report involved a girl who had been forced into prostitution at the age of 15 and was ordered to steal from her clients. Caught in a double bind, she faced a beating from the brothelkeeper when she refused and risked the same from an angry guest when she went ahead

[11] A partial list of sources that refer to white slavery in Russia includes: Baranov, V zashchitu; Belyia rabyni; L. A. Bogdanovich, Bor'ba s torgovlei zhenshchinami i "Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin" (Moscow, 1903); Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); R. S. Dembskaia, V zashchitu zhenshchin (k prostitutsii) (Tiflis, 1911); V. F. Deriuzhinskii, "Piatyi mezhdunarodnyi kongress po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami," Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii, no. 1 (January 1, 1914): 200–210; Fon-Guk, "Sluchai pokhishchenii zhenshchin v Peterburge"; S. K. Gogel', "Iuridicheskaia storona voprosa o torgovle belymi zhenshchinami v tseliakh razvrata," Vestnik prava, no. 55 (May 1899): 108–19; TsGIA, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, f. 1278, op. 2, d. 3476, Zhurnaly komissii po sudebnym reformam; Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety (1909), tretii sozyv, sessiia 2, zasedanie 109, pp. 887–902; Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh"; N. D. Iavorskii, Politseiskoe pravo (St. Petersburg, 1909); TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, "Po voprosu o bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami v tseliakh razvrata"; Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor"; V. P. Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu padshikh devushek (Moscow, 1888); Pokrovskaia, O zhertvakh; TsGIA, ROZZh, f. 1335, d. 1, "Zhurnal zasedaniia Komiteta Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin" (October 28, 1903); Otchet o deiatel'nosti Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin za 1900–1901; Rubinovskii, "O nekotorykh ustranimykh prichinakh prostitutsii," pp. 133–54; Sofiia Sedovskaia, "O s"ezde pol'skikh zhenshchin v Varshave," Soiuz zhenshchin, no. 9 (September 1908): 11–13; Truly s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vols. 1 and 2; "Mery protiv torgovtsev zhenshchinami na vitemberskikh kazennykh zheleznykh dorogakh," Zheleznodorozhnoe delo, nos. 46–47 (1905): 531.

and robbed him.^[12] In Kiev, six men who worked for a brothel owner hunted down a young prostitute who had escaped from the house. When they found her, she was badly beaten, urinated on, and raped.^[13] The author of The Sex Market and Sexual Relations described a prostitute who had been punished by being locked in a dark cellar for seven days and fed nothing but bread and water.^[14] Another author referred to a huge, illegal brothel in Ufa with a hundred prostitutes of different nationalities. The women here were fed scraps like potato peels and kept half-naked to prevent them from running away. Any transgressions invited a beating from the male owner.^[15]

One of the most scandalous incidents took place in 1912 in the Siberian factory town of Dmitrievsk. According to the newspaper report, not only was the district police officer protecting the illegal operations of a brothel owned by a Madame Iakubovskaia, but he and his friends were availing themselves of the brothel's many services. Rumors about the kind of abuses taking place in Iakubovskaia's brothel were the talk of the town, but not until the local priest raised a fuss was this matter brought to official attention. At first, the priest demanded a list of the Russian Orthodox women inside, along with their ages, from Iakubovskaia herself. In response to his second request, she told him, "Go to Sipachev, the policeman. He's our boss!" Siberian Life (Sibirskaia zhizn ') quoted a letter that the priest mailed to Sipachev, accusing him of improper and immoral behavior. It was no secret, the priest wrote, that minors were kept in the brothel and that the madam "tortures the girls and after this lashing sends them to you and you complete the thrashing and throw them into a cell." He declared, "As a priest and a Russian, it is a shame and pity to me that a Russian police official who is under obligation to uphold public morality would renounce his conscience and trample on the people's morals for the sake of despicable money. I am firmly convinced that the tears of those unfortunate girls you have treated so badly will burst over your head." In an action that brings to mind the corrupt officials in Gogol's The Inspector General, the district police officer had the priest arrested to teach him "not to interfere with my business."

When the matter came to the attention of the MVD, the ministry launched an investigation, only to learn that this brothel was part of a

[12] Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 25–29.

[13] Kievskaia mysl', cited in Belyia rabyni, pp. 14–15.

[14] Matiushenskii, Polovoi rynok, p. 100.

[15] Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 40–41.

domestic ring. Among those prostitutes who were not legally registered, the youngest was 13 years old and entertaining up to twenty clients a night. The investigators interviewed one prostitute who claimed she began working there at the age of 14. She charged that Sipachev and his assistants had the privilege of sampling all the girls who were new to the brothel. The MVD investigation also revealed that girls who refused to take clients or who proved difficult were beaten by a policeman. The "stubborn" ones would be taken to the station for still another beating and a few days in a cell. Four minors were said to have committed suicide in Iakubovskaia's brothel.^[16]

Even when brothel prostitution was voluntary, prostitutes could easily experience brothel life as oppressive, if not a form of slavery.^[17] Certainly, the high rates of venereal disease in brothels, the prostitutes' cycle of financial indebtedness, the gap between brothel reality and government regulations, and the recurring incidents of beatings and abuses warranted exposure and indignation. A prostitute's letter published in The Women's Union (Soiuz zhenshchin ) in 1909 summed up the problems: "There exist some very cruel madams who feed you poorly and beat you. In order to get a little more money from the girls, they force them to take ten and fifteen men a night. The men are for the most part so vulgar, drunken, and likewise depraved that they are repulsive even to us. But worst of all they allow diseased men to come to us and we become infected."^[18]

The relentless pace of commercial sex in brothels indeed posed a serious threat to the health of the prostitutes, as well as to their clients. A typical brothel prostitute had sexual relations with a much greater number of men than did a typical odinochka. Most observers agreed that streetwalkers were lucky to find more than two clients a night. Brothel prostitutes, if we can believe the estimates, regularly entertained anywhere from five to ten times as many men. Tarnovskii estimated that they each serviced ten to twelve guests on weekdays, thirty to forty on holidays.^[19] One brothelkeeper from a 20-kopeck house in Warsaw that

[16] Sibirskaia zhizn', no. 195 (September 1, 1912): 3; Zhenskii vestnik, no. 11 (November 1912): 242–43.

[17] In the collection of writings by French prostitutes involved in a 1975 strike in Lyons, a 42-year-old woman characterized a regulated brothel in Morocco as a "prison": "You felt you were gradually turning into a sex-machine, a robot, you stopped thinking, you became stupefied. Clients—vouchers, clients—vouchers, non-stop. You no longer existed." A——, "In the End," in Prostitutes—Our Life, ed. Jaget, pp. 64–65.

[18] "Pis'mo prostitutki," pp. 9–10.

[19] From V. V. Avchinnikova, O reglamentatsii prostitutsii (St. Petersburg, 1904), p. 7.

catered to a lower-class Jewish clientele claimed that each of her prostitutes took forty to fifty men daily, sixty to seventy on High Holy Days.^[20] When the schoolteacher M. S. Onchukova polled the brothel prostitutes in Odessa's city hospital to find out how many they had relations with each night, sixteen women estimated five clients, thirty-eight women estimated ten, twenty-one estimated fifteen, and seven said up to twenty men or more.^[21] By virtue of sheer numbers then, women in brothels had the opportunity to pass infections to (and contract infections from) a much higher number of males. Furthermore, despite medical-police rules to the contrary, most madams did not allow prostitutes in their houses to refuse clients. Such practices greatly increased a woman's risk of contracting disease.

In 1890, in Moscow's 30-kopeck and 50-kopeck houses, more than half the women suffered from syphilis, with a third of them diagnosed to be in its contagious stage. In the brothels that charged one ruble, the proportion of women with syphilis shifted to slightly less than half, but close to the same percentage were contagious. The numbers jumped in the higher priced establishments because the prostitutes tended to be young. Relatively new to the trade, they were vulnerable to syphilis in its primary, most contagious form. As they aged, suffered from various diseases, and became less marketable, prostitutes transferred to cheaper brothels, thereby adding to the numbers of women in these houses suffering from syphilis in its later stages. In Moscow's 2- or 3-ruble brothels, not only were more than half the women syphilitic, but 47 percent had primary (svezhii ) syphilis. In the three brothels that charged a steep five rubles, exactly half also had primary syphilis.^[22] If we can believe the 1897 congress's estimate for women in St. Petersburg, a full third of the women who found jobs in brothels were already infected with syphilis.^[23]

Medical-police physicians examined brothel women twice a week and inspected the brothels in their divisions at least once a month. Examina-

[20] In Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 65. During World War I, in the French port city of St. Nazaire, brothel prostitutes averaged forty to fifty customers a day. From Brandt, No Magic Bullet, p. 103. Writing of her experience in a Moroccan brothel in the 1950s, a French prostitute asserted that she "must have done over a hundred clients a day." A——, "In the End," p. 63.

[21] Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," p. 52.

[22] Nikolai P. Fiveiskii, "K statistic sifilisa sredi prostitutok domov terpimosti v Moskve," Protokoly Moskovskago venerologicheskago i dermatologicheskago obshchestva za 1892–93 gg., vol. 2 (Moscow, 1894), p. 7.

[23] "Protokoly obshchikh zasedanii," p. xvii.

tions in the brothels helped save time because prostitutes, wrote Fedorov coyly, can "undress to the costume of Eve."^[24] In addition to examining women for symptoms of venereal diseases, the medical police also checked for pregnancy, since committee rules forbade pregnant prostitutes from continuing to accept customers. Apparently, this posed few difficulties, because brothel prostitutes either failed to become pregnant or, familiar with what Fedorov called "the particulars" of their trade, they sought protection from unwanted pregnancies in contraception and abortifacients. In St. Petersburg only one brothel prostitute in 1889 and only eight in 1890 had been discovered to be pregnant (as opposed to seventeen and twenty-three odinochki). Petersburg rules required a madam to send a prostitute in her ninth month of pregnancy to Kalinkin Hospital's maternity ward, but Fedorov confessed that most brothelkeepers either threw a pregnant woman out or broke the rule by compelling her to work.^[25]

Even at its most benign, brothel life took its toll, for the constant merrymaking had a powerful effect on prostitutes and brothel workers. Shneider-Tagilets, a brothel musician who was a fifteen-year veteran in these houses, recorded his memoirs in a book entitled Victims of Depravity (Zhertvy razvrata ). According to him, on a typical day brothel prostitutes rose late in the afternoon and prepared for the night by washing and fixing their hair and applying makeup. When the first guests arrived, the women would sing or dance (despite MVD rules that prohibited "any kind of entertainment") and then invite clients to their rooms. They would coax their guests to order something to drink, also against ministry rules (and at prices five to six times the retail cost), and then perform sexual services as requested. Each night would wear on, Shneider-Tagilets wrote, until 4 or 5 A.M., filled with music, singing, dancing, drinking, the creaking of beds, laughter, tears, conversation, and shouting.^[26]

Servants often complained about the lack of peace and quiet in these "boiling cauldrons." Nostalgic about peasant life, they would say how they used to "get up at four or five in the morning, go outside, and breathe the fresh air deeply, hungry for breakfast. You'd drink some tea and with healthy delight, throw yourself into your work. It was so good. Then, you'd work some, eat a good lunch of simple, but delicious

[24] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 43; Fedorov, Pozornyi promysel, p. 14.

[25] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 51, 54.

[26] Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 35–37.

food, and you'd go to sleep on time, having pleasant, peaceful dreams. Yeah, those were the good ol' days."^[27] In the brothel though, "mornings" did not begin until the late afternoon or early evening, and the daytime hours strangely served as the "night," putting all the workers on an exhausting and artificial schedule.^[28]

Living conditions within brothels reinforced accusations of white slavery. In 1901, Onchukova informed the Odessa branch of the Society for the Protection of Public Health (Odesskii otdel Russkago obshchestva okhraneniia zdraviia) that brothel prostitutes lived "in the most ruinous and depraved conditions." She described their rooms as "small and narrow, with soiled wallpaper and pitiful pretenses of luxury. A dirty pink or pale blue lantern hangs in the middle of the room. The bed and dressing table, draped with faded muslin covers, occupy the most prominent place. All sorts of useless things—little boxes, shells, broken perfume bottles, jars with rouge, knick-knacks—are on the table." To her eyes, everything appeared "vulgar, gaudy, colorful, dirty, jaded."^[29]

Dr. Arutiun Melik-Pashaev counted twenty-six state-licensed brothels in the Azerbaidzhan capital of Baku in 1913 housing a total of 294 prostitutes. All of these brothels lacked plumbing and electricity and were located on two dirt roads, one of which reached a dead end (despite ministry rules stipulating that brothels be situated on thoroughfares). As for conditions within the brothels, Melik-Pashaev found only sixty bedrooms acceptable. The rest were in an "unsatisfactory sanitary state, and several of these were frankly unbelievable." The "Persian-style" brothels were usually the worst. Distinguished from the "European-style" ones in that prostitutes in the former received room but no board for a daily fee of one ruble, Persian-style brothels tended to contain small rooms, several of which leaked when it rained. Those rooms lacking ventilation had an "oppressive atmosphere," smelling of "various cosmetics, cigarettes, and kerosene." In some, the walls were covered with "dirty, sometimes peeling wallpaper." The courtyards were also messy. "filled with shells from seeds, cigarette butts, and other refuse."^[30]

[27] Ibid., p. 48.

[28] According to Harsin, the reversal of day and night "completed the divorce from reality and took its toll on the emotional health of the inmates." Harsin, Policing Prostitution, p. 298.

[29] Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," pp. 56–57. Also in "Prostitutsiia v Odesse," p. 3.

[30] Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," pp. 847–49. "European-style" brothels included room, board, and linen.

According to Konstantin Shtiurmer, the cheap brothels in Moscow contained stuffy, tiny, dark, and dirty rooms with shoddy toilet facilities.^[31] One Odessa report stated that most prostitutes lived in tiny bedrooms no larger than two by three meters. Each room had washing facilities, but some had no windows; a glass door to the corridor provided the only source of outside illumination.^[32] In St. Petersburg, medical-police committee rules stipulated that every brothel have a common room, a dining room, a bedroom for the madam, and one bedroom containing no less than four square meters for each prostitute, the same amount of space designed for Moscow flophouses.^[33] As the prices sank, so did the splendor of the surroundings and the standards of cleanliness. In the houses at the bottom of the heap, the "bedrooms" required by committee rules were frequently just partitioned cubicles (cribs).^[34]

Such descriptions were typical of the contemporary literature. To be sure, public houses were squalid and unappealing. Only a few brothels qualified as settings for wild erotic fantasies; most resembled the "ordinary, prosaic, boring" brothels in Anton Chekhov's short story "A Nervous Breakdown." Chekhov's protagonist found everything vaguely familiar—"the lounge, the piano, the mirror with its cheap gilt frame, . . . the dress with the blue stripes, the blank, indifferent faces."^[35] Observers like Melik-Pashaev and Onchukova were horrified by what they learned about brothel life, but their point of view obscured some of the more fundamental issues. Lanterns and knick-knacks struck the Odessa teacher as "vulgar" and "gaudy," but they must have represented the height of luxury to a girl from a remote village or urban slum. Brothels, located as many were in apartment buildings, were part and parcel of working-class housing. Surely there was nothing unusual about the kind of courtyards Melik-Pashaev disdainfully referred to as "filled with shells from seeds, cigarette butts, and other refuse." For a poor population

[31] Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," p. 31.

[32] "Svedeniia o vrachebno-sanitarnoi organizatsii i epidemicheskikh zabolevaniiakh g. Odessy," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 17 (October 1904): 564–65.

[33] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 20. When the Moscow duma established guidelines for the city's flophouses in 1910, it also ruled that tenants must have four square meters of air each. Robert William Thurston, "Urban Problems and Local Government in Late Imperial Russia: Moscow, 1906–1914" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1980), p. 268.

[34] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, p. 20. Kuprin wrote how the bedrooms in 50-kopeck brothels were "more precisely cribs divided by narrow partitions that did not reach the ceiling." Kuprin, Iama, p. 7.

[35] Anton Chekhov, "A Nervous Breakdown," in The Oxford Chekhov, vol. 4, trans. Ronald Hingley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 159–79.

accustomed to renting corners of rooms, sharing barrack beds in factories, or sleeping under their sewing machines or huddled on the stove in the countryside, the accommodations in brothels were often a big step up.

Mistreatment by clients, brothelkeepers, and their associates also frequently accompanied the trade of brothel prostitution. Petr Oboznenko pointed out that it was only in books that well-behaved young men visited brothels to satisfy their sexual desires. In fact, in the cheaper houses one could find "a crowd of drunken, brutal people who resemble human beings on the outside only. Look at the victims of these visitors who are taken to the hospital beaten, bitten, scratched all over, and you will understand the difference between books and real life."^[36] When Onchukova interviewed prostitutes in the Odessa hospital, she learned of coarse treatment by guests and beatings by madams for infractions of the house rules. One prostitute said, "It would have been better to have died young than to wear myself out so from such a life." Another told her, "If anyone knew how your heart breaks from this life. . . . God sees how much I cry after every guest." "How wretched it is here," another exclaimed. "The dancing really tortures you. [You're] dropping like flies from exhaustion, but you have to put up with the drunks."^[37] Aleksandr Baranov, a founder of the Kazan Society for the Protection of Unfortunate Women (Obshchestvo zashchity neschastnykh zhenshchin), described a brothel in Kazan known for its vicious boss. In a period of just seven or eight months, several women in this house died of consumption and two committed suicide.^[38] In another instance, when a woman who decided to leave the trade returned to her Kazan brothel to collect her possessions, she was beaten and locked in a room. The woman managed to escape, prompting her boss to visit one of the Kazan Society's representatives in order to demand her return!^[39]The Volga Herald (Volzhskii vestnik ) described in 1900 how a madam had tried to force a consumptive 16-year-old prostitute to drink and take guests. When the girl refused, the madam beat her and tossed her into the snow-covered

[36] Oboznenko, "Po povodu novago proekta nadzora," pp. 347–50.

[37] The fact that all the women interviewed by Onchukova were already in the hospital for venereal disease probably influenced the nature of their responses. Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," pp. 55–56. One author was skeptical of the veracity of any of the prostitutes' answers, writing that Onchukova probably heard a hundred "intricate stories in which much was fashioned romantically." Akvilon, "Kontury," Odesskiia novosti, no. 5216 (February 18, 1901): 3.

[38] Baranov, V zaschitu, p. 117.

[39] Ibid., p. 118.

street.^[40]White Slaves in the Clutches of Infamy listed various methods by which prostitutes were disciplined and punished. A common practice involved locking them in rooms where their screams were inaudible and then tying them up and beating them with wet towels. As one author remarked, wet towels were ideal: because they left no obvious marks, they did not deprive the "live merchandise" (zhivoi tovar ) of its "appetizing appearance."^[41]

Brothelkeepers also had well-deserved reputations for cheating prostitutes in their houses and inventing ways to saddle prostitutes with heavy debts and obligations. Although brothel prostitutes earned large sums of money for their work, it appears that little went into their own pockets. As prostitutes frequently remarked to Petr Gratsianov, "[Y]ou work and work, but everything goes to what you owe the mistress."^[42] According to the author of White Slaves in the Clutches of Infamy, the sole difference between a brothel prostitute and a slave lay in the former's ability to demand a transfer "to another den of depravity (together with her original debt and what she owes her new mistress for the resale)."^[43]

Shneider-Tagilets described what was a common arrangement between brothelkeepers and new prostitutes. Often a woman would commit herself for one year in exchange for room and board, half a dozen blouses, three or four dresses, two or three pairs of shoes, underwear, and a coat. If she stayed for the entire term of her contract, these items were supposed to come into her permanent possession, but if she left sooner, all the property reverted to the brothelkeeper. In his words, some madams accrued great wealth and lived "no worse than any landowner with their gold, silk clothes and diamonds." But "the poor woman-prostitute who, like a bee, gathers honey for someone else, collects riches for her employers only to go prematurely to her grave, tormented and suffering from every disease possible."^[44]

Shneider-Tagilets published a contract between a Moscow brothelkeeper, Anis'ia Usacheva, and a peasant woman, Mariia Serebriakova, pertaining to the Nizhnii Novgorod summer fair in 1905. (Evidently,

[40] Someone brought her to the district hospital, where she was refused treatment. Finally, members of the Kazan Society for the Protection of Unfortunate Women took her in. One of its members described how the girl died before their eyes, muttering how glad she was at last to be rid of the terrible yellow ticket. Volzhskii vestnik, no. 45 (February 23, 1900): 3; Baranov, V zashchitu, pp. 119–20.

[41] Belyia rabyni, p. 13; M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 42.

[42] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," p. 11.

[43] Belyia rabyni, p. 32.

[44] Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 10–11, 17.

the revolution of 1905 did not inhibit all forms of business in Russia.) For a total of 50 rubles plus room, board, laundry, and transportation, Serebriakova agreed to engage in prostitution at a Nizhnii Novgorod brothel for a period of two months. The illiterate Serebriakova indicated her agreement with a mark certifying that:

Usacheva has the right to use all the money I receive for visits from guests. I am obligated to enter the reception room no later than 9 P.M. every day, and on the days designated by Usacheva for outings [progul'ki ], I, Serebriakova, must return to the house no later than 9 P.M., completely sober. If I, Serebriakova, do not have valid reasons for not appearing in the reception room or if I arrive from my outing later than 9 P.M., then Usacheva has the right to fine me ten rubles from my designated salary each time.

Apparently, a mere five instances of lateness could erase Serebriakova's entire earnings. If we estimate that this woman's work earned the brothel a minimum of five rubles each night for sixty nights, we can see that the madam had the opportunity to profit tremendously. Furthermore, had Serebriakova left Nizhnii Novgorod or entered another brothel before the designated date, all of her earnings would have reverted to Usacheva.^[45] Yet Serebriakova did not completely lose according to this agreement. The lateness fines to her madam would be offset by the money she was presumably earning on the side when she failed to show up on time for work.

Brothelkeepers had other ways to exploit the prostitutes in their houses financially. In his report on Baku, Melik-Pashaev described how brothelkeepers succeeded in extorting money from local prostitutes by overcharging transportation fares. According to him, several prostitutes had paid their madams 50 rubles to travel between Baku and Kharkov when the actual fare was only 20.^[46] Brothelkeepers and procurers also pocketed money when the prostitutes who worked for them moved to other houses. Madams willingly let them go because the brothelkeepers in their new houses paid off whatever debts had been incurred. (Meanwhile, the new madam would add this to the prostitute's bill along with inflated costs of transportation and related expenses.)^[47] Madams would also sell clothes to women in their brothels, raising prices to several times the actual cost. Onchukova described the expensive, elaborate cos-

[45] Ibid., pp. 12–14.

[46] Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," p. 851.

[47] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 6–8, 11–12. Harsin describes a similar situation in regard to transfers between brothels in Policing Prostitution, p. 293.

tumes worn by prostitutes in Odessa. Women would dress as exotic Turks, Tatars, Spaniards, and Italians, having purchased these clothes from their madams at a lucrative 500 percent markup.^[48]

In this way, brothel prostitutes chronically remained in debt. Despite rules forbidding a brothelkeeper from using a woman's indebtedness to keep her in the brothel against her will, brothelkeepers were known to claim that the law required a woman to remain until her debt was paid off. This worked because the majority of prostitutes were unfamiliar with the elaborate rules designed to protect them from this kind of servitude. A Moscow physician explained that some madams would threaten prostitutes who wanted to leave by lying that they had to accept a "discharged whore's card" (bilet razriadnoi devki ) in place of their passport. Fear of this card's discovery by parents and friends served to discourage many women from breaking out of brothel life.^[49]The Russian Gazette (Russkiia vedomosti ), reporting on the suicide of a prostitute, claimed that a police investigation revealed that she, "like many other prostitutes, was forced into a public brothel." She killed herself when she found she could not leave until she had repaid a debt to the brothelkeeper.^[50]

Officials from medical-police committees made some efforts to help prostitutes break the pattern of financial exploitation. In 1898, the medical-police committee of St. Petersburg learned that 605 women in twenty-six brothels owed a total of more than 200 rubles each to their madams. Such indebtedness, wrote the city governor, Lieutenant-General Kleigels, made it virtually impossible for prostitutes to resume "honest work." Instead, the "fallen woman becomes like the personal property of the brothel and is passed from one establishment to another. Gradually she becomes more and more entangled in the cunning web of debt that has been laid out for her." The medical-police committee therefore introduced a savings program which after six months of operation held over 42,000 rubles for Petersburg prostitutes. Whether the funds were actually returned to their owners is, however, unclear. Kleigels meticulously recorded only 9,643 rubles, 35 kopecks, as having been distributed by the committee to prostitutes for "urgent need" (vy-

[48] Onchukova, "O polozhenii prostitutok," p. 57.

[49] Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 56, 58. This author melodramatically declared that there were only two ways to escape: by transferring to another brothel or by suicide.

[50] Russkiia vedomosti (May 30, 1887), in Muratov, "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor," p. 406.

dano prostitutkam na bezotlozhnyia nuzhdy ). Did that imply the retention of funds for needs that were not deemed "urgent"? In addition, officials began to inspect brothels more rigorously. As a consequence, the committee summoned 106 madams suspected of violating local rules to appear before them, imposed restrictions on twenty-four brothels, and shut down seven houses of prostitution entirely.^[51]

In 1908, St. Petersburg's medical-police committee issued a new set of rules that attempted to guard brothel prostitutes from unfair debts by enabling them to sue for their money and possessions in court. This measure sounded promising, but it often backfired. Whereas prostitutes formerly had the chance to receive aid from the police, they were now compelled to await a court date. In the interim, left without clothes and a place to sleep, many women had no choice but to return to their former madams.^[52]

A report from the Smolensk medical-police committee in 1912 acknowledged that despite ministry rules, "brothelkeepers do not consider it their obligation to assume expenses for prostitutes, whereas prostitutes pay brothelkeepers for room and board, as well as laundry and clothes." To rectify the prostitutes' "slavery" (zakabalennost '), Smolensk committee members proposed organizing a system to oversee accounting procedures between local madams and prostitutes. They also ruled that medical-police procedures should be posted in every brothel in order to guarantee that prostitutes were aware of the obligations their madams had toward them.^[53] Baku's medical-police committee held the savings of local prostitutes in a police station account. Half of a woman's salary went to her madam and another part of it paid for personal expenses, but the remainder sat "safely" in police hands. Judging by Melik-Pashaev's rendering of their accounts, only 60 of Baku's 147 brothel prostitutes had managed to put aside any money and only 13 succeeded in saving more than 100 rubles.^[54]

Part of the problem had to do with profiteering by brothel madams, but prostitutes' own attitudes and habits also played a role in their failure to save money. A detailed account of attempts by Minsk's sanitary

[51] Lieutenant-General Kleigels, "O deiatel'nosti sostoiashchago pri upravlenii S.-Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika vrachebno-politseiskago komiteta," February 15, 1900. Kleigels's report is also mentioned in Baranov, V zashchitu, p. 99.

[52] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g., p. 60.

[53] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, contains an April 6, 1912 report from Smolensk province's medical-police committee.

[54] Melik-Pashaev, "Prostitutsiia v gorode Baku," p. 858.

commission to protect local prostitutes from financial exploitation reveals something of how these women interpreted solicitude from officials, as well as the way in which many saw their relationships with brothel madams. Gratsianov's commission began in 1893 by issuing the prostitutes personal account booklets that listed wages, possessions, and goods purchased or borrowed from their madams. This policy failed because brothel prostitutes refused to take these accounts seriously. A typical case involved a brothel prostitute who left Minsk without even trying to collect her money and clothes. As it turned out, the owner of her brothel had confiscated her savings in compensation for the two months this prostitute had spent in a hospital receiving treatment for venereal disease. When Gratsianov informed the woman that hospitalization was in fact her brothelkeeper's responsibility, she responded, "How can that be possible, doctor, sir? Why should the mistress pay? You know, there are a lot of us at her place and she can't pay for everyone who winds up in the hospital."^[55]

Minsk's commission went one step further, ruling that it would hold each prostitute's earnings until she wished to leave the brothel, but prostitutes and their madams discovered how to circumvent this precaution as well. To collect her money, a woman would simply appear at the commission and announce that she intended to leave town. In reality, she would return to a local brothel. When questioned by the commission, she would claim that she had lost the money and was compelled to return to work. "Not one of these women was using this money, " objected Gratsianov. "All of it was being paid to the madam ."^[56]

Minsk's sanitary commission next decided to withhold a prostitute's money unless she could prove that she was leaving prostitution due to illness, beginning an "honest" job, or getting married. In other words, the commission refused to issue a prostitute her earnings so long as she remained in the trade. Not surprisingly, local brothel prostitutes outwitted this new regulation as well. In the year that followed, the number of marriages among Jewish prostitutes increased tenfold in this city in the Pale of Settlement, the western region of the Russian empire to which the Jewish population was restricted, and, according to Gratsianov, within a couple of months most of the "brides" were back in their former brothels.^[57] Nonetheless, when the provincial governor over-

[55] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," p. 15.

[56] Ibid., p. 15 (emphasis in original).

[57] In 1910, a Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw claimed that Jews ran all fourteen houses of prostitution in the city of Minsk. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p.56.

turned the commission's program, the commission had already collected nearly 8,000 rubles over a two-year period. Gratsianov pointed out that only 4,000 rubles had been handed back to Minsk's prostitutes. With the remaining funds, he stated, the commission might have opened a shelter for women who wished to leave prostitution.^[58]

Of course, few prostitutes would have taken kindly to suggestions that their hard-earned rubles be put toward opening a halfway house. It is much more likely that they considered Gratsianov and his commission a violation both of their finances and their autonomy. Minsk's regulatory agency believed that it was assisting local prostitutes, but the issues were actually more complicated. For one thing, Minsk officials held too much power over the women's lives. Though the sanitary commission was attempting to "protect" the women's earnings, it was still in the business of the "three I's"—identifying, inspecting, and incarcerating. For another, like a bunch of pimps it had even usurped control over these women's precious rubles.

Gratsianov had enough sense to realize that the prostitutes' obstinacy stemmed not only from coercive tactics of their madams, but from a singular code of ethics. In fact, prostitutes generally believed they had a moral obligation to repay debts to their brothelkeepers. In spite of treatment in the houses that outsiders interpreted as oppressive, prostitutes still identified more closely with their madams than they did with doctors and government officials. It could not be otherwise. Brothel life was too intimate and consuming to resemble the typical workplace. By necessity, work in a brothel was more than a job; it was a full-time commitment. Under these circumstances, brothel prostitutes would naturally form strong attachments to each other and to their madam, who could represent a mother figure as much as an exacting boss.^[59] Prostitutes might suffer economic and even physical abuse at the hands of their madams, but this treatment differed fundamentally from what they encountered at the hands of men from government agencies. Brothelkeepers could be cruel, but many had risen from the ranks and all remained social outcasts along with the prostitutes themselves. Consequently, brothelkeepers could not dehumanize the women in their houses quite in the way that even well-meaning, paternalistic bureaucrats could.

[58] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 13–18.

[59] Ruth Rosen has argued that relationships between prostitutes and their madams were "necessarily ambiguous and complex." Brothelkeepers served as confidantes and counselors at the same time as they functioned as exploiters. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, p. 88.

While the charge of "white slavery" was frequently applied to brothel prostitution, the most common slavery within the system was debt peonage. Despite regulations and the intervention of authorities, prostitutes were economically exploited and had little recourse. For some, the bondage imposed by debt seemed unbearable. For others, it was better than a life of toil and starvation. At least the brothel brought them female camaraderie and daily rituals to share, not to mention food, drink, and a warm place to sleep. Yet brothels used women up night after night and often left them diseased and destitute. Most women of the brothel did not fulfill dreams of economic success or romance in their public houses. They were a class of sleepwalkers who lived and breathed apart from most other tsarist subjects, except when they met for a few minutes—on the job.

Antisemitism and Brothel Prostitution

"Nu, what can a poor Jew do in times like this?"
Jewish procurer in Iama

Something that "intensely alarmed" the Jewish community in Russia and Europe was the way Jewish brothelkeepers and procurers kept turning up in accounts of brothel prostitution.^[60] This brings us to another aspect of Russia's concern over "white slavery"—how a focus on forced prostitution reinforced the deep strains of antisemitism in Russian society. In fact, the London physician who first coined the term "white slavery" to refer to prostitution in 1839 did so with explicit reference to Jewish involvement in this "infernal traffic."^[61]

Jews did not dominate the trade of prostitution in Europe, but they were visible enough in procuring and brothelkeeping—particularly within the Pale of Settlement—to reinforce negative stereotypes. To antisemites in Russia, such activities only confirmed their impression of Jews as clever exploiters of the trusting Russian people. To them, it was not surprising that a "dreadful kike" (strashnyi zhid ) ran a brothel in Sevastopol' or a Moscow gang known as the "Maccabees" tricked inno-

[60] Baron Aleksandr Gintsburg used these words to describe how Jews felt about Jewish participation in the "trade in women." See Gintsburg, "O mezhdunarodnoi evreiskoi konferentsii v Londone po voprosu o bor'be s torgovlei zhenshchin," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 424.

[61] Michael Ryan, Philosophy of Marriage (London, 1839), p. 14, quoted in Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 35.

cent women into prostitution by running phony advertisements for domestic servants and nannies.^[62] In Kuprin's Iama, surely the best-known novel about Russian brothels, the "flesh traders" also had Jewish surnames. One, an observant Jew known by the pseudonym "Horizon" (Gorizont ), faithfully supported his old mother in Odessa and observed the Sabbath, but had no compunctions over marrying fifteen girls to sell them into brothels.^[63]

The villains in stories about the trade in women that were reported in Russian newspapers and journals often turned out to be Jews as well.^[64] A Moscow paper recounted in 1909 how Jews ran an organization in Warsaw known by the name of Ludwig (Liudvig) that ostensibly hired girls to work at food counters, but in reality sent them to "private rooms" to entertain guests. One young woman exposed the operation when her "guest" helped her to escape.^[65] Another Jewish "trader" named Sherman was caught transporting three young women in a train station in Podol'sk province. Although Sherman had promised them good jobs in Odessa, it turned out that they were en route to brothels in a more remote seaport.^[66]

Russian officialdom did its share in perpetuating the association between Jews and the business of prostitution. As early as the 1840s, when the Medical Department of the MVD solicited opinions from provincial governors on prostitution in the areas under their jurisdiction, Jews were identified as the main purveyors of this trade in western Russia.^[67] At the 1899 London Congress on the White Slave Traffic, State Secretary and former Minister of Education Andrei Saburov told his distinguished international audience about Jewish men who sold their wives in Turkey, only to return to Russia with a passport stamped "Wife remaining abroad" or "Divorced" to find new victims.^[68] When another tsarist official reviewed the history of regulation before the 1910 Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women, he stated that Jews dominated as "owners and agents" (predprinimateli i komissionery ) in the

[62] M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 42; Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 14–17.

[63] Kuprin, Iama, pp. 104–21.

[64] The antisemitic press is described in Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 45.

[65] Moskovskii listok, no. 145 (June 26, 1909): 7–8.

[66] Novosti dnia, no. 1643 (February 1888), in Belyia rabyni, pp. 8–9. See also S.-Peterburgskiia vedomosti, no. 341 (December 13, 1902), for report about Jews involved in sending women to international brothels.

[67] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.

[68] Congress on the White Slave Traffic, p. 26.

"trade of the female body."^[69] The governor of Kherson province despaired of his inability to control clandestine vice in urban hotels because the proprietors were "predominantly Jews." Their "inherent dodginess and skill" (v silu prisushchei im izvorotlivosti i snorovki ) enabled them "to sidestep the law."^[70]

Matters in the fourth precinct of Odessa's district court seemed to bear out such inflammatory accusations. A 1902 report to the minister of justice from Odessa's public procurator detailed half a dozen recent investigations, all of which involved complaints from Jews about other Jews who had tricked their female relatives into leaving Russia for brothels in Argentina, Egypt, Siam (Thailand), China, India, and the Philippines. The court had been frustrated in its attempts to prosecute, partly because the laws on the international trade in women were so difficult to enforce, but also because witnesses supplied conflicting stories. Most significantly, when the "victims" were contacted they often reported that they had left home willingly. In one case, a mother did not identify her daughter Shendl as missing until the money that had been sent home to Odessa for four years had stopped coming.^[71]

In 1909, when deputies of the State Duma considered a bill to restrict the trade in women, they debated the role of Jews in brothel prostitution. For one Berezovskii, a representative from Volynskaia province, the proposed law provided a welcome opportunity to re-examine the "Jewish question" and "finally cure this horrible ulcer which is eating away at Russia and, according to the prophecy of Dostoevsky, reducing her to ruin." Berezovskii asserted that the "overwhelming majority" of individuals involved in the trade of prostitution belonged to the "Judaic tribe" (k iudeiskomu plemenni ). When a fellow deputy shouted out "That's a lie!" Berezovskii (to "applause from the Right") retorted that "no kind of open or secret Jew-lovers" (iudofily ) could prove otherwise.^[72]

In Prostitution and Prejudice, Edward Bristow described famous Jewish courtesans like Sendele Blueffstein of St. Petersburg, who earned money in the second half of the nineteenth century both as a broth-

[69] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.

[70] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter to MVD of December 19, 1911.

[71] TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, report of November 28, 1902.

[72] Gosudarstvennaia Duma, tretii sozyv, pp. 896–97. By the census count in 1889, five of the six madams in Berezovskii's home province were Jewish. See Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. 12.

elkeeper and as an agent of the tsarist police. In Warsaw, a Jewish gangster named Shilem Letzki organized a synagogue for his underworld colleagues of prostitutes, brothelkeepers, pimps, and thieves. The tsarist secret police let "King Shilem I," as he was known, conduct business freely, partly because he was an enemy of the Jewish socialist organization, the Bund.^[73]

How accurate was the general impression of brothel prostitution as a uniquely Jewish trade? To be sure, Jews worked in prostitution disproportionately to their numbers in the population, with the percentages of Jewish madams far exceeding the percentages of Jewish brothel prostitutes, and both outnumbering the proportion of Jews in Russia's population. According to an 1897 census, Jews composed only 4 percent of the population in the entire Russian empire (including Poland, with its nearly five million Jews).^[74] In 1889, Jews made up 7 percent of the prostitutes registered in the empire's brothels (570 of 7,840 women) and 6 percent of its odinochki (631 of 9,763). In contrast, a full 24 percent of the madams were Jewish (297 of 1,214. women). In 1889, in Minsk, Bessarabia, Kherson, and Tavrichesk provinces, Jewish brothelkeepers reached percentages of 64 (7 of 11 women), 79 (15 of 19 women), 83 (30 of 36 women), and 92 (22 of 24 women) respectively.^[75] Within the Pale of Settlement as a whole, Jewish women ran a full 70 percent of the brothels.^[76] Jewish brothelkeepers were not in the majority overall, but their numbers were significant enough to raise eyebrows.^[77] Though Jews clearly did not dominate brothel prostitution numerically, their disproportionate status, their visibility, and the public's readiness to think badly of them left Jews extremely vulnerable to the image of brothelkeepers as rapacious Jews who profited off the bodies of young Russian women.

Some of the confusion derived from the public's misunderstanding

[73] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 14, 20–21, 24, 60–61.

[74] In the Pale of Settlement, 11 percent of the population were Jews. Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), p. 63.

[75] The percentages of Jews rise when counted by nationality: 27 percent of madams were Jews by nationality. Likewise, in Minsk, the percentage increases to 82 percent; in Kherson, to 89 percent; in Tavrichesk, to 96 percent. Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. xiii, 12–14, 20, 24.

[76] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 55.

[77] Bristow cites police and anti-vice crusaders in Berlin, Hamburg, and London as having found 37 percent of 578 known traffickers to be Jewish. He suspects, however, that this is a low figure since many Jews disguised their Jewish identity. Ibid., p. 52.

of statistics regarding the large numbers of Russian prostitutes abroad. According to data collected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the years 1900 to 1904, among 1,650 registered prostitutes in Buenos Aires, a full 18 percent (293) were Russian. Numbers like these could fuel fears of "white slavery" indeed. Yet in 1905, Petr Oboznenko pointed out that every one of the "Russians" was, in fact, a Russian-born Jew. Rather than falling into some terrible web of international deceit, these women had simply traveled to Argentina with their families under the inducement of Baron Hirsch, who sponsored Jewish agricultural colonies for immigrants. When the heavy agricultural work required of these brand new "farmers" proved beyond them, the women turned to prostitution for the usual reasons. Soon, Oboznenko wrote sarcastically, "white slaves" should be appearing in Uganda; it was after all slated as the promised land for many Zionists.^[78]

In a speech to the 1910 Congress against the Trade in Women, Baron Aleksandr Gintsburg suggested that the participation of Jews in the trade in women was "inversely proportional to their legal and social position."^[79] When Kuprin's Horizon met a military general on a train, he presented himself as part traveling salesman, part broker. Horizon was not far from the truth about Jewish involvement in the trade of prostitution when he said, "Nu, what can a poor Jew do in times like this?"^[80] Edward Bristow perceptively calls white slavery "the sexualization of blood libel." Just as it was believed that Jews required the blood of Christian virgins to make their Passover matzoh, it was easy to accept that Jews gleefully lured naïve gentile girls into brothels and other dens of debauchery. Brothelkeeping, writes Bristow, was an economic necessity in an empire where most professions were closed to Jews. Antisemitism may not have directly caused the trade in women, but it certainly "distorted the Jewish economy and impoverished the people."^[81]

Gratsianov singled out the Jews not only as prostitution's chief third parties in western Russia and Poland, but as the ones most adept at

[78] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1675–76. Bristow has also pointed out that Jewish go-betweens dealt mostly with Jewish women. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 47.

[79] Gintsburg, "O mezhdunarodnoi evreiskoi konferentsii," p. 424.

[80] Kuprin, Iama, p. 106.

[81] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 46, 85.

dodging sanitary commission rules.^[82] Letters he reproduced, however, provide other, more useful insights into Jews and the business of prostitution. In Mitav, someone named A. I. Simon answered the letter of a woman who had asked to return to Simon's brothel and promised to bring along an 18-year-old "pretty young lady" (khoroshen'kaia baryshnia ). Simon was willing to take them both, so long as they had no outstanding debts. If they lacked the fare for railway tickets, "then send your things C.O.D." Another woman, one in a family of four sisters who ran brothels in Minsk, Kovno, Odessa, and Bobruisk, told a prostitute named Rokhlia that she was welcome, but not for the 15 rubles Rokhlia had requested in payment.^[83] Given the high number of Jews in Minsk, not surprisingly, the principals in these letters are obviously of Jewish ancestry. But the letters tell us more than that—they suggest that brothel prostitution was by necessity a close and personalized activity that often extended to large families. Though the trade in women was serious business, it clearly had its human elements as well.

The Jews who engaged in the business of prostitution resembled the women who chose prostitution as the most sensible employment option among the few that were available to them. Coercion and fraud played a role in some instances, but the individuals who traded in women mostly just facilitated the progress of what they looked upon as legitimate business transactions. Alain Corbin has dubbed these activities a logical extension of brothel prostitution itself, with its imperative to find new women to satisfy the customers.^[84] Most middlemen and brothelkeepers were not the evil "slave traders" that made the news; rather, they were men and women who ran the brothels, moved women between brothels and cities so that "fresh merchandise" was available to the customers, found new recruits, negotiated agreements, and kept up a circle of contacts. Jewish involvement in the trade of prostitution was an artifact of an antisemitic system that extended quotas to Jews in higher education and the professions, and excluded Jews from owning land. Ironically, this had the consequence of confirming the antisemites in their conviction that Jews were by nature traffickers in flesh and stigmatizing the business of prostitution as a Jewish pursuit.

[82] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 5, 15, 17, 26–27.

[83] Ibid., pp. 12–13.

[84] Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 280.

Bonds and Rituals

So clowns just be careful with me,
It's dangerous to play tricks on an ardent heart.
To fall in love, it's so easy and so likely,
To forget Tania—only that will be hard.
Poem to a prostitute in Kalinkin Hospital

Brothel women are less elusive to the historian than odinochki. Streetwalkers and other independent prostitutes faded in and out of Russia's working class and urban poor, complicating the task of differentiating them. Brothel prostitutes, on the other hand, lived within the walls of their brothel and in so doing created their own communities. As members of unique subcultures within Russian society, brothel prostitutes appear to have formed social bonds tied to their economic backgrounds, their profession, and their shared status as outcasts.

Brothel prostitutes and brothelkeepers retained strong cultural links with peasant and religious folk traditions, even as they tried to boost revenues. To do so, they employed rational means to make more money: prostitutes encouraged guests to buy drinks at inflated prices, madams tried to spice up their houses with an ever-changing supply of young and pretty women, and both did what they could to create an atmosphere appealing to men's libidinal imaginations. But brothel owners and prostitutes also resorted to seemingly "irrational" techniques to enhance their income by consulting with wisewomen and seers on how to purge their brothels of bad luck and following complicated, symbolic rituals to attract more customers and foil competitors. Good luck charms, special rites, and magic were common throughout Russian peasant culture; in the brothel these practices were adapted to the particular conditions of commercial sex.^[85]

One brothel rite was known as "drawing the devil." In the hope of bringing in clients, one woman would sketch a representation of the devil by drawing a man with short legs, horns, a ladder in one hand, and a broom in the other. Other women in the brothel would write the names of their favorite guests in the blank space around this picture and then, at the stroke of midnight, stick a burning cigarette in a hole that had been made where the devil's mouth had been drawn. Next, in front of a mirror, each woman would take a puff of the cigarette and slap

[85] Descriptions of rituals are from Shneider-Tagilets, Zhertvy razvrata, pp. 56–63.

herself on the chest. The brothel's musicians would play a march and the women would then carry the "devil" onto the beds in each of the brothel's rooms, all the while beating his picture with twigs. Finally, the devil would be crumpled up and thrown into the fireplace, as the women shouted the names of their preferred clients into the chimney. According to Shneider-Tagilets, the brothel musician who recorded these practices, if no guests arrived, the woman who initially drew the devil's picture would be shunned as "unlucky" (neschastlivaia ) and she would not be allowed to participate in "this stupid procession" again.

Another ritual involved burning locks of the women's pubic hair with some kindling while each of the women danced around this fire with her dress raised. There were also rites in which women in the brothel would boil the keys to the front door or wash themselves in water that had been used to cook a piece of meat. Another method of attracting customers involved the fashioning of a voodoo doll wrapped in a shroud for delivery to a rival brothel. Superstitious madams might also make a note of the first woman to bed down with a client each night, dubbing her the "starter" (pochin ), someone to be considered good luck. If, however, some scandal erupted that night or something went wrong, the same woman would be branded unlucky and her fellow prostitutes might decide that similar problems would arise should she once again be the first to find a client.

Shneider-Tagilets also wrote down the lyrics of three "heartbreaking" songs that were sung in Russia's brothels. With some caution, we can use the words to provide some clues about how prostitutes thought about themselves and the choices they had made. Judging by all three songs, in their more sober moments brothel prostitutes considered themselves according to categories similar to the ones constructed by privileged society. In "Fallen," for example, the scenario of a girl's ruin corresponds closely with the notion of prostitution as a desperate measure to ward off starvation: a God-fearing girl "unacquainted" with need finds herself in dire straits and throws herself into the "huge abyss of vice." Angered over the way society holds her in disdain, she turns her back on its values and rejects its pity.^[86]

Fallen

There once was a time that I looked for
Some brotherly help here in town.

[86] Ibid., pp. 18–19. Songs translated by Laurie Bernstein.

But now my soul has grown callous,
And I'm used to the roaming around!

Not for this was I born and then raised up.
Unacquainted was I with such need.
I once prayed to God, I was faithful.
I once had a soul that knew peace.

But then need set in, and soon after,
The spectre of hunger, it loomed.
The grief, it became a disaster,
And I gave myself up as quite doomed.

So in the huge abyss of vice
I fell with my eyes shut so tight
I forgot what was holy and nice
And succumbed to the terror and fright!

The whore's always held in contempt.
No pity will anyone proffer.
I was lured right into the abyss,
And no help did anyone offer!

I turned to my friends for assistance.
Their advice they gave before long:
"Shame on you! You ought to be working!"
With one voice they all sing this song.

But where there is work they won't tell me;
On that there is nothing to hear.
If someone could help me in that way—
Now that kind of friend I'd hold dear!

So toss all your dirt and your stones.
I can take it, I'm used to all that.
I'm not waiting around for your pity.
No one cares about me, that's a fact!

In the second song, a consumptive seamstress worn out from work and abandoned by her lover at a time when "love and honor . . . don't hold much water," seeks refuge in a brothel. There she need not go hungry anymore, but she must sell sex to "old men" and face the fact that sooner or later she will contract syphilis.^[87]

Poor Seamstress

You're already a poor, poor seamstress.
You've suffered for twenty-five years.

[87] Ibid., pp. 19–20.

A kopeck's not easily gotten.
You've survived much misfortune and tears!

With nose pinched, and cheeks all a-sunken,
Hard labor has sucked dry your breast.
Your white hands are now all bony.
Your cough just won't let you rest!

Say goodbye to depression and worry.
For "honor" it's grown much too late.
Forsake sadness and iron needle.
Make peace with a debauched fate.

Love and honor, they don't hold much water,
And old age, it's dry as a bone.
Every rake spoils somebody's daughter,
Then leaves her behind all alone.

So join up with "the institution."
You'll never be hungry while there.
They'll give you a room that's yours only,
And they'll teach you to dance oh so fair.

There you'll drink beer and porter and cognac.
You'll never sleep without a man.
You'll also learn various methods
To steal ruthlessly long as you can.

You'll fondle old men for a ruble,
And laugh to those girlfriends of yours.
And you'll often wind up in hospital,
Suffering from syphilitic sores.

The third song has a more mournful tone. It is narrated by a man whose betrothed has left him to become a prostitute. Unlike the women in the first two songs, she is completely unsympathetic; she has forsaken love and respectability out of greed and a desire to live the gay life. His heart broken, the narrator appeals to his dead mother for pity. Only at the very end does the song arouse any sympathy for the prostitute—but there it is only for her poor damned soul.^[88]

Oh Mother!

Oh mother, oh mother, my mother!
Was I born so all this could be?
I curse the fate that has brought me
Such endless and cruel agony!

[88] Ibid., pp. 20–21.

You lie in your grave very peaceful;
My sorrows do not reach your ears.
But listen, oh mother, I'm grieving;
I love her, yet know only tears!

To love her so madly is painful.
She's mistress to some other men.
My heart burns with a flame I can't fathom
And with malice and hatred for them!

She was my betrothed, my beloved,
But she grew restless living with me.
I loved her with all of my senses,
But from her I found cruel mockery.

She left for a den of infamy,
Where she found chandeliers and gold jewels,
Where the heart spills over its own blood,
Where the immortal demon, he rules!

She sits in the arms of another,
Who flatters her so vulgarly.
To her, God and shame are forgotten
Alongside someone as corrupt as he.

In heaven, there aren't any secrets;
It's known who is righteous, amen.
For us, divine judgment is waiting.
The guilty ones will be condemned.

So blessings, my dear, dear mother.
Give me patience to live out my role,
And pray for my poor, poor darling,
For her young and fallen soul!

To analyze these songs with any assurance, we would need to know the spirit in which they were sung, whether the women who sang them took them seriously, whether they were performed during quiet, intimate moments, whether they were sung solo or in unison, whether raucous tempos and sophomoric or clever rhymes subverted the melancholy lyrics, and whether customers demanded such songs for their own reasons. Shneider-Tagilets introduced them as genuinely sad, sung "in moments of depression and consciousness," but the sparks of anger and defiance suggest that they may also have served other functions. Surely a unified chorus of prostitutes' voices would have helped take the edge off whatever feelings of alienation or self-pity or disappointment these women shared.

Life within the brothel encouraged emotional and physical intimacies among residents. Observers, however, remained uncharacteristically silent about sexual relations among prostitutes. Although explicit prurient speculation extended to most aspects of prostitutes' lives, it usually stopped short of a consideration of lesbianism.^[89] In France things were different. According to Alain Corbin, in the mid-nineteenth century Parent-Duchâtelet assumed that "tribalism" was part and parcel of relations among women working as prostitutes.^[90] Jill Harsin has suggested that French authorities required brothel prostitutes to maintain separate beds in order to discourage sexual acts between the women themselves.^[91] In the Russian context, however, nineteenth-century regulations about separate beds in houses of prostitution explicitly fell under the rubric of sanitation and public health.

In western Europe, a conception of "lesbianism" was slow to follow what was a new understanding of homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century. Lesbianism did not even exist according to Russian laws and was not yet a significant topic of social discourse.^[92] As with so many aspects of prostitution, perceptions were askew of a more complex reality. In fact, we encounter allusions and even a few explicit references to "perversions" among the girls in the House of Mercy's juvenile division and to a female clientele among the privileged classes that also patronized prostitutes.^[93] In Boris Bentovin, we find a lengthy discussion of sexual and loving relationships among prostitutes.

Bentovin discussed lesbianism in a 1904 article based on his experiences as a Kalinkin Hospital physician. In his view, the "depraved environment" of the brothel in particular gave relationships of the innocent, schoolgirl variety "another character." Wrote Bentovin, "The very regime of the brothels, with its prison-like foundation and the constant relations of brothel women, could not do more to promote such in-

[89] Laura Engelstein argues that in the post-1905 atmosphere, educated society was more wont to see "deviance" among prostitutes and other members of the lower classes. See Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness , pp. 288–98.

[90] Corbin, Women for Hire , pp. 4–5.

[91] Jill Harsin, "Crime, Poverty and Prostitution in Paris, 1815–1848" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1981), p. 35.

[92] See Engelstein, "Gender and the Juridical Subject," p. 482 n. 99.

[93] See, for example, Kuprin, who suggested that prostitutes were so repelled by their profession that almost every one engaged in lesbian activities (Iama , p. 88); A. I. Matiushenskii, who asserted that this "unnatural vice" originated in the East (Polovoi rynok , p. 115); Zakharov, "Prichiny rasprostraneniia prostitutsii," p. 202; Konopleva, "Otdeleniia dlia nesovershennoletnikh," pp. 304, 306; Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1990 g. , p. 70.

timacy." Such alliances were not discouraged by madams because they kept prostitutes from the ups and downs of love affairs with men. But, Bentovin argued, because prostitution was a mercenary occupation, these relationships could only have mercenary aspects. In the brothel, they were based on experience, with the new recruits hooking up with the veterans. On the streets, young prostitutes would find "more solid and experienced girlfriends" for mutual exploitation, the former benefiting from the financial security of the established prostitutes and learning the ropes, and the latter attracting more clientele because of their lovers' youth and "freshness."^[94]

Bentovin reproduced some letters that had been sent among prostitutes in Kalinkin's infamous venereal ward. It was there that he had seen "affectionate pairs" walking down the hospital corridors, "tenderly embracing and cooing." Though the letters are not necessarily explicit about sexual relations or brothel prostitution, they certainly document powerful emotional attachments between the inmates and women on the outside. In the first letter, a 15-year-old in Kalinkin named Niusha admonished another inmate, her "Dear Mania," for insulting her. Niusha asked her to come see her; Mania's refusal would be read as a signal that "you don't love me." But "whom I love, that you yourself must understand." Niusha acknowledged that she and Mania would soon be separated—Mania was going to enter the House of Mercy. "You'll find yourself another girlfriend where you live, and you'll forget about me." But Niusha closed her letter by sending "endless" kisses to Mania's lips and enclosing a poem that begged her to remember their time together.

Mania wrote back, complaining that she did not have Niusha's address and adding that Niusha was now with another woman and she did not want "to interfere with your happiness." Niusha was still young; it was better for them to stay apart—"If you were 16, then it would be another matter." But Mania also gave her a chance to resume their relationship: "if you don't want to break up, then you must listen and do everything that I want." She closed with the words, "be happy and don't forget me."

Niusha answered, admitting her confusion. "I wanted three girls to make a scandal and break windows so they would transfer me to you in the barracks." Now Niusha decided it was not worth it, since she was going to be discharged on Friday. She promised to come see

[94] Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," pp. 165–66.

Mania before she left, closed with another poem, and signed off, "I kiss you an endless number of times and I passionately embrace You.^[95]

One prostitute with the initials "A. A." apologized for not having written in a while and acknowledged her "Dunia's" jealousy over someone referred to as "P." Yet she reminded Dunia "how many times I cried" when Dunia herself was with someone else. "Sweet Duniasha, I beg you, please, don't get yourself a girlfriend in the hospital." In a second letter, she apologized many times over for hurting Dunia's feelings and begged her to reconcile. She explained to her "dear Dunechka": "No, I don't love her. You know that I love only you, and I am your girlfriend, and you are mine until I lie in my grave. I loved you and will love you, but I don't know whether you love me as much." In a third note, she again begged Dunia not to be angry with her. "My dear Dunia, no, we didn't come together in order to fight and argue; no, not for this."^[96]

One Katia expressed her horror over the fact that "Taniushka" had wound up in the hospital. She wrote, "Sweet and dear Taniushka. I kiss you endless times on your luscious lips [appetitnyia gubki ]. Sweet Tania, you know that I love you. I love you madly. Tania, when I heard about you, that you were taken in [to Kalinkin Hospital], I didn't sleep for two days and nights. With eyes that were never dry, I cried and pitied you, that such a young thing was perishing." She also forwarded the poem translated at the beginning of this section that ends, "To fall in love, it's so easy and so likely/To forget Tania—only that will be hard." When Tania wrote back, she expressed her gratitude for Katia's concern and told her they would be together when she was released from the hospital. She apologized for not writing a poem: "Forgive me. I can't write verses, I don't know how."^[97]

Such letters belie Bentovin's cynicism about the relationships between prostitutes. Though the letters indeed display naïveté and not a small share of histrionics, they also evince deep and serious attachments between these young women. Bentovin, however, could only interpret the writings according to established parameters. From their "illiterate lines," like any good Victorian, he could detect the "sensitive and tender female soul" of someone who, with the proper cultivation, could be "a

[95] Ibid., pp. 167–68.

[96] Ibid., p. 168.

[97] Ibid., p. 169.

good wife and good mother."^[98] He did not realize that the women were already fulfilling those roles (and might continue to do so) for each other.

The Movement to Abolish Licensing

Public brothels are official employment agencies of women for the purpose of prostitution, arenas of criminality, and an open provocation to debauchery. [Brothels] are schools in which our youth loses its health, its honesty, and its respect for women and the family hearth. [Brothels] are sources of venereal disease and alcoholism.
Medical Department of Kharkov (1915)

The granting of licenses to houses of prostitution evolved into one of the most controversial aspects of the regulatory system. By the turn of the century, support for continued toleration of brothels disintegrated because of three overlapping factors. First, it had become patently clear that brothels were not fulfilling the prophylactic role that had been assigned them in the nineteenth century. Increasing numbers of studies showed that brothel prostitutes had higher rates of venereal disease than registered odinochki and clandestine prostitutes, and that the majority of men suffering from venereal disease blamed their infections on women in brothels. Soaring rates of syphilis and gonorrhea reinforced claims that brothels functioned as "syphilis laboratories," both for prostitutes and for the men who paid for their services.^[99] One Tomsk official provided sobering statistics that traced a third of all syphilis in that Siberian city to its brothels.^[100]

Second, growing awareness of "white slavery" and the ways in which brothelkeepers and their associates exploited brothel prostitutes played a major role in shaping public and professional opinion about licensing. Russia's dailies fueled the movement against brothels by publishing sen-

[98] Ibid., pp. 166–69.

[99] Avchinnikova, O reglamentatsii prostitutsii, p. 7.

[100] In the summer of 1896, it was found that 92 percent of brothel prostitutes in Tomsk suffered from some form of syphilis; in 1911 Dr. V. M. Timofeev diagnosed 45 percent of Tomsk's brothel prostitutes as syphilitic. See K. M. Grechishchev, Pritony razvrata (Tomsk, 1913), pp. 4–5; "Protokoly zasedanii vrachebno-sanitarnago soveta," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika g. Tomska, no. 9 (September 1912): 402.

sationalistic articles about beating, rapes, robberies, and kidnapings involving brothel owners and young women. The formation of the ROZZh in 1900 was both a consequence and a mainspring of antibrothel sentiment. International efforts to combat the trade in women inspired the ROZZh's organization, but its well-publicized activities also helped focus educated society's attention on the issue of forced prostitution and the exportation of women to brothels in foreign countries.^[101]

Third, the struggle against brothels was one of the growing pains of Russian urbanization. When toleration was originally conceived, officials extended licenses to brothels located on the outskirts of towns. However, as towns expanded and populations and industries grew, former suburbs frequently became incorporated into hitherto small cides.^[102] As a result, brothels attained a new visibility. Whereas earlier they may have been seen as a vague annoyance, they had now become a genuine social threat. Brothel opponents in Kharkov, for example, argued that brothels were "anachronistic," that twenty-five years had passed since brothels were licensed for their neighborhood, at a time "when life in our city was not so intense."^[103] The presence of brothels hurt property values of surrounding homes and threatened a neighborhood's tranquility and sense of community.

State officials also shifted their position. Even Tarnovskii came full circle, characterizing brothels in 1899 as "the worst form of tolerated prostitution" and claiming that unless medical-police committees started examining the men who visited brothels, brothel prostitution would remain more harmful to public health than prostitution in the streets.^[104] In 1901, the MVD explained its decision to forbid women under the age of 21 from living in brothels by asserting that "entry into

[101] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1900 i 1901 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1902), p. 8.

[102] See, for example, Vasil'ev, "O prostitutsii v Libave," p. 14O2.

[103] "Doklad o zakrytii domov terpimosti v gorode Khar'kove," Izvestiia Khar'kovskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 9–10 (September–October 1915): 133.

[104] At the 1897 congress, Tarnovskii still favored brothels, but much less enthusiastically and more guardedly than he had in previous forums. Whereas he had once suggested exempting brothels from state taxes and organizing free, obligatory visits to brothels for the army's lower rank, by 1897 he was more circumspect, hinging his continued approval on the necessity of medical examinations for male guests. When the Medical Council commission that digested the congress's decisions failed to include this measure in its proposals, Tarnovskii submitted a personal protest. Tarnovskii, "O reglamentatsii prostitutsii v Moskve i v Parizhe," Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal (February 1881); Vrach, no. 9 (1899): 260–61; Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 3 (March 1901): 56. See also Elistratov, O prikreplenii zhenshchiny, p. 367; M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 49.

a brothel at such an early age exerts an extremely harmful influence on a woman in physical as well as moral respects."^[105] The Medical Council itself made a dramatic about-face in 1906, declaring that "one of the particular measures for the betterment of the population must be the obliteration of state-licensed brothels, whose further existence cannot be justified from a hygienic or prophylactic point of view, and whose existence contradicts basic humanitarian and social demands."^[106] Though the MVD never withdrew its policy of issuing licenses to brothels, there is evidence that officials in the upper echelons of the UGVI listened carefully to both the medical profession's disenchantment with brothels and the public's indignant outcry. When dumas and rural councils (zemstva ) throughout the empire ruled to shut down local brothels, the MVD never attempted to overrule their decisions. It appears that even the tsarist administration doubted the wisdom of continuing to sponsor houses of prostitution.

Brothels became anathemas by the early 1900s, perceived as polluting the very men and women they were designed to protect. Feminists and moral crusaders spearheaded Russian society's campaign against state brothels, but government bureaucrats, members of the liberal intelligentsia, and ordinary urban residents also participated in the struggle to halt the government's policy of licensing. Sympathetic reformers and staunch regulationists alike complained of "white slavery" and the inordinately high rates of venereal disease and alcoholism in state-licensed brothels. The clamor against the state's toleration of brothels grew increasing loud, as these houses came to be regarded as "citadels of syphilis and venereal disease" and "dens of depravity" (pritony razvrata ).^[107]

[105] MVD circular of June 6, 1901, to provincial governors, published in "Offitsial'nyi otdel," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 9 (September 1901): 165. This ruling, as an "explanation" circulated six weeks later elucidated, did not apply, however, to women already in brothels. See MVD circular of July 16, 1901, published in ibid., p. 166. Another circular attempted to straighten out any "misunderstanding" caused by the first two, reiterating that prostitutes under the age of 21 at the time of the June 6 ruling did not have to leave public houses. If they quit work in a brothel, though, they could not be readmitted until they had reached the legal age. See MVD circular of October 3, 1902, published in ibid., no. 11 (November 1902): 193. In 1910, the MVD complained that these instructions had not been followed. See MVD circular of April 28, 1910, published in ibid., no. 6 (June 1910): 120.

[106] This break with Medical Council tradition was widely quoted, but the most complete version of the decision is in Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 8 (August 1906): 182–85.

[107] A Siberian physician used the expression, "citadels of syphilis," in "Protokoly zasedanii vrachebno-sanitarnago soveta," p. 403. "Dens of depravity" was a common epithet for brothels.

In 1910, although not all 293 representatives to the Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women voted to abolish regulation altogether, they unanimously called for the elimination of state-licensed brothels.^[108]

Residents from all over the Russian empire employed various political strategies to move brothels out of their neighborhoods or eliminate them completely. Brothelkeepers and the homeowners who rented out apartments as brothels acted in their own defense, composing what they considered legitimate appeals for consideration and protection.^[109] When local authorities failed to deliver, petitioners sought aid from the Department of Police, provincial and city governors, the UGVI, and even the minister of internal affairs himself. The extent of official involvement indicates a system that was governed by many, but ruled by none.

In 1911, residents from the island of Kronstadt wrote to the MVD about transferring a brothel to a more remote location. Showing familiarity with empirewide rules, the petitioners asserted that the house was too close to a military barracks and, surrounded as it was by wooden buildings, represented a potential fire hazard. They also complained of the pernicious moral influence on neighboring families. According to their petition, from early evening until late at night one could hear noise, shouting, and cursing near the brothel. Drunken sailors from the Baltic fleet often harassed female passers-by and there were several incidents involving drunks who had tried to enter the wrong house.^[110]

[108] Papers against brothels at the 1910 congress included Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma"; Ekaterina I. Gardner, "Ob unichtozhenii domov terpimosti"; Pavel D. Leskevich, "Khodataistva gorozhan ob unichtozhenii domov terpimosti"; Vera Kliachkina, "Mnenie Kievskago otdeleniiu Rossiiskago obshchestva zashchity zhenshchin po voprosu ob unichtozhenii domov terpimosti." For the 1910 congress vote, see Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 575.

[109] In addition to the cities described below, the sources contain and/or mention petitions and letters of complaint from residents in Sevastopol', Iamburg, Mariupol', Irkutsk, Maikop, Kherson, Kobrin, Astrakhan, Elabuga, and Kineshma. There are also letters and petitions from brothelkeepers and landlords in Astrakhan and Ufa.

[110] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition to MVD of October 19, 1911. A 1907 inspection report on the Kronstadt brothel described serious defects in the house's construction and matter of factly mentioned how dancing would naturally take place there (in disregard of regulations that forbade merrymaking). In ibid., November 26, 1907 minutes from building commission in Kronstadt; letter to UGVI from military governor of December 10, 1911. In 1903, a Kronstadt police chief was tried for taking bribes and extorting money from local madams. See "Sudebnyi otchet po delu Shafrova," Novosti (February 4, 1903); Gratsianov, "Po povodu proekta novago 'Polozheniia o S.-Peterburgskom vrachebno-politseiskom komitete,'" Russkii meditsinskii vestnik, no. 1 (January 1, 1904): 5; Bentovin, "Torguiushchiia telom," p. 164.

In Narva, a letter to the minister of internal affairs described how brothels "threaten our peaceful and quiet part of the city" and contribute to the "demoralization of our young population." Brothels meant "orgies" and "public whores" providing "a dangerous example to our children."^[111]

Such complaints provide evidence of how brothelkeeping violated the social order and how the rules governing brothel maintenance were routinely broken. In a more extreme vein, between 1905 and 1910, charges against the brothelkeeper Gita Dvorkina in the city of Nevel' included robbery, beatings of prostitutes and clients, passing counterfeit money, insulting police officials, selling alcohol, possessing blank passports (presumably for forgeries), and keeping a 14-year-old girl on the premises. Not only were brawls, scandals, and disturbances said to be frequent occurrences at Dvorkina's brothel, but in 1910 it became apparent that she had never even received official permission to run her business.^[112] In Dvinsk, prostitutes as young as 16 were living in local brothels and, according to an investigator's damaging report, the local physician conducted his examinations of prostitutes "extremely carelessly." Equally disturbing was an allegation that the chief of police had been bribed by Dvinsk brothelkeepers to overlook breaches of medical-police committee rules. The exasperated investigator concluded that influential individuals "were displaying partiality toward dens of depravity, having an interest in prolonging their existence."^[113]

Accusations about lawlessness in brothels did not only originate among neighbors and local authorities. A group of brothel owners threatened with closure in Tver alleged that in their competitors' houses, "musical instruments are played all day long. . . . There is bartering taking place and lanterns are blazing in order to attract the public.

[111] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition of June 16, 1911, to minister of internal affairs.

[112] In 1910, action was taken, possibly related to the fact that charges brought against Dvorkina's brothel had trebled in 1909. TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter of September 10, 1910, from Department of Police to UGVI; letter of February 20, 1910, from Vitebsk governor to Department of Police; letter of June 29, 1910, to Vitebsk medical-police committee from Nevel' district officer; letter of November 10, 1909, to Nevel' medical-police committee from Vitebsk medical-police committee.

[113] When the MVD and local residents pressured the local medical-police committee to find a more "suitable" location for these brothels, the first proposed site turned out to be adjacent to a school and synagogue. A second site was designated in 1911, but it housed the twenty-fifth division of the Russian infantry, as well as the military high command. TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, report of March 13, 1913, to minister of internal affairs.

The people that visit these houses are predominantly drunk; they have no shame before children or the respectable public in general. These visitors constantly behave disgracefully on the street, taking no notice of holidays or the time of day." The brothels in their apartments, they claimed, had been much less troublesome. Music had been forbidden and they never resorted to obvious advertisements. "We ran these houses decorously. These places didn't do any harm. In order not to abandon our homes now, what is to be done?" (A report to the Department of Police from Tver's governor challenged their right to cast the first stone. As it turned out, the petitioners' homes were decrepit: rooms in their brothels were tiny, airless, and often divided only by screens, the floors were rotten, and the heating was grossly inadequate. Not only were these houses ill-suited for brothels, the report declared them illegal as residences for odinochki as well.)^[114]

Brothel neighbors complained of noise, disorderly streets, disease, and links between brothels and criminal activities, as well as of lowered property values. The complaints suggest a clash of economic motives, as small-scale business owners—the brothelkeepers and their landlords—squared off against a petit bourgeoisie that had its wealth invested in property. For example, frustrated homeowners from Dvinsk despaired after the local duma ignored their efforts to move public houses to a less-populated part of the city. They wrote not only of an "outraged moral sensibility," but of the depreciation of their property values.^[115] Thirty-eight Kharkov homeowners complained that the red-light district on Lantern Lane was "tremendously uncomfortable for everyone who lives there" and that these houses had "a ruinous influence on our children." Moreover, the brothels "have deprived us of the possibility to rent apartments to our own people." In light of the "tremendous harm" these houses had created and in anticipation of "moral and economic betterment," they begged the duma "to free us from a horrible nightmare."^[116]

Narva brothelkeepers had their own nightmare to worry about. Peisokh Blokh, an enterprising brothel landlord in that city, was doing everything he could to put his competitors out of business. At one point,

[114] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition to MVD of March 1909; petition to MVD of May 18, 1909; letter of October 20, 1910, from Tver governor to Department of Police; letter of November 7, 1910, from Department of Police to UGVI.

[115] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, quoted in report of March 13, 1913, to minister of internal affairs.

[116] "Doklad o zakrytii domov terpimosti," pp. 133–44.

he paid people to sign his anti-brothel petitions, forged names, and, like Gogol's Chichikov, even added some "dead souls" for good measure.^[117] He did his work too well, however. Though the Narva medical-police committee and provincial governor at first decided to transfer the brothels in question to a "weakly populated" area, just one month later, "in light of the unceasing complaints of the population" and the houses' "corrupting influence," licenses for all the brothels in Narva were withdrawn.^[118] In 1913, Narva brothelkeepers wrote to the minister of internal affairs to lament their tribulations. Calling themselves "long-suffering, ill-fated landladies," they questioned the legitimacy of the signatures on the anti-brothel petitions and described a fire of mysterious origins that destroyed a building into which they were slated to move. "Not out of a feeling of malice, but for the sake of justice itself," they begged the minister to reopen the brothels in Narva. At the very least, he might give them a year to get their accounts in order.^[119]

As much as instructions to shut down public houses pleased brothel neighbors, they threatened the financial interests of brothelkeepers and brothel landlords. Brothels' defenders invoked not only "justice itself" on their behalf, but the value of their tax contributions, the necessity of proper bureaucratic proceedings, and the dangers that lay in store when the prostitutes in their houses were evicted. Twelve Kharkov homeowners argued to the local duma that they had constructed their residences specifically to house brothels. Furthermore, they reminded officials, they paid taxes at a higher rate than anyone else.^[120] One madam in Dvinsk called the order to close down her house "unjust—lacking consideration or resolution of the issue according to the appropriate procedures."^[121] In 1911, Dar'ia Shcherbinina from the town of Slaviansk informed the MVD that the provincial administration had unfairly given

[117] A. B., "Bor'ba s domami terpimosti v Narve," Narvskaia gazeta, no. 50 (August 8, 1912); TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition of June 16, 1911, to minister of internal affairs; TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, request of January 21, 1913, from brothelkeepers to MVD.

[118] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter of October 12, 1912, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 8, 1913, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 17, 1913, from UGVI to minister of internal affairs.

[119] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition from brothelkeepers, January 21, 1913.

[120] Kharkov's medical department responded by insisting that revenues "could scarcely be a motive of the municipal administration for allowing state-licensed brothels." In "Doklad o zakrytii domov terpimosti," p. 136.

[121] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, quoted in March 13, 1913 report to minister of internal affairs.

her a mere six months to shut down her brothel. She contended that she had ran an "orderly" house for many years. Properly situated on a street far from the city center and sufficiently distant from churches, schools, and factories, her brothel could not "be considered awkward for the public under any circumstances." In her view, the provincial administration was overstepping the bounds of its designated authority by ruling against her brothel and violating her interests in an "irredeemable manner." Demonstrating an uncanny familiarity with the authorities' most dreadful worry, she (or her ghostwriter, for her only visible contribution to this letter was a scrawled signature) warned that the closure of her brothel would lead to a rise in clandestine prostitution.^[122]

Campaigns against brothels met different fates, often depending on the willingness of tsarist officials to get involved. When the branch of the MVD in charge of licensing, the UGVI, stayed out of a controversy, dry, district, and provincial authorities could do as they pleased. Sometimes this meant leaving brothels in place; in other cases it meant moving and even abolishing local houses of prostitution. If the UGVI began making inquiries, particularly if it launched an investigation, then local authorities had to obey St. Petersburg in a more direct way.

In Kronstadt, a contested brothel stayed open because the UGVI honored the determination of the military governor to protect it, despite a report that chronicled several violations of ministry rules.^[123] In Dvinsk, the brothels in the red-light district were closed, but the process took nearly a quarter of a century. The Dvinsk saga began in 1889, when residents petitioned the provincial governor about finding other locations for neighboring brothels. The governor recommended their proposal to the Dvinsk city duma 12 years later and the council assented to it in 1902, but the brothels stayed put. In 1906, another provincial governor asked the duma what had happened, only to hear brothels defended as permitting "more suitable and better control of prostitutes." The UGVI finally got involved in 1908, dispatching an investigator who submitted a report that revealed numerous violations of empirewide rules. Nonetheless, bureaucratic wheels turned slowly and the houses were not moved until 1913.^[124]

The UGVI withdrew from the prolonged and messy controversy in the city of Narva, dumping all materials in the lap of the St. Petersburg

[122] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, petition of January 26, 1910 [sic], from Dar'ia I. Shcherbinina to minister of internal affairs.

[123] Ibid., letter of December 10, 1911, from Kronstadt military governor to UGVI.

[124] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, report of March 13, 1913, from Koshkin to minister of internal affairs.

provincial governor, who took it upon himself to shut down all Narva brothels.^[125] In Odessa, the UGVI left the city governor and duma to battle among themselves over the question of brothels. The Odessa municipal duma ruled against brothels in 1904, affirming that they "debauch youths and serve as the cause for the ruin of many girls. They habituate young people to drunkenness, making them cynical, and turning them into criminals. Brothels destroy the calm and order in those parts of the city in which they are found, depreciate the property values of their neighbors, and offend the morality of nearby residents." But Odessa's ban never came into effect: though the center was prepared to accept the duma's ruling, the duma could not persuade the city governor to ratify it.^[126]

The UGVI also steered clear of a struggle in Tomsk that followed the city duma's 1913 decision to revoke all brothel licenses. Though the duma claimed for itself the right of municipal governments to maintain jurisdiction in areas of public health and sanitation, the provincial governor's administration overruled the decision on the grounds that in 1898 the State Senate had ruled in favor of licensing for another city. The duma countered by arguing that the Senate had ruled on the question of regulation per se, not the autonomy of local decision making.^[127]

In Moscow, elected representatives and the tsar's appointed authority acted in concert. Residents and homeowners of the Sretenskaia district of Moscow initiated a campaign against local brothels in 1905 and 1906, petitioning the duma and city governor to move them to the city outskirts. The city duma went one step further, ruling brothels to be "completely intolerable" and refusing simply to relocate them. In this case, the city governor supported the duma's decision, closing down all "open dens of depravity" in Moscow's center and allowing just a few brothels in other sections.^[128] The UGVI did not question the ruling.

[125] Ibid., letter of October 12, 1912, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 8, 1913, from St. Petersburg provincial governor to UGVI; letter of March 17, 1913, from UGVI to minister of internal affairs. The provincial governor of St. Petersburg in 1904 did something similar, maintaining that the medical-police committee in Kolpino and Iamburg and the municipal police in Narva were in charge of determining when to withhold brothel licenses. TsGALO, Vrachebnoe otdelenie S.-Peterburgskago gubernskago pravleniia, f. 255, op. 1, d. 852, letters of May and June 1904.

[126] "Postanovlenie Odesskoi gorodskoi upravy," Izvestiia Odesskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 7–8 (April 1905): 951.

[127] For a description of the provincial administration's decision, see Grechishchev, "K voprosu o tom, v prave li gorodskoi dumy vospretit' otkrytie i soderzhanie pritonov razvrata," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika g. Tomska, no. 4 (April 1913): 259–61.

[128] In 1908, the new city governor found a compromise in tolerance for other types of bawdy houses: "furnished rooms" (meblirovannye komnaty ), "houses of rendezvous" (doma svidanii ) and "apartments of rendezvous" (kvartiry svidanii ). Tatarov, "Postanovka prostitutsii," pp. 388–90, 401; "Vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor za prostitutsiei v gorodakh v Rossii," Izvestiia S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, no. 21 (May 1914.): 2050–53.

During the next ten years, municipal administrations flexed their local muscles even further. Kharkov residents' battle against local brothels succeeded in convincing the "Black Hundreds" city council^[129] in 1915 not only to transfer the brothels out of one area, but to prohibit the operation of bawdy houses and ban them from the city completely.^[130] Authorities in Omsk, Archangel, and Tashkent also shut down their cities' public houses. Elected officials in Tashkent noted how brothels failed to protect public health. In their words, "prostitution does not appear to be a necessary institution for society." Irkutsk took its notion of municipal autonomy to a logical extreme, petitioning to shut down brothels as well as abolish regulation altogether. But the fact that the MVD controlled brothels through administrative procedures prevented city dumas from abolishing brothels on any legal grounds.^[131]

Local wishes to get rid of bawdy houses were facilitated by the UGVI's limited role. It confined itself to occasional benign inquiries to learn how matters were progressing, thereby providing additional impetus to the struggles in various cities. In most cases, the UGVI simply redirected the petitions it received back to the city where the trouble had originated, allowing decentralization—so unusual for Russia in matters of law and order, but clearly the rule where health was concerned—to take precedence. The UGVI's reliance on local decision making permitted each battle to intensify, encouraging officials, activists, and brothelkeepers alike to push even harder for their interests.

Brothel prostitution clearly engaged the political energies and emotions of many cities in the years prior to the revolutions of 1917. So long as the central government remained quiet, cities could adhere to their own interpretation of existing procedures. Not until January 1917, just a month before the question would be rendered moot by the February revolution that deposed the tsar, did central authorities enter the fray officially. At that time, the State Senate finally decided "whether a municipal duma has the right to participate in the promulgation of compul-

[129] A rightist coalition with this nickname had replaced "Progressives" in Kharkov's city council. Michael F. Hamm, "Khar'kov's Progressive Duma, 1910–1914: A Study in Russian Municipal Reform," Slavic Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 32.

[130] "Zasedanie 23-go oktiabria 1915 g.," "Izvestiia Khar'kovskoi gorodskoi dumy, nos. 9–10 (1915): 78–79.

[131] Gorodskoe delo, no. 10 (1914): 650; no. 2 (January 15, 1915): 102; nos. 11–12 (June 1–15, 1915): 698. See also "Khronika," Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 4 (April 1914).

sory regulations which forbid the opening and maintenance of state-licensed brothels." In a move that avoided true responsibility for this issue, the Senate underlined the 1898 ruling that the Tomsk provincial administration had invoked, reminding Russia's cities that brothels came under administrative rules and were thus outside municipal control.^[132]

The slowness with which the Senate addressed this issue and the Senate's reliance on judicial precedent suggest an unwillingness to grace brothel prostitution with further approval. Despite their jurisdiction over this realm, from 1898 to 1917 neither the State Senate nor the UGVI acted to impose their will on those local administrations which saw fit to abolish brothels. Indeed, when Iaroslavl brothels reopened after having been shut for seven years, the UGVI demanded an explanation from the provincial governor.^[133] The UGVI also permitted Kiev to close its brothels in the middle of World War I. When the governor requested official permission to abolish Kiev's brothels in November 1916, the UGVI simply asked whether the city had developed concrete plans to combat venereal disease.^[134]

By then it had become untenable to uphold licensing on the grounds that brothels prevented venereal disease. The UGVI saw its main role in the business of regulation as that of an arbiter of questions concerning public health. When directly queried regarding permission for a city to act in one way or another, the UGVI relied on ministry rules. However, when confronted with a fait accompli, the UGVI made a measured judgment about its main concern, prevention of venereal disease.

When the Senate ruled in January 1917 that the matter of state-licensed brothels was outside the jurisdiction of city governments, it skirted the real issue. In reality, only the MVD had the power to decide the question of brothel prostitution once and for all. By continuing its policy of toleration, the ministry was flagrantly disregarding the wishes of those members of the public who had so clearly expressed their disapproval of state licensing. At the same time, by failing to demand that municipalities and districts maintain brothels, the MVD was bowing to reality and public pressure. Grassroots organizing had helped to thwart

[132] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, Senate ruling of January 18, 1917.

[133] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2332, letter of July 3; letter of August 4, 1912, from Iaroslavl governor to Department of Police. See also Birzhevyia vedomosti (June 29, 1912).

[134] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, letter of November 30, 1916, from Kiev governor to Department of Police; letter of February 11, 1917, from UGVI to Kiev governor; letter of February 27, 1917, from Kiev governor to UGVI.

the state's policy of toleration for brothelkeeping, not to mention its long, tangled relationship with brothel prostitution.

Just as the brothels often operated outside the law with their liquor, dancing, and a myriad of other violations, so too could their neighbors, taking vigilante action to cleanse the streets. During the explosive year of 1905, Jewish workers stormed Warsaw's Jewish brothels in an infamous "Alphonsenpogrom" against pimps and prostitutes. According to Reuters, forty brothels were destroyed, 100 people were injured, and 8 were killed, including a prostitute.^[135] That same year, residents and workers from the Bekman factory in St. Petersburg attacked a local brothel on a June evening, returning the next night to finish it off. When a barricade of broken glass and other debris kept them out, they went after a neighboring brothel owned by the same madam. The angry crowd broke in, charged up to the house's second floor, and proceeded to destroy everything they could get their hands on, tossing the remains of mattresses, linens, pillows, and furniture out the window. The "horribly frightened" prostitutes and madam succeeded in hiding out in nearby apartments, but the police were not so fortunate. When they arrived, they were met by a shower of stones and it was not until a detachment of mounted cossacks appeared an hour and a half later, long after the destruction had begun, that the crowd was dispersed.^[136] The irony of these working men and women rising against the state—as exemplified by the state-regulated brothels—should not be overdrawn, however. They did so for motives that hardly bespoke a revolution, but rather a desire for orderly streets and to distance themselves from the stain of Jewish or working-class vice.

The furor over brothel prostitution provides us with new insights about individuals who have fallen through the historical cracks—homeowners, urban residents, urban landlords. From the petitions and letters on licensing, we learn that these individuals were much more than passive subjects capable of no more than self-defeating extremes of resignation and rebellion. In fact, their articulate protests evince a sense of rights and civic responsibility. Several activists showed a familiarity with anti-regulationist rhetoric and western European and Russian debates on abolishing regulation. But their arguments originated from already

[135] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 58–61.

[136] "Razgrom veselago doma," Priazovskii krai, no. 152 (June 25, 1905): 4. I am grateful to Timothy Mixter for this reference and the microfilm on which I read the article.

existing grievances in specific local situations. This was not a revolutionary movement, yet it did represent a moral and ideological challenge to state authority inasmuch as the state had given its mandate to establishments that affected a neighborhood's quality of life.

The regulationist vision of brothel prostitution as sanitary and easily controlled had little connection to reality. The high rates of venereal disease among brothel prostitutes and their customers advertised the fact that something neither hygienic nor wholesome was taking place in Russia's public houses. Brothels were not about hygiene and the "physiological needs" of which Fedorov spoke; they were about profit and parties and drinking and dancing and sex. Prostitutes knew this; their madams knew this; their customers knew this; even the doctors and policemen knew this. But to admit this officially was to admit that the state was condoning not only commercial sex, but genuine debauchery, something regulationists rejected.

Brothels were an embarrassing but integral part of the Russian urban landscape. Though regulation's intention to keep them under close surveillance proved chimeric, brothels evolved their own raison d'être. For men, they provided an institutional setting for obtaining commercial sex; for brothelkeepers and landlords, they were an excellent source of profit; for some women, they were the torture chambers that privileged society depicted. But for most prostitutes, they meant a roof over their heads, an alternative to walking the streets, and a place in a world among women very much like them. There were serious drawbacks and risks to becoming a public woman in a public house, to be sure, but there were also significant advantages. Degradation, oppression, and disease accompanied brothel life, but so might gaiety and camaraderie. A room of one's own (filled even with broken perfume bottles and little Japanese tables, those "pitiful pretenses of luxury") could indeed seem worth the sacrifice. Nor should it be forgotten that brothelkeepers attended to the brothel prostitutes' material needs. Most madams saw to it that their residents were fed (often, well-fed), clothed, and housed. From the standpoint of a woman from the lower classes, this could be a tempting arrangement. Plus, the promise of constant parties and endless streams of men probably sounded alluring, at least at first. Perhaps many women thought they could escape the common fate of debt, disease, and eventual ejection to the street.

Efforts to abolish brothels stemmed from understandable moral outrage, medical concern, and personal/community interest, but they also revealed contradictions and short-sightedness. Would brothels really

disappear if licensing was withdrawn? Did it make sense simply to drive brothels underground? According to a police inspector in Moscow, the abolition of brothels in Moscow only compelled many women to leave town, put a "mass" of prostitutes out on the streets, and increased clandestine prostitution and rates of venereal disease.^[137] In 1915, several prostitutes in Ekaterinoslav wrote directly to the minister of internal affairs, begging him to pay attention to "us unfortunate, fallen women-prostitutes." In rambling prose and deferential language, they described their plight as a result of the recent abolition of state-licensed brothels in their city. Since that time, "we have been compelled to corrupt the streets with our sinful bodies because we haven't any shelter as a result of the multiplication of prostitutes among us. Infectious syphilitic diseases are raging through the whole city of Ekaterinoslav as a consequence of the closing down of the Shantan Apollo brothel." After a thinly veiled threat to infect the men of Ekaterinoslav, these women pleaded with "Your High-Excellency and Merciful Dear Father" to re-open a house for "us unfortunates."^[138]

As the women evicted from the Shantan Apollo brothel pointed out, where were they to go now? Uninterested in giving up their trade, the only road they saw for themselves was the one of clandestine prostitution. But privileged society, at any rate, was not worrying about such things. If it was to open a house, the house would not be a public one for prostitution, but a private one for rehabilitation. Russian society had a larger goal—that of "saving" women from prostitution altogether.

[137] Tatarov, "Postanovka prostitutsii," pp. 388–90, 401.

[138] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 2400, letter of February 9, 1915, to minister of internal affairs.