"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.