Introduction

Crime and Culture

A terrible situation has seized our city and, under the name of hooliganism, takes forms that threaten the security of our society. Malicious assaults, fistfights, knifings, disgusting forms of depravity, and inexcusable drunkenness occur on our streets—and are committed not only by grown men but by women and children as well. The situation has become so grave that it is necessary to take serious measures to eradicate an evil that no civilized country would tolerate.

At the beginning of the twentieth century St. Petersburg was gripped by fears of crime. This book is about those fears, the crimes that provoked them, and their role in shaping urban Russian culture in the last years before World War I. Crime of all kinds was on the increase, but it was a peculiar concoction known as hooliganism that made headlines in St. Petersburg and within a few years grew to acquire symbolic stature. Around 1900 the Petersburg boulevard press began reporting an increasing number of cases of annoying public disturbances, rowdiness, drunkenness, rock throwing, shouting of obscenities, and the like. Soon, more serious crimes were added to this list: armed assault, mugging, and brawling. None of these crimes were new, and they seem to have little in common with one another, yet they were all lumped together and collectively portrayed as a new urban blight. When this diverse assortment of offenses was dubbed “hooliganism,” the word—imported from England, where it recently had been coined—was quickly absorbed into Russian usage.

Crime itself and the fear of crime were hardly new in the year 1900, nor were they unique to urban Russia, but crime and the outrage it provokes always acquire meanings specific to their place and time.^[1] Because crime engages words and actions about every aspect of social interaction—political, economic, cultural—it can illuminate processes of change in ways other subjects cannot. Hooliganism involved offensive pranks and horrendous crimes, but what makes it important historically is that the hooligans’ reckless behavior hinted at deeper discontents while at the same time the published discussion about hooliganism transcended the specific crimes to focus on the larger social, political, and cultural issues that hooliganism seemed to explain.

In published discussions disparate crimes were lumped together because they seemed to reveal a new mentality of defiance among petty criminals and later among the lower classes generally. On the streets the hooligans themselves were forging a new kind of power—new for turn-of-thecentury Petersburgers, though familiar to every city dweller today—by exploiting their ability to mock and intimidate the respectable pedestrians who stood above them on the social and economic ladder. Hooligans did not defy institutions of power directly but used public and symbolic behavior to challenge existing hierarchies of everyday life. They threatened established forms of social authority openly, but they also reached below the surface to tap some of the as-yet unarticulated hostilities, fears, and insecurities emerging in the new Russian metropolis. This whole discourse—word and deed—is what elevated hooliganism from a crime wave to a full-fledged symbol: hooligan acts and charges of hooliganism articulated important messages that could not be expressed more directly.^[2] The extraordinary potency and usefulness hooliganism acquired as a symbol lay in its ability to speak about critical issues to multiple audiences at numerous levels. Because hooliganism was so rich in symbolic resonance, so obviously constructed, and within a few years so widely adopted, an understanding of its uses and meanings provides an entrance into the social and cultural world of the Russian city.

Hooliganism in St. Petersburg was an example of what sociologist Stanley Cohen identified as a “moral panic”: an episode in which part of the population responds briefly, suddenly, and intensively to some new feature of lower-class behavior.^[3] At the turn of the century, crime waves similar to hooliganism took place in a number of Western capitals, when seemingly marginal conflicts managed to capture and symbolize some of society’s central issues and basic preoccupations. In Russia, however, in contrast to London, New York, Paris, and Berlin, the power of hooliganism to provoke and explain has endured. Hooliganism became an important issue in the social campaigns and cultural discourses of the 1920s, and it has retained its usefulness in a variety of changing contexts since.^[4] This study of the emergence of hooliganism in the period 1900–1914 helps explain the conflicts and concerns of that era of unprecedented change in urban Russia, but it also addresses some persistent strains in Russian culture—an abiding preoccupation with the friction between defiance and obedience, authority and change, and barbarism and civilization—and it examines the birth of a new trope for representing that friction. Hooliganism started out as a marginal phenomenon of the boulevard press, a conflict between relatively small, neglected, and largely powerless sectors of the middle and lower classes, but it quickly evolved into a useful symbol and an enduring cultural category. One of the goals of this book is to explain how hooliganism emerged from the ranks of a simple moral panic to enter and remain in Russian national discourse as an evocative symbol of social disintegration and cultural difference and decay.

In its early stages hooliganism arose and flourished at the intersection of social and cultural changes taking place at the turn of the century in connection with rapid urbanization, industrialization, demographic shift, the spread of education, the inception of a more public, open society, and the first tremors of the revolutionary era. New economic classifications were beginning to overlay old social and legal categories. New occupations, as well as recently acquired wealth and education, cut across old demarcations of social status and privilege, and new groups were emerging within traditional social categories. Above all, peasant migration flooded the city with new people, new cultures, and new problems. Such changes in the social structure produced both confusion about social identity and, confusion’s companion, acute self-consciousness.^[5] In the attempt to define and assert new social identities, people drew sharp distinctions between themselves and groups they saw above and below. Those distinctions were often based on judgments about public behavior, customs, and underlying values: on culture, broadly defined.^[6] Hooliganism, and the discussion it provoked about the culture of the lower and middle classes and about Russian society as a whole, helped determine the content of those identities.

Recent social history of the late imperial period has furnished us with portraits of some of the new social groups as well as more nuanced views of the traditional sosloviia (legal estates). But even these recent studies have generally focused on one particular group rather than on interaction between groups.^[7] Yet it is interaction, after all, that is the critical ingredient in the social soup that boils over into revolution. I am not speaking here of the open political battles historians have studied, such as those between the intelligentsia and the state or between labor and management, but of the divergent ways in which people attributed meaning to the events unfolding around them and how those meanings coalesced in language or public behavior to represent conflicting interests. The search for meaning and self-definition is what allows people to make sense of their economic or political position in society, particularly in a society undergoing rapid change. What Frank Kermode once wrote about fiction is equally true of the ways people understand everyday life: “It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped forco-existence with it only by our fictive powers.”^[8] It is not that we are connoisseurs of fiction either, but the history of urbanization cannot be understood apart from the symbols and rituals people devised to represent themselves and stake out their place within society. Crime is an ideal subject for studying the sort of social interaction through which people define themselves, because it provides one of the few instances in which classes actually interact, right on the street. Or for the more fortunate, crime encounters provided riveting, if anxiety-provoking, reading material about interaction. Hooliganism, in particular, was at heart a dialogue. The public behavior and published commentary took on meaning in response to one another, and the two continually interacted to generate new behaviors and new interpretations.

This study follows hooliganism as it proliferated and evolved both on the page and on the streets. Chapter 1 treats the original discussion of hooliganism in the boulevard press, where it was first detected and defined; it also explores the reasons why the semisensational newspapers of the boulevard were the first to identify this fundamental form of conflict. Chapter 2 traces the escalation of hooliganism during the 1905–1907 Revolution; it analyzes the contribution hooligans made to the upheaval with their violent expressions of subterranean anger. Chapters 3 through 5 combine popular sources with those of the government and the intelligentsia to examine the ways hooliganism spread beyond the boulevard press and the St. Petersburg streets. Chapter 3 explores the diverse new forms hooliganism took after the 1905–1907 Revolution, when it appeared in the countryside and was adopted by avant-garde artists; it also surveys the debates hooliganism provoked among the educated and political elite. Chapter 4 returns to the streets of St. Petersburg to examine those who were taking practical steps to understand and eradicate the social and cultural sources of hooliganism: professional social workers and judicial experts. The lower-class youth culture these specialists uncovered, their efforts at “cultural improvement,” and their interaction with poor youths illustrate the important role cultural categories played in dividing the privileged and the poor and structuring their responses to one another. Chapter 5 analyzes the growing fear that hooligan alienation was spreading among the lower classes as the persistence of poverty and cultural “backwardness” among the poor became better known, as hooligan crimes increased both in number and in violence, and as hooligan tactics were adopted by the labor movement during the upsurge in working-class unrest in 1912–14. The chapter culminates with an examination of the July 1914 general strike, which seemed to confirm this fear.

Three major motifs in this evolution of hooliganism provide a framework for understanding how people in St. Petersburg adjusted to living in a modern, industrial, transient, diverse, and politically volatile city. First of all, each phase in the development of hooliganism was characterized by changing perceptions and uses of public space. As migration inundated cities with peasants who then brought city ways back out to the countryside, public streets and squares throughout the empire became theaters for asserting and exhibiting contrasting cultures, styles, and behavior. The revolutionary display of mass power on the streets further undermined the ability of traditional social authorities and conventions to control the streets and dictate public behavior. After the 1905–1907 Revolution, violent hooliganism made public space increasingly unsafe for respectable pedestrians, a development that had profound consequences for social relations and perceptions. Much of the outrage over hooliganism was a reflection of the loss of the streets to the “many-thousand human swarm,” as Andrei Bely evoked them in Petersburg, his great 1913 novel of the city.^[9]

Second, as hooliganism appeared in new settings it revealed new expressions of hostility between classes and new fissures within existing social groups. Hooliganism, especially hooligan violence, revealed the depth of hostility smoldering among the urban poor, and it darkened society’s perceptions of the lower classes as a whole. But the range of responses to the spread of hooliganism also paralleled the growing diversity of responses to all the issues of city life as educated society became more complex and the nineteenth-century intelligentsia began to lose its place as the sole leader of civil society.

Until late in the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia was a small enough group to be unified by its members’ common European education and a shared set of values and cultural goals. Though they differed sharply on specific political positions, members of the Russian intelligentsia were more or less united in a commitment to the “cultural development” of the people and the cultural unity of the nation. This “culturalism” promoted the idea of a single culture, defined and embodied by the intelligentsia but accessible to everyone in a way that would allow the assimilation of the masses into a single, stable, and harmonious society.^[10] But the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s and rapid industrialization beginning in the 1890s eroded the unity and authority of the old intelligentsia by encouraging social diversity and cultural pluralism. The old intelligentsia and its didactic cultural project were challenged to varying degrees from many sides: the growing professional and commercial classes, the consumers of popular culture, and the artistic avant-garde all advanced their own ideas, tastes, and claims. By the 1910s, culturalism no longer dominated intellectual discourse. In fact, social fragmentation and the disintegration (or democratization) of the old cultural ideology spelled the end of the intelligentsia as a discrete social group. But while many people challenged the cultural program of the old intelligentsia, they simultaneously wished for the success of its mission. When hooliganism began to reveal the depth of society’s failure to civilize the masses (or to impose cultural norms, depending on one’s perspective), no consensus could be reached to explain the errors of the past or propose steps for the future.

Third, and overarching both the transformation of public space and diversification, hooliganism brought questions of culture out into the open. Explanations for hooliganism involved reevaluations of cultural difference, debates about the breakdown of “traditional” cultures, questions about the uses of cultural development projects for assimilating the poor into society, and doubts about the culturalist project. In this way, hooliganism reveals for us the centrality of cultural issues in late imperial Russia in shaping social policies and identities and in imagining a social and political future for Russia.

Thus while the symbolic discourse on hooliganism was dominated by images pitting respectable, cultured society against the uncultured and dangerous poor, it would be a mistake to view hooliganism purely as class conflict. The social and economic categories of class do not correspond neatly to cultural issues.^[11] Neither the lower classes nor the middle classes (nor the intelligentsia as a class) were clearly defined in turn-of-thecentury Petersburg. Nor is it a simple matter to identify the culture of respectability with some coherent middle class or to link hooliganism with a discrete lower-class social group. Hooliganism was first and foremost a cultural conflict and as such grouped people according to beliefs, values, and behavior as much as by status, occupation, and wealth. This is not to say that class differences played no role in hooligan behavior. On the contrary, the hooligan challenge was rooted in economic and social inequalities. But hooliganism was a special form of conflict that emphasized cultural issues. Hooligans expressed their antagonism in cultural forms; they used cultural weapons such as parody, mockery, and symbolic behavior; and even the more ordinary hooligan crimes were perceived as a threat to Russian culture. One of the central purposes of this book is to trace the outlines of a cultural landscape for St. Petersburg, within which social and political conflict—revolutionary class conflict—occurred. The point here is not to elevate culture above other categories but to establish its separate usefulness for understanding the critical developments in this period and to explore the way cultural categories intersect with issues of class and power.

But what is culture, and how is the concept used in this study?

Historical Approaches to Crime and Culture

At its most basic, culture consists of the shared values, practices, and codes of behavior, along with the means for enforcing codes and the forms for expressing them, that delineate a community.^[12] Needless to say, the lines dividing communities are fluid: subcultures overlap (urban/rural, national/local, class/gender), and individuals can migrate between them. Culture is a less rigid ordering principle than legal or political structures, but it is more pervasive. Except during crises most people experience political or economic power intermittently, and as forces from without. But daily life is filled with the stuff of culture—language and religion, games and entertainment, fighting and rivalry, claims to justice, patterns of family interaction—all of which function in a multiplicity of ways. In relation to politics, culture can both reproduce and subvert power structures while translating power relations into everyday life. The economic reality of work is a necessity imposed from without and carried on according to rules someone else made up. But even in the workplace, economic conditions are perceived through cultural filters, through local practices and customs—colliding with, converging with, and circumventing officially imposed power. During periods of great economic and political transformation, when the old distinctions of the outer world no longer bind as tightly, people hang on to culture, especially its symbols, as a way of apprehending and functioning in the changing world. Culture, of course, is not static while the world around it changes, but at any one time enduring aspects of culture provide the materials for constructing our perceptions and for interpreting the new.

The social and cultural consequences of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and migration had become palpable in St. Petersburg by the first years of the twentieth century. Shared values, habits, and histories, recognizable practices, and similar interpretations of new experiences all helped bind people in alien surroundings by providing a framework for apprehending new political and economic arrangements.^[13] In St. Petersburg self-awareness about social position and its cultural markers was especially intense in new, emerging groups. Members of the urban work force were acutely conscious of features of dress, behavior, values, and ambitions that distinguished the skilled and settled urban worker-peasant from the “backward” peasant-worker. Surface differences in dress or slang symbolized deeper, less obvious distinctions in political consciousness or separation from the village left behind as well as more concrete distinctions, as in level of income and degree of workplace independence. Workers also displayed a sharp awareness of the ways in which they were perceived by people higher up the social ladder.^[14] The semi-professional, semi-educated middle classes, ranging from those in the lowest white-collar positions to wealthy urban property owners, were also anxious to clarify their social position, to separate themselves from the “uncivilized masses,” and to assert their own claims to the privileges of economic and educational superiority. Popular literature and newspapers were full of stories about people who had “fallen” from positions of privilege and status, as well as stories about success and upward social mobility.^[15]

The anthropological concept of culture has been sifted out of the multiple meanings of the word only gradually. The concepts of coexisting cultures, of separate working-class or middle-class cultures, of culture as diverse, not universal, sets of values and conventions were not widely accepted anywhere in Europe during the period this study examines.^[16] At the turn of the century culture was thought of as something to be achieved. Through a process of education, moral development, and refinement, people and whole nations might become cultured or civilized. When colonization brought Europeans into contact with other peoples, they did not immediately embrace the idea that the exotic customs they discovered were equally legitimate ways of living in the world. In fact they seized on those customs as further evidence of the superiority of European ways. For the same reason, many of the nineteenth-century exposeś of lower-class urban life portrayed the poor as exotic savages, inhabiting distant and alien terrain.^[17] In both cases a cultural hierarchy was implied: the strange customs portrayed were clearly inferior: “primitive,” “uncivilized,” “uncultured.” Hooliganism appeared just when the concept of cultures in the plural was beginning to compete with the notion of one standard of judgment that situated peoples on a hierarchical scale ranging from uncultured to cultured.^[18]

The hierarchical sense of culture did not consist solely of intellectual or aesthetic development or taste. Public behavior in Petersburg at the turn of the century was circumscribed by convention, as it was elsewhere in Europe at the time. Never mind that respectable people spat and blew their noses onto the street, members of the respectable classes who appeared in public (the aristocracy, of course, preferred to ride if they could afford it) took pains to adhere to conventions regarding public propriety. As a result, culture, or rather the acquisition and display of culture, represented a hierarchical dividing line in Russian society. Russia differed from the West both in the intensity of its obsession with rank and in its pronounced emphasis on education as opposed to, or at least along with, wealth in determining social status. Furthermore, educated Russians were conscious of their country’s position on the margins of civilization and its tenuous claim to have achieved a Western level of cultural development. Together these perceptions accentuated the need to acquire culture in order to achieve social status and magnified the conflicts that occurred between people on either side of the line dividing the cultured from the uncultured. Cultural difference, or the level of cultural achievement as it was understood at the time, was a major source of conflict in Russian society, and one that has been largely overlooked.

My conception of hooliganism as cultural conflict, social self-assertion, and an expression of popular values draws on recent trends in criminology and the social history of crime and popular culture. A new school of crime history emerged in the 1970s under the influence of works by E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and Louis Chevalier, who shifted historical attention from the criminals themselves to the societies that defined and regulated crime: crime became a perceived activity.^[19] These historians and their followers rescued poachers, machine breakers, brigands, bandits, and others from the censure of their contemporaries and relabeled their acts “social crime”.^[20] This enabled historians to show a high degree of intentionality, rationality, and purpose in criminal acts. In sociology, at the same time, the “new” criminology took off in a similar direction, paying particular attention to the way language was used to define and punish behavior that threatened political and social powers.^[21] In both cases, scholars examined the ways that power, exercised by the state or a ruling class, could be used to control potentially dangerous sectors of the population by defining them as deviant.

In contrast, interest in cultural anthropology led other historians to explore crime and unrest for symbolic and ritual behavior that might provide clues to the mentality and values of popular cultures. Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, and Robert Darnton all showed the lower classes to be creative inventors of complex, dynamic, and changing cultures of their own, rather than passive recipients of diluted forms of elite culture.^[22] The wide range of expressiveness found in popular culture was evidence of both popular cultural autonomy and the people’s ability to interact on their own terms with elite culture in ways that produced sophisticated parodies of, and challenges to, what Antonio Gramsci meant by “cultural hegemony.”^[23]

Michel Foucault shifted the focus again and invigorated crime history by placing the construction of deviance at the center of the exercise of power. Foucault’s conception of power, however, deemphasized the role of the state by showing how power can be exercised not only through oppression but through processes of classification and “normalization,” which occur between groups throughout society. For Foucault, power consists of access to knowledge and language, which confer the ability to classify ideas, behaviors, and experiences and impose that classification, as norms, on others. Social groups create crime waves and moral panics, for example, both in order to define the unacceptable and to protect their own place in society by marking their own proper, normative behavior as superior. Access to the superior ranks depends on accepting social discipline and adopting the norms, which are, however, defined in such a way as to make them only partly within the grasp of the lower orders. In Russia, as we will see, hooliganism provided respectable society with a counterexample for defining the norms of respectability, both for its own self-identification and for “disciplining” the working classes.^[24]

In contrast, Michel de Certeau explored how people conduct their lives outside of and in defiance of efforts to confine, oppress, or discipline them. He argued that for most ordinary people daily life is composed of creative acts that allow them to develop an autonomous sense of self and community despite superordinate power.^[25] Certeau also showed how people continue to engage in these efforts to detach themselves from the “grid of power,” even when self-assertion fails to erode the actual edifice of state power, because it is through such wilful actions that we construct a satisfying sense of our place in the world.

These studies emphasizing cultural dynamism and the power of culture, taken together with the evidence of the creativity and intentionality among people labeled as criminals, make it possible to understand the role hooliganism played, not just in the repertory of popular culture and politics but in the changing political and cultural relations of Russian society as a whole. The subjective, emotional, and value-laden observations of crime, which were often expressed in symbolic shorthand, can be more useful than other data for analyzing the class and cultural conflicts inherent in hooliganism. But, while hooligans, like the medieval skomorokhi, or minstrels, have been made known to us primarily “by their enemies,”^[26] hooliganism was much more than a figment of the respectable society’s imagination, and hooligans did what they could to escape being subjects of normalization. The repeated patterns visible in hooligan behavior reveal specific choices individual hooligans made, producing a “text” that can be read and interpreted. Hooligan acts may be treated as outward signs of inner values the same way ritual and other public behavior are analyzed by anthropologists for the meanings they convey to participants and observers. Hooligans used culture (both consciously and inadvertently) to transform everyday power relations on the streets of the city, the one arena where they could seize some power. The hooligans’ self-assertion contributed directly to the disorders of the revolutionary era, and, more indirectly if more fundamentally, hooligans reordered the operation of authority on the city streets by challenging the power of respectable society to control street life. The construction of hooliganism and the conflicts it represented brought together issues of culture and power in ways that indicate the need for a broader notion of what constitutes power, what forces are able to challenge its authority, and what role culture plays in distributing power.

The Boulevard Press and Other Sources

Hooliganism was first defined and publicized in the boulevard press—the commercial, semi-sensational tabloid newspapers that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century.^[27] After 1905, hooliganism appeared in an ever-widening circle of publications, but the printed discourse on hooliganism was indelibly marked by its initial emergence in the boulevard newspapers because they were uniquely situated to grasp the cultural and class elements of hooliganism that made it so useful both as a tactic and as a symbol. Since the boulevard press created the model of hooliganism from which all other sources drew and since it is a prodigious but virtually untapped mine for historians, it merits more of an introduction than the other sources used in this study, whose genres are better known.^[28]

The most popular of the boulevard newspapers, Peterburgskii listok (The Petersburg Sheet), and the similar, if somewhat less successful, Peterburgskaia gazeta (The Petersburg Gazette) both aimed at a broadly defined middle-class readership, though they attracted some aristocratic and some working-class readers as well.^[29]Peterburgskii listok in particular occupied an important spot on the Russian cultural landscape. Other newspapers published information about cultural, political, and social life, but Peterburgskii listok was the first newspaper in Russia to concentrate all these aspects of daily life in one publication, devoted specifically to news about the capital. The boulevard press, however, was so roundly criticized by the Russian intelligentsia that its genuine merits were, and have been, overlooked.^[30] According to B. I. Esin, the premier Soviet historian of journalism, the boulevard newspapers “cultivated apoliticism,” proffering instead of serious news, “light reading, sensationalist rumors, incidents, vulgar jokes, patently indulging the prejudices of their subscribers.”^[31] This modern Soviet view echoes the ideas of the contemporary intelligentsia about the boulevard press, but in the case of Peterburgskii listok it gives a false impression of the contents and tone of the newspaper. Along with sensationalistic crime, scandal, and gossip, it was, in fact, a good source of news, information, and entertainment: in the words of its first editor, it was intended to be “an organ of everyday life.”^[32]

In contrast to the official government press and newspapers published for a national audience, Peterburgskii listok provided a wide range of information about culture, commerce, politics, and sports specifically for the capital’s readers. In the early twentieth century, international and national news were squeezed in among the advertisements on the first two pages, followed by the comings and goings of Russian and foreign royal families and government dignitaries. The heart of the paper was made up of reports on local issues and events and the activities of various societies and trade organizations, theatrical and artistic groups, and church and charity societies. Romantic adventure novels and thrillers (often dealing with crime and banditry) were serialized daily. A chronicle of “incidents,” as they were called (Dnevnik prikliuchenii), reported crimes, accidents, suicides, and fights. Drawings lampooning local officials or commenting sardonically on the city’s social problems or simply illustrating the day’s stories were daily features by the turn of the century. Regular signed columns, feuilletons, and sketches commented (usually critically) on politics and social problems, with special attention to the St. Petersburg City Duma, the Petersburg district circuit court, and the Justice of the Peace courts; these columns also provided lighter fare with observations on the weather or the latest gossip from the lives of such popular celebrities as Sarah Bernhardt or Fedor Chaliapin. Occasionally probing and insightful, though equally often superficial and lighthearted, these columns provide an index to concerns of the newspaper’s readers.

Peterburgskii listok also had a cultural mission, which, however, was never explicitly stated and only gradually established. The wide variety of genres, articles, and stories depicting the diversity of life in the capital—celebrating certain activities and deploring others—described the boundaries of acceptable behavior for its readers. Peterburgskii listok constructed a Russian variant of the culture of respectability that predominated in the “civilized” West. Respectability as delineated in the boulevard press was not socially exclusive; it was offered to all readers, of whatever class, provided they adopt the values and behaviors applauded as cultured. Examples of civilized respectable workers could be found in its pages, as could the occasional aristocrat. For this reason (among others already mentioned), I have usually avoided identifying the readers of the boulevard press and the consumers of hooligan images with a specific social class and have opted for the cultural category of respectability instead. Adherents of respectable culture in Russia (and readers of newspapers like Peterburgskii listok) tended to be members of the new middle classes rather than the unprivileged poor or the privileged rich, but what distinguished them were the values they shared and their reception of the cultural symbolism they found in the boulevard press.

Respectability, however, should be understood as a relative term. What passed for morality tales in the boulevard press earned only approbation from the established intelligentsia (radical wing included), who derided the newspapers and the commercial culture they purveyed as vulgar, sleazy, and crude. But while accounts of excessive violence and a lurid interest in private life deserve to be called sensationalistic, to dismiss such reporting because of its sensationalism is to slight the real services these newspapers provided their readers. If the news reporting was, at times, highly spiced with gossip and scandal, even Esin believed that it was usually accurate.^[33] More important, emotive language and graphic description made the news digestible for readers whose interest in politics may have been eager but not necessarily profound. Moreover, sensationalistic reporting was not limited to attracting readers by engaging them emotionally, nor did it necessarily minimize the social and political features of crime or of any other issue, as some have argued.^[34] The boulevard newspapers’ reporting of scandalous crimes, outrageous behavior, and the private lives of public figures supplied engrossing reading but also offered readers unforgettable examples of improper behavior, defined the parameters of the acceptable, and reassured readers of their own superiority for never sinking so low. Furthermore, lurid crime and scandalous gossip was surrounded in the newspapers by other stories, and together these shaped the reading experience and resulting perceptions of the city. Peterburgskii listok presented a consistently solid quality and ample quantity of local, national, and international news, which countered its sensationalism and made it multidimensional.^[35]

The boulevard press was not, of course, lacking in ideological biases, but there was considerable variation among the different newspapers. On national political issues Peterburgskii listok (and, to a lesser extent, Peterburgskaia gazeta) took moderately liberal positions, supporting the call for government based on the rule of law and, in 1905, for civil and political liberties. On local issues Peterburgskii listok was a consistent critic of City Duma policies. It regularly published articles reproaching the Duma for its indifference and inaction, especially in regard to the city’s poor population. During the 1905–1907 Revolution Peterburgskii listok (and, again to a lesser extent, Peterburgskaia gazeta) wrote sympathetically about many working-class issues, especially economic exploitation, and published daily reports of strikes, rallies, and demonstrations.

Crime reporting in Peterburgskii listok followed simple conventions typical of the boulevard press of its day. It presented crime and violence both as serious social problems and as entertaining reading, though it should be noted that the treatment of crime before 1905 was often tame and understated in comparison with the sensationalism and melodrama of post-1907 journalism. Crime reporting was a popular feature in the boulevard press, but, as a rule, before 1905 crime was neither prominently displayed nor graphically described even in the boulevard newspapers renowned for their sensationalistic reporting. Only in 1905 did some newspapers begin to highlight their daily crime reporting, emphasizing criminal violence with bold headlines, melodramatic language, and drawings or photographs.^[36] Crime was covered in three kinds of stories: simple entries in the day’s “chronicle,” which listed crimes and other incidents; reports of trials held in the circuit courts and the courts of the Justices of the Peace, which appeared several times a week; and occasional separate articles, columns, or feuilletons about especially curious crimes. Most boulevard papers also published letters on crime from readers. The crime “chronicle” or column contained the most common and least digested reporting of hooligan offenses. Such chronicles of crimes and incidents appeared in almost every major newspaper regardless of its political profile or intellectual style.^[37] They generally appeared in the middle pages, in a smaller typeface, and listed anywhere from three to as many as ten or twelve incidents daily. The chronicles were not entirely devoted to crime; side by side with robberies, pickpocketing, fistfights, and murders of passion appeared a variety of noncrime incidents, including traffic accidents, runaway horses, fires, drownings, suicides, abandoned children, and explosions. The crime entries in the chronicle were laconic and understated in comparison with the language used in separate articles. Even so, the language is suggestive, and along with the reporting of hooliganism elsewhere in the boulevard press it provides clues to the cultural significance of hooliganism.

The boulevard press undoubtedly played a role in forming popular perceptions of the city and its inhabitants, but determining the extent to which any text “reflects” or “shapes” the views of its readers is difficult, and newspapers present particular problems.^[38] Newspapers always contain a variety of genres, and they are literally polyphonic, representing the decisions of a board of editors and publishers, the contributions of a newsroom full of writers, an assortment of advertisers, and a few letter writers from among their readers. It seems logical that newspaper portrayals of public issues had some impact on their readers’ understanding of those issues by virtue of the language chosen, the images displayed, and the emphasis placed on a given subject. But newspapers cannot have an infinite power to shape popular perceptions for two reasons: first, people bring to their reading a range of previous experiences that allows a spectrum of interpretations; and, second, newspapers must appeal to readers’ existing preconceptions in order to sell. Therefore, commercial newspapers use a number of strategies to control the symbiotic process of shaping and reflecting. Usually the newspaper’s commercial character is seen as an impediment to accurate representation of reality: everyone knows that newspapers shape the news in a way that sells, probably distorting the real events.^[39] But the distorted story has to reflect readers’ expectations or no one will buy it.^[40]

Newspapers are meant to be read quickly and thrown away, not pondered and analyzed; so they rely on cultural clues that reduce meaning to a limited repertory of perceptual categories that are comprehensible to a large number of people. Some variation in interpretation will always occur, of course, but newspapers are designed to limit variation. One way newspapers appeal to readers while restricting their interpretive choices is through the repetition of specific words, images, or symbols, which journalists use to convey ideas about complicated social phenomena in simple form, “without presenting the abstract argument.”^[41] Symbolic representations of reality may dilute and simplify the news, but for historians they provide essential evidence of cultural expectations, values, and beliefs. The images and symbols associated with hooliganism, and, more important, the endurance of hooliganism as a symbol, would not have been possible if the label had not struck a responsive chord among the newspapers’ regular readers. When newspapers began to use various epithets—“savages,” “beasts,” “apaches”— to describe hooligans, they were shaping readers’ perceptions of the phenomenon of hooliganism by clarifying, articulating, unifying, and reducing disparate meanings to a single symbol. But the symbol had to “ring true” by appealing instantaneously to preconceptions. The meanings a newspaper uses to shape reality have to reflect readers’ prior experience.

These limitations on the interaction between newspapers and their readers make it possible to identify the language commercial newspapers used to clarify, articulate, and shape reality and to see in those language choices symbols that represented and reflected readers’ cultural values and expectations. As a result it is easier for the historian to define a newspaper’s “image” and the values it conveys. It is also possible to identify those values more directly with a newspaper’s readers. Rather than evade the biases in the sources or simply corroborate their evidence with material from other sources, this study depends on the biases that shaped the news to elucidate the values that the newspaper conveyed and readers imbibed.

The tsarist censorship, of course, also shaped the way news was presented, but it seems to have had little impact on the quantity or type of crime news reported. The task of monitoring every newspaper in the Russian empire was too large for the agency established for that purpose, and there were numerous methods, both legal and illegal, to circumvent its prohibitions against reporting certain types of incidents.^[42] The censors repeatedly harassed Peterburgskii listok for disobeying censorship guidelines, but financial and other penalties did not stop the newspaper from publishing crime reports even when they were illegal. In 1903 a censorship regulation was introduced that prohibited the publication of information about the “escapades of hooligans.” In the same year Peterburgskii listok was taken to court for publishing drawings of hooligans and prostitutes.^[43] But by the end of 1903 one journalist could write that hooliganism had become a topic that never left the crime columns.^[44] Throughout this period the press coverage of crime coincided with police and judicial crime rates, undeterred by the censors. Since this was true both before and after the virtual elimination of censorship in the reforms of 1905–6, it seems that censorship did not affect decisions to report crime.^[45] On the other hand, the relaxation of censorship may have given writers freer rein to adopt the more graphic and melodramatic language that crept into the newspapers after the 1905–1907 Revolution.

As hooliganism (and awareness of hooliganism) spread, it was reported in newspapers popular with other readerships, each of which contributed its own class and political rhetoric to the hooligan question. Among such newspapers were Gazeta-kopeika (The Kopeck Gazette), also a boulevard newspaper but one that targeted a working-class readership; the conservative Novoe vremia (New Times); and the liberal Rech (Speech). Comparison of coverage in these publications will be used to corroborate some aspects of hooliganism, to show the range of interpretations hooligan behavior elicited, and to identify the features peculiar to the boulevard press. After 1907, hooliganism generated interest in the “thick” journals, which usually combined literature and political or social commentary; in the new journals devoted to modernist artistic works and manifestos; and in the professional legal journals, each of which provided additional perspectives on hooliganism.

Statistical data have been used here with some caution. There was a time when historians of crime would not touch official statistics, because they felt that instead of representing “real” crime rates, statistics could show only how much crime was detected by the police or prosecuted by the courts. It has now become clear that published crime statistics influenced much of what was written in the nineteenth century about crime. The annual publication of judicial statistics was cause for comment in popular newspapers and legal journals and thus had a considerable influence on perceptions of crime in Russian society as in the West.^[46] Historians have since turned back to crime statistics to see what careful use of them can produce. V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden argued, reasonably, that although statistics could never represent the “dark figure” of crime—the number of crimes actually committed—they could be used to show long-term trends and fluctuations, assuming a certain level of consistency within institutions in treating and recording crime.^[47] The rise in prosecution rates for hooliganism was a subject of public discussion among Petersburg judicial officials and in the press throughout the period under study, so the local crime statistics entered into the discourse on hooliganism. But statistics on hooligan crimes are complicated by the fact that hooliganism was never identified as a separate offense in the Russian criminal code.^[48] When hooligans were arrested or came before the court they were indicted for other offenses already individually prohibited and punished by tsarist law. Armed robbery, for example, was against the law; it was also a misdemeanor to appear “in a drunken state” on the streets. But it was commonly understood that a hooligan drunk differed in some significant way from other public drunkards and that a hooligan with a dagger in his hand differed from other armed thieves. These distinctions, however, are not apparent in the aggregated statistics published by the Ministry of Justice. Fortunately, the local St. Petersburg court responsible for prosecuting petty crimes, the mirovoi sud, or Justice of the Peace Court, published lengthy commentary together with its annual statistics, which includes invaluable material for analyzing the statistics and assessing the importance of hooliganism in the capital.

Establishing the “real” level of crime took on new importance for historians questioning the seemingly universal assumption that urbanization and industrialization increase crime. This belief came under attack when historians realized that in urban, industrial settings more institutional attention was paid to controlling the concentrated lower-class population. The greater the attempts at control, the higher reported rates of crime rose, but the actual number of crimes may not have changed.^[49] This question has particular relevance for early twentieth-century Russia, though from a slightly different perspective. Almost all social and labor historians have followed Leopold Haimson in arguing that urban society was undergoing a process of profound social destabilization that created difficult, if not unresolvable, problems for the tsarist government in the years before World War I.^[50] In Haimson’s view civil society was not only bitterly estranged from the state but was also profoundly split itself once workers and the educated elite lost the common ground that had united them against the tsar in 1905. This study of hooliganism shows that perceptions of social instability were at least as important as actual economic and social conditions in polarizing society and shaking its foundation. The chasm Haimson found between workers and the intelligentsia that was expressed in high culture and labor politics was echoed in less exalted but equally important places, in the boulevard press and on the streets, and the discourse on hooliganism reveals a city even more fragmented than Haimson imagined. Social fractures not only divided the middle and lower classes, but each was splintered internally as well.

The Revolution of 1917 shaped the way all historians have viewed late imperial history. Initially social historians were primarily concerned with groups having the most conspicuous political impact: the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, the industrial working class, and more recently the nobility and the peasantry. But when we examine turn-of-the-century urban Russia as a society in transition rather than as a society preparing for revolution we find a myriad other groups in the population and we see that the political and economic conflicts they generated were often expressed in cultural forms. In other words, hooligans may well have hated respectable and privileged society on the basis of differences in status, class, wealth, power, or ideology, but they understood those differences through a filter of cultural artifacts and symbols: differences in dress and manners, in public behavior, in speech patterns or gestures, in entertainment tastes, and so on. The conflicts over culture illuminated by the discourse on hooliganism reveal sources of hostility and distrust that contributed to social instability in the years before World War I and hindered the building of consensus in postrevolutionary society as well. The history of hooliganism uncovers cultural conflicts that divided and demoralized urban society but at the same time gave urban inhabitants a language for creating and understanding the city and their place in it.

Notes