Bezprizornost’, Contamination, and Street Culture

For the principal specialists writing on juvenile crime during this period, crime was primarily a moral issue, but their view of moral development was firmly embedded in a social context. In her denunciation of official efforts to curtail crime, I. Karpinskaia wrote that “the main (and unlimited) source of beggars, juvenile criminals, fallen women, and alcoholics, it has long been recognized, is the street—this university of all the sciences that corrupt the younger generation.”^[65] Semenov noted that a good family—“strong, ambitious, moral, and thrifty”—could “relatively easily guide a youth on an honest path,” but freedom to wander the streets, as another social worker put it, left children with “no instructor in life to protect them from evil and direct them to the good.”^[66] There was broad consensus that exposing children to the destructive dangers of the streets turned relatively innocent youths into hooligans.^[67] Life “on the streets” summoned up for these observers a world beyond the purview of respectable society, which lured children and then contaminated them with the immoral and illegal behavior on open display. The result, it was argued, was the alienation, idleness, and aggression associated with hooliganism. “Once a village boy has passed through the school of the flophouse, the tearoom, and the police station,” Semenov commented, “he will adapt to their invariable characteristics—cards, billiards, vypuski, movies, the tearoom, the park, the tavern.”^[68]

At the time, bezprizornost’ was viewed almost exclusively as an urban problem. The city, it was thought, provided both the social and economic conditions for bezprizornost’ to appear and the cultural institutions for its pernicious influence to flourish and infect the innocent. The streets deplored by reformers were obviously city streets, and they were often presented in contrast to an idealized village. According to one criminologist (but implicit in the works of many), a lack of adult supervision in the village was “unimaginable”: everyone in the village worked in some productive capacity, men in the fields, women in the hut, and children, even when they left their huts and wandered around alone, were always looked after, because everyone knew everyone else. In the city, in contrast, fathers, mothers, and older brothers and sisters all worked away from home. The high cost of living either forced small children to find work as well or left them alone and untended. Even those children lucky enough to go to school would still be unsupervised for much of the day.^[69] However accurate a picture of city life, this common image of the village was, to say the least, surprisingly uninformed. As historians have demonstrated, family life in the village was undergoing a process of transformation just as destabilizing as that being experienced by families in the urban working class.^[70] Others have shown that direct supervision of children, even infants, was virtually impossible during the demanding periods of agricultural labor when women and men were at work in the fields. Kanatchikov started the chronicle of his life with the “outstanding” fact of his having survived the common perils of a peasant infancy, which included being “abandoned without any care during the summer harvest season.”^[71] In addition, given the widespread transiency of the working population between factory and field, many of the problems of family separation and fragmentation noticed in the city were common to both workers and peasants; indeed many of the families involved must have been one and the same.

This is not to argue that city and village poverty were identical or that transiency for both had the same effects on children or on family life. But by the time these issues were being discussed in the 1910s, the countryside had been the scene of various manifestations of social, not to mention political, instability, including the challenge to traditional authorities and the widespread hooliganism discussed in the previous chapter. Excessive drinking, wife beating, child abuse, hunger, and poverty were hardly unknown. Moreover, in almost any other context village social life would be criticized for much the same cultural backwardness and low moral development that criminologists and journalists deplored in city life. Ignorance of the village does not automatically disqualify the urban criminologists from understanding urban problems, but it is, among other things, a startling reminder of just how isolated many urban social reformers were from the lives of the majority of Russia’s people, including the peasant portion of the population that produced the urban poor. More important, the contrast set up by urban criminologists between the pathology of the city and the health of the village allowed specialists to dwell on specifically urban facets of life, while neglecting others, such as endemic poverty, social immobility, and cultural transformation, that affected people in both settings.^[72]

Many of the young offenders who began life in the countryside also idealized the village and were nostalgic or homesick for their village homes. The boys Semenov worked with often “forgot” that they had left the countryside because there had been nothing to eat or because their stepmother had thrown them out of the house or their father had drunk away all the family’s possessions (“even the icons”). Even so, those who had come alone felt uprooted and lacking cultural moorings or emotional support.^[73] The overwhelming majority of juvenile offenders, however, were either city-born or had been living in the city for a considerable length of time. In 1910, approximately half of those convicted for petty crimes had been born in the capital. Only 6 percent had been living in the city for less than a year before their arrest.^[74]

Bezprizornost’ was viewed as an urban problem not only in contrast to the situation in an idealized village family, but because the city provided the economic, social, and cultural soil for the moral consequences of bezprizornost’ to take root. T. E. Segalov, Semenov, Okunev, and others believed that the city presented new and difficult situations for migrants. The economy of the industrializing city required new skills and new sacrifices, which were hard enough to meet even with the support of a family. Industrial work called for intellectual abilities and moral qualities—a capacity for work, the intelligence to learn new skills, and “an understanding of property relations and the proper standards of behavior”—in order to compete in the daily struggle for survival. Without the family’s guidance (often, in fact, eliminated by the economic demands of city life), bezprizornye children could not master these conditions; so they simply ceased working and took up a life of crime.^[75] Almost all commentators mentioned a few purely economic factors connecting city life with bezprizornost’, but only a few writers saw social and economic factors as the decisive ones in producing juvenile offenders. Most believed that urban poverty was not an evil in and of itself, but that it contributed to the problems of bezprizornost’ by depriving poor children of constant and competent parental care and leaving them vulnerable to the dangers and vices that congregated in the city.

The fear that a hooligan mentality was contagious was not a new one in this period, nor was it unique to Russia, but the medical metaphor was employed widely during the 1900s and especially the 1910s to explain how untended youths were changed into hooligans. Moreover, descriptions of the environment that contained the hooligan “bacteria” often conflated truly dangerous settings and activities with relatively harmless or even beneficial ones for the children involved, seen as they were through the prism of middle-class respectability. Even the most sober and scholarly writers released torrents of moral outrage in describing this disreputable side of lower-class culture. Dril’s speech to the VII Congress for Representatives of Russian Juvenile Correctional Institutions was typical in its cultural bias and its melodramatic rhetoric:

Thrown out onto the streets, into the “wide, wide world,” the child or youth completes his education…when he encounters various misfortunes that undermine his still developing, embryonic physical stamina. He falls in with other abandoned, bezprizornye comrades, among whom many have already become almost full-grown professional hooligans, who live at the society’s expense and to its horror. He encounters the company of veteran tramps, beggars, vagrants, prostitutes, thieves, and horse thieves. At every step he is irresistibly drawn to the temptations of crude, filthy pleasures that gradually erode all of his best human feelings, all necessary bases for positive actions. He encounters life in slums, dives, and flophouses; he finds games, cards, and billiards; vodka, drunkenness, early spiritual debauchery, masturbation, homosexuality, idleness, lies, deception, crime, and the other forms of instruction available on the street that further develop and strengthen the original education he received in his shattered family life.^[76]

Dril’s description here was not based on a reading of the boulevard press, despite the stylistic similarities (see fig. 9), but on his own experiences among working-class youths and his research on patterns of criminality among them. Because specialists set out to find the causes of hooliganism, they tended to emphasize the amorality, bravado, and disregard for proper, conventional behavior typical of hooliganism that they found in analyzing the cultural world of juvenile criminals. In a study of the links between film going and juvenile crime, A. I. Zak claimed that the movies cast a kind of addictive spell over children, which compelled them to steal the money for tickets. What on the surface appears to be primarily an economic argument in fact rests on current ideas about bezprizornost’. Zak’s reports of individual cases stressed the youths’ lack of supervision, their unquenchable and implicitly illicit desire to see movies, and their cunning persistence in overcoming obstacles to fulfill that desire. In these specific examples we can see the ways that experts wove together the conditions that they believed produced hooliganism: the modern city with its unsupervised streets, its poverty, and its popular entertainments that prevented proper development, while providing models of disorderly, dishonest, and disrespectful behavior. Eleven-year-old Liza, Zak reported, was growing up without much parental supervision, and after once going to the movies, she yearned to go again. But she had no money; so she turned to begging, using all kinds of clever methods to extract money from passersby. When her mother found out, she beat Liza, who, undeterred, stole a shirt to sell for ticket money. Tatiana, thirteen years old, showed no inclination toward criminal behavior until she moved to Moscow from the countryside. One visit to the movies got her hooked, and she went whenever she could, stealing money to pay for tickets. She too was punished—by being locked in her room—but she escaped by climbing down a drainpipe. When asked why she was not afraid to disobey her parents and risk the dangerous descent, she replied that people did such things all the time in the movies and survived.^[77]

The overcrowded apartments where poor children resided and the flophouses where a homeless child might be able to afford a cot also exposed children, it was thought, to contamination and eroded whatever moral upbringing their parents had succeeding in passing along. Conditions in Russian flophouses and slums are relatively well known.^[78] Although in some cities a substantial number of regular workers with steady jobs shared the flophouses with beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, and habitual criminals, respectable society viewed the flops primarily as “seedbeds of crime” where immoral and illegal behavior ran rampant. Describing the flophouses of Moscow’s Khitrov Market for her readers in Zhenskoe delo (The Woman’s Cause), E. Vystavkina complained that “drunks, petty thieves, and prostitutes of the lowest variety crowd before the children’s eyes from morning until night, and they are not the least bit shy about [the children’s] presence.”^[79] Even when children lived with their parents or relatives, they often shared overcrowded apartments with “unsavory” people, which made a moral upbringing impossible. Semenov described “corner” apartments in the Haymarket, where each corner of a room was rented to a different family, including one “as crowded as a flophouse,” with fifteen cots, some of which were shared by as many as three adults. The denizens of another apartment that Semenov visited “glared at each other like wolves and hurled nasty and malicious curses.” Their willingness to behave so crudely in Semenov’s presence left him wondering how much worse they must have carried on when no social worker was around.^[80]

Even those writers and criminologists who sympathized with the juvenile offenders and who believed crime to be rooted primarily in social and economic conditions rather than in the moral failings of the working class could not resist condemning what they saw as corruption and sexual laxity reigning in the flophouses and overcrowded working-class housing. Mikhail Gernet, a socialist university professor and the leading proponent of a social theory of criminal motivation, wrote in an early study connecting housing conditions with crime that children were corrupted at a very young age in the “dark hovels” that were never “dark enough to hide coarse drunkenness and open debauchery.” He found that the correlation between tight living conditions and crime against the person was especially strong because living in such close quarters destroyed respect for others as individuals. Who is more likely to commit crimes against peace and order, he asked, than those who grew up where peace and order were missing?^[81] But Gernet’s question raises others, which he failed to address. Why do only some poverty-stricken inhabitants of such neighborhoods become criminals? Why did small living space in village huts fail to produce similar kinds of crime? By 1909, when P. V. Vsesviatskii examined the connection between living conditions and crime based on Moscow court cases, these questions still had not been raised. Vsesviatskii made the same argument Gernet had: children in the slums were exposed to crime and sexual depravity, which destroyed their modesty, their respect for others, and their morality in general. Accordingly, these conditions explained why the most crimes were committed in the most crowded neighborhoods of the city.^[82]

The pioneering work of these early social scientists exposed the horribly substandard and overcrowded living conditions of the Petersburg slums and established a crucial connection between social conditions and crime, but their assumptions about how that connection functioned were rooted in ideas about respectable morality and culture that ignored the larger social context. Despite the fact that Vsesviatskii and Gernet sought social rather than moral, individual, or biological causes of crime, their analysis rested on the primacy of moral influence and the exposure of slum children to behavior from which middle- and upper-class children were shielded. In arguing that exposure to these conditions produced criminal behavior they presented the youths as primarily passive beings, incapable of responding consciously or actively to their surroundings. Moreover, they failed to take into account the slums’ position within the larger society—at the bottom of the social structure—which provided its own reasons for lawbreaking, rebellion, and alienation. This sort of analysis is contradicted by the personal characteristics of the juvenile criminals and hooligans, whose very acts displayed the youths’ active nature.

The contrast between passive images of juveniles as victims of contamination and their lively, daring, or desperate exploits is particularly striking in discussions of female crime and of the institutions of youth culture. Concerns about the plight of poor youths, while thoroughly justified in the majority of cases, may also have disguised fears about the freedom from control boys and girls enjoyed on the streets. The autonomy that they obtained in the absence of adult supervision made them acquire values and seek out forms of association other than those approved by respectable society. Thus bezprizornost’ signified not only the absence or brutality of parental upbringing. The word also came to represent a whole network of social relations, experiences, and values, in the context of which poor children existed independently of any authority.

For the most part, the jurists and criminologists concerned with juvenile crime ignored girls altogether. When girls did raise concern, it was almost always prostitution that attracted the most attention, even though only a small percentage of female juvenile offenders were arrested for illegal prostitution.^[83] Juvenile prostitutes were uniformly represented as victims of a criminal milieu into which they had fallen. In all too many cases, young girls were genuine victims of kidnapping, seduction, and recruitment by men who employed them as domestic servants and shopworkers or by unscrupulous agents who organized “white slavery” rings in Petersburg and throughout the empire.^[84] But many others offered their services for purely economic reasons, and of their own accord (though the choice was made from a limited range of options). Like male hooligans and young criminals, many of them may have been the least passive and most enterprising girls. However, while juvenile prostitution provoked a public and professional outcry, its apparent threat to society ranked lower than that of almost any category of male criminality, and so it elicited even less action than male juvenile crime and hooliganism.^[85] There were fewer shelters built for girls, fewer criminologists interested in female criminality and child prostitution, little interest in the differences between male and female juveniles, and as a result much less contemporary research.^[86]

As for the institutions of youth culture, when observers referred to the contamination of the streets, the process they had in mind took place in a specific setting: the cultural institutions of lower-class urban life where people of all ages gathered, relaxed, and entertained themselves. Bezprizorniki, boys and girls alike, gravitated toward precisely those urban institutions respectable society deplored: flophouses and taverns or, in Gogel’s words, “street life and street friends, taverns, tearooms, excerpts from semi-literate stories about various heroes of the criminal world, which are sold at an affordable price on every corner, and finally gambling, billiards, etc.”^[87] Eventually, most specialists agreed, it was in these same taverns that contaminated youths turned into full-fledged hooligans.

In fact, however, evidence provided by the same observers suggests that the actual number of youths who actively engaged in these activities, while high, was lower than one might expect and far from universal. Of the juveniles convicted by Justices of the Peace and assigned to court supervision in 1910, 40 percent admitted spending time in taverns, 17 percent confessed to gambling and playing billiards, 53 percent to drinking, and 46 percent admitted reading cheap crime novels.^[88] Of the 2,540 youths Makovskii analyzed only 19 percent described themselves as unemployed or beggars. Ninety-one percent of the juvenile recidivists that Iakov Berman studied had “some sort of job.”^[89] Among the girls E. I. Chichagova worked with between 1910 and 1915 fewer than 4 percent either begged or lived with their parents; the rest were working. Of the 255 boys and girls she worked with in 1911, 4 lived with their parents, 2 begged, and 12 would not say how they supported themselves, but the rest worked as apprentices, servants, factory workers, or “occasionally” as prostitutes.^[90]

And yet other than tearooms and taverns there was hardly anywhere to go. There was little public entertainment for children in St. Petersburg and less still accessible to the poor.^[91] Even a child of the cultivated nobility was forced to carry on his social life in the dusty corners of the Russian Museum, as the writer Vladimir Nabokov recalled years later, and of course, few bezprizorniki were likely to have availed themselves of the same opportunity.^[92] The worker Kanatchikov claimed that there was nothing to do when he arrived in St. Petersburg from Moscow (in the late 1890s) except go to the tavern or play billiards. In the Nevskii Gates region, where he and 60,000 other workers lived, Kanatchikov complained that there were only two “shabby” theaters, which, he concluded in agreement with the middle-class observers, helped explain why so many workers occupied their time with fighting, rowdiness, and hooliganism. Kanatchikov, however, believed that such activities were filling up the prisons as a result of boredom and isolation, not because of moral contamination.^[93] Several youth clubs were established at this time, but they tended not to attract the poorest children. One popular club, which was built expressly to provide migrants from the provinces with “defenses against the pernicious influence of the thousand temptations of the big city,” was visited primarily by white-collar workers: clerks in banks, offices, government agencies, stores and factories, and railroad offices.^[94] In 1905 there were all of ten working-class clubs in St. Petersburg, and only ten more appeared between 1907 and 1914.^[95] Public readings organized by literacy societies became fairly popular among workers, but these were for adults, not children, and they required that the audience exhibit some degree of decorum.^[96] Scanning the pages of Gazeta-kopeika for these years one finds announcements for readings as well as for sporting events, plays, and the like. “People’s Halls” (Narodnye doma) were constructed in Petersburg and Moscow to provide lower-class entertainment, but they cost money and were situated at some distance from many working-class quarters, and once inside the audience was expected to listen quietly rather than respond vocally to the entertainment, as they might at a fairground show.^[97] The Petersburg People’s Hall did manage to attract young hooligans, but not to its entertainments. The park in which it was located was one of the prime sites for hooligan assaults. Their targets were the “cultured” workers or People’s Hall employees.

Social reformers in philanthropic and voluntary societies were unanimous in calling for more palatable public entertainment and meeting places. A handful of “Children’s Houses” (Detskie doma—they were not places to live) were established in the years after 1905, at least one of them originating in the soup kitchens set up during 1905 and 1906 for unemployed workers. At first concerned with providing food, clothing, and occasional shelter for the needy children of unemployed or poor workers, the staff at one Children’s House on Vasilevskii Island tried to improve the children’s inner life as well. This they found extremely difficult because the youths “arrived at this sanctuary straight from the street.” The staff was undoubtedly also hampered by their commitment to instill in the children an attraction to work and to “awaken in them a consciousness of the necessity of working.” But while the inexperienced staff found their efforts stubbornly resisted at first, they eventually scored some successes with a summer camp and with winter activities, but only because they began to attract what they called more “tranquil” children.^[98]

Among judicial professionals these institutions were seen as particularly beneficial preventive measures for juveniles, because they offered both surrogate moral upbringing and the cultural tools for integration into society. They believed that the main obstacle to constructing such institutions was primarily financial: neither the city nor the central government was forthcoming with funds.^[99] But the issues involved were invariably more complex. The reform programs and the people staffing them expressed more than a little Victorian intolerance for the lower-class culture they sought to eradicate: if it was not edifying, if it did not raise the cultural level, it surely would corrupt. Left on their own, these reformers thought, the bezprizornye children of the slums could reflect only the worst aspects of the environment in which they lived. Even those who placed the blame for bezprizornost on the economy and social structure rather than on the base morality of urban lower-class culture saw only harmful values in that culture. The usually sensitive Okunev wrote that even the games of urban, working-class children exhibited their propensity for crime. When they became bored with games of “ball” they began to play “bandits,” or more often “thieves.” Games about thieves soon led to real thievery—at first minor things, like an apple or firewood—until the thieving became a habit.^[100] It is hard to believe, however, that middle-class children never played “bandits” in St. Petersburg or, more to the point, that such games produced criminals.

Certainly the taverns and tearooms where children mingled with habitual criminals and others who lived beyond the margins of respectable society were likely to be dangerous places for young children. And it stands to reason that spending time in such establishments would have made crime, prostitution, tramping, and begging seem more like ordinary endeavors than reprehensible, amoral, and frightening occupations.^[101] But even taverns and tearooms offered homeless, rootless children something they found nowhere else: companionship, entertainment, and often protection of a sort as well. Alekseii Svirskii inadvertently captured the duality of the slum culture in one of his superb vignettes about the urban underworld. Amid drunken figures, who “run about like madmen before your eyes,” the smoky tavern known as The Blindman

serves as a warm haven in winter for cabdrivers, women of the night, petty thieves, and street youths of both sexes. Late into the night…from somewhere…appears a child about four years old.…Wearing only a shirt, the toddler steps into the room with her tiny, soft little feet. With wide-open eyes of the lightest blue she looks around at the drunken people.…When the prostitutes notice her they surround her and begin to coddle her. One wraps the child in her dirty skirt, takes a sticky, shopworn caramel, and puts it in her tiny mouth. Another takes her by the hand and covers her little face with slovenly, wet kisses.^[102]

The context makes it clear that Svirskii meant to horrify his readers by contrasting the innocence of blue-eyed childhood with debauched womanhood, and to suggest that the child would inevitably follow the path of the women who surrounded her. I am not arguing that, in contrast, we should see the tavern as an ideal environment for raising children, but only that the scene depicted here had some positive features that the author, like the majority of judicial experts, could not see. Where Svirskii perceived in the prostitutes’ “slovenly” kisses a sign of depravity, it is possible to read affection, protection, and a kind of mothering that children living in garbage bins or slaving away in brutal workshops might envy. Such blanket condemnation blinded middle-class observers to the appeal street culture had for bezprizornye youths, and thus it was difficult for reformers to provide genuinely attractive alternatives.

This censure of lower-class public life was paralleled in the middle-class experts’ opinions of the private sphere as well. Affection, loyalty, and respect were absent from portraits of family life, and evidence of their existence was largely ignored. Case histories of the children who passed through the courts or were studied by researchers never acknowledged attractive personality traits or the possibility of positive family relationships, even in instances where evidence of caring can be gleaned from their findings.^[103] We know, for example, that some juvenile offenders came from families with “strict” parents, both mothers and fathers, who tried to keep their children out of trouble and punished them for misbehavior.^[104] The same criminologists reported numerous cases of parents who tried to have their children arrested, in the hope that punishment might straighten them out.^[105] Other parents, single mothers in particular, hoped that in the juvenile shelters or rehabilitation colonies their children would receive better care than their own wages and work schedules allowed them to provide. One of Makovskii’s thirteen-year-olds, a boy named E., lived with his mother, although she was too ill to work and could barely keep herself alive on handouts, much less support her son. E.’s mother persuaded a neighbor to accuse E. of stealing a chicken in order to get him into a juvenile shelter, simply in order to feed him.^[106] In some of these cases parents may have been trying to rid themselves of responsibility for their children, but frequently they appear to have been motivated by care and desperation. Such evidence, partial and ambiguous as it is, of concerned family ties did not find its way into the specialists’ analysis of the lower-class family or of the lower-class juvenile criminal.

The specialists’ overriding concern with the defects of their subjects’ lives is apparent in the kinds of information they requested and recorded. Numerous surveys were carried out among lower-class children in the 1910s, both by the Special Juvenile Court established in St. Petersburg in 1910 and by criminologists interviewing children at urban workhouses. The guardians appointed to supervise convicted juveniles were required to keep a formal notebook that included information about the juveniles’ family situation—where and with whom they lived, their parents’ financial and employment situation, their parents’ physical and psychological state, their drinking habits, and the quality of the relationships between parents and children—and the juveniles’ own habits—their physical and psychological state, their tendency to lie, their education and mental development, their “degree of moral degeneracy” (isporchennost’), their occupation, the influence of their comrades, their previous record, and their participation in a variety of activities, such as smoking, drinking, reading of crime and adventure novels (Sherlock Holmes was specified by name), time spent in taverns and tearooms, playing billiards or gambling, and if they were girls, whether they worked as prostitutes.

As a result, these observers overlooked positive features of youth culture in the slums—the camaraderie of the streets, the affection and security available even in “haunts and dives,” and the less rigid moral code that allowed poor youths to enjoy playing pool and reading Sherlock Holmes. Their emphasis on moral contamination also prevented them from understanding children who were neither depraved nor immoral. The lurid picture their reports presented ignored signs of depression, low self-esteem, loneliness, or other problems that might explain teenage alcohol abuse, self-destructive crime sprees, or hooligan self-assertion. Segalov, for example, recorded the case of an unnamed fifteen-year-old girl, picked up for disturbing the peace only months after her arrival in Moscow from the countryside, who was subject to periodic drinking bouts and suicidal depressions caused, she said, by loneliness and melancholy (toska). But these notations appeared in her report almost incidentally and as evidence of her certain future as an “inveterate prostitute.” The report emphasized her sexual maturity and “surprisingly dirty underwear,” her smoking and drinking, and her unwillingness to scrub floors and carry out slop buckets for an aunt who managed an apartment building.^[107]

The specialists’ presumption that the juvenile criminals’ environment was problem-ridden and that the children were “ruined” might seem appropriate since they were studying children who had committed crimes, but their one-sided critique had a detrimental effect on their efforts to eradicate crime and improve the children’s lives. Ignoring positive signs of cultural identification and bonding among lower-class family members and peers precluded remedies rooted in the beneficial aspects of lower-class culture.

Many of these same specialists were the people who had exposed the brutality of the workshop and the other hardships faced by children of the poor. But while their sympathy was with the children’s plight, and while several of them blamed “society” for creating the conditions that poor children faced, their understanding of juvenile crime was limited to the narrow world of the slums. None of them thought that juvenile crime might originate in a juvenile’s perception of the inequities of the social structure or that it might represent an attack on society itself. A number of important crime and judicial experts did emphasize what they called “social factors” in the genesis of juvenile crime, including some of the more prominent and committed figures, such as Gernet, Makovskii, and Okunev. But these observers also either viewed the children as passive objects susceptible to the moral contamination of their social surroundings or they concentrated exclusively on lower-class society, minimizing its interaction with society at large.

One of the main reasons some observers sought social and economic, or what today we call the “structural,” problems underlying crime was to avoid blaming the poor. They saw moral interpretations as an abdication of social responsibility for the conditions that produced juvenile crime, and they sought the social origins of crime in order to design social and practical measures for curtailing it.^[108] Many of the socially oriented analysts were either affiliated with the St. Petersburg Justice of the Peace Court, as was Okunev, or were working with Gernet at Moscow University. Gernet, mentioned earlier in connection with the influence of housing on crime, directed an influential seminar on juvenile crime in 1909. The research produced by the seminar was published in 1912 in the remarkable collection Deti-prestupniki (Criminal Children). Gernet organized the seminar in direct response to the growth of juvenile crime but stated explicitly that its objective was to examine the social conditions that led children to crime, in order to recommend legal action to control juvenile crime.^[109] The authors’ research was based on local statistics and surveys as well as information about the children’s background and experience, often in the children’s own words. Consequently, the works in this collection presented the first sustained and realistic portrait of the lives of poor children living in the capital.^[110]

The most consistent and outspoken of the social theorists working under Gernet was Iakov Berman, whose contribution to the collection was on juvenile recidivism, a subject particularly important for understanding the genesis of hooliganism. Berman argued that the causes of juvenile recidivism were, first and foremost, poverty, hunger, and need. Children stole not because social conditions prevented their learning to make moral choices but because they were hungry.^[111] Berman’s conclusion was based on his discovery of the horrendous physical conditions in which the city’s poor children were living. Many of the jobs that were available to children under seventeen provided less than enough for survival. It was common for young boys to sell newspapers or take unskilled part-time jobs (often illegally), neither of which provided more than meager and highly irregular income. Okunev confirmed this impression by noting that children often found themselves resorting to such illegal jobs out of need, “often with the consent and encouragement of their parents, because they are too young to work as an apprentice or in a factory.” But because it was illegal for children under eighteen to engage in many trades “the police pick up hundreds of these children each day.” “As a result,” Okunev continued, “the adolescent population of Petrograd sees each policeman or dvornik as his enemy.”^[112] Signs of poverty and instability were supported by the boys’ own explanations for their actions (Berman did not study girls). One sixteen-year-old convicted of theft (his fifth, Berman pointed out) explained that

only my difficult situation forced me to steal—after serving my sentence for another case, I was thrown out on the street. My parents wouldn’t take me in. I was hungry and poorly dressed. I stole some of the things for my mother, to please her, hoping she would take me back.^[113]

Another sixteen-year-old, also guilty of theft, explained: “I needed to. I was looking for work with a friend, but I couldn’t find anything at all.”^[114] These were not the “pranks and caprices” of first-time offenders, Berman argued, but a “sad and threatening social anomaly that proceeds from the logic of our society, which needs the depths as a counterweight to the heights.”^[115] As for the influence of a prison sentence on a young offender, Berman emphasized its social and practical effects. Because they had been pushed off life’s path at an early age, it was often difficult for young offenders to find their way back on track. Often after serving a sentence, youths were regarded with suspicion by prospective employers, and thus they were more likely to end up in the ranks of the unemployed. Their families rejected them, leaving them no place to live and no outside support.^[116] Berman concluded that juvenile crime was “not solely [the product] of a criminal nature, not simply a habit or an inclination toward evil.” It was much simpler: it was “the oldest motive, but it is ever new,” and it bore repeating because the usual explanation for juvenile crime portrayed the children as moral degenerates. Berman went on: “If there are some juvenile recidivists with deeply engrained criminal tendencies who are thoroughly ensconced in the life of crime, the majority are not.”^[117]

Okunev also presented juvenile crime as primarily a “social phenomenon” in his official history of the Special Juvenile Court. An “inescapable” social problem, juvenile crime was, in Okunev’s view, a product of the concentration of people in big cities, the development of factory industry, the poverty of the working-classes, and the high cost of living in the capital, which made theft, for example, almost a necessity.^[118] A social phenomenon, Okunev impressed on his readers, demanded social measures to combat it. If bezprizornost’ were at its root, then it must be fought with day-care centers, kindergartens, shelters, clubs, and an increase in city schools, which would allow children to go to school until they were old enough to work.^[119]

Ironically, the evidence these analysts produced to argue for social, and against moral, interpretations of juvenile crime was almost identical with that marshaled by those who focused on bezprizornost’ and its corrosive moral consequences: homelessness, parental neglect, the lack of regular productive activity or adult supervision, alongside poverty, and hunger. But by transferring the weight of motivation from individual children and their families to the structure of the society in which they lived, the criminologists achieved several ends at once. They could remove the stigma of moral degeneracy from children they viewed as basically innocent, a necessary step toward preventing first-time offenders from committing new crimes. They encouraged people to see that the causes of crime were to be found not within the individual criminal, but within society, which allowed reformers some hope for believing that social action might decrease juvenile crime. If crime were caused by social injustice rather than individual psychology or morality, it could be diminished by improving living and working conditions. If it were poverty and hunger rather than the child’s mentality or attitude that led to crime, then food, housing, and assimilation would prevent the alienation and hostility to society that turned juvenile criminals into hooligans.

For all these differences, however, the social structural explanation of juvenile crime shares several features with the moral arguments. First, few experts perceived the milieu and the motives of urban youth in any complexity. For example, few observers subjected the juveniles’ words to more than superficial scrutiny. When children caught stealing explained that they were hungry or “had not eaten for days” it does not seem to have occurred to Berman, for example, that the juveniles might know that their answers would win favorable responses. Second, there was little attempt among any of the analysts to sort out the various factors they found juvenile criminals to have in common or to understand how they worked to reinforce one another. Both the social-economic and the cultural-moral analysts viewed the entire milieu of the lower-class city in isolation from the rest of society. Even Berman and Makovskii, who exposed the children’s wretched conditions, did not see juvenile crime as a response to or an attack on the underlying social and economic structure responsible for those conditions.

Third, both the moral and the social observers of juvenile crime viewed lower-class life from the perspective of respectable society and its values. With only the rarest exceptions, crime specialists, including social theorists, called for cultural measures to curtail and prevent juvenile crime by raising the cultural level of the juveniles and assimilating them into respectable culture.^[120] These observers assumed that activities and mores that offended respectable tastes were necessarily corrupting; so they did not try to differentiate the relative importance and influence of various features of lower-class life. They argued that bezprizornost’ and poverty left children open to the contaminating influences around them, but playing billiards and reading crime fiction are fundamentally different experiences from exposure to open sexuality, ubiquitous alcoholism, and public, ritualized fighting. The point here is not to judge the various experiences on the basis of some corruption quotient, but to determine the varying roles they may have played in influencing a poor youth’s life choices. What seemed the abnormal by-products of urban social conditions to respectable society were in fact regular features of lower-class culture (as well as of middle- and upper-class culture, though to different degrees and differently ritualized). While violence may be an obstacle to civilized and equitable social life, it cannot be said to have a uniformly deleterious influence. Inasmuch as ritualized gang violence, holiday brawling, and domestic abuse were commonplace in lower-class culture, their presence alone cannot explain why only some children committed crimes. The same goes for drinking. Alcohol consumption and abuse were so pervasive in Russian culture that they cannot be assumed to have had extraordinary influence on the children who became criminals. Furthermore, some children may have found a safer and more secure existence in the tavern among friends than with abusive parents at home or in a brutal workshop. This particular reading of lower-class culture by proponents of both social-economic and moral-cultural theories of criminal motivation, along with their call for exclusively cultural measures in the fight against juvenile crime and hooliganism, reflected a deep class and cultural chasm that divided reformers from the youths they wanted to help, and constituted the main obstacle in the legal battle against hooliganism.^[121]