The Brothels of Imperial Russia

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It's the 1850s betwixties and we are in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia's window to the west.

It's a fascinating time to be in haymarket squarelessness,

walking amongst the dusty streets and the crowded taverns

because this was the epicenter of sex work at a time

when it had just been legalized by Nicholas I.

But who was he legalising it for?

Whose interests did that serve?

What does it really like for the women who were working in this system?

What were the living conditions like?

Where did they live and?

Why were there being asked to carry yellow tickets about with them?

Well, I'm ready to find out if you all let's do it.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets, the history of sex,

scandal and society with me, Kate Lister.

If there are two words which can conjure images of absolute power

and ruling with an iron fist, it's Imperial and Russia.

And with great power comes even greater poverty, it seems.

And with poverty, you will always find people selling sex.

So how did Imperial, Russia and sex work sit together?

Was the Tsar's move to legalise sex work progressive?

Or was it something more sinister?

I bet we probably know the answer to that one before we even start, don't we?

And how did elite society react to sex workers being in their midst?

Well, joining me today is the marvelous Kaleen Lucy, associate professor of Russian

and Slavic studies at the University of Arizona and she is going to tell us more about it.

Right, without further ado, let's crack on!

Well, hello and welcome to Betwixta Sheets, it's only Kaleen Lucy, how are you doing?

I'm doing very well, thanks for having me on.

As a first question, you are a historian of, well, Slavic studies, but Russia in particular,

what's it like being a historian of Russia right now?

It's a pretty wild time, I think that the response, yeah, I mean, it's never a dull moment in

Slavic studies, historically speaking, especially in the United States, but as somebody who

positions themselves as a kind of literary historian, somebody who teaches culture, language,

literature, the arts and context for a mostly American audience, we feel like a great sense of

loss for the Ukrainian people and for what's happened in Ukraine, but it has really caused us to

reconsider what we teach, why we teach it, how we teach it, and move from the Russo-Centrism

that has long marked our field and to decolonize what we have considered to be the canon since the 50s

and 60s. So I think we feel a sense of responsibility, a sense of ownership, a sense of need,

to do what we can. That's amazing, Colleen. We are here to talk about sex work in Imperial

Russia, which I'm so excited about, because this isn't something that I know very much about,

I mean, the thing about Russian history is that it's kind of dependent on amazing people

like you, getting in there, finding the sources, translating it, and then getting it out for

everyone else to read. It's not like I can just nip to Moscow and look in the archives,

so this isn't a subject that I know very much about at all, but how did you become interested

in it? So I became interested in the history of prostitution and the Russian Empire,

particularly the lens of literary works and cultural productions, so artworks that dealt with

the theme of sex work in veil terms, right? Sonsorship was heavily institutionalized in Imperial

Russia. However, writers, the big names that we think of in Russian literature of the 19th

century, Justaevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, these were writers that dealt with the theme of prostitution,

sex work, directly, and felt a great sense of responsibility to convey the plight of sex workers

in urban populations, particularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow. That's how I became interested in

this topic, and also because I felt that the story was important that hadn't been told yet,

about why writers felt so enthusiastic or such a need to create these archetypes in their works,

and to undermine those archetypes or question them, to go into brothels, to interview sex workers,

this to me was interesting, and I felt that the works that have been done on history, excellent

works on the history of prostitution in Imperial Russia by Laurie Bernstein, a more contemporary one

by Shavon Herne, contemporary study of policing prostitution, those are excellent works that study,

you know, the archival productions, you know, what has happened in the archives that we can trace

in terms of women's lives, how they were policed in urban settings in the metropolitan and in the

peripheries, but a separate story is taking place in the cultural realm of how sex workers are being

produced and pictured for the public, and that's what I wanted to study. That was a big thing in

the 19th century, I mean, certainly in the UK and in America, and I know in France as well,

I think Germany too was this kind of obsession with the fallen woman or the courtesan,

it was that big in Russia as well at the same time it sounds like it was, it was huge, and the Russians,

the Russian authors at the period really looked to France and they looked to Great Britain for

inspiration, but they also pushed back against that, they felt that Westernization and the European

model of sex of the bourgeoisie family was foreign to Russian orthodoxy, and so you always

see all this tension between how the fallen woman narrative plays out in a Russian orthodox

country where there is great sympathies, but also a kind of distrust of female sexuality and

sexuality in general. Yes, it was a major topic and it continues to kind of reverberate

in contemporary culture. There's another, you know, it seems like this time-old question,

like what do you do with sex workers? How do you use, and always typically speaking, the voice

of sex workers is erased, and it is replaced with oftentimes male narratives of salvation,

of intervening, and these are quite patronizing patriarchal modes of discussion as you yourself

have uncovered in your own work and in this podcast. That's fascinating that it seems like it's

almost a ubiquitous attitude at the time, but I've jumped ahead of myself because we should

probably start with a really beginner question for sex work in imperial Russia. What's imperial

Russia? What is, what is imperial Russia? When was it, where was it? So it's here,

Tuesday afternoon, around 1800. Yeah, so we think of imperial Russia really beginning in the 1700s

with Peter the Great, a great expansion. Russia becomes a major European power, and there's

an opening to Western Europe and that opening, the St. Petersburg. And for writers and publicists

of the period, St. Petersburg was a bureaucratic city, but that window to the west was also a window

through vice that vice would enter the Russian land. And this vice, of course, prostitution existed

in Russian, in Russian lands and in Slavic lands, but it's really in the 1700s that it takes a

kind of bureaucratic role, and there's policing of it and those, and it's outlawed. And then,

in the 19th century, so skipping ahead, in the 18th century, if there was more liberal attitudes

towards sex, especially amongst the elites, but in the 19th century, with a wave of a kind of

medical police movement or medicalization of sex that we see in Britain and France, it also makes

its way to Russia. And in 1843, prostitution is legalized somewhat through a form of regulations

similar to the Parisian model. What is the Parisian model? Because this was a very influential one

in Europe. It's like France went first and everyone went, oh, we'll do that. We'll do that too.

That's what we're going to do. I think it's very helpful to remember that the period that we're

dealing with in Russia, very different from France. In Russia, it's an autocratic state.

The Tsar holds all power over the people. We're dealing with Nicholas first. This is the Tsar

who comes into the throne in 1825 on the heels of a revolt amongst his military officers.

So he takes the throne and you can kind of think about the 30s and 40s and the 50s as really the

growth of a police state, of the growth of a bureaucratic surveillance system in which the population

is under the Tsar's authority and the Tsar considers himself as kind of a father figure to the

nation. It's autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality of the three pillars. And that is where the growing

interest in women's lives and particularly women who exist outside the patriarchal unit,

outside the family model, moving to the urban centers who are supplementing their income

with sex work, who may be migrant laborers, becomes quite necessary to bring them

under the fold of surveillance state. And it kind of helps place where the medicalization of sex,

how it takes, how it takes roots in the Russian Empire, modeled off of the Parisian one, of course.

But it doesn't have the bureaucratic built-in system yet. So it is part of a surveillance growth.

And the medicalization of sex work that takes place in Western Europe and then is adopted in

Russia has left us a trove of information of archival documents of what is called the yellow ticket.

That was the official documentation, form of identification that sex workers received once they

entered the sex trade. So the Russian Empire created an entire class of women, a political class,

a social class of prostitutes. And that yellow ticket meant that women were subjected to medical

checks at least once a week, if not twice a week. Certain behaviors were controlled where they

could live in the city, how they could practice their trade, what they were required to do. It

becomes like more and more regulations and more and more rules through the 1850s and the 1860s up

into the end of the 19th century. This is what happened in France, wasn't it? And I think it was

Napoleon actually who brought this in. It was like all brought in under the idea of public hygiene,

which was that sex work was again occupied a strange ground of like, well, is it legal?

I guess it's kind of legal, but it's basically state controlled now with people being forced to

submit to venereal examinations every two weeks. And the state keeping very close tabs on everybody

and police oversights on everyone. And it was supposed to be much, much better. And of course,

the reality is it isn't how close to that was what Russia was doing.

Very close. However, one thing that's striking, I think, in the Russian case, is that

the policing of prostitution in the imperial centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg worked

differently than in the provinces and then in the Baltic states and in the peripheries.

So women who had a yellow ticket in the Metropole in St. Petersburg or in Moscow were really

locked into the yellow ticket system. It was very difficult to get out of prostitution. You

oftentimes were indebted to your madam who could hold you in debt for various things like

having to purchase bedlinens or dresses or food and so forth. Whereas outside in the peripheries,

we know from Shavon Herndt's work that women came in and out of sex work a little bit more fluidly.

I think that the idea of that venereal disease and this is kind of a way to keep moral hygiene

and public hygiene was also about, of course, controlling women's

entrance into public life and making sure that, or at least theoretically, the idea is,

you're keeping a certain population of women who are laboring in the sex trade from the rest of

the population in the hopes that they don't intermix. That a certain population as the

theater to stay of ski has in crime and punishment when the major character considers this and says,

this is the hypocrisy, the moral hypocrisy, where we keep a certain part of the population as a

certain percentage to go into prostitution so that the rest of the female population can remain

chased and pure. So you have it in the literature of the period, a sense that the Russian Orthodox

state, the Tsar, is overseeing the sale of public sex. This is moral hypocrisy and the writers

were very clear about, even though they themselves may have visited brothels or participated in

in the sex trade, they themselves felt like this was a major sticking point for them.

Like, how could the Tsar's authorities participate in this kind of clear, you know,

by Orthodox standard sinful practice? I bet. Let's talk about this yellow ticket then because it's

something, I think this is interesting. I don't know how interesting it if that's the right word,

but what happens is when you get a formalized system and now you've got rights, now you are

officially, I'm not sure what the Russian word is, but you're officially a sex worker,

have this yellow ticket, this is now your job, you go and you do it over there, that's it now,

that's a label, that's something that you've got on you and what that creates is a new identity,

it, and it's suddenly, you're in a system then that perhaps is much harder to get out of because

one of the things that we know about sex work even today is it's very transient, we have this

idea that people, like it's my full-time job, 95, that's what I'm going to go and do, but it isn't,

is people move in, people move out, people do it on the side to top up other incomes,

what, how did they categorize somebody that would need a yellow ticket?

This is the major question, as how do women move in and out of the system? The Tsar's bureaucracy

created an internal passport, which all citizens of the Russian Empire could have access to,

but for women, in order to get your internal passport, clear, you had to have the permission

of a father or a husband or a male paternal figure.

Oh my god, you just have to go and ask your dad if you could have one of these yellow tickets,

did you, oh my no, not necessarily that, but no, no, no, no, but you do, in order to get the yellow

ticket, you have to exchange the passport for the yellow ticket. You're literally handing in

your good girl ticket and get your hand in your good girl ticket and to get a different kind of

ticket. And so it marks you and you were identified by the state, you were identified by others,

that was your medical ticket, it is what you presented to the medical police,

it could be a form of identification that gave you certain powers and certain,

you know, access to laws that were supposed to protect you, but you were also at the mercy of

the state. And so I think that kind of ambiguous state where you can't, you're kind of in flux

and you, you are dependent on the Tsar's bureaucracy, on the medical police, on the madam,

on your clients, is something that writers of the period felt like drawn to, that they felt a

kind of connection, even though they're men with power and with authority and they're still

subjected to the imperial Tsar's mandates, they're still subjected to intense scrutiny and censorship,

they're still at any moment, everything could be taken away from them at the Tsar's when

and that kind of ambiguity makes the figure of the sex worker, of the prostitute,

particularly appealing to men of the period who wrote about them. And that's, I think,

you know, one thing that also comes to mind is that sex work as it was regulated in the empire

was also akin to our drawn parallels to the bourgeois marriage model. And so writers and cultural

thinkers were wondering, okay, so we have these sex workers who are providing an important,

you know, a vital service, it's a duty. They're ostracized, they're seen as fallen women,

they might need her help, but what about the women who are also sold on the bridal market

to the highest bidder, to men who are 30, 40, 50 years older than them? What about the,

the women who are surfs and subjected to the landlords, you know, sexual abuses? What about the

women who are forced into marriages and then must have sexual relations with husbands that they hate

and there's no, no opportunity for divorce? So there's a kind of sliding scale and I'm not saying

that they are equivalent in any way, but writers want to use that story of the sex worker

in order to make other social critiques about women's place in society and men's exploitation

of women. You see that argument starting to emerge elsewhere in the 19th century. I can't

know which writer it was that said it's like, what is marriage other than prostitution, but to one

man? And it's like that idea starts to emerge of just like hang on a minute. We're panicking about

women selling sex moralized about it, but we've also got this strange system where they have to

get married, basically, and they don't have a lot of say in it and they can't get out of it either.

Yeah, feeling trapped in a system where you, you're beholden to male parties who have their own

incentives and their own desires and beliefs about a bunch of future. That is also, I think,

what is about, what's, what about what appeals and what is they're telling and what pulls,

I think, a lot of historians, cultural analysts to the story of the sex worker, because

this is something that feels akin to exploitation in other realms, in other realms, yeah.

I'll be bowing clean after this short break.

Do any of these yellow tickets survive, and do we know much about the women who had them?

I mean, the bureaucratic system sounds intense, but has it at least left as archival

documents to work with? Yes, one positive of the bureaucratic system was that it left a long

history and a long trace of documenting sex workers through imperial wide surveys and census

protocols in which there was documentation of where sex workers came from, what their

nationality was, what social class they belonged to, how long they had been in the sex trade,

what their medical history was, all of that is there for the taking, but what that census does,

I think, of the different, the different types of census and the different census that go

through the 19th century, is it obscures, I think, the individual stories of women's lives who,

like you're saying, turn to sex work like we oftentimes consider now as transient labor,

as migrant labor, and I think it gives a kind of snapshot view more of the surveilers than the

surveilled. I should have asked you probably at the beginning, it's like it's too broad a question

to say what was Russia like at this point, but like you mentioned the Tsar is all powerful,

so is that the sort of the system that Russia is working in, even in the 19th century, is like,

this is the guy he's in charge, there's no parliament putting checks and balances on this,

he's the guy. Yes, this is an autocratic system in which the Tsar holds complete power over the

nation. However, however, there are independent actors and imperial authorities spread throughout

the nation, and one thing with Nicholas the first that I think is valuable to think about is that

this is the Tsar who creates a special chancellery of secret police, specifically created for surveillance,

for observing for censorship, for noting any particular actors or figures in the political

realm or just an everyday life's students, teachers who seem somehow untrustworthy or critical of

this date. This third division of the Tsar's imperial chancellery was created to help bureaucratize

a surveillance state. It's helpful to think about I think Russia as a complex nation at this period,

as an imperial power with a grand designs on competing with England and with France,

expanding westward and eastward into the south, and that it's a multi-ethnic empire, even at this

point. And in that kind of huge empire, how can you possibly police all the different regions? So

there's individual kind of abilities to subvert the system as it were. But for the large part,

I think about the Tsar as the one who controlled what could be written, how it could be written,

and how it could be produced. Wow. And do they still have a system of

Serfdom at this point? Yes, so Serfdom existed up until 1861, and the freedom that they earned

if they were granted was also kind of a rotten bag. So Serfdom existed in the Russian Empire,

this was another hot point that could not be discussed. It's kind of like slavery, would you say,

Serfdom, what is that? Yes, it is a form of slavery, and Russia didn't participate in the trans-Atlantic

slavery because they enslaved their own population. So Serfdom really kind of inculcated a class of

peasants, which made up the large majority of the population, who were beholden to the land owners.

And Serf's had very few rights, and the landowners of this period had a great say over what

could be done and how the work could be performed. But throughout Russian history, there were moments

of rebellion and resistance against those landlords. And so there are tales and there are stories to

look at that show that kind of friction and pushback. And so there were incentives to treat one's

Serf's with a monochrome of respect, one could say. But it was a very dire drastic system,

and women's lives under Serfdom were particularly difficult. And they said in the 19th century,

no more Serfs, and then everyone was free and lived happily ever after. If only this were the case,

right? I knew it wouldn't be. Not exactly. So the Serfs received a monochrome of freedom that was

really a form of additional indentured servitude, which they had to pay back for the land that they

were given small plots that they could use to sustain themselves and their families on. But they

were still largely beholden to their former landowners, although they could have more freedom of

movement. So this is one one aspect that helps the story of sex work is that beginning in the 1870s

and 1880s, there's really a push towards industrialization. So we see more rural populations moving

to the city centers to participate in factory labor or an industrial work. And that is kind of how

we get more documentation on the lives of sex workers. Wherever you get poverty, you're going to

get prostitution, right? This is the truth. I mean, in Heymarket Square in St. Petersburg,

it was a central node and a meeting place for prostitutes for sex workers and for brothels.

And Heymarket Square, which is kind of, which was founded in like 1700s, really as a center

of bustling of trade, also offshoots to nefsky prospect, which was another avenue that was known

for perusing either same sex or heterosexual markers for repeating places. Now there were strict

rules about how prostitutes, how sex workers could behave in public. They couldn't congregate,

they couldn't be in public, they couldn't show their faces on the side of a window. But nefsky

prospect, Heymarket Square and the surrounding areas were all known to kind of have this

unsanctioned but tacitly allowed red light districts. Wow. And how many brothels we're talking about

in this? I guess this must be the most well-documented area, St. Petersburg, but presumably this

was being replicated throughout the empire. So we're talking about like hundreds. Hundreds. Wow,

okay, they've really gone for it. Well, even in the empire, in the empire, in the empire,

in the empire, right? We know. Just in this one street, yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Wow,

wouldn't that be interesting? We would have a lot more people interested in imperial Russia,

if that were, if that were only the case, yeah. The field will be bustling with sex historians.

Yeah, so we have that. And the brothels themselves are also interesting places to kind of

parse out women's lives in the period, these urban workers, how they survived and the relationship

between the brothel madams, because brothel madams were considered also as a crucial linchpin to

the Tsarist surveillance apparatus, one of the ways that Nicholas could stomach the emplacement

of imperial prostitution and the legalization of prostitution, at least in theory, was that the

brothel madam was seen as a potential informer to the police for things that might the Tsar's

chancellery might need to know about. Why is he so paranoid? Why does he need to watch everybody

and have everybody report, is he particularly paranoid? No, no, I think autocrats, I think it

just comes with the territory. The technology caught up. I think the story that we tell about

Tsars, about the Romanovs is usually kind of informed by Disney cartoon. I mean, a lovely

family. That's great. That also has a place. But if we think about it from the position of the

lower classes of the access to power, the use of petitioning to access one's rights to play a

certain role as you're trying to inform or kind of fight back against the system, you see just how

limited people were in providing for themselves and arguing for themselves and accessing the power

structures. And it is a very frustrating process in large part because the autocrat is also seen

as kind of second to the patriarch of the orthodox church. And so he's well loved, he's well

respected, he's a figurehead. But you know, I mean, this is also the Tsar who sent Dostoyevsky

to a mock execution for, you know, participated in a reading circle. Yes. It was a mock execution,

although Dostoyevsky didn't realize that when he was lined up there.

And then what Nazar was just there going, joking, I'm just joking. Yeah, JK. And I'm just going

to send you to Siberia instead. Oh, nice. Thank you very much for that. But just to pick up on what

you're saying there. So the brothel madam would be expected to have a sort of a symbiotic relationship

with the police as informant. Absolutely. And this is one area again, Shavan Herne has done excellent

research on to show where the brothel madam has operated as a kind of someone who supplemented

the police's meager incomes. So bribery was definitely part of the system. And the Tsarist

apparatus would not pay brothels outright to exist. They had to, they had to survive on their

own. And brothel madam's in the police also, the police needed the brothel madam's to help

supplement their meager income. So how to pass medical examinations or how to get skirt certain

regulations about what could be sold, what kind of alcohol could or food items or how one could operate

once brothel. All of that is part a parcel of the brothel's kind of existence. And if we think

about the madam also as a small business owner, it kind of helps place the brothel in context.

I mean, she's the brothel owners that could only, so they could exclusively be women,

not typically in childbearing years between the age of 30 and 60, all those childbearing years

for many women. And they were under strict regulation. They had like three times as many

more rules than sex workers themselves about. Wow. Yeah. So these were, I guess we're like an arm

of the surveillance state if you can think about it that way. But we're brothel madam's exploiting

workers and were they the horrible kind of taskmasters and cruel overseers that they're presented to be

in fiction of the period? Or were they the ones who cultivated relationships with their sex workers

and protected them from the police? Or is it somewhere in the middle? This is a great area where

again, another story that I think needs to be flushed out is exactly that. Where did broth,

where did the brothel madam sit? It's a very old relationship that one. I mean, certainly when

I met an old guy down the pub a couple of years back, he was really getting on. He used to be a

police officer and he told me that in Leeds, which is where I am, that they used to just go and

into the brothels and just sit and have a cup of tea with the madam and just get information.

But what, and he was just kind of telling, it was, it was very nicely, didn't see anything wrong

with this. But like, what was hanging over the head of the madam was that sex work was illegal,

what they were doing was illegal. So the police were basically turning up and not saying, if you

don't tell us, we will rage you, but they're making their presence known and sort of forcing another

relationship of like, you have to give us information. Well, absolutely. It's so fascinating that

the police officer shares this story with you. Just really freely. Just really. Yeah. Because,

you know, there's going to be no repercussions for, yeah, sussing out or trying to find out this,

this kind of information from someone who can easily be exploited and they themselves can exploit

others. You know, I mean, I think it tells you something about like biopolitics of like how power

and sexuality are oftentimes intertwined and how the police can be foes or friends to the sex

trade industry and you're reliant on the best of intentions. One would hope to support basic human

rights there. You mentioned a while back about there being same sex relationships available,

in St. Petersburg. That's fascinating because Russia isn't known as a place that's gay friendly today.

They have a lot of issues there. What was the sort of state of play at the time? Was homosexuality

was it out and proud? Was it tolerated? What was going on? It's a very good question about homophobia

and the present context of Russia, not necessarily really historically true. So one could see a more

libertine attitude towards sexual relations, sort of same sex relations in the 18th century,

1700s, some well-known cases amongst the elite in which there's some same sex between men.

Now, in the 19th century, what happens with the regulation of prostitution is that you just

have more eyes and ears on the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow. And well-known cases of

places in the city meeting zones one could think about, in which subcultures thrive, in which

sexual minorities can find a like-minded individuals and find safer spaces to meet up,

to do some kind of exchanges or to kind of key oneself to another's eye would be, again,

nevsky prospect. Now, were they out and proud to be gay in the 19th century? Absolutely not.

Homosexuality is criminalized between men, interestingly enough, homosexuality between women

is considered so uninteresting that it doesn't even make it into the legal codex.

Just fly under the radar, don't they? Just frequently. Completely flies under the radar,

another interesting point. So we have much more documentation on women prostitutes, on women sex

workers who worked in brothels or who registered with the medical police as streetwalkers, right?

But we also know through recent work by Dan Healey, another important historian of Imperial

Russian, up to the present day, and Olga Petri, who writes about, particularly St. Petersburg,

and how Flanures could walk the city, meet each other, identify a fellow gay individual in the city,

and meet that way. No, they flew under the radar, certainly. However, there were lists of known

homosexuals in St. Petersburg. Again, people could be denounced, who could be denounced women, men,

participants, brothel owners, who are operating outside the Judices of the Imperial police,

which is another aspect that historians have kind of sussed out or kind of found the lives of how

women who were, again, this is not the answer to your question, but how women who entered or were

prescribed into the sex trade could fight against that. They might have been denounced, suspected

as sex workers, and then denounced to the police and then brought in, and forcibly inscribed into

the sex trade. So to your question about same sex, about homosexual desire, another place that was

important were the bathhouses. The bathhouses were known so much. The Russians favorite.

More about Russ Putin, I feel like, but they're interesting fellow and his own right, but the bathhouses

were places where it was known that the sex between men could take place either for sale or not.

I see. So it's kind of, I guess this is kind of the case of everywhere, is just that you go through

everywhere that's been criminalized. You go through these periods of toleration where it's happening,

but we're kind of trying to ignore it, but if you know where to go and all of that stuff,

that's interesting. So actually, most of the people we've been speaking about so far,

they must be the poorer people, the people that are getting these yellow tickets and that are being

threatened by the police. I can't imagine that this extends to the the wealthy, to what we start

calling cotizans and mistresses. Oh, certainly not. There's much anxiety about courtesans who are

entering the public sphere with impunity, going to the theater and the opera, on the arms of men,

making more money as a courtesan than they would, I don't know, as a seamstress certainly,

living lives of luxury and doing so flagrantly and without a sense of, I guess, moral guilt,

one could say. That, you know, is part of I think a flowering of leisure culture that you see,

the courtesan's arts, the kind of salon hostesses who participate and create these parallel

realms from the state and are well known for, I guess, for lively interactions, for vibrants,

kind of subculture context, for flowering of different forms of sexual desire. Courtesans and the

elite were not policed in the same way. They exist because they had quadruple the salary of police

officers, right? They looked and they felt and they acted like women of the elite. And so they got

a benefit of the doubt that the lower class sisters did not. Exactly. And it kind of puts up

against one of the problems that anyone who attempts to police or regulate sexual labor will come

across, which is how do you define it? And it almost always ends up being defined as poor people

who are doing this full-time in a visible area. And once you get outside of that, it gets very

difficult to well, a courtesans, do they count to do women that do it occasionally? Do, like,

it's suddenly, it's very difficult to pin down exactly what you made. And it's a big panic

because what do you do about these women who are making a ton of money? Have a great time.

And have a great time. And you think to yourself, if I were a woman in this period, I would say,

how can we hate on that? I mean, this is an exciting way to live. And it sure is how beats working

in a factory working 12, 14, 16 hours a day. I think this is the panic, the moral panic that erupts

when you cannot control female sexuality. It's just easier to control amongst the urban lower

classes because they have less access to power and they have less access to systems that can

pull them out of poverty. And they can be more easily surveilled and police because they have no

rights under those RS codex, let's say. There were the rights could be easily just dismissed.

So how does this all kind of come tumbling down then? Because obviously we've got the Russian

revolution to deal with. And what the the Bolsheviks and the Marxists, what they decide to do with

sex work is endlessly fascinating. I think it is such a fascinating period in history and one

that third wave feminism could learn a lot from. I find the writings, for instance, of Alexandra

Colin Ty, who was a Bolshevik leader and who was leading the women's socialist movement and the

socialist movement at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th and then becomes one

of the most important communist figures in the common turn of the early Bolshevik period. And then

as kind of her her theories and her ideas become a little bit too problematic or too forward

thinking too progressive for linen and his and his cohort. And she's shipped off to be an ambassador.

But what happens in the failed revolution, there's one failed revolution of 1905. And then

there's again a pushback, a kind of regression and a more authoritarian control of the population

and hopes of keeping the the genie in the bottle, as it were, the 1917, the outbreak of the Bolshevik

Revolution. Bolsheviks were inspired by Marxist ideology on domestic labor and on the bourgeois

model of marriage. And what they said was that prostitution is really just an outgrowth of the

bourgeois marriage model. And we are actively working against it and we will eradicate prostitution

simply through eradicating the bourgeois marriage unit. That will free women to live outside of

sex work and it will allow men and women to more easily come together in sexual union without

any kind of stigma regulation and then move on to another sexual or kind of relationship.

So prostitution is really seen as a question of labor. It's not valued as labor as such. It is

seen as an exploitation of women and that it's part of this bourgeois family model that uphold

a capitalist system. Get rid of it. We'll get rid of prostitution. We'll retrain women and put

them in working kind of retraining camps to get them educated to get them into the legitimate

workforce and prostitution. What a fabulous idea. And thank you so much for that. And obviously

it worked. Swimingly well, definitely because there's also a civil war that we're dealing with

World War One. And we know historically speaking that in their such societal instability and

work is questionable at best, women will oftentimes you turn to supplementing your income

through sex work. You've got to eat, you have to feed your children, you have to feed your

family, right? This is the the labor that's available to you. This is the labor that you choose.

And so it follows apart relatively quickly. But they really did round up sex workers and try and

reeducate them. Yes. I mean, this is for better or for worse, Colin Tye, Alexander Colin Tye

get a major feminist, although she would not call herself that major socialist Marxist thinker.

Really concentrates on the idea of sexual desire as a linchpin of what's

kind of supporting this entire sexual double standard. We get rid of this stigma

on multiple sexual unions or freeing us from the bonds of marriage, of controlling

and a relationship. And think about eros, think about love, think about sexuality as part of the

whole person. Then we won't need sex work. If people can freely choose their partners

without stigma and we don't have a capitalist system, I can see the thought, I can see where they're

trying to like like if if women aren't if you don't create the system of like wives and then

the bad girls if you stop this because men were getting a lot of sexual experience by

sea sex workers that they couldn't get anywhere else because women were kept like emotionally

like chased and pure and bred up for marriage and then once they're married, they're controlled.

So you create this outlet. So I can see the thinking that if we let women have sex then there

won't be any need for anyone to have paid sex. But it's sort of you feel like you've read enough

we're going, wait, consent, consent, come back. Yeah, there are certainly flaws within and if you

think about it, it's heavily indebted to a socialist understanding of how labor should be liberated,

you know, and how labor should be returned to the individual and one shouldn't be alienated

from one's form of labor. But it doesn't think about sex work as a form of labor in that way.

No, it's kind of like saying if we talk everybody how to cook, there'd be no need for cafes anymore.

Yeah, I guess that's a wonderful way of that's a wonderful analogy and it's like it didn't

quite work unfortunately. Not quite, not quite. A wonderful idea is interesting thought experiments

and at the very least what we can say is that the removing of stigma of sexual relations outside

of marriage was a very positive thing and forward thinking for the time. That was positive.

So the Bolshevik criminalized sex work again to the make it illegal. So that they decriminalize

sex a sex trade because they remember it's like not going to happen anymore now that we have a

socialist system. We fixed that. We fixed it. And then sex work, prostitution is recriminalized

under Stalin in the early 1930s and then it's seen really as shirking once legitimate work

that should be for the socialist state, for the communist state. So you're just damned if you do

and damned if you don't. You are. So there's a final question and all of your research that you've

done about sex work in imperial Russia. Have you met any characters in your research that you've

just thought, God, I'd love to have gone and had a pint with you. Any yellow ticket holders or

brothel madams? I think I would say it oddly enough. I would love to speak with a sex worker

from the period. But one person I would also want to interview or think about would be this writer,

his name is Sevalod Garshan and he was a major popular figure in the 1880s and he went to brothels

and he interviewed sex workers and he wrote about sex work. He's the first Russian writer to have

a story written from the point of view of a sex worker herself. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so women

writers of the period didn't write about brothels. It didn't interest them and it's not something

that they would have written about because of ideas about what was appropriate. But Garshan who

died their early committed suicide, his brother actually tried to intervene in the life of a

sex worker. I would think I would ask a little bit more about the perception, the stigmatization

and the question about masculinity in this period about why is it so necessary for all of you men

to try to grasp the fallen women's story and hold onto it for dear life and make it meaningful

for your readers. Colleen, you have been wonderful to talk to. I don't know what the Russian word

for wonderful is, but whatever it is, you have been so sure. Oh, I bet you can speak fluent Russian

as well, can't you? That's part of the game. I say it's so sexy when people can do that. I'm so

jealous. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? So I am

associate professor at the University of Arizona, Russian and Slavic Studies and I'm very

and Googleable and I'll answer emails as they come in very happily. Well, thank you so much for

coming to talk to us. You've just been wonderful. Well, Kate, it is such a joy and it's such a

delight to speak with somebody like you. This is a topic that I feel like is one of importance and

one that connects to people today and I am grateful for what you do. Thank you for listening and

thank you so much to Colleen for joining us and if you like what you heard, don't forget to like

with you and follow along with everything you get your podcasts. I know everybody asks you to do

that but that's because it really does help. Coming up, but we have got episodes on the mysterious and

sexy masquerades of the 18th century and another episode taken you inside the brothels of colonial

India. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or retarded to say hello, then you can email us at

betwixtatthistoryhit.com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart

Beckworth. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again betwixt Sheets, the history of

sex, scandal and society, a podcast by the street. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.