Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Brothels of Imperial Russia About this episode In today's episode we're taking you back to the brothels of 19th century St. Petersburg.
Sex work was legalised under the Emperor Nicholas I, but what was life like for sex workers? Why did they have to carry yellow tickets? And why did sex work there differ to the rest of Europe?
Joining Kate today is Dr. Colleen Lucey, Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona, to take us back to Imperial Russia to find out.
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister. I'm me, you're you, and this is Betwixt the Sheets. Hello and welcome back! Thanks for dropping by, but before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, once again, I think you know what's coming. Yep, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things and adulty way of living, adult subjects to be in adult too. Right, on with the show!
1:02 Kate Lister? It's the 1850s, Betwixters, and we are in St Petersburg, Imperial Russia's window to the west. It's a fascinating time to be in Haymarket Square, listeners, walking amongst the dusty streets and the crowded taverns, because this was the epicentre of sex work at a time when it had just been legalised by Nicholas I. But who was he legalising it for? Whose interests did that serve? What is it really like for the women who were working in this system? What were their living conditions like? Where did they live? And why were they being asked to carry yellow tickets about with them? Well, I'm ready to find out if you are. Let's do it.
2:17 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in 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 legalize 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?
2:59 Kate Lister? Well, joining me today is the marvelous Colleen 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.
3:19 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Colleen Lucy, how are you doing?
3:24 Speaker 01 I'm doing very well, thanks for having me on.
3:27 Kate Lister? 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?
3:37 Speaker 01 It's a pretty wild time. I think that the response, yeah, I mean, it's never, 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 in 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.
4:05 Kate Lister? Oh, yes.
4:06 Speaker 01 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 have, we feel a sense of responsibility, a sense of ownership, a sense of need. To do what we can.
4:30 Kate Lister? 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. 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?
5:00 Speaker 01 So I became interested in the history of prostitution in the Russian Empire, particularly through the lens of literary works and cultural production. So artworks that dealt with the theme of sex work in veiled terms, censorship was heavily institutionalized in imperial Russia. However, writers, the big names that we think of in Russian literature of the 19th century, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, 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 and urban populations, particularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow. That's how I became interested in this topic, and also because I felt that
5:43 Speaker 01 the story was important that hadn't been told yet, about why writers felt so enthusiastic or felt 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 had been done on history, excellent works on the history of prostitution in imperial Russia, by Laurie Bernstein, a more contemporary one by Siobhan Hearn, contemporary study of policing prostitution. Those are excellent works that study the archival production, what has happened in the archives that we can trace in terms of women's lives,
6:27 Speaker 01 how they were policed in urban settings in the metropole and then 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.
6:41 Kate Lister? That was a big thing in the 19th century, 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. Was that big in Russia as well? At the same time, it sounds like it was.
6:57 Speaker 01 It was huge. And the Russians, the Russian authors of 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 feel 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?
7:41 Speaker 01 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.
8:01 Kate Lister? That's fascinating. It seems like it's almost a ubiquitous attitude at the time. 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?
8:14 Speaker 01 What is Imperial? What is Imperial Russia? When was it? Where was it?
8:18 Kate Lister? When did it start? Tuesday afternoon, round about 1800.
8:22 Speaker 01 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 is 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 lands.
8:50 Speaker 01 This vice, of course prostitution existed 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 it's outlawed. And then in the 19th century, so skipping ahead, in the 18th century, 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 regulation similar to the Parisian model.
9:33 Kate Lister? What is the Parisian model? Because this was, it was a very influential one in Europe. It's like France went first and then everyone went, oh, we'll do that, we'll do that too. That's what we're going to do.
9:43 Speaker 01 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 czar holds all power over the people. We're dealing with Nicholas I. This is the czar 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 czar's authority and the czar considers himself as kind of a father figure to the nation. It's autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality are the three
10:27 Speaker 01 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 into, under the fold of surveillance state. And it kind of helps place where the medicalization of sex 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
11:11 Speaker 01 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 1830s and the 1860s
11:56 Speaker 01 up into the end of the 19th century.
11:57 Kate Lister? This is what happened in France, wasn't it? And I think it was Napoleon, actually, who brought this in. It was 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 or is it not? 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 of it isn't. How close to that was what Russia was doing?
12:30 Speaker 01 Very close. However, you know, 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, you know, 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, uh, who could hold you in debt for various things like having to purchase bed linens or, uh, or dresses or, or food and so forth. Whereas outside in the peripheries, we know from Siobhan Hearn's work that women came
13:15 Speaker 01 in and out of sex work a little bit more fluidly. I think the, the idea of, you know, that, 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 Fyodor Dostoevsky has in Crime and Punishment, one of the, the major character considers this and says, you know, this is the hypocrisy, the moral hypocrisy,
13:56 Speaker 01 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 chaste and pure. So you have it in the literature of the period, a sense that, okay, the Russian Orthodox state, right, the czar, is overseeing the sale of public sex. This is moral hypocrisy and the, the writers were very clear about, you know, 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 czarist authorities participate in this kind of clear, you know, by Orthodox standards sinful practice?
14:37 Kate Lister? I bet. But let's talk about this yellow ticket then, because it's something...
14:45 Kate Lister? I was gonna say it's interesting. I don't know how interesting it is, if that's the right word. But what happens is when you get a formalized system and now you've got, right, 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. They are like, we have this idea that people like, it's my full-time job, nine to five, that's what I'm gonna go and do. But it isn't. People move in, people move out, people do it on the side to top up other incomes.
15:29 Kate Lister? What, how did they categorize somebody that would need a yellow ticket?
15:34 Speaker 01 This is the major question, is how do women move in and out of the system? The Tsarist 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 cleared, you had to have the permission of a father or a husband or a male paternal figure.
15:58 Kate Lister? Oh my God, you didn't have to go and ask your dad if you could have one of these yellow tickets, did you? Oh my, no!
16:02 Speaker 01 Well, not necessarily that.
16:04 Kate Lister? No, no!
16:05 Speaker 01 No, no, no, but you do, in order to get the yellow ticket, you have to exchange the passport for the yellow ticket.
16:13 Kate Lister? You're literally handing in your good girl ticket and getting one.
16:17 Speaker 01 You're handing in your good girl ticket and to get a different kind of ticket. And, and so it marks you and you are 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're 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 are dependent on the Tsar's bureaucracy, on the medical police, on the madam, on your
16:57 Speaker 01 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 whim. 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 or drawn parallels to the bourgeois marriage model.
17:42 Speaker 01 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 our help, but what about the women who are also sold on the bridal market to the highest bidder, to men who are thirty, forty, fifty years older than them? What about the women who are serfs 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 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
18:27 Speaker 01 other social critiques about women's place in society and men's exploitation of women.
18:32 Kate Lister? You see that argument starting to emerge elsewhere in the nineteenth century. I can't remember which writer it was that said it. It's like, what is marriage other than prostitution but to one man? And it's like, that idea starts to emerge of just, of like, hang on a minute, we're panicking about women selling sex, moralizing 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.
18:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, feeling trapped in a system where you're beholden to male parties who have their own incentives and their own desires and beliefs about your future. That is also, I think, what appeals and what is very telling and what pulls, I think, a lot of historians, cultural analysts into the story of the sex worker. Because this is something that feels akin to exploitation in other realms, in other realms, yeah.
19:38 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Colleen after this short break.
19:45 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
20:27 Kate Lister? 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 us archival documents to work with?
20:39 Speaker 01 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 types of census and the different census that go through the 19th century, is it obscures, I think, the individual stories
21:20 Speaker 01 of women's lives, who, like you're saying, turned to sex work like we oftentimes consider now as transient labour, as migrant labour. And I think it gives a kind of snapshot view more of the surveillors than the surveilled.
21:32 Kate Lister? Ah, okay. 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.
21:54 Speaker 01 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 chancery of secret police. Specifically created for surveillance, for observing for censorship, for noting any particular actors or figures in the political realm or just in everyday life, students, teachers, who seem somehow untrustworthy or critical of the state. This third division of the Tsar's imperial chancery was created to help bureaucratize a surveillance state.
22:40 Speaker 01 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 and to 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 this system, as it were. But for the large part, you know, I think about the Tsar as as the one who controlled what could be written, how it could be written and how it could be produced.
23:18 Kate Lister? Wow. And do they still have a system of serfdom at this point?
23:22 Speaker 01 Yes, so serfdom existed up until eighteen sixty one. And the freedom that they they earned, that 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.
23:37 Kate Lister? It's kind of like like slavery, would you say, serfdom? What is that?
23:41 Speaker 01 Yes, it is a form of slavery. And Russia didn't participate in the transatlantic slave trade because they enslaved their own population.
23:48 Kate Lister? Fucking hell.
23:48 Speaker 01 So serfdom really kind of inculcated a class of peasants, which made up the large majority of the population, who were beholden to the landowners. And serfs 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 are 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 serfs with a monocle of respect, one could say. But, you know, it was a very dire, drastic system. And women's lives under serfdom were particularly difficult.
24:32 Kate Lister? And they said in the nineteenth century, no more serfs. And then everyone was free and lived happily ever after?
24:38 Speaker 01 If only, if only this were the case, right?
24:41 Kate Lister? I knew it wouldn't be.
24:42 Speaker 01 Not exactly. So the serfs received a monocle of freedom that was really a form of additional indentured servitude, which they had to pay back for the land that they were getting. 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 eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, there's really a push towards industrialization. So we see more rural populations moving to the city centers to participate in factory labor and industrial work. And that is kind of how we get more documentation on the lives of sex workers.
25:24 Kate Lister? Wherever you get poverty, you're going to get prostitution, right?
25:27 Speaker 01 This is the truth. I mean, in Haymarket Square in Saint Petersburg was a central node and a meeting place for prostitutes, for sex workers and for brothels. And Haymarket Square, which is a kind of which was founded in like seventeen hundreds, really as a center of bustling of trade. Also offshoots to Nevsky Prospect, which was another avenue that was known for perusing either same-sex or heterosexual markers for meeting places. Now, there were strict rules about how prostitutes, how sex workers could behave in public, that they couldn't congregate, they couldn't meet in public, they couldn't show their faces on the side of a window. But Nevsky Prospect, Haymarket Square, and the surrounding areas were all known to kind
26:11 Speaker 01 of have this unsanctioned but tacitly allowed red light districts.
26:16 Kate Lister? Wow. And how many brothels are we talking about in this? I guess this must be the most well-documented area, St. Petersburg, but presumably this was being replicated.
26:26 Speaker 01 Replicated throughout the empire. So we're talking about like hundreds.
26:28 Kate Lister? Hundreds. Wow, okay, they've really gone for it.
26:31 Speaker 01 Well, even in the empire, in the empire itself.
26:33 Kate Lister? Oh, in the empire, right. I thought you were just in this one street.
26:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, on the one street. One, no, no. I mean, 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, with sex historians. Yeah, so I, 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, the emplacement of Imperial
27:18 Speaker 01 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 chancellor might need to know about.
27:32 Kate Lister? Why is he so paranoid? Why does he need to watch everybody and have everybody report? Is he particularly paranoid?
27:38 Speaker 01 No, no, I think autocrats, I think it just comes with the territory.
27:42 Kate Lister? The, the technology caught up.
27:44 Speaker 01 I think the story that we tell about, about Tsars, about the Romanovs, it's usually kind of informed by Disney cartoon. No, I mean, a lovely family.
27:55 Kate Lister? I saw Anastasia.
27:56 Speaker 01 Exactly. And that's great. That's that also has a place. But if we think about it from the position of the lower classes, of the access to power, of 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 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 he's well loved, he's well respected, he's a figurehead.
28:39 Speaker 01 But, you know, I mean, this is also the czar who sent Dostoevsky to a mock execution for, you know, participated in a reading circle. Yes. I mean, it was a mock execution, although Dostoevsky didn't realize that when he was lined up there.
28:53 Kate Lister? So then what the czar was just there going, joking, I'm just joking.
28:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, J K. And I'm just going to send you to Siberia instead.
28:59 Kate Lister? 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.
29:10 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And this is one area, again, Siobhan Hearn 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 czarist apparatus would not pay brothels outright to exist. They had to they had to survive on their own. And brothel madams and the police also, the police needed the brothel madams 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
29:55 Speaker 01 food items or how one could operate one's 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, they could exclusively be women. It could be, you know, not typically in childbearing years between the age of thirty and sixty. All those, of course, those childbearing years for many women. And they, they were under strict regulation. They had like three times as many more rules than, than sex workers themselves about.
30:27 Kate Lister? Wow.
30:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, so these were, I guess, were like an arm of the surveillance state, if you can think about it that way. But were brothel madams 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 gray area where, again, another story that I think needs to be flushed out is exactly that. Where did brothel, where did the brothel madam sit?
31:04 Kate Lister? Yeah. 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, 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 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, he was, he was very nice and he didn't see anything wrong with this. But like what was hanging over the, the, 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 raid you. But they're making their presence known and sort of forcing another relationship of like, you have to give us information.
31:45 Speaker 01 Well, absolutely. It's so fascinating that the police officer shares this story with you.
31:50 Kate Lister? Just really freely.
31:51 Speaker 01 Just freely.
31:52 Kate Lister? Yeah.
31:52 Speaker 01 Because, you know, there's going to be no repercussions for
31:55 Kate Lister? Fine, yep.
31:56 Speaker 01 sussing out or trying to find out this, this, this kind of information from someone who can easily be exploited and they themselves can exploit others. You know, I mean, I, I think it tells you something about like biopolitics of like, how, 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.
32:35 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Colleen after this short break.
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33:51 Kate Lister? 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?
34:10 Speaker 01 It's a very good question about homophobia in the present context of Russia. Not necessarily really historically true. So one could see a more libertine attitude towards sexual relations, towards 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,
34:48 Speaker 01 in which subcultures thrive, in which sexual minorities can find like-minded individuals and find safer spaces to meet up, to do some kind of exchanges, or to 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.
35:22 Kate Lister? Just fly under the radar, don't they, just frequently?
35:25 Speaker 01 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 Healy, another important historian of Imperial Russia to the present day, and Olga Petry, who writes about particularly St. Petersburg, and how flaneurs 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?
36:09 Speaker 01 Women, men, participants, brothel owners, who are operating outside the judices of the Imperial Police, which is another aspect that historians have sussed out, or found the lives of how women who were, again, this is not 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 zones.
36:48 Kate Lister? Rasputin's favorite.
36:51 Speaker 01 More about Ross Putin, I feel like, but very interesting fellow in his own right. But the bathhouses were places where it was known that sex between men could take place, either for sale or not.
37:03 Kate Lister? I see. So it's kind of, I guess this is kind of the case of everywhere is just that you go through, well, everywhere that's been criminalized, you go through these periods of toleration where like it's happening, but like we're kind of, kind of try and ignore it. But if you know where to go and all of that stuff, that's interesting. 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 wealthy, to what we start calling courtesans and mistresses.
37:38 Speaker 01 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, of flowering of, of leisure culture that you see, the courtesans' arts, the kind of salon hostesses who participate and create
38:17 Speaker 01 these parallel realms from the state and are well-known for, I guess, for lively interactions, for vibrant kind of subcultural contexts, for flowering of different forms of sexual desire. Courtesans and the elite were not policed in the same way. They existed 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 their lower class sisters did not.
38:51 Kate Lister? Exactly, and it kind of butts up against one of the the problems that anyone who attempts to police or regulate sexual labour 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, are courtesans, do they count? Do do do women that do it occasionally, do, like, suddenly, it's very difficult to pin down exactly what you mean.
39:18 Speaker 01 And it's a big panic, because what do you do about these women, right, who are making a ton of money?
39:23 Kate Lister? Having a great time.
39:24 Speaker 01 And flaunting it, and having 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 as hell 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 policed because they have no rights under the Czarist Codex, let's say. Their their rights could be easily just dismissed.
40:07 Kate Lister? 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.
40:21 Speaker 01 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 Cullentai, who was a Bolshevik leader and who was leading the women 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 and the common turn of the early 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 Lenin 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 1900.
41:00 Speaker 01 Five. And then there's again a pushback, a kind of regression and a more more authoritarian control of the population in hopes of keeping the genie in the bottle, as it were. Then 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
41:44 Speaker 01 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 upholds 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.
42:20 Kate Lister? What a fabulous idea. And thank you so much for that. And obviously, it worked.
42:24 Speaker 01 Swimmingly well, definitely. Because, you know, there's also a civil war. You know, we're dealing with World War One. And we know, historically speaking, that, you know, when there's 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 falls apart relatively quickly.
42:53 Kate Lister? But they really did round up sex workers and try and re-educate them.
42:58 Speaker 01 Yes. I mean, this is, for better or for worse, Cullin Ty, Alexandra Cullin Ty, again, a major feminist, although she would 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 the stigma.
43:26 Speaker 01 On multiple sexual unions or freeing us from the bonds of marriage, of controlling in a relationship, and think about arrows, 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.
43:50 Kate Lister? 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 this system of like wives and then the bad girls, if you stop this, because men were getting a lot of sexual experience by seeing sex workers that they couldn't get anywhere else because women were kept like emotionally, like chaste 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're running after it going, wait, consent, consent, come back.
44:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's, 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.
44:47 Kate Lister? No, it's kind of like saying, if we taught everybody how to cook, there'd be no need for cafes anymore.
44:52 Speaker 01 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. Wonderful ideas, 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, for the time.
45:13 Kate Lister? That was positive. So the, the Bolsheviks criminalized sex work again, did they make it illegal?
45:18 Speaker 01 So that, they decriminalized sex, sex trade because they remember it's like not going to happen anymore now that we have a socialist system.
45:25 Kate Lister? Yeah, we fixed that.
45:26 Speaker 01 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.
45:41 Kate Lister? God.
45:42 Speaker 01 So you're just damned if you do and damned if you don't.
45:45 Kate Lister? Ah, you are. So as a final question, then, 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?
46:00 Speaker 01 I think, I would say 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 Sevlo D. Garchin. 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.
46:27 Kate Lister? Oh, interesting.
46:29 Speaker 01 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, you know, ideas about what was appropriate. But Garchin, who died very 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 on to it for dear life and make it meaningful for your readers?
47:04 Kate Lister? Oh, 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.
47:10 Speaker 01 Patrishayshe.
47:12 Kate Lister? Oh, I bet you can speak fluent Russian as well, can't you?
47:16 Speaker 01 That's part of the game.
47:17 Kate Lister? See, 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?
47:24 Speaker 01 So I am associate professor at the University of Arizona, Russian and Slavic Studies. And I'm very Google-able and I'll answer emails as they come in very happily.
47:35 Kate Lister? Well, thank you so much for coming to talk to us. You've just been wonderful.
47:39 Speaker 01 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'm grateful for what you do.
47:54 Kate Lister? 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, review and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. I know everybody asks you to do that, but that's because it really does help. Coming up, we have got episodes on the mysterious and sexy masquerades of the 18th century and another episode taking you inside the brothels of colonial India. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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