Policing Prostitution

Abstract

Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the final two decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical-police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. Official interest in prostitution generated a mass of documentation, which allows us to glimpse the lives and challenges of various groups of the Empire’s urban lower classes, including women who sold sex, their clients, brothel madams, police, and wider urban communities. In the late imperial period, prostitution was not just an urban ‘problem’ to be controlled and contained, but also a lucrative commodity due to the formal and informal financial relationships forged between brothel madams, registered prostitutes, and the police. This study is a social history of prostitution, drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It focuses on how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted in various urban centres in the northwest of the Russian Empire, and how everyday experiences of regulation varied widely from place to place. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.