Stories of the Street: Hooliganism in the St. Petersburg Popular Press

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century St. Petersburg fell victim to a wave of petty crimes and violence. Starting around 1900 the press began to report an increasing number of cases of annoying public rowdiness, drunkenness, rock throwing, shouting of obscenities, and the like. Soon more serious crimes were added to this list: armed assault, robbery, and brawling. None of these crimes was new and they seem to have had little in common with one another, yet they were all lumped together and collectively portrayed as a new urban blight.This disparate assortment of offenses was dubbedhooliganism, and the word—imported from England where it recently had been coined—was quickly absorbed into Russian usage. Between 1900 and 1905 hooliganism received a substantial amount of attention in the popular press, where by 1905, it had been transformed from a vaguely defined and relatively isolated phenomenon—one crime among many—into a social problem of serious proportions. Hooliganism had become a sign of urban social disintegration and a symbol of the “degeneracy” and “danger” of the urban lower classes.