The Specter of the Dangerous Classes

Abstract

Abstract This article examines a formative moment in Russian social thought. The origins of modern research about urban society lie in the years after 1815, when French and British writers developed new methods for analyzing poverty, crime, and other aspects of city life. This literature, especially in the aftermath of the cholera pandemic and revolutions of 1830–1832, painted an alarming picture of slums teeming with “dangerous classes” of paupers and criminals. Russians joined this discussion with three books about Moscow and St. Petersburg by Vasilii Androssov, Aleksandr Bashutskii, and Andrei Zablotskii-Desiatovskii. These authors adopted the new Western research methods but claimed that Russia was free of “dangerous classes” of the Western type thanks to the unique virtues of the imperial regime and the Russian folk. The article argues that these writers helped to give 19th century Russian social research both its methodological sophistication and its distinctive ideological voice.