Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Brothels of Imperial Russia

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

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.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I'm me, you're you, and this is Betwixtor 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 an adulty way you're covering arranged. All subjects, these being adult too. Right on with the show. 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 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 they being asked to carry yellow tickets about with them? Well, I'm ready to find out if you are. Let's do it. Welcome back to Betwixtashie. It's 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 Killeen Lucy, Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona, is going to tell us more about it. Right, without further ado, let's crack on.

Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Killeen, 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, 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. God, yes. 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 a sense of. 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? So I became interested in the history of prostitution and the Russian Empire, particularly through, of literary works and cultural production. So artworks that dealt with the theme of sex work in

veiled terms, right? Censorship was heavily institutionalized in imperial Russia. However, writers, the big names that we think of in Russian literature of the 19th century, Testejewski, 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 work and 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 Lori Bernstein, a more contemporary one by Chauvin Hearn, contemporary study of policing prostitution. Those are excellent works that study, you know, the archival production, 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 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. 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. 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 of the period really looked to France and they look to Great Britain for inspiration, but they also pushed back against that. They felt that westernization, 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's, it continues,

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. 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? What is Imperial Russia? What is Imperial Russia? When was it? Where was it? What did you start? Tuesday afternoon, round about 1800s. Yeah. So we think of Imperial Russia really beginning in the 1700s with Peter the great, a great expansion. Russian. 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 land. And this vice, of course, prostitution existed in the 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. 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 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 of the three pillars. And that is where the growth. 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

roots in the Russian Empire modeled off of the Parisian one, of course. But it, 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 until 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 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 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 keep 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? 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, 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 who could hold you in debt for various things like having to purchase bed linens or dresses or food and so forth. Whereas outside in the peripheries, we know from Chavon Hearn's work that women came in and out of sex work a little bit more fluidly. I think the idea of, you know, 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 major character considers this and says, you know, 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 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 more. moral hypocrisy and the writers were very clear about, you know, even though they themselves may have visited brothels or participated 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 standard, sinful practice? I bet. Let's talk about this yellow ticket then because it's something, I was going to say it's interesting. I don't know how interesting 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. 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 sets work even today is it's very transient. We have this idea that people, like it's my full-time job, 9 to 5, that's what I'm going to go and do. But it isn't. It's people move in, people move out, people do it on the side to top up other incomes. How did they categorize somebody that would need a yellow ticket? 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, 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 you, Dad, if you could have one of these yellow tickets. Did you? Oh, my, no. No. Not necessarily that. 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 getting a good girl ticket to get a different kind of ticket. And so it marks you and you are identified by this date. 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 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, you're dependent on the czar'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 czar'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 czars 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 or 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 women who are serfs and subjected to the landlord? words, 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 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 remember 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 saying it and they can't get out of it either. Yeah, feeling trapped in the 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 is about what appeals and what is their 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 and other realms. Yeah. I'll be about with Colleen 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 us 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 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 surveillers than the surveilled. 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 you mentioned the Tsar is all powerful. So is that the sort of the system that Russia is working in, even in the night? 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 czar 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 czar 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 in everyday life students, teachers who seem somehow untrustworthy

or critical of this state. This third division of the Tsar's Imperial Chancery 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 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. 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 transatlantic slave trade 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 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 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 monocum of respect, one could say. But, you know, 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 and lived happily ever after? If only. If only this were the case, right? I knew it wouldn't be.

Not exactly. So the serfs received a modem of freedom that was really a form of additional indentured servitude, which they had to pay back for the land that they were given. 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 aspect that helps the story of sex work is that beginning in the 1870s

in 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 Haymarket Square in St. Petersburg was a central node and a meeting place for prostitutes for sex workers and for brothels. And Haymarket Square, 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 meeting places. Now, there were strict rules about how prostitutes,

how sex workers could behave in public. They couldn't congregate. They couldn't meet in public. They couldn't show their faces on the side of a window. But Nefsky Prospect, Haymarket 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 are we talking about in this? I guess this must be the most well-documented area, St. Petersburg, but presumably this was being replicated. 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, right. Just in this one street. Yeah, on the one street. No, no. I mean, wow, wouldn't that be interesting? We would have a lot more people interested in Imperial Russia, 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 the Tsar's chancellery might need to know about. Why is he so powerful? 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, about Tsars, about the Romanovs, it's usually kind of informed by Disney cartoon. I mean, a lovely family. I saw Anastasia. Exactly. And 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 all. 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. 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 Dosteufc didn't realize that when he was lined up there.

So then what, the czar was just there going, joking. I'm just joking. Yeah, J.K. 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, Chauvin 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 Tsarist apparatus would not pay brothels outright to exist.

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 skirt certain regulations about what could be sold, what kind of alcohol could or food items or how one could operate one's brothel. All of that is part and 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, that could be,

you know, not typically in childbearing years between the age of 30 and 60, all those, of course, those childbearing years from many women. And they were under strict regulation. had like three times as many more rules than sex workers themselves about. Wow. 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 great area where, again, another story that I think needs to be flushed out is exactly that. 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 into the brothels and just sit and have a cup of tea with them, madam and just get information. But what, and he was just kind of telling, it was, it was very nice, he 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 raid you, but they're making their presence known and sort of forcing another relationship of like, you have to give us information. Well, absolutely. And so fascinating that the police officer shares this story with you. Just really freely. Just freely. Because, you know, there's going to be no repercussions for sussing out or trying to find out 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. I'll be back with Colleen after this short break. 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

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, 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, you know, 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's 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 and up to the present day. And Olga Petri, who writes about particularly St. Petersburg and how Flanors 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 instance 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. Russ Putin's favorite. More about Russ 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. I see.

So it's kind of, I guess this is kind of the case of everywhere, is just that you go through, wherever that's been criminalized, you go through these periods of toleration where like it's happening, but 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. 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 wealthy, to what we start calling courtisans and mistresses. Oh, certainly not. There's much anxiety about courtisans 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 leisure culture that you see, the courtesons 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 a vibrant kind of subcultural context, for flowering of different forms of sexual desire. Courtesons 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 butts 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, are courtesans? Do they count? Do women that do it occasionally? Do suddenly it's very difficult to pin down exactly what you mean. And it's a big panic because what do you do about these women who are making a ton of money

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 is 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 sexual. 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 the Tsarist Codex, let's say. 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 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 Alexander Cullen Thai, 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 and the common turn of the early Bolshevik period. And then as kind of her theories and her ideas become a little bit too problematic or too forward-thinking, too progressive for Linen 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 in hopes of keeping 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. Womenly well, definitely. Because, you know, there's also a civil war. You know, we're dealing with World War I. 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 labor that's available to you. This is the labor that you choose. And so it falls apart relatively quickly. But they really did round up sex workers and try and re-educate them. Yes. I mean, this is for better or for worse, Alexander Colentai, again, 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. If we get rid of the stigma on multiple sexual unions or freeing us from the bonds of marriage,

of controlling in 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 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. of sexual experience by seeing sex workers that they couldn't get anywhere else because women were kept emotionally, like, chased and pure and bred up for marriage and then once they're marriage, 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 going, wait, consent, consent, come back. 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. No. It's kind of like saying if we taught 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, 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 did the Bolsheviks criminalized sex work again? Did they make it illegal? So that, they decriminalize sex, sex trait because they remember it's like not going to happen anymore now that we have a socialist system. Yeah, we fixed We fixed it. 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 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? I think, uh, 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 Sevalod Garshin. 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, you know, ideas about what was appropriate. But Garshine, 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, hold onto it for dear life and make it meaningful for your readers. Kaleen, 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... What is say, you? Oh, I bet you can speak fluent Russian as well, can you. That's part of the game. 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? So I am associate professor at the University of Arizona, Russian and Slavic studies, and I'm very Googled. 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'm 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 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 of each wanting to say hello, then you can email us

at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodore of and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Freddie Chick. Join me again for Twix Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Fit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.