ILYA GERASIMOV

PLEBEIAN
MODERNIT Y
Social Practices, Illegality,
and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1905-1917
 Plebeian Modernity

Gerasimov.indd i 11/16/2017 5:28:43 PM

 Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe
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 Plebeian Modernity
Social Practices, Illegality, and the
Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916

Ilya Gerasimov

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 Copyright © 2018 by Ilya Gerasimov

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no

part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission of the copyright owner.

First published 2018

University of Rochester Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-905-0
ISSN: 1528-4808

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gerasimov, Ilya, author.

Title: Plebeian modernity : social practices, illegality, and the urban poor in
Russia, 1906–1916 / Ilya Gerasimov.
Description: Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2018. | Series:
Rochester studies in East and Central Europe, ISSN 1528-4808 ; Vol. 19 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039508 | ISBN 9781580469050 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Social classes—Russia—History—20th century. | Social
conflict—Russia—History—20th century. | Sociology, Urban—Russia—
History—20th century. | Russia—Social conditions—1801–1917. | Russia—
History—1613–1917.
Classification: LCC HN530.Z9 S63365 2018 | DDC 305.5/120947—dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039508

This publication is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America.

Gerasimov.indd iv 11/16/2017 5:29:13 PM

 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Note on Editorial Conventions xi

Introduction
The Subalterns Speak Out: Gerasim and the Infamous 1

1 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond: Reading Social

Practices between the Lines 18
2 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground:
Urban Plebeian Society 55
3 The Patriarchal Metropolis: Trespassing Social Barriers in
Late Imperial Vilna 81
4 “We Only Kill Each Other”: The Anthropology of Deadly
Violence and Contested Intergroup Boundaries 108
5 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 133

Epilogue
Gerasim in Power: A Plebeian Modernity 171

Notes 193

Selected Bibliography 249

Index 269

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Gerasimov.indd vi 11/16/2017 5:29:13 PM
 Acknowledgments

I have been writing this book for nearly twenty years, parallel to my other
research projects. Twenty years was the amount of time required to conduct
research in twenty archives and libraries in six countries in a quest for answers
to the most basic questions. Like many other scholars, the initial motiva-
tion for my interest in the multiethnic urban milieu in Late Imperial Russia
came from Isaac Babel’s powerful “Odessa myth.” Specifically, I asked myself
a simple question: Did the fictional “King of thieves” Benya Krik rule over the
entire city of Odessa or just its Jewish community? Babel’s texts allow both
interpretations, but the implications of choosing one version over another are
huge: How differently New York City and post-World War II American soci-
ety in general would have looked if the influence of the also fictional Don Vito
Corleone were restricted to Little Italy and portions of Brooklyn? This ques-
tion led to other equally simple questions: What did it mean and why did it
matter to be a Jew in a Russian imperial city at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury? What is a Russian imperial city and can we speak of the imperial city as
a distinctive social locus? Where do we look for the primary sources to study
city commoners and how do we explain the stark disconnection between the
actual behavior of these people and the way they are presented in our most
popular historical sources—newspaper reports and publications written by
various experts? Soon I had to broaden the scope of my study beyond Odessa,
and compare the case of Jews to Tatars, Poles, and Russians. Eventually,
I realized it was necessary to question the seemingly self-evident categories
that historians use to analyze societies, such as “ethnicity,” “criminality,” or
even “modernity.” There is nothing more difficult or productive than answer-
ing simple questions—I only wish that these answers could be as laconic and
simple. Still, I worked hard to substantiate my explanations and make them
vivid—open to verification not just on methodological grounds, but simply
based on the credibility of the life stories reconstructed in the book.
This complex and long-term research became possible only thanks to the
external support I received throughout all these years. By support I mean not

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 viii Acknowledgments

only funding but, first of all, the trust of reviewers and boards of grant-mak-
ing foundations that sustained my determination to carry out the study. Each
major grant helped me to clarify the scope and focus of my research, taking it
from one stage to another, until the pieces of the puzzle finally came together.
It all started with Grant no. 437/2000 from the Research Support Scheme
of the Open Society Support Foundation (Prague, Czech Republic) in
2000–2, for the project Russia’s Own “Central Europe”: Three Strategies of
Ethnic Minorities’ Integration in Odessa and Batum at the Beginning of the
Twentieth Century. In 2003–4, the American Council of Learned Societies
gave me a research grant for the project Jewish Ethnic Crime in Early
Twentieth Century Odessa as a Marker of Modernization. In 2009–10, my
research was supported by Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Düsseldorf, Germany),
on the topic Ethnic Crime, Imperial City: Practices of Self-Organization
and Paradoxes of Illegality in Late Imperial Russia. In 2011, a grant from
the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (New York) allowed me to con-
centrate on the theme of violence under the research project Ethnic Violence
vs. Imperial Segregations: Multinational Criminality in the Russian Imperial
City as a Space of Conflict and Cooperation. Finally, thanks to the Aleksanteri
Institute Visiting Fellowship (Helsinki University, Finland) in 2011, I was able
to finish the first draft of my book.
At different stages, parts of this study were presented at countless confer-
ences and workshops in the United States, France, Germany, Poland, Russia,
and Ukraine. I am deeply indebted to everyone who commented on my pre-
sentations or just raised questions—this feedback directly enhanced the devel-
opment of the research. I also tested my ideas in various published texts, one
of which, published as “A Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground: Urban
Plebeian Society in Late Imperial Russia in Search of a Common Sense,”
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 62, no. 1 (2014): 1–29, became the foun-
dation of chapter 2 of this book. I wish to thank Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH,
Stuttgart, Germany, for their kind permission to use parts of this article here.
Of special and most decisive importance has been intellectual exchange
with my colleagues—coeditors of Ab Imperio quarterly. Together we are devel-
oping a new imperial history of Russia as a study of complex societies as open
systems. This study is the result of our collective quest for a modern postna-
tional history and my contribution to the new imperial social history. Marina
Mogilner, Sergei Glebov, and Alexander Semyonov are the most important
readers and critics of my work.
The latest impact on this study has been made by two reviewers for the
University of Rochester Press; Sonia Kane, the editorial director; and Timothy

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 Acknowledgments ix

Snyder, the series editor of Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe. My
book has been written in dialogue with the most dynamic scholarship in sev-
eral fields, and it reflects the multiple influences of attentive, critically think-
ing readers. I want to repay this intellectual debt and I hope that the book’s
future readers will find it equally engaging and stimulating.

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Gerasimov.indd x 11/16/2017 5:29:13 PM
 Note on Editorial Conventions

All dates are given according to the Julian calendar (which in the twentieth
century was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar). Personal names
are transliterated following the Library of Congress guidelines except in cases
where an alternative spelling has been accepted in the literature.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Russian and Ukrainian are
my own.

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Gerasimov.indd xii 11/16/2017 5:29:13 PM
 Introduction

The Subalterns Speak Out

Gerasim and the Infamous

This book tells simple life stories of very ordinary people who found them-
selves in mundane situations familiar to or at least easily recognizable to
everyone. The events took place just over a century ago, during the interrevo-
lutionary period of 1905–17, in the urban landscape still largely present in
Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania. This illusion of closeness—spatial, chronolog-
ical, and cultural—presents the main challenge in telling those life stories cor-
rectly, as stories of other people rather than our perceived knowledge of those
people. Back in 1917, Viktor Shklovsky, a founding father of the Russian
Formalist tradition of literary criticism, coined the concept of “defamiliariza-
tion” (literally, “estrangement”) to describe the effort to differentiate our habits
of thought from an object’s deeper meaning by alienating it and making the
object look strange, unfamiliar, or unpredictable.1 The same idea was captured
in 1953 in the famous dictum by L. P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country:
they do things differently there.”2 To accurately introduce the protagonists of
this study and their exploits—in fact, even to identify them by some generic
name as a group—we need to recognize all the foreignness of their world and
the strangeness of their perceptions of it.
To illustrate the process of defamiliarization at work on universally recog-
nizable material directly related to this study, let us briefly review the well-
known novella Mumu by the famous Russian realist writer Ivan Turgenev.
Written in 1852 and published in 1854, it was included in the school cur-
riculum in Russia for the first time in 1874,3 and for the past century or so has
remained compulsory reading in Russian middle schools. This is the story of
the exceptionally tall, strongly built, and hardworking but deaf and nonspeak-
ing serf Gerasim. Taken from his native village, he serves at the city mansion

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 2 Introduction

of his landlady. At her whim, Gerasim drowns his only soul mate—the dog
Mumu. After demonstrating this excessively resolute obedience, he packs his
belongings and leaves for his native village, refusing to serve her any longer.4
Although published a year and a half later, the novella was widely read in
manuscript form and received enthusiastic responses from critics as early as in
1852. Ivan Aksakov, a founding figure of Russian Slavophilism, was probably
the first to interpret Gerasim as a symbol of the oppressed Russian people,
commenting in a letter to Turgenev: “He personifies the Russian people [with]
its terrible strength and inconceivable meekness. . . its silence to all demands.
. . . It will, of course, begin to speak over time, but now it surely may seem
both mute and deaf.”5 This interpretation has become a commonplace in lit-
erary studies, but only after the publication of the seminal essay “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak did the powerful symbolism
of a muted and deaf people become fully explicated.6
Writing at the height of the controversy over the abolition of widow self-
sacrifice in India by the British authorities (completely banned by Queen
Victoria in 1861), Turgenev hardly had much concern for the ancient Hindu
ritual. And yet, Turgenev instinctively found the symbolic language con-
veyed the idea of subalternity of the Russian peasant nation, which shared
the code of body language with Indian widows of the time performing Sati,
which Spivak interprets as the only form of public self-expression available to
Hindu women. More directly, Turgenev’s imagery resonated with the social
vision of such Slavophiles as Ivan Aksakov and his brother Constantin, who
conceived of the emerging Russian nationalist elite in terms anticipating the
postcolonial critique of Western hegemonic discourses of the mid-twentieth
century.7 Accordingly, members of the Russian ethnoconfessional nation,8
largely identified with the peasant serfs, were perceived by Slavophiles and
early populists as subalterns (to use the term as conceptualized within the
South Asian Subaltern Studies project): a mute mass unable to express its
true self, but also deaf to the words of enlighteners or revolutionaries. “The
term ‘subaltern’ . . . is used . . . to refer to subjects, working people, the
lower classes: ‘the demographic difference,’ as Ranajit Guha put it in the first
volume of Subaltern Studies, ‘between the total . . . population and all those
. . . described as the ‘elite.’”9
The original subalterns, as conceptualized within South Asian Subaltern
Studies, were subjugated by the alien colonial rule imposed by foreigners,
who had forced upon them their own alien cultural norms, social divisions,
and political regime.10 Today, thirty years later, the condition of subalternity
is understood more broadly and at the same time more specifically as a state

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 3

of alienation from the modern epistemological regime imposed and sustained

through hegemonic discourses. Colonial domination has been reconceived
primarily as a discursive hegemony, and as such has lost a formal connection to
the actual occupation or colonization of the country by foreigners. According
to this way of thinking, the advent of modernity as an intellectual and cultural
phenomenon can create an invisible barrier between the elite classes whose
members participate in what might be called (after Habermas) the all-embrac-
ing public sphere and the subalterns still living in the nondiscursive world
of pockets of local knowledge, now being conceptualized as “traditions.” This
collision could take place in any modernizing society.11
The significance of subalternity well exceeds the role of yet another fash-
ionable way of repackaging the same old empirical material. It is not a new
name for the urban poor—it is a recognition of the fundamental difficulty in
describing a social sphere structured by absolutely different rules and rational-
ity, and yet closely integrated with the discourse-based modernized part of the
community. In the words of Princeton historian Gyan Prakash, “we should
understand subalternity as an abstraction used in order to identify the intrac-
tability that surfaces inside the dominant system—it signifies that which the
dominant discourse cannot appropriate completely, an otherness that resists
containment.”12
Russian intellectuals had already encountered this situation in the mid-
nineteenth century with the discovery that the “people” existed in a semi-iso-
lated world of their own, largely unaffected by the ideas of the educated upper
classes and incapable of expressing themselves in any language comprehensible
to the elite. As in so many other instances, Russian literature assumed the
role of social theory, and Turgenev’s Gerasim became a popular symbol of the
essentially aphasiac subaltern, who cannot speak or hear. In Mumu, the con-
flict of Gerasim with the urban and upper-class world is resolved through his
self-willed retreat to the village. This disengagement could be but a tempo-
rary solution for the colliding worlds—one of the educated minority, and the
other of the “mute people.” The social cohesion of the former is coordinated
through the public sphere sustained by public discourses, which are prolifer-
ated through printed texts. The latter should have a logic and physics of its
own, but they are inexplicable in the language of elite culture (“It signifies that
which the dominant discourse cannot appropriate completely”).13 Upon the
abolition of serfdom in 1861, ten years after Turgenev created the character of
Gerasim, tens of thousands of “Gerasims” began arriving in imperial cities in
ever increasing numbers. Driven by the crisis of the old serf estate economy
in the village and attracted by new economic opportunities in towns, they

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 4 Introduction

produced a population explosion and changed the social composition of the

imperial city. Over the last decades of the nineteenth century, the urban popu-
lation doubled in Russia, mostly with the arrival of peasants, whose numbers
in the cities increased almost fivefold.14 Over the life-span of just one gen-
eration, peasants became the largest social group even in the capital of the
empire: between 1869 and 1897, their proportion in the population of St.
Petersburg grew from 31 percent to 59 percent.15
According to the rigid criteria upheld by social historians—purists of the
Habermas model—only 2 or 3 percent of the inhabitants of Russian provin-
cial cities (such as Kazan in the Middle Volga region) belonged to the public
sphere at the beginning of the twentieth century.16 This figure might be viewed
as too low, and there can be alternative methods for assessing the size of the
public sphere. It is clear, however, that the majority of the urban inhabitants
could not in principle have partaken in the public sphere for basic reasons.
To begin with, even in such an important provincial center as Kazan, the site
of one of the few imperial universities, only 51 percent of the population was
literate in 1897, and the rate of literacy was not much higher even ten years
later, given the influx of mostly illiterate migrants from the countryside.17
Furthermore, the cumulative print run of major newspapers in Kazan reached
its peak in 1913, with about 25,000 copies of about ten titles published at a
time—for a city that had about 158,000 inhabitants over the age of ten, or
120,000 older than age twenty.18 This means that only 16–20 percent of adult
Kazanians would have had access to newspapers, which by itself did not make
them active participants in the text-based public sphere, but was a sine qua
non for those who wished to participate in it. It can be added that in terms of
formal social status, 90 percent of the urban population in Russia belonged to
nonprivileged social groups: peasants or petty commoners (meshchane).
Thus, 2–20 percent of the urban population participated in or could partic-
ipate in the public sphere, having access to public discourses on a regular basis
and perceiving reality in discursive categories, so that for them, as Geoff Eley
puts it, “textuality . . . become[s] a metaphor for reality in general.”19 The rest
could be exposed to discourses and the world of ideologies and bureaucratic
document-based procedures, but they were not properly socialized into this
world, and did not fully interiorize its “geography” and “physics.” At least, as
this book shows, they did not rely on discourses and textuality in their every-
day lives. This majority cannot be unambiguously identified with a particular
class, legal estate, occupation, or confession—or any other categories of mod-
ern social discourse. They are most accurately defined in the vaguest terms as
the “lower classes” or “plebeian society”—a truly “subaltern” social standing.20

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 5

Of course, “Gerasims” migrating to Russian towns in the late nineteenth

century were not colonized representatives of, say, a different race from exotic
islands or complete strangers to the imperial social order. As individuals, they
participated in the social interactions and hierarchies sanctioned by impe-
rial officialdom as the regime of modern knowledge. They were licensed as
petty craftsmen and peddlers, employed as manual workers or shop assistants,
drafted into the military or prosecuted as criminals under the imperial penal
code and according to the standard juridical procedure. Yet they did not have
a common name as a group, nor did they have a common subjectivity or a
sense of universal solidarity.21 At least there was no way to frame and express
that commonality discursively, even if it were called “subaltern.” As Spivak
notes, “Subalternity cannot be generalized according to hegemonic logic.”22
Clarifying this thesis, Spivak further complicates the seemingly unresolvable
conundrum of the subaltern class as representing the “One-That-Must-Not-
Be-Named” social stratum, and hence elusive to the point of nonintelligibility:

Subalternity is a position without identity. . . . No one can say “I am a sub-

altern” in whatever language. And subaltern studies will not reduce itself
to the historical recounting of the details of the practice of disenfranchised
groups and remain a study of the subaltern. Subalternity is where social lines
of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognisable
basis of action.23

The very aspiration to grasp the nature of subalterns (even if by means of

invalid discursive instruments) stems from the broadly shared conviction that
such a community is real, at least as a commonality of lived life experiences.
We cannot easily grasp this commonality of plebeian society conceptually, but
we do not question its reality, as we observe it personally or get a sense of it in
the past from reading between the lines of our primary sources. Is it possible
to break the silence of the “Gerasims” if it is a result not of their organic defect
but rather of the structural incompatibility of two different modes of perceiv-
ing and communicating reality (two incongruent epistemes)?
Michel Foucault, with his unique flair for identifying ruptures between
reality and the analytical tools employed by scholars to grasp it, attempted
to “make the subalterns speak” for the first time. In 1977, he put together an
anthology of the criminal records of ordinary people of the eighteenth century:

I wanted it always to be a matter of real existences: that one might be able

to give them a place and a date; that behind these names that no longer
say anything, behind these quick words which may well have been false,

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 6 Introduction

mendacious, unjust, exaggerated, there were men who lived and died, with
sufferings, meannesses, jealousies, vociferations . . . propelled by a violence,
an energy, an excess expressed in the malice, vileness, baseness, obstinacy or
ill-fortune. . . . All those lives destined to pass beneath any discourse and
disappear without ever having been told were able to leave traces—brief,
incisive, often enigmatic—only at the point of their instantaneous contact
with power. . . . In short, I wanted to assemble a few rudiments for a leg-
end of obscure men, out of the discourses that, in sorrow or in rage, they
exchanged with power.24

Foucault came out with a solution to the study of “infamous men”—known

as “the silent majority” and “the people without history” to medievalists,25 and
conceptualized in more general terms as “subalterns” by postcolonial schol-
ars. He resorted to the criminal records of the epoch as the only documented
instance of the interaction between the upper-class, textually empowered elite
and the “infamous” (plebeian) society. True to his sphere of expertise, with its
emphasis on discourse, Foucault attempted to capture the very moment when,
for the first time, nondiscursive “mute” common folks entered the sphere
dominated by public discourses, describing it as “an important moment . . .
when a society lent words, turns of phrase, and sentences, language rituals
to the anonymous mass of people so that they might speak of themselves.”26
Taking the powerful social metaphor of Turgenev’s Gerasim seriously, we can
see that Foucault’s was a utopian and inherently coercive attempt to make the
subaltern speak. Were Gerasim one of the “infamous” studied by Foucault,
it would have become obvious that any translation of Gerasim’s “inarticulate
noises” and gestures provided by the master interpreter, head steward Gavrila
(“a man whom, judging solely from his little yellow eyes and nose like a duck’s
beak, fate itself, it seemed, had marked out as a person in authority”27) into
“normal” language, were but projections of Gavrila’s authoritative discourse
onto Gerasim.
Subaltern is not merely an abstract construct coined by theorizing lit-
erary scholars, but a useful analytical category (like “discourse”) that helps
us to grasp important aspects of reality in the language of rational scholar-
ship. Otherwise, it would remain up to writers of literary texts to commu-
nicate this content in the language of metaphorical symbolism and parables.
Regardless of whether one prefers to speak of “subalterns” or “Gerasims”
(in the venerable tradition of analyzing social types as presented by Russian
literature28), there is a serious problem that historians and social scientists
have to tackle—namely, the existence of a different physics of social com-
munication and processing information, “beneath any discourse” and often

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 7

even wordless, alien to the text-centered mode of processing information.

The firm conviction of postcolonial scholars in the subalterns’ inability “to
speak” reflects their understanding of intrinsic limitations of the discursive
sphere (where they operate themselves) in retelling the experiences of the
nondiscursive world. Foucault himself recognized the fundamental conflict
between the two spheres: “There, not even a shared language but, rather, a
clash between the cries and the rituals, between the disorders to be told and
the rigor of the forms that must be followed.”29
Does it mean that any attempt to make “the infamous” speak is doomed
to be lost in translation, overridden by the authoritative voices of educated
contemporaries (authors of newspaper feuilletons, court records, and research
papers) or no less imposing modern-day scholars? The very understanding of
our limitations provides a clue to resolving this conundrum. Let us return to
the seminal essay by Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which for the first
time articulated the fundamental conflict between the vitality of the “unspeak-
able” collectivity and the impossibility of framing it through generalizations.
Commenting on the main idea of this text almost two decades later, Spivak
explained: “The focus of subalternity in the essay remained the singular
woman who attempted to send the reader a message, as if her body were a ‘lit-
erary’ text.”30 This phrase revealed the disciplinary limitations of the Subaltern
Studies approach as influenced by methodologies developed primarily within
text-centered literary studies (which Spivak herself duly acknowledges), and
implicitly suggested a way out of the seemingly unresolvable predicament
of subalternity. Perhaps “subalternity is a position without identity,” but not
without a physical body that can be read as a text. This might not be much,
but it is already something with which a researcher can safely work without the
paranoiac fear that she is studying her own discursive projections. Consider,
for example, the main paradox of the story of Gerasim that has been puzzling
students of Turgenev: “The critics’ attention is focused either on the murder
of the dog, as the ultimate manifestation of the hero’s enslavement, or on his
defiant escape [to the home village]. Accordingly, Gerasim is viewed as either a
slave resigned to his fate or as a dangerous rebel.”31
This one-sidedness is inevitable since no single discourse is capable of
embracing Gerasim’s motivations and deeds without running into contra-
dictions. But let us look at his actions as a story communicated by a sub-
altern unable to speak, rather than as a reflection of something bigger and
better structured (a discourse) than the life of an infamous man (“destined
to pass beneath any discourse and disappear without ever having been told”).
Gerasim could have hidden his dog from the lady or, since he decided to rebel

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 8 Introduction

anyway, walk to the village with Mumu. Instead, he makes a series of explicit
statements without uttering a single Russian word: he treats his friend to a last
delicious meal, which confirms his affection for the dog. Immediately there-
after, he gets into a boat with Mumu. After attaching two bricks to the small
dog, he could have thrown her from any bridge or from the river bank, but
“Gerasim rowed on and on. Moscow was soon left behind. Meadows stretched
[on] each side of the bank, market gardens, fields, and copses; peasants’ huts
began to make their appearance. There was the fragrance of the country.”32
He literally “went out of his way” to accomplish his mission, which suggests
the presence of an additional, even if subconscious, meaning to his actions.
In this text communicated through the body language of Gerasim, it is sig-
nificant that he in fact arrived in the countryside as “his” place, leaving the
foreign city behind. Drowning Mumu on “his territory” revealed him as the
full subject of his actions, rather than an obedient executor of his lord’s order.
Already far away from the city, he did not run away home at that moment.
Instead, Gerasim returned to his garret in the city mansion, picked up his
scanty belongings, and only then walked away, back to the village. Was this a
symbolic confirmation of the legality of his departure from the vantage point
of some moral economy (insisting on retrieving what lawfully belonged to
him as a sign of general legitimacy of his actions)?
The goal of this brief excursus into the story of Gerasim is not to make a
contribution to Turgenev studies, but merely to illustrate the very possibility
of making the mute subaltern speak in a language comprehensible to mod-
ern text-centered observers. There is nothing self-evident in body language
read as a literary text, and alternative variants of translation can be advanced,
supported by different or additional evidence. Possible disagreements not-
withstanding, it is important that in any version of “translation” of his body
language the subaltern protagonist reclaims his own subjectivity, not that
granted by the interpretative power of observers informed by hegemonic dis-
courses, who infer possible ideas and desires on behalf of the mute Gerasim.
The subalterns may not express their inner selves through speaking, but they
do exactly this through their life trajectories and the choices they make along
the way. Taking the idea of perceiving the body as a literary text seriously
opens the way to finally hearing the subalterns speaking out. To understand
this “body talk” we first have to decipher a peculiar language of self-descrip-
tion and self-representation composed of individual social gestures as “words,”
interconnected sequences of actions as “sentences,” and stable social practices
as its grammar. In many ways, this work follows the program of thick descrip-
tion introduced by Clifford Geertz, by reading social gestures like elements

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 9

of a coherent text.33 Except the ethnography of the urban silent majority has
to rely not on any single location, and not on any single social or cultural
community, but on some broad and truly representative sampling in order to
attain the degree of richness required to keep this metatext coherent.
The necessary prerequisite for this task is a truly massive array of sources
documenting the lives of subalterns, even if, as Prakash warns, “what histori-
cal records present us with are palimpsests of the subaltern, impressions of the
subversive force exerted by the ‘minor,’ never the force itself.”34 This is only
natural, as there can be no narrative sources consistently depicting subaltern
society as a “thing,” and we are looking into actions that left traces in historical
records, not into ready interpretations of intentions, much less the subjectivi-
ties of the subalterns. Actions too can be misinterpreted and misrepresented
in the sources, but the chances of compensating for these flaws through the
simultaneous use of alternative sources and their analysis in a broader histori-
cal context are incomparably higher than in the case of misinterpretations of
someone’s thoughts and intentions. And what kinds of actions of the infa-
mous other than vital statistics (of births and deaths) have been best regis-
tered? Only one: instances of their breaking the law. At this point we return to
the brilliant intuition of Foucault, who proposed to tell the story of common
people as reflected in various types of criminal records without criminalizing
them retrospectively, but instead celebrating the authenticity “of a scarce few
words that speak of them or that are pronounced by them.”35 Indeed, the
greatest concern of students of the infamous should be the very ability to find
those authentic few words, rather than contempt for their inevitably unlawful
context. Given the reasonable doubts raised within Subaltern Studies regard-
ing the ability of the subaltern to “speak,” however, we should take a differ-
ent path from that tried by Foucault. It is not literally “the words” (“hidden
transcripts”) that we should be looking for in the records of various govern-
ment agencies prosecuting mute Gerasims coming to towns from their home
villages. Rather, those records, along with newspaper chronicles and rare per-
sonal writings, are invaluable for documenting the much more authentic body
language and social grammar of Russian subalterns, their statements commu-
nicated in seemingly irrational actions and choices. The available sources are
all narrative in nature: police reports, court records, or newspapers. Instead of
deconstructing these narratives in a rather hopeless search for some authentic
voices beneath a palimpsest of authoritative discourses, these narratives can
be treated merely as registers of acts and gestures. Regardless of their textual
qualities, their value as primary sources derives from whatever information
they can communicate about sequences and circumstances of actions, details

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 10 Introduction

of clothing and meals, weather and means of transportation. This idea and
methodology informed the research project that after fifteen years of studies in
archives and libraries in six countries has led to this book.
Gerasim knew just one city—Moscow, which was “the” Russian city in the
view of Slavophiles, who were the first to utter the hope that the subaltern
people “will, of course, begin to speak over time.”36 A number of first-rate
recent studies of imperial urbanity show that there is no such thing as a “typi-
cal imperial city” (with great variations even in basic characteristics such as the
presence of government agencies, the number of inhabitants, and the speci-
ficity of economic infrastructure).37 To address the problem of the variety of
urban settings in the Russian Empire, this work explores the situation on the
ground in four different locations: Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Odessa, and
Vilna (today, Vilnius). This sampling is as random as it is carefully assorted:
obviously, representing only a small fraction of all the empire’s urban centers,
these cities have much in common but also are very different.
Looking at a map, envision a giant trapezoid covering a good deal of the
European part of the Russian Empire. Its shortest side, less than 250 miles
long, connects Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod in the Middle Volga region. Both
cities belong to the historic heartland of Russia. Kazan had an ever-growing
Tatar (Muslim) community, while Nizhny Novgorod remained predomi-
nantly ethnically homogeneous Russian (Christian). Draw a straight line from
Nizhny Novgorod through Moscow and farther, for 750 miles, and it will
end in Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian Republic, once a provincial capi-
tal in the Russian Empire (there known as Vilna). Draw another straight line
from Kazan to Kharkiv in Ukraine and 1,000 miles farther will be the Black
Sea port city of Odessa. There are some 625 miles between Odessa and Vilna
(Vilnius), and much in common: both were large borderland centers with
multiethnic populations. Both were located in the Pale of Jewish settlement,
and had comparable Jewish communities constituting up to one-third of all
their inhabitants. Both became parts of the Russian Empire at the very end of
the eighteenth century. At the same time, Vilna was the center of an ancient
historic region claimed by competing Polish, Lithuanian, and, in a way, Jewish
national movements as their ancestral land, while Odessa was founded on the
order of a Russian empress as an imperial settlement virtually in the steppe,
in the recently colonized territory known as “New Russia” (Novorossiia).
In many respects, Odessa was perceived as an antipode of Vilna. There are
also many parallels and differences between Odessa and Kazan, or Vilna and
Nizhny Novgorod. In the following chapters they will be studied in pairs and
together, showing similarities and profound differences. We will thus discover

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 11

what was typical of various imperial cities, as well as the distinctiveness of

these four.
“Gerasims” crowding Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Odessa, and Vilna were
not all Russian in the ethnoconfessional sense. Although ethnicity is yet
another public discourse ascribing common qualities to the subalterns that
they might not experience as such, we will have to use it with some additional
qualifications and reservations in order to underline an important aspect of
diversity of the Russian plebeian society. The very awareness of the possibility
that this factor could influence the acts and gestures of our protagonists should
improve the quality of translation of their body talk. Indeed, would we inter-
pret the story narrated by Turgenev differently if Gerasim were a Tatar? What
about his being a Jew, or a Russian Old Believer? The category of ethnicity
mentioned in this book will be used here in this sense: as a potentially avail-
able maker of difference (along with several others) that can be used meaning-
fully in some cases while providing no added value in others. It is not a fixed
and universally applicable quality—even if, from our discursive perspective, all
the Gerasims in Moscow were ethnically Russian (and the women practicing
Sati were Hindu).
The predominantly lawless nature of the actions and choices of the infamous
as documented by the urban political or discursive authorities raises important
concerns about the validity of conclusions reached on their basis. What can
we learn from studying ethnically marked criminality besides the seeming law-
lessness of culturally diverse subalterns? These concerns are only partially dis-
missed by advancing the argument present in Foucault’s approach—namely,
that criminality (or what was perceived as criminal by certain social groups,
in certain epochs) offers a unique window on social practices as a particular
language of self-expression and self-representation unmediated by traditional
institutions and not concealed by dominant public discourses, including those
supported by present-day historians and custodians of national purity. Even
so, criminality, a deviant behavior by definition, seems to be at odds with the
very idea of the typicality of social practices (unless we assume that the lower
social strata are inherently criminal and immoral). To counter this idea, it is
necessary to point out that no other types of social actions can be regarded
as typical in the usual sense when it comes to subalternity, that is, when a
sampling of actors or actions is viewed as representative of an entire group.
As Spivak put it, “The subaltern has no ‘examples.’ The exemplary subaltern
is hegemonised, even if (and not necessarily) in bad faith.”38 In other words,
Gerasim’s drowning of Mumu or running away from the city is not typical of
any social group—but the very choices he made under certain circumstances

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 12 Introduction

might be similar to those made by others. Therefore, in this book, based

mostly on criminal records, the main focus will not be the lawless acts as such.
Our primary concerns are the ways that people responded to certain situa-
tions, rather than the situations themselves as communicating a certain pre-
existing “meaning.” It can be a fistfight, church attendance, labor culture, or
courting rituals—the question is not which of these activities were more “typi-
cal” of the subalterns as members of urban plebeian society, but what choices
they made when faced with such an opportunity. Did they reveal any patterns
of group solidarity, a coherent moral economy, or rational choice under the
circumstances?
Last but not least, the very structure of record keeping in the epoch and
society we are talking about made criminal behavior grossly overrepresented in
documents. The newspapers registered no other episodes of private lives with
similar breadth and intensity. The richest archival collections were formed by
the police and various courts, and all focused mostly on instances of breach-
ing the law. Nobody cared about documenting the everyday relationships of
merchants’ employees of different ethnoconfessional background until some-
body committed a crime. The ensuing police investigation registered, inter
alia, invaluable elements of regular social practices. This makes criminality
a good foundation for discussing much broader and more typical aspects of
people’s lives. It so happened that both the authorities and the public were
attracted mostly by conflicts; we can use this specific interest to our advantage
by preserving a broader focus and remembering that conflicts (and criminal-
ity) formed only a small fraction of the complex social interactions we are
about to explore.
Without succumbing to the relativization of the criminal, this study focuses
on the responses to a misdemeanor, rather than on its inherent intention.
A closer look at social conflicts identified as criminal can shed light on the
process of ascribing meaning to personal confrontations and making sense of
cultural and social differences. What becomes the exemplary (or typical) is
not the people and the situations they got into, but the social practices they
demonstrated in the process of engaging with each other and different situa-
tions. To reveal and review the variety of possible responses to a wide range of
situations and encounters, a very substantial survey of registered incidents is
required. We are speaking about thousands and thousands of cases reported by
the police, by newspapers, or described in the court records, which should be
analyzed qualitatively, rather than processed quantitatively as statistical aggre-
gations. The elaboration and historical contextualization of the model of social
practices as a specific language of the nondiscursive community is provided

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 13

in chapter 1, “Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond: Reading Social Practices

between the Lines.” Hundreds of nonexemplary Gerasims were speaking in
their own body language, but at some point of aggregation of individual cases
we will discover the regularities of their body talk, the persistence of a cer-
tain grammar and vocabulary there. At this point of generalization, individual
social gestures will be identified with more stable social practices as the subal-
terns’ peculiar language of self-expression and communication. A close reading
of newspaper criminal chronicles, police reports, and anonymous extortion
letters reveals the possibilities and limitations of these main historical sources,
and builds a case for a newer approach to writing a new imperial social history
as a history of social practices.
What if Gerasim were not the only nonspeaking and deaf stranger in a
city, surrounded by shrewd and talkative locals? If there were more people
like him in the house, on the street, in a tavern, at a local market? Suppose
some of them were migrants from the Caucasus, and others from the Polish
lands? How would they—nonverbal and deaf in the nonsymbolic sense—find
a common language with each other? This hypothetical situation was reality
for the unprivileged majority of urban inhabitants in Late Imperial Russia.
Ethnic Russians, Tatars, Jews, Armenians, and Poles (in an alternative tax-
onomy—Russian Orthodox Christians and Catholics, Muslims and Russian
Old Believers, Protestants and Animists) had to share cramped quarters,
cooperate in everyday encounters and on the job, and find some common
language (often quite literally). In terms of formal social status, they were
déclassé noblemen, impoverished “honorary citizens,” town commoners, and,
of course, peasants—but only those who had not made their way into the
upper echelons of successful entrepreneurs. Professionally, these people were
employed as shop assistants, waiters, cart drivers, housemaids, artisans, and
workers. Each of these categories indicates not an aspect of the typicality of
these people but, on the contrary, highlights additional dimensions of their
personal experience that made it incongruent with that of others. Newcomers
had to overcome their particularity and socialize into the world of urban plebe-
ian society, learning the wordless language of social practices as the local lingua
franca. This multidirectional process of making sense of each other is analyzed
in chapter 2, “The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground: Urban Plebeian
Society.” “Creative misunderstanding” (middle ground) was the name of the
game. Naturally fraught with the possibility of conflicts, it still succeeded in
bridging isolated individual experiences without relying on the mediation of
universal public discourses. This mechanism is identified in the book as one of
the common social practices of the subaltern (nondiscursive) society.

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 14 Introduction

But was it really a society? Amassed people do not necessarily produce a

society as a coherent community structured by common institutions, norms,
and rituals. For instance, despite his best intentions, Foucault did not seem
to believe that “the infamous” whose voices he wanted to recover from non-
existence composed a society of their own (“a society lent words . . . to the
anonymous mass of people”). In this book, which deals not with society or
authority in general, but with the imperial multidimensional and multilayered
social space, the neutral dualism of Foucault’s formula is viewed as a situa-
tion of acute confrontation. The institutionalized society and the authorities
actively combated any tendencies toward the integration of the lower classes.
Confessional congregations insisted on the purity of their ranks, the state
enforced residence laws and a rigid grid of social estates, and community tra-
ditions upheld a mistrust of strangers and xenophobic prejudices. How, under
these circumstances, did urban dwellers manage to intermingle (settling under
one roof, working, and even falling in love with people of a different faith
and blood)? And yet, this was the reality. Moreover, “the anonymous mass
of people” managed to perform as a coherent society, largely achieving this
without the help of public discourses of their own and against the resistance of
powerful discourses of segregation.
The question of the mechanisms that brought about this cohesion will
be addressed throughout the book, and most specifically in chapter 3,
“The Patriarchal Metropolis: Trespassing Social Barriers in Late Imperial
Vilna.” The main driving force behind the cohesion of plebeian society was
societal self-organization, one of the main themes of this book.39 Like any
force, however, self-organization can serve any purpose, both constructive
and destructive. Self-organization can produce solidarity, but conversely it
can also produce social rifts, for example, in the case of a pogrom against
Jews or a class conflict. To sustain the cohesion of the plebeian society in
the multicultural imperial city, self-organization should avoid the trap of
channeling into a mass mobilization along the lines of one of the mod-
ern ideologies, be it nationalism or party politics. Chapter 3 builds the
case for patriarchality as a main social practice (along with middle ground)
that was performed by the infamous in order to defuse the danger to
plebeian society of being pulled apart by modern mobilizing ideologies.
“Patriarchality” is used in the book as shorthand for “pretending to live by
the rules of an imagined archaic social order, so as to validate one’s feigned
ignorance about the conflicting potential of hegemonic discourses.” This
complex meaning can be discerned in plebeian patriarchality as a peculiar
component of the subalterns’ body language.40

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 15

Chapter 4, “‘We Only Kill Each Other’: The Anthropology of Deadly

Violence and Contested Intergroup Boundaries,” brings us to the most dis-
turbing mode of deviant social behavior: violence, including its most grue-
some forms of rape and murder. In previous chapters, even the most outright
criminal actions are analyzed as byproducts of self-organization processes or
imprints of more general social patterns. In chapter 4, crime is discussed as
a specific social phenomenon in its own right, which, as has been shown by
anthropologists of violence, can be senseless but is never “meaningless.”41
Once again, the fictional character, Gerasim, can be seen as a case in point.
In the context of the novella, his murder of the dog Mumu appears as the key
to understanding not just his personal motivation, but the entire complex of
social relationships around him. Could he not disobey the order of his mis-
tress? Did the murder become the turning point in his social behavior? How
to explain the circumstances of Mumu’s death? These questions go beyond the
sphere of moral judgment (which does not require scholarship to condemn
violence) and psychological reconstructions. Similar questions regarding a real
murder can shed new light on the historical society.
While paying special attention to ethnically marked violence, this book
avoids the notion of ethnic violence, following the sociology of violence and
nationalism studies.42 In plebeian society, violence as a social practice was mul-
tifaceted and played an important common role as a communicative medium
(together with social practices of middle ground and patriarchality). As such,
it was excessively expressive, spoken in the body language of injuries, rape, and
mutilations, but it was the only alternative to verbalized communication based
on borrowed discourses with built-in explanatory schemes. It was mostly an
extreme way of expressing one’s individual position, and as such is invaluable
for a study of social arrangements beyond the normative groupings into eth-
nicities, confessions, legal estates, or classes. The language of body politics that
occasionally culminated in murders tells the story of hatred and victimization,
but also betrays the logic of making choices and drawing invisible boundaries
between “us” and “them.” Self-organization negates old boundaries and erases
obsolete divides, but the resulting social arrangement is by no means struc-
tureless. Deadly violence helps us to see the emerging contours of a new social
order well before it has crystallized in new legislation or customs.
How do we synthesize the portrait of a plebeian society from hundreds of
individual cases and several regularities (the hypothesis of three main social
practices as a peculiar language of self-expression and communication of
discursively mute and deaf “Gerasims”)? Social history lacks a conventional
mode of describing the limbo zone of self-organization activity between the

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 16 Introduction

world of the old order and the coming updated regime that recognizes some
of the new social realities that have emerged. This zone can be conceptualized
as a sphere of “illegality,” to borrow the concept introduced but underdevel-
oped by Foucault.43 How an abstract sociological concept actually helps us to
understand the actual historical dynamics and seemingly odd rationality of
low-class urbanites will be discussed in chapter 5, “The Transformative Social
Experience of Illegality,” the final chapter.
Criminality constitutes one segment of illegality understood as a larger ter-
ritory of anomie or at least blurred social boundaries and ambiguous norms,
so typical of the late imperial urban society in flux. Many of the social inter-
actions and encounters studied in this book were classified as criminal at the
time, and many of them would still be qualified as criminal today. Instances
of interethnic and interconfessional contacts were often particularly associated
with breaching the law. There is some literature on criminality in Late Imperial
Russia, but only occasional mention of the factor of ethnicity,44 whereas
recently emerging studies of Jewish criminality in Europe focus completely on
public discourses, middle-class sensibilities, and imagination, and are all but
irrelevant for the discussion of plebeian social practices.45 Among the many
meanings of crime and scholarly approaches to it, particularly important for
the purposes of this study is a modern trend in the sociology of criminality
that seeks a positive theory of crime that is expected to explain criminal activ-
ity as a phenomenon in its own right and with multiple social functions.46
Without engaging the debate on the nature of criminality, the current study
focuses on criminal behavior as an indicator of general processes of societal
self-organization that by definition violated the norms and laws of their soci-
ety’s institutionalized organization. Self-organization—the other main compo-
nent of illegality—can lead to nasty results and should not be idealized, but it
is equally meaningless to condemn it: self-organization is nothing more (but
also nothing less) than the process of creating new social realities. As such, it is
beyond any moral judgment, although its results certainly are not.
Ivan Turgenev gives us a glimpse of the state of illegality in the final para-
graphs of Mumu. Gerasim enters the field of illegality after his unauthorized
return to the village: he had committed no criminal offense, yet his actions
were not legal either. A brief intermediate position between two stable condi-
tions (like that of a fugitive on the run, between the prison and an eventually
free life somewhere beyond the reach of the law) becomes a third normal form
of existence. The landlady at first ordered the return of Gerasim, but died soon
thereafter, and her heirs forgot about him. The village authorities were initially
surprised by his arrival (and probably considered denouncing on him), “but

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 The Subalterns Speak Out 17

the hay-cutting had just begun; Gerasim was a first-rate mower, and they put a
scythe into his hand on the spot” and closed their eyes to his murky legal sta-
tus in the village.47 Thus, illegality was established through de facto toleration
by the authorities for a variety of reasons (whether the inability to curtail it, or
rational calculations).
The “Epilogue” puts the story of the self-organized plebeian society in Late
Imperial Russia, which occupied a niche of illegality, into historical perspec-
tive. What does it mean for a modernizing country and society to rely on the
practices of plebeian self-organization?

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 Chapter One

Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond

Reading Social Practices between the Lines

Now here is an example of a mode of writing whose function is no lon-
ger only communication or expression, but the imposition of something
beyond language, which is both History and the stand we take in it.
—Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953)

A Late Imperial City as a Foreign Country

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” warned L. P.

Hartley back in 1953.1 This was a radical response to the philosophical musing
by Marcel Proust sometime around 1923: “The only true voyage . . . would be
not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.”2 In Hartley’s formula, tak-
ing a fresh look (with “other eyes”) at a seemingly familiar object or situation
means automatically turning them into artifacts of “strange lands.” This opera-
tion—which Viktor Shklovsky called “estrangement” (ostranenie) in 1917—is
required to differentiate our habits of thought from an object’s deeper mean-
ing.3 Making the object look strange, unfamiliar, or unpredictable is necessary
to study it as a phenomenon in its own right, endowed with a rationale of its
own. An act of epistemological emancipation is a necessary prerequisite for
free thinking about diversity, as well as for any further steps toward political
and social liberation.
Overshadowed for much of the twentieth century by the dominant histori-
cal narrative centered on the 1917 Revolution as the culmination of Russia’s
prior development, studies of the late imperial period became a booming field
only in the 1990s. Probably because of the need to legitimize this new interest
in the period and in topics not limited to the revolutionary movement, the
dominant mode of history writing on the Russian early twentieth century has

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 19

been one of “familiarization.” The most innovative studies were discovering a

bourgeois modernity, middle-class sensibilities, and mass culture in Russia very
similar to those familiar from European and American history. Recognizable
elements of “global modernity” helped to identify methodological approaches
to studying Russian realities and incorporating them into ready historical nar-
ratives, even if through a certain revisionism. At some point, familiarization
reveals its limitations—for example, in borrowing a rather limited repertoire
of models from European history, or building a normative model only from
“familiar” topics and methods. The wealth of knowledge about the Russian
Empire accumulated over the past quarter century ultimately makes it possible
to look at it as a most strange place, “to see the universe through the eyes of
another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them
sees, that each of them is.”4
This is not so much a matter of historical distance as a question of open-
mindedness and imagination. As early as the 1920s, addressing his contem-
poraries with firsthand experience of the late imperial city, the writer Isaac
Babel found it necessary to invite them to look at the subject of his Odessa
Tales—lower-class urbanites—with “other eyes”: “Well then, forget for a while
that you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your heart. Forget that you
pick fights from behind your desk and stutter when you are out in the world!
Imagine for a moment that you pick fights in town squares and stutter only
among papers.”5
This was an invitation to imagine the reality of a different class and cul-
tural experience. We too can imagine ourselves in a foreign country: in the
streets of a Russian city sometime after 1905, in Kazan or, for a more color-
ful setting, Odessa. Other people on the street would themselves most likely
be strangers to the city. The constant influx of newcomers from the country-
side or smaller towns, seeking a better lot and struggling to adjust their old
values and life scenarios to new realities, swelled the big cities. Between the
first imperial census of 1897 and the early 1910s, the population of Nizhny
Novgorod had increased by 24 percent (from 90,100 to 111,600); the popula-
tion of Kazan soared by almost 45 percent (from 130,000 to 188,000);6 the
population of Odessa exploded by 54 percent (from 404,000 to 620,000).7
There were also seasonal high tides of migration (e.g., during the summer fair
in Nizhny Novgorod, or in winter, when seasonally unemployed agricultural
laborers moved to big cities in search of jobs). This made town society par-
ticularly fluid and undisciplined: as early as 1897, temporary migrants and
visitors added an extra 8 percent to the regular population of Kazan, and we
have every reason to believe that in the early 1910s this figure was not lower

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 20 Chapter One

but higher.8 In 1897, only 35 percent of Kazan’s inhabitants had been born
in the city;9 given the low “natural” growth of the population, in the early
1910s, the share of “native” Kazanians should have dropped to no more than
20 percent. Thus, the overwhelming majority of inhabitants had moved to
Kazan from elsewhere, which usually meant from the villages. In Odessa, the
disproportion was even more dramatic. The proportion of immigrants in the
population of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1880s and early 1900s was
greater than in London, Berlin, Vienna, or Paris.10 In the course of just over
one decade, Russian imperial towns had to accommodate, socialize, and accul-
turate an enormous body of people who often did not even speak a common
language: every third person was a recent migrant, every second person had
moved to the town within the past few years.
On closer look, this seemingly homogeneous mass unfolds into a highly dif-
ferentiated social milieu with an established hierarchy spanning from beggars
on the one end to shop assistants and petty clerks on the other. Employment
and district of residence also constituted important markers of difference.
Ethnicity in the modern sense of the word mattered, but confessional differ-
ences and regional identities were no less important. Still, all this diversity not-
withstanding, there were fundamental commonalities of life experience that
united some 90 percent of the urban population, both recent migrants and
locals. It is this lived experience rather than any external formal criteria that
allows us to characterize the majority of urbanites as members of the “lower
classes” or “plebeian society.”
Being one of those people meant earning about 35–50 rubles a month.11
This effectively limited one’s choice of housing and diet as well as one’s social
and cultural experiences. We can imagine the difficulties of this life by getting
into the shoes of those people (and here we are talking only about the people
who wore shoes, leaving the not-so-innumerous group of beggars, vagabonds,
and other marginals beyond the scope of this study), for instance, in a mod-
estly expensive Nizhny Novgorod in 1912:

What should people getting 30–60 rubles a month—civil servants,12 shop

assistants—do? They are doomed to starvation. With 30–60 rubles one has
to pay for an apartment, clothes, and shoes, and this leaves you with some
20–35 rubles to live on for one month. Take an average family of five to six,
and a salary of 60 rubles. The apartment [costs] 10–15 rubles: the first rate
is for a room and a kitchen, the second is for two rooms with kitchen. . . .
Moving on. For a family of five to six, you need rye bread alone worth 30
kopecks a day, or 9 rubles a month, firewood for . . . 2 rubles, say, 8 rubles
a month for clothes and shoes, and here you have 26 rubles left out of 45

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 21

rubles. . . . You have to live on these miserable pennies for thirty days. Your
everyday meals for this money: potatoes and rye bread, rye bread and pota-
toes. . . . Meat no more often than ten times a month. Instead of hot soup,
the civil servant expects a samovar and rye bread, or wheat bread, at best.13

A low-income town commoner began the day early, with the sunrise: to
some, it was an old habit from their village past; to others, it was a require-
ment of their jobs to start early. In any case, the inefficiency and high cost of
lighting devices encouraged people to synchronize their activity with the sun.
A shower and jogging were not part of a typical urbanite’s regular morning a
century ago, not only because such practices had not become popular or even
available yet but also because there was, most likely, no running water in the
house, while running on unpaved streets full of stray dogs, bored and anxious
for entertainment, could hardly be fun. Those somewhat better off, who had a
separate room or even a small house, could have breakfast at home: a glass of
tea with bread.
The majority, however, had only a bed (at best, a corner in a room), so
they had to leave their homes the moment they got up. They would stop at
teahouses and pubs on their way to work to buy a glass of tea for 3 kopecks:
the majority of teahouses opened at four or five o’clock in the morning, and
those located close to markets as early as two-thirty. Chances are that those
arriving soon after the teahouses opened would sip unboiled water, as it would
take at least half an hour to boil the cube to brew the tea.14 Waiters serving the
customers could not be expected to come to their jobs early to prepare water
in advance after sixteen or even seventeen hours of work (teahouses closed at
nine o’clock at night), and very few owners would keep a special “cubist” in
charge of boiled water around the clock. Thus, the workday could start with
disappointment—and what a long workday it could be, particularly for those
employed in small enterprises or as household help! With legislation limit-
ing the workday to twelve to thirteen hours in the wake of the first Russian
revolution of 1905, and plans to raise it to fifteen hours in 1911–12,15 we are
talking about a practical average of twelve hours.
There was a large group of people in-between: they lived at the site of their
job as housemaids, apprentices, or shop assistants of petty merchants and shop
owners. They had their morning tea at home, but it was not their home. Their
privacy was even more restricted than that of the workers attending teahouses,
as they spent all day under the eyes of their employers and coworkers. They
slept in one room with other apprentices or shop assistants. Housemaids often
shared a room with their female employer, or slept in a corridor shared by sev-
eral tenants, literally in a public space.16 This is a very foreign experience for

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 22 Chapter One

modern-day people without any prior familiarity with the army or prison—
with no knowledge of how to live life almost completely deprived of privacy,
how to sustain a unique subjectivity in the absence of any physical possibility
of spending some time alone with oneself, even at night, even in the restroom.
“What to wear” was not a valid question in the morning: most of the peo-
ple had just one set of clothes, particularly when they constantly moved from
town to town, from one employer to another (most accounts do not even
mention a suitcase). Today, guests occasionally steal towels and bathrobes from
hotels, but in our everyday experience people do not consider the theft of their
bedding or underwear to be a real threat (and real trouble). A hundred years
ago, this was one of the most vulnerable categories of personal belongings,
quite scarce even in lower-middle-class families. People could recognize their
stolen pillowcases, sheets, and underwear in a booth selling secondhand linen
at the market, amid dozens of other such booths.17 Usually, people changed
their underwear once a week, after attending a bathhouse. As for dress, “it
depended.” Even in hot summer months, men wore woolen jackets. This was
a sign of at least some material status, a solution for chilly and windy weather,
but the main value of woolen jackets was their pockets, particular the inside
one. To many, this was the only place on earth where they could keep their
valuables: money and a pocket watch. They carried all their cash with them,
and even slept without taking their jacket off, or, if they did take it off, they
used it as a pillow.18
Women looked more colorful, alternating a combination of different pieces
of garments (skirts, shawls, and tops). They had a certain advantage over men
in being able to keep capital such as jewelry even more closely at hand (actu-
ally, on their person), but they had to rely on exposed purses in which to keep
cash. Moreover, their wealth converted into jewelry was also easily visible to
anyone interested in forcefully taking a share of it. People did not have eco-
nomic status (or social standing) as a real (if abstract) social phenomenon dif-
ferentiated from their actual appearance and presence: to have money meant
having cash in one’s pocket at this particular moment; to be considered a
decent woman, one had to be actually employed and dressed in clean and
fairly good-looking clothes: the same person in a dirty skirt or who was tem-
porally unemployed a week later would be categorized completely differently.
Russian common folk of the early twentieth century did not have a social
persona in any significant way distinct from their human bodies; they had
very little, if any, symbolic capital, and in general did not much value any-
thing abstract and invisible. Their economic well-being depended on their
physical shape; their private social sphere was only several inches wider than

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 23

their biological bodies; and many of their social interactions were mediated
by body language or direct bodily functions. A personal conflict had every
chance of being resolved through a brawl, not because these people were par-
ticularly prone to violence, but because their social interface was underde-
veloped. Similarly, their most widespread entertainment was a combination
of the simple carnal joys of eating, heavy drinking, and sex: not because of
their insatiable Rabelaisian temperament, but because they preferred to con-
sume those commodities that could be experienced immediately and in a most
unmediated way.
This structuralist and static snapshot outlines the basic social conditions
that influenced individuals and significantly restricted their usage of certain
social mechanisms of communication. But this does not imply that people
lived totally physiological lives: they just used different mechanisms to pro-
cess and communicate information. Today, we perceive social reality through
a universally recognizable “secondary modeling system,” as the Russian school
of semiotics called it (literally: “secondary signifying system”):19 we identify
not an object itself, but its familiar representation-cum-interpretation in a
symbolic language. The phenomenon of racial profiling (and racism in gen-
eral), for instance, is based on this system. Here, an image is inseparable from
its semantics. This explains the popularity of what is usually called “discur-
sive analysis” in scholarship: a search for elaborate intentions in the statements
occasionally left by historical actors (individuals or groups). In this respect,
we are fundamentally different from Russian (and certainly not only Russian)
common folk of the early twentieth century because they had very few univer-
sally recognized mediums to communicate meaning to strangers. Indeed, they
were people of a foreign country.
The vast majority of them did not have access to elite culture-producing
and -circulating discourses. Many of them went through primary schooling,
but it was not enough to articulate complex social ideas. Confession was the
only truly universal system of abstract ideas, but traditional (and very basic)
theology was equally unsuitable to frame the modern experience of urban
life. Besides, in Russian imperial cities, Christians had problems communi-
cating productively in the confession-dominated language with Muslims, and
Russian Orthodox—with Catholics (and even Old Believers). Moreover, impe-
rial Russia was a multiethnic and multicultural state, where many lacked a
common language—and even “ethnic” Russians who did not receive sufficient
education in the literary Russian language spoke a variety of local dialects,
often almost incomprehensible to each other. What they all had in common
as the universally recognizable basic element of the “primary modeling system”

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 24 Chapter One

was their body (both physical and social) and its functions. The emerging
“secondary modeling system” used as its medium not words, but semiotically
meaningful social practices.
In plain language, this means that people prioritized not the meaning of the
phenomenon, but its situational context. What mattered was who did certain
things, when and how—that is, actual social practice. The same phenomenon
meant different things under different circumstances. Thus, modern-day histo-
rians may see an instance of same-sex intercourse in the past as a manifestation
of someone’s homosexuality—and in having certain concepts of homosexual-
ity, we proceed to constructing particular social identities and reconstructing
the discourses of the parties involved. To actual observers of and participants
in a plebian society a hundred years ago, the picture would look very dif-
ferent. Homosexuality was too abstract and vague a notion (although some
were familiar with it, even specialists argued about what exactly constituted
homosexuality, and what did not).20 Generically, it was certainly a sin, but
so were many other actions that people routinely performed (starting with
cursing, smoking, or drinking alcohol). Moral condemnation suggested the
mode of attitudes, but not any distinctive meaning. While observers and par-
ticipants saw the bare fact, to make any sense of it, they needed to know the
actual circumstances: they would treat as almost unrelated phenomena inter-
course between drunken friends or between a sales assistant and his employer,
on the insistence of the latter; a common practice within male society (be it
an elite boarding school or a prison); a source of supplementary income for
bathhouse employees; or the dominant sexual routine of “perverts.” This is
how the nondiscursive common sphere of communicating meaning worked
in Russian plebeian society: people knew the “alphabet” (the fundamentals of
relations among humans and the rules of society), and on the basis of this “pri-
mary modeling system” they developed a symbolically meaningful “secondary
system” by partaking in acceptable and unacceptable (or partially acceptable)
social practices. Social practices were the universal language binding the urban
plebeian society together, substituting for virtually unavailable discourses.21
Nobody briefed a recent migrant about the rules of behavior in town: he or
she picked up this nonverbalized wisdom by literally rubbing shoulders with
more experienced peers, by getting punched for every mistake, and negotiat-
ing a new arrangement through close physical contact, including violence.22
The nonverbal and very bodily foundation of social practices eventually cre-
ated a developed metalanguage of self-expression and self-representation of
individuals and social groups (“the secondary modeling system”)—we just
need to learn how to read this language.

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 25

In the Language of Social Practices

How do we identify something as a universally recognized social practice,

and where do we look for the historical sources needed to describe and ana-
lyze it? All students of the lower classes of Late Imperial Russia have to rely
on the same pool of mass sources, regardless of their methodological prefer-
ences: basically, it is numerous newspapers and the richness of archival doc-
uments produced by the police, courts, and other controlling and juridical
institutions of the state. Everything else only complements this main body
of sources, including personal documents (such as diaries and letters)—a
particularly coveted bonus to any historian, most likely preserved in the
papers of the above-mentioned government agencies. Michel Foucault sug-
gested using similar sources pertaining to the old regime in France to recover
the authentic voices of “the infamous men”: “All those lives destined to pass
beneath any discourse and disappear without ever having been told were
able to leave traces—brief, incisive, often enigmatic—only at the point of
their instantaneous contact with power.”23 Confined in his work by the pub-
lic sphere constituted by hegemonic discourses, Foucault attempted to reg-
ister the lives and voices of those living “beneath any discourse” at the very
moment they came in contact with the authorities and their record keeping
as the source of any discursive reality: “How light power would be, and easy
to dismantle no doubt, if all it did was to observe, spy, detect, prohibit, and
punish; but it incites, provokes, produces. It is not simply eye and ear: it
makes people act and speak.”24
True to his methodology, Foucault fails the test of “defamiliarization,” envi-
sioning the “discourse-less” people as not truly different from the members of
the modern public sphere, and thus denying them any sovereign subjectivity.
If not speaking in the language of the hegemonic authority, these people must
be silent and deaf, like Gerasim in Turgenev’s novella Mumu. The utopian
quest for some authentic content recorded in the language of an authoritar-
ian discourse yet independent of this discourse is what Roland Barthes meant
when he spoke of “writing degree zero.” The seemingly abstract theoretical
problem that concerned French poststructuralists is related directly to the
work of the most empirically minded historians: how can one be sure that the
textual primary sources in any way realistically depict the lives of “infamous
men,” rather than the fantasies and projections of the record keepers on behalf
of power? Were those lives and deeds accurately documented or involuntarily
(or purposefully) edited by a more literate record keeper (a journalist or police
officer), who might have a very different agenda of his own?

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 26 Chapter One

Looking at the Russian imperial city as a foreign country, one cannot but
be amazed by how little the “secondary modeling system” of concepts and
words correlated with the reality they were supposed to reflect. This rupture
is particularly visible when it concerns the conceptualization of differences
that today we would call “ethnoconfessional.” People habitually employed
tropes (and even primitive discourses) of enthoconfessional hatred and eth-
nic slurs to frame their minute conflicts, but this verbal (“discursive”) sphere
did not make them more selective in their choice of employees, tenants, and
even sexual partners. A good illustration of the radical divorce of a discourse
from the actions it was supposed to frame is presented by the case of the
leader of Russian nationalists in Nizhny Novgorod, the Russian Orthodox
priest Orlovskii. Father Orlovskii will be discussed in more detail in the next
chapter, primarily in connection with his staging of fierce propaganda con-
demning the proliferation of Jewish commercial advertisements in Nizhny
Novgorod as a sign of Jewish control over the ancient Russian town. The
paper trail left by Father Orlovskii in the public sphere characterizes him as
a different person when compared to his profile as reconstructed from his
practical actions. For example, he himself placed two signs of Jewish-owned
enterprises on the building where he lived (which was also used as headquar-
ters by local nationalists): so much for fighting “Jewish” marketing.25 This
fact alone is insufficient to deconstruct Orlovskii’s true attitude to Jews, but
it clearly reveals his sober pragmatism (although in the logic of discourse-
centered analysis, the single fact of his anti-Semitic publications would have
been regarded as a sufficient reason for far-reaching generalizations). A simi-
lar gap between the public record of an interconfessional conflict and the
practice of transcultural sustained cooperation is revealed in a series of more
mundane conflicts discussed in the next chapter. For example, it was typical
that drunken brawls between a Russian and a Tatar would take place after
heavy drinking in a pub, where one of them had invited the other as a per-
sonal friend.
Realistically, a complex portrait of “infamous men” is possible only as a col-
lective portrait of the entire group or its most characteristic types, written on
the basis of agglomeration of numerous individual social gestures in structurally
similar situations. This kind of “writing degree zero” is fairly independent of
omnipresent hegemonic discourses, as it implies reading between the lines of
intertextual reality, making use of the “rubbish” ignored by scholars of words
and ideas. The study of social practices inevitably uses narrative sources, but the
question of their authenticity and adequate interpretation of events is largely
irrelevant here because what matters is not the words themselves, but their

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 27

connectedness with actual social practices. It is the socially contextualized prac-

tice that communicates a meaning, rather than an individual act or event.
The outlined approach would be easily recognizable to historians dealing
with societies dominated by “the silent majority” and “the people without his-
tory” (as preserved in a textual footprint of their own).26 Recently, Nathan
Perl-Rosenthal stopped short of announcing the arrival of a “practical turn”
in early modern history, noting how “younger scholars write about ‘mate-
rial practices,’ the ‘practice of politics,’ and ‘cultural practice.’”27 Explaining
that “practice offers a language well suited to discussing how meaning-mak-
ing occurred through ordinary, habitual behavior,” Perl-Rosenthal reminded
readers about the genealogy of practice-oriented historical studies from the
Annales school through microhistorians.28 This tradition may have common
roots in the epistemology of Ludwig Wittgenstein (elaborating on the prob-
lem of “rule-following”) and the sociological vision of Pierre Bourdieu.29 Yet,
there is no normative model of social practices, and no single authoritative
blueprint for writing a history of social practices.30 In this book, the notion of
social practice as a particular nonverbal language of self-expression and com-
munication implies a certain continuity and typicality of actions, or rather of a
particular mode of actions. Only an interconnected sequence of actions makes
a statement. An isolated act is like a single word taken out of a sentence: by
itself, it cannot communicate any idea.
Thus, as an isolated fact, a fight between a Russian and a Tatar who are
patrons in a Kazan pub can be interpreted as an indicator of tense intereth-
nic relations. However, when we learn that the two brawlers were old friends
and one of them had invited the other for a drink, we see the picture from
a different perspective. If we have a series of similar incidents characterizing
time spent in a pub, we might conclude that a fistfight was an integral part of
this social practice. Furthermore, and most important, this was typical of both
Christian Russians and Muslim Tatars. Still more important is the fact that
ethnicity did not serve as a structural social divide that prevented people from
choosing friends from another ethnoconfessional group. At the same time,
when conflicts occur, those friends would eagerly employ any available tropes
articulating and substantiating animosity, including ethnic hatred. Such con-
flicts (quite typical, as we will see in subsequent chapters) must be seen in their
dynamics, whereby lasting relationships between two people acquire proper
status as a fundamental factor. Even though we do not have any detailed nar-
rative of their friendship, their well-documented noisy quarrel will be properly
identified as only an episode in the long history of their relationship. We read
as a text not the “fact,” and not its rationalization in narrative documents,

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 28 Chapter One

but a sequence of events, viewed in a particular social and historical context.

As a distinctive social practice, even criminality can present one of the most
rewarding and informative “texts” a social historian can read, recovering non-
textual transcripts beyond “writing degree zero” of the official records that reg-
istered the real or alleged unlawful exploits of “infamous men.”

Through the Prism of Newspaper Reports and Police Records

Proceeding from the general model to actual field research, one has to admit
that there is no universally demarcated border separating an interpretation
from registration of facts (“nontextual transcripts”) in primary sources. The
problem of locating this border and compensating for possible manipulation
of the facts can be significantly alleviated by a number of practical consider-
ations discussed below.
The language of social practices is not completely immune to the influence
of the intermediaries keeping the records, both individuals and organizations.
Even ignoring discursive projections embedded in the very mode of present-
ing events, we cannot compensate for the possible selectivity of compilers
who were able to censor some facts or even ignore them altogether. This is
particularly true of newspapers that usually very explicitly demonstrated their
orientation (napravlenie, as it was called in Late Imperial Russia). Nationalist
newspapers quite consciously used criminal statistics to support their dis-
course of the inherent criminality of ethnoconfessional minorities. The influ-
ential Kazan Telegraph (Kazanskii telegraf) had a hidden anti-Tatar agenda that
was reflected in its eagerness to report any incident involving Tatars, especially
those indicted for brutal violence and capital crimes.31 Similarly, the major
nationalist newspaper in Odessa, Russian Speech (Russkaia rech’), prioritized
any accidents involving Jews as perpetrators and even as victims.32 On the
other hand, another Odessa periodical, a radical leftist paper, Express Evening
Post (Srochnaia vecherniaia pochta), explicitly tried to avoid any theme of
Jewish criminality whatsoever. When it had to publish information about a
Jew attacking a Christian, it would immediately cite several instances of anti-
Jewish violence.33
This possible one-sidedness and partisanship of periodicals can be offset
by studying a range of local newspapers representing the whole spectrum
of political views. It is particularly revealing to compare descriptions of the
same incidents published by rival papers.34 Moreover, even newspapers with
strong ideological preferences (to put it delicately), never unfailingly followed
the general line: much depended on the individual journalists presenting the

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 29

news.35 What is more important, every commercially viable newspaper had to

comply with readers’ demands for information and thrilling criminal chroni-
cles. In not reporting certain types of events, a newspaper contributed to the
success of its rivals. This is why even ultranationalist newspapers published
abundant information about Russian (or Christian) criminality. The only way
they could indulge their biases was to add additional degrading comments
every time a non-Russian perpetrator was exposed in the news. But as was dis-
cussed earlier, this discursive layer is almost irrelevant to reading social prac-
tices as metatexts.
Unlike the discrete sphere of periodicals, where ideological conformity
was more a desired and proclaimed ideal than the actual practice of selecting
materials for publications, police records promise a much more homogeneous
narrative. It seems reasonable to expect from the police the demonstration of
ideological conformity and coordinated adherence to their formal and infor-
mal internal instructions, and to find there an embodiment of the discursive
authority hypothesized by Foucault. Although the history of the criminal
police remains greatly understudied (compared to the political police36), the
available literature presents it as an efficient and well-coordinated force.37
Indeed, the Russian police were at the vanguard of the pan-European pro-
cess of rationalization of surveillance and control of the masses, with its early
introduction of photography (1881), anthropological measurements along the
Bertillon system (1901), and compulsory fingerprinting (1907).
At the same time, the papers that have survived (in varying degrees of leg-
ibility and completeness) from local criminal police units in Kazan, Nizhny
Novgorod, Odessa, and Vilna somewhat correct this unproblematic image.
These really compact task forces (sometimes a dozen men strong in a big
provincial city) for a long time acted within very vague legal boundaries.
Legislation lagged behind the development of the network of criminal police
units, and even internal instructions were of little help or practical relevance.38
This “vagueness” resulted not only in the diversity of regional police practices
but also in the mass-scale corruption of senior officers and ordinary agents.
A series of government inspections in 1911–13 resulted in the sacking of the
heads of many local criminal police units and their trials on charges of cor-
ruption. In June 1913, the former head of the Odessa criminal police, Prince
Kherkheulidze, was accused in the systematic racketeering of Odessa entre-
preneurs and accepting bribes to close (or not to open) investigations.39 In
Vilna, the head of criminal police was fired in 1908: Filip Grigoriev and his
aide, Alexander Aladin, were accused of bribery, extortion, and appropriation
of goods recovered from criminals.40 In Kazan, the morals of the force were

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 30 Chapter One

equally low: for instance, detective Alekseev burglarized a downtown apart-

ment, hid part of the stolen goods in the snow in a neighboring yard, and
attempted to sell the rest to a fence. He intended to profit both from selling
the stolen goods, and from getting a reward for “recovering” what was hidden
in the snow.41 In Nizhny Novgorod, the senior agent of the criminal police,
Mikhail Gershgorn, himself had four criminal convictions and continued his
shady operations in his capacity as police detective.42 When the government
decided to put an end to local abuses and to standardize the operations of the
eighty-nine local investigative units that had already been functioning for a
number of years, the move generated panic among the local criminal police.
As it turned out, even the most basic paperwork-related routine had not been
standardized throughout the country.43 Frustrated by the government’s incon-
sistent regulations, regional criminal police units established close contacts in
order to share their local experiences and elaborate a common position.
On March 5, 1911, the head of the Ekaterinoslav criminal police unit (in
Ukraine) circulated the following request to his colleagues in other parts of the
country: “I humbly ask Your Most Honorable Sir . . . to inform me in as short
a time as possible about what answer you have given to your local provin-
cial command . . . on how much the circulated ‘Instruction to the Officials of
Investigative Units’ corresponds to the needs of life, and whether it raises any
questions and misunderstandings in its local application.”44
Three days later, his Zhitomir colleague addressed fellow heads of the crim-
inal police with more practical questions: “For the sake of establishing the
uniformity of paperwork and registration of criminals with other investigative
units, I ask Your Most Honorable Sir . . . to inform [me] on the procedures
established in these matters in the investigative unit under your command, by
sending me the forms and registers introduced by your initiative, under the
local conditions.”45
One week later, the head of the Baku criminal police unit (in today’s
Azerbaijan) wrote to his colleague in Nizhny Novgorod:

May I ask you to be so kind as to inform me for the purpose of improving

the paperwork, whether Your Most Honorable Sir keeps, besides a general-
purpose [journal], a special secret desk journal mentioned in the Instruction
to the Officials of Investigative Units, whether you find it practical and easy-
to-use, and whether the office of the unit maintains a special investigative
card index in accordance with the instruction of 1886, and the registers: one
for the purchase of firearms confiscated from the population, and another
for material evidence.46

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 31

Thus, the performance of the criminal police was characterized by the same
dynamics of self-organization as the urban society it was supposed to police.
As late as 1911, police officers in different imperial towns not only did not
share any standardized paperwork routine, but did not even have any norma-
tive idea about the organization of their activities.47
The role of the unrestrained human factor and the lack of proper bureau-
cratic procedures in local criminal police units resulted in the absence of
any uniform discourse, as reflected in accounts of individual cases and
cumulative weekly or monthly police reports. Contrary to what one might
expect according to theories of hegemonic discursive authority—i.e., a coor-
dinated police mentality in Late Imperial Russia—the texts written by the
local police produce an impression of the priority given to local knowledge
over universal discourses. Like low-status representatives of local societies,
police officers relied more on their intimate knowledge of the situation on
the ground, which could sometimes bring them into potential conflict with
their superiors in St. Petersburg.
This cognitive conflict can be illustrated using the example of the Odessa
secret service unit (Okhranka), which was more self-confident than the frus-
trated criminal police and therefore more determined to hint at its special
expertise in communications with St. Petersburg. On June 27, 1906, the
head of the Odessa secret service received an inquiry from the Department of
Police, communicated through the office of the governor:

The Department of Police has received information that the Jewish pop-
ulation of Odessa has organized self-defense, its numbers allegedly have
increased five- to sixfold since October 1905 [the time of the horrific
pogrom against Jews], and this self-defense allegedly has 350 bombs and
6,000 revolvers at its disposal. Thus, in case of a pogrom the entire Jewish
population will come armed with Brownings, while the Russian population
will find itself defenseless due to difficulties in purchasing firearms under
the state of martial law. . . .
I ask Your Most Honorable Sir to tell me what information you have
regarding the quantity of bombs, and the numbers and arms of the Jewish
self-defense.48

This genuine concern of St. Petersburg officials about the defenseless

pogrom-makers provoked a most sober and restrained response. In business
style, laconically but providing all the relevant details, the Odessa secret ser-
vice described the known self-defense units existing in town, emphasizing the
relative scarcity of firearms available to them—with no speculations, moral

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 32 Chapter One

judgments, or discursive projections of the kind demonstrated by the St.

Petersburg message: just a technical analysis of the situation.
But the ghost of the Jewish uprising still haunted the Department of
Police, so one month later, it sent an even more fantastic inquiry to Odessa:
“The Department of Police has received information that in Odessa, a new
group of so-called Chaimists has emerged, composed of the followers of a
certain Chaim, who propagandizes exclusively among the workers. . . . The
Department of Police asks Your Most Honorable Sir to find out about the
structure and goals of this group and about the identity of Chaim, and report
on your findings.”49
Contrary to the usual practice, in which a response to the inquiry by
the Department of Police was given after a special formal investigation and
internal correspondence (sometimes quite extensive), this time the Odessa
police undertook none of the measures required by their commanders in St.
Petersburg. The head of the secret service took an appropriate pause of about
a week, without even formally contacting any of his agents or peers in the
regular police, and then sent a response to the Department of Police: “I hereby
report to Your Most Honorable Sir that the [Odessa secret service] unit does
not have information about the existence of a new labor group of so-called
Chaimists, and likewise of its leader Chaim.”50
In essence, the objectively anti-Semitic request from St. Petersburg was
ignored by the Odessa police because of its absurdity: obviously, the knowl-
edge of the chief commanders in the Department of Police about Jewish poli-
tics did not go beyond two or three names from Jewish jokes and tabloids
speculating about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The local police were dif-
ferent just because they had actually met real Jewish activists and dealt with
real Jewish revolutionary and criminal groups. Neither these examples nor the
everyday practice of the Odessa secret service and the criminal police reveals
any philo-Semitism or political correctness in the treatment of ethnoconfes-
sional minorities. The available documents reveal nothing more (but also
nothing less) than the reluctance of the regional police to partake in the broad
public discourses (e.g., anti-Semitic), and their clear preference for local,
empirical, and positive knowledge.
Police records in different imperial towns all reveal this prevalence of local
knowledge over any general discourses, but this localism notwithstanding,
they had one thing in common: as a rule, they were free of value judgments.
People who faced deviant social behavior every day did not display their own
emotions in describing crimes. In the hundreds of police reports analyzed for
this study, I never detected any hidden connotations of value judgment, not

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 33

even in syntax or grammar.51 Given the underregulated state of criminal police

activity, this amazing neutrality should be attributed not to their hypothetical
self-discipline and principles, but to the fatigue of detectives who had seen
it all and rather than contemplating the essence of the crime, thought only
about how to find the perpetrators. This also explains why we never find either
explicit or masked xenophobic tropes in police reports on the ground: some
of the detectives might be anti-Semites or might hate Tatars, but these feelings
were irrelevant to their work. They faced crimes every day, and there would be
little relief in interpreting criminality as a result of the antisocial behavior of
some ethnoconfessional group. To succeed professionally, police detectives had
to act rationally—hence, the whole complex of irrational (emotional, psycho-
logical, ideological) feelings very rarely affected their documentation of inci-
dents. At the same time, as we saw, their local knowledge sometimes directly
contradicted the ideas of their direct superiors. Thus, even though they are not
the master key to all historical problems, police records can safely be used in
the same way as any other mass written sources: there was no secret univer-
sal conspiracy behind compiling them. As with other documents, the use of
police records should always be contextual and comparative, and it is impor-
tant to remember that they were prepared by actual people with different life
experiences and personal agendas, and not by some anonymous and omnipo-
tent state institution with a single, independent subjectivity of its own.

When Society Writes Back

Police reports, court records, and newspaper chronicles are familiar and readily
available primary sources. Because of their serial character, merely broaden-
ing the pool of sources and multiplying their number can help in discerning
the invisible border between their communication of bits and pieces of social
practices and their promotion of biased interpretations. Furthermore, the
traditions of positivist “historical source studies” (istochnikovedenie) and the
deconstruction of discourses by poststructuralist writers have led to the devel-
opment of techniques for critical reading of the texts produced by officials or
at least within the official textual culture. At the same time, there is a category
of historical sources that differs in every aspect from those well-established
types, and that cannot be ignored because of its centrality to the discussion
of relationships between plebeian society and the textual world. This category
is composed of anonymous letters and denunciations (donosy) composed by
urban plebeians on their own initiative, and in pursuit of their own interests,
whether individual or group.

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 34 Chapter One

Anonymous letters are much more difficult to locate in archives, but dozens
of them have been recovered for this study, and possibly hundreds more are
preserved in various sites. Individuals across the country systematically wrote
anonymous letters informing the authorities or an interested third party about
the details of perpetrated wrongdoing, or threatening to commit certain crim-
inal actions in the future. The very anonymity of denunciations and extortion
letters makes it tempting to see in them a reflection of some autochthonous
public discourses of the lower classes. Indeed, society itself is anonymous,
whereas public discourse in the proper sense is universally shared and sup-
ported, and hence cannot be attributed to any individual author. Written by
“infamous men” without any intermediation by a person of authority or even
of advanced education, these letters have the potential to offer glimpses of
attitudes and aspirations that are otherwise very rarely put down on paper by
members of plebeian society. Moreover, finding an authentic plebeian public
discourse would amount to falsifying the whole concept of subalternity, as
if Turgenev’s Gerasim were caught singing an aria while rowing away from
Moscow in a boat with Mumu.
A case of such significance cannot be resolved merely by references to any
general theoretical models and precedents, whether these are English pam-
phlets of the eighteenth century (as studied by E. P. Thompson) or Soviet-era
donosy. We have to look more closely at the actual documents of the period
(1905–17) in some detail to minimize the risk of reading into them meaning
that is not there.
A close reading of actual anonymous letters reveals certain regularities in
such texts, at least in the sense of upholding certain rhetorical canons. They
have a certain style, or rather, styles.52 What is interesting is that those styles
differ from city to city and from genre to genre. This first preliminary obser-
vation has perhaps two explanations, pointing toward opposite conclusions:
either the textual sphere represented by these letters was so elaborate that it
was differentiated into stable forms, or there was no coherent sphere at all.
The most renowned series of anonymous letters was produced in Odessa.
Many scholars see a connection between these letters and the brilliant “expres-
sionist realism” of Isaac Babel’s fiction, which some tend to perceive as a por-
trayal of actual practices of racketeering:

A typical raid in Odessa would begin with a letter of extortion received by

the owner of a business. In this letter the extortionist would demand that the
owner amass a prescribed sum of money and deliver it to a designated place.
Such letters invariably contained some of the same clichés found in busi-
ness letters. But, because of the intent of these letters, the correspondence

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 35

ultimately produces a pure parody of business correspondence. . . . Thus,

“the raid” serves as the narrative plot even before entering Babel’s text. . . .
The narrative structure of the raid follows a set of rules, conventions, and an
honor code.53

The powerful literary “Odessa myth,” with its elaborate built-in explana-
tory schemes, has habitually encouraged historians to treat narratives as the
main source of the history of Odessa society,54 but in this case we find some-
thing more: a claim that narratives in fact shaped the actual social practices.
The actual letters of extortion that have survived in archives and are often
accompanied by police investigations of the circumstances of their appearance
do not support this narrative-centered theory.
To begin with, there were two waves of proliferation of anonymous letters
in Odessa: one wave formed sometime in the second half of 1906 and virtu-
ally came to an end by 1910, and the second arose in early 1915. Incidentally,
these cycles correlate with the declaration of martial law in the city. In the
wake of the bloody October events, martial law was announced on December
15, 1905, and lasted until December 4, 1908.55 Then, Odessa was again
placed under martial law on July 17, 1914, with the outbreak of the Great
War.56 The surge of symbolic violence (threatening letters) during the period
of tight control over the outbursts of physical violence can be viewed as an
indication of the disconnectedness of narratives from practices. This phenom-
enon of epistolary terrorism developed through several stages.
About half a year after the imposition of martial law in 1905, extortion let-
ters began burgeoning in police records and news chronicles, all written on
behalf of extreme revolutionary groups: no one would use the written word for
banal racketeering in the way described by Babel. Rather, these anonymous let-
ters continued the textual tradition of Underground Russia.57 Before this time,
armed people would simply come to the business owner with their demands;
now, they tried to avoid direct physical confrontation until the end. For exam-
ple, on August 1, 1906, at lunchtime, two strangers came to a downtown hat
shop owned by Nison Vekselshtein, and asked for the owner. He was not in
the shop, so they left a letter for him, demanding a contribution of 25 rubles
“for the unemployed.” In the evening, one of them stopped by the shop to col-
lect the money, but was arrested. He identified himself as Boris Chokler and
was reprimanded “for unauthorized fundraising.” Apparently, the police did not
expect the symbolic violence to escalate into physical violence. However, three
days later when someone threw a bomb into the shop through the open door,
Chokler was arrested as a member of an anarchist terrorist group. Even though
no one was hurt in the attack, he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor.58

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 36 Chapter One

Similar dynamics are revealed in a more tragic incident that occurred eight
months later. The owner of a shoe store, Moisei Volsky, received a letter in the
mail signed by the Southern Russian Group of Anarcho-Communists, Black
Banner, ordering him to open a shoemaker’s workshop for twelve cobblers in
three days, or else face “death and destruction.” He disregarded the mail, and
the next time, the letter was delivered in person. Volsky did not comply, and
several days later, on April 9, 1907, an unknown man came into the shop. He
showed interest in a pair of shoes that cost 5 rubles, but instead of producing
the money, he drew a gun and shot at the owner. He missed, but when Volsky’s
wife attempted to grab him, the attacker gravely wounded her and escaped.59
Clearly, the attack was retaliation for ignoring the blackmail, and the goal of
the letters was to avoid physical violence. This time, cash or other material
goods were completely out of the picture (the whole episode was probably
because of a labor conflict in the local shoemaker business).60
On June 4, 1908, a member of the Odessa City Council, Nikolai
Mikhailov, received an anonymous letter in the mail, full of threats. The
letter, signed by a Committee of Laborers, attacked Mikhailov’s opposition
to shorter business hours for trade outlets as “incongruent with the interests
of shop assistants.”61 (Mikhailov believed that shorter hours would lead to
unemployment, but the authors of the letter wanted a shorter workday at
any cost.) This was clearly a politically motivated letter, and luckily, it was
not followed by a physical assault.
In December 1908, the regime of martial law was lifted, and the anony-
mous extortion letters became much more rare. However, they did not dis-
appear completely, but radically changed their genre. Still trying to conform
to the archetypal rhetoric of revolutionary leaflets and belles lettres (and not
of business correspondence, as suggested by Babel’s fictional epistles), they
became radically dissociated with politics in practice.
We can see an early sign of this transformation in the following episode.
On March 14, 1908, a group of active anarchist-syndicalists kidnapped the
teenage son of a wealthy entrepreneur, Boris Magner. Next day, they sent a
letter of extortion demanding a ransom of 10,000 rubles. After negotiations,
the sum was reduced tenfold, and on March 16, the boy was released for
1,000 rubles (the annual salary of a high school teacher).62 All the perpetra-
tors had records of active revolutionary activity, and they signed their letter
the “Flying Detachment of the International Federation” (some of its mem-
bers were German nationals). They demanded money for the revolution, but
it was known that a significant part of the proceeds from expropriations of this
anarchist group was invested in the Modern coffeeshop on Torgovaia Street,

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 37

operated by the mother of three of the group members.63 In this case, politics
was a cover and a vehicle for entrepreneurial activity.
One year later, the merchant Bentsion Lovchinsky received an extortion
letter demanding 1,000 rubles. On March 1, 1909, he went to meet the rack-
eteer accompanied by police detectives, who promptly arrested the perpetra-
tor. The latter turned out to be Lovchinsky’s former employee, Mikhail Telal.64
The new epoch of anonymous letters began: now they were written by ama-
teur or professional swindlers, who did not even consider any physical action
should their correspondence be disregarded—neither a raid nor a terrorist
attack. Extortion letters of the revolutionary era used the established literary
form dissociated from any personal content (as in the form of any revolution-
ary declaration) but occasionally were supported by individual physical vio-
lence. Did the letters of the new epoch, unaccompanied by practical actions,
express more individual subjectivity?
Three weeks later, another Odessa entrepreneur received an extortion let-
ter signed by the “Southern Russian Group of Anarchists-Beznachaltsy.”65
The blackmailers assessed his solvency as capable of providing them with 500
rubles in cash. Police arrested two young men who came for the booty—they
were seventeen and twenty-three years of age, recent migrants to Odessa, hav-
ing no actual relation to politics and extremist groups. They explained that
they had written the letter of extortion “out of indigence.”66 The story was
repeated on September 8 (“anarchists” demanded 300 rubles) and October 3,
1909 (75 rubles): young people without any political or criminal record were
attempting to make easy money.67 It seems that the extortionists adequately
assessed the seriousness of their intentions and adjusted their appetites accord-
ingly, lowering the sum of ransom to the level of a lower-middle-class monthly
income. At the same time, their actual personae, interests, and intentions were
not even remotely represented in the notes they penned.
In 1910, anonymous letters of extortion further degenerated into almost
a practical joke. In January, two schoolboys, Osip Grinberg (fifteen) and
Shulim Shatailo (fourteen) came to the upscale fur store of Bushulianov
on fancy Deribasovskaia Street and produced a fake money order for 75
rubles.68 They were arrested but soon released. A month later, the man-
ager of that store received an extortion letter signed by the group “Young
Will.” The letter featured the slogans “Down with Tolmachev the governor
and death!” “Down with Zarubaev!” (the commander of the military dis-
trict), and under the threat of death demanded 100 rubles. It did not take
the police long to discover that the letter was written by Shulim Shatailo,
who confessed and was arrested.69 Two weeks later, Bushulianov’s fur

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 38 Chapter One

store appeared in the criminal chronicle for the third time. A well-dressed
young man came to the shop’s manager and left a letter demanding 75
rubles under the threat of death at the hands of “anarcho-communists.”
When he returned for the money, he was arrested and identified as Fedor
Florkin, seventeen years old, a recent migrant from Kherson. He confessed
that having no means for making a living, he had decided to do “this.”70
Doubtless, the young Florkin was acting under the influence of newspaper
reports that provided him with a ready scenario and even target of extor-
tion. Thus, we see how anonymous letters of extortion, once they emerged
at the intersection of the tradition of revolutionary poetics (leaflets and
belles letters) and politically motivated radical practice, gradually became
transformed into a media event par excellence. As before, the anonymous
narrative substituted for any practical action, but while initially the sym-
bolic violence of letters was validated by the reputation of anarchist mili-
tants so prone to violence in the wake of the revolution of 1905–7, now
the letters’ threatening power completely depended on the mass culture
formed by the media and pulp fiction. The symbolic violence of narrative
became a product of the equally symbolic sphere of popular imagination
framed by the press, a purely rhetorical device with a logic and language of
its own. We see how newspapers could encourage people like Florkin “to
do this”—but note his inability to characterize his own actions. It is still
unclear how writing an extortion letter expressed Florkin’s individuality,
besides making a choice because of his dire financial situation in favor of
“peaceful” blackmailing rather than robbery or theft.
This new, purely symbolic quality of the anonymous letters is vividly
revealed in the second big wave of blackmail correspondence in Odessa. The
letters written after the imposition of martial law in 1914 already demonstrate
the tropes and language so skillfully reconstructed by Isaac Babel. Their elabo-
rate “Odessa language,” however, is as representative of the actual habits of
speech in multicultural Odessa as it is derivative of the literary canon estab-
lished by the writers of tabloids and news reporters in the early 1910s.
In sharp contrast to police reports in 1914, which hardly ever mentioned
an anonymous letter of extortion, the regular police accounts of incidents in
1915 registered anonymous letters on almost a weekly basis. The first one in a
series was received by a man named Nikolai Rastorguev on January 15, 1915,
three days after a gangster, Grigorii Grigorash, was sentenced to three and a
half years in prison for a raid on the apartment of Rastorguev in January 1914:
“Baron of millionaires! We’ve been waiting for the friend of freedom. But alas,
now there is only shameful death for you. Wait!”71

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 39

The raid took place six months before the imposition of martial law in
the summer of 1914; now, half a year after the tightened security measures,
the anonymous letter became the sole outlet for Grigorash’s friends’ anger—
apparently, the only authentic content of the note. It is highly unlikely that
among themselves the authors called Rastorguev, the resident of a downtown
apartment, “baron of millionaires.”
On the same day, a teenage courier delivered a letter to Ruvin Birger.
Written on behalf of a group of “anarcho-communists” in good literary lan-
guage, it contained a modest request for just 25 rubles to be delivered by
eight o’clock in the evening on a certain date, and threats to Birger’s two sons
(apparently of high school age). Quite possibly, the letter was written by their
teenage adversaries at school or in the neighborhood.72 And it was also on
January 15, 1915, that Boruch Aronberg brought a letter dated January 13 to
the police:

Mr. Boris Aronberg, what for didn’t you put the money under the staircase
next to the bench, you better put [the money] or else you’ll catch it, if you
want to put then put on January 15, I have written one letter to you so that
you put 100 rub., or else we will kill and rob you. With respect, the aide to
the black gang of Zelim-Khan-Shura [followed by a picture of two sets of
skulls and bones].73

What possible “inner self ” was communicated in this text? Most likely,
the author of the letter was influenced by the widely publicized story of the
famous Chechen abrek (outlaw), Zelimkhan Gushmuzukaev from Khorochoi,
who terrorized wealthy inhabitants of Chechnya and Dagestan in the North
Caucasus from 1901 to 1913, when he was killed by the authorities.74 This
explicates the author as a reader of newspapers or comic book-like popular
brochures, who sees 100 rubles (a schoolteacher’s monthly salary or three
months’ wages for a low-level sales assistant) as a sum that is worth the trouble
to attempt extorting.
On January 23, Evdokiia Grinko, the wife of a ship captain, brought to the
police a well-written laconic note, penned in a style reminiscent of a psycho
stalker, rather than a follower of Robin Hood as in the previous letters: “You
are in danger of death, bring the money, 500 rubles, I will be waiting for you
January 24 at noon, then I will leave you in peace, I will be on the corner of B.
Arnautskaia and Kanatnaia [streets], I am constantly following you.”75 Next,
on February 14, Dmitrii Bolshakov complained about receiving an anony-
mous letter sent from Kiev, instructing him to give the same considerable sum
of 500 rubles to someone at his home address:

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 40 Chapter One

Dear Dmitrii Efimovich,

I kindly ask you, if you want to escape the death that is currently await-
ing you, that the only way you can avoid it is if you deposit five 500 rub.
to the place indicated below, should you not comply, you will be killed on
your way to the job or from the job. . . so cho[o]se one of the two what you
like more[—]the timing . . . if you do not bring by March 1 the abovemen-
tioned sum before Easter [March 22, 1915], you’ll be killed like a dog. Pres-
ent the money at Koblevskaia 26–2, to Philip Maliarchyk.76

Now, this is one of the first attempts at writing in the style of business
correspondence, and one that ultimately failed because the author did not
manage to properly coordinate a couple of formal clichés grammatically or to
handle the spelling of the desired sum (500 rubles).
The merchant Chaim Pekelis, owner of a fur store on fancy Rishelevskaia
Street, received an extortion letter in April: “Mr. Pekelis, we ask you to pay
immediately a ransom of 100 rub., or death, put the money next to the the-
ater Apollo. We do not request much, the Nikterterter gang on Sunday April
26 at 8 p.m.”77 It is unclear what the author meant by asking Pekelis to “put
the money” next to a movie theater on a busy street. The choice of the site
and the businesslike tone of the note suggest the influence of American pop
culture, including Nat Pinkerton crime stories—or, rather, of another dime
novel protagonist, Nick Carter.78 The strange name of the gang (Nikterterter)
sounds like a pun on the name of Nick Carter himself. But it might also have
been the influence of an overheard Tatar-language speaker (nikter: for some
reason; tır-tır—as in tır-tır itərgə, to prattle).
Several days later, on April 27, another merchant, Alexander Kuznetsov,
presented a letter that documented its literary pedigree with absolute clarity:
“Aleksasha, darling. Give 2,000 rub. to the war needs and this should be pub-
licized in the Odessa Post, otherwise you will be killed within 3 days, do not
seek assistance of the police. The successor to Arsène Lupin.”79 Arsène Lupin
was the charming criminal protagonist of detective stories written by Maurice
Leblanc (1864–1941), who began his career as a reporter for Le Figaro.
Although the first story about Lupin was published only in 1905, he soon
became very popular in Russia—and even acquired followers and “successors,”
as one can see. The amount of extortion was unrealistic, the instructions very
unusual, and the whole case looked like a practical joke pulled by someone
who was able to think in abstract categories such as “war needs” and to read
the scandal-mongering Odessa Post on a regular basis, paying a substantial sub-
scription fee of 4 rubles.

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 Figure 1.1. Photocopy of an anonymous extortion letter received in Odessa, May
14, 1915. Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv, F. 385, op. 2, spr.
173, ark. 20e. Reproduced by permission of the archive.

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 42 Chapter One

On May 14, Evdokiia Grinko received a second letter from racketeers dem-
onstrating that for some, it was not a onetime affair: “We have quieted down,
now we begin to act, at the forefront are Grinko, Parienko, and Lozinskaia,
the gang “Black Hand” requested 700 rubles from you.”80
Then, on May 20, another letter signed by “Black Hand” (but in very dif-
ferent handwriting) requested the unheard of sum of 15,000 rubles from
Anatolii Ptashnikov, the owner of a dry goods store, so the head of the crimi-
nal police unit found it necessary to report the incident to the Odessa chief of
police. The Black Hand demanded in rather rugged Russian:

Dear Sir, Mr. Ptashnikov!

This is an honor to inform you at this time with the gang of Black Hand
that you should deliver “15 thousand rubles” more clearly “fifteen thou-
sand.” Please deliver the money to the post office to be called for by letters
B[lack] H[and]. In case you will apply the runaround [sic] or report to the
investigative unit, [we] “swear” to wipe you off the face of the earth. Exclude
one of the two. We are waiting till May 24th. You are being persecuted at
our hands.
With respect, Hersht of “Black Hand”81

Apparently, the Black Hand’s leader had some idea about writing business
letters (or, rather, filling out some basic financial documents such as money
orders), but the influence of the tabloid press clearly prevailed. The title chosen
by the author is telling: Hersher means “ruler,” “leader” in Yiddish. Perhaps,
some stratum of Odessa argot in these years used a modified Yiddish word
as a synonym of “boss” (the latter English word also reportedly originates in
Yiddish, meaning “owner of the house”).
In early June, Karl Topalov, an accountant employed by city hall, received
a series of even more fictitious letters of extortion signed by the “Bandit
Brothers” (a quote from the romantic verse by Alexander Pushkin, “The
Bandit Brothers,” written in 1821–22). It is likely, though, that the author
picked up this phrase as a cliché from a public discourse, rather than from
reading Pushkin, judging by the illiterate threats in illegible handwriting (and
without any punctuation marks):

Death or life, Karl Khristoforovich Topalov! On June 12 at night we should

finish you off, you will be killed or [sic] we will enter through the courtyard
[when?] the dogs will be poisoned, or we will break the window [and] get
inside and finish you off, but to prevent murder prepare 500 rubles, we will

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 43

Figure 1.2. Photocopy of an anonymous extortion letter received in Odessa, May

20, 1915. Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv, F. 385, op. 2, spr.
173, ark. 20b. Reproduced by permission of the archive.

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 44 Chapter One

take them from you for now, and will finish with this matter for a while, do
not think that you [can] report to the police, we are not afraid of this, and
hard labor does not scare us. . . . From us, bandit brothers.82

This and subsequent letters to Topalov are striking for their utterly real-
istic planning of an attack that never happened. Extortionists mention dogs
and the condition of window frames, or the name of the night guard, whom
Topalov allegedly approached for protection. The letter sounded as if it were a
practical plan, but it was never realized in practice.
Perhaps the most illiterate of all the extortion letters reviewed so far was
received in July 1915. It displayed such a low level of the author’s socializa-
tion into textual reality that it is difficult to comment on its poetics: whether
it attempted to emulate business correspondence or just spoke in the language
of fairy tales. Besides its miserable grammar and language, it was addressed to
a cashier in a drugstore, much to the surprise of the owner, who gave the let-
ter to the police: apparently, the author believed that the person handling the
cash was the richest one. On the other hand, the author did not ask for too
much (although it is unclear exactly how much): “Dear Madam, Ms. Cashier,
upon the order of my letter to fulfill my plea to give myself twenty five rubles
of money 26 rub. . . . I think it is better to give 25 rub. than to sell one’s life.”
The letter ended with an excessively curly signature that probably read “N. N.
Vorovskii” (i.e., Mr. N. N. Thiefman).83 Thus, the author did not pretend to
be speaking on behalf of terrorists or gangsters; it was just a personal mes-
sage from a private individual (although with a telling pseudonym). Equally
personal was the next letter, which was registered by the police in September,
but this one was written with a distinctive Odessa accent and in the friendly
tone of good neighbors, reminiscent of the notes penned by Isaac Babel’s jolly
gangsters: “Hello Madam Bomsa Hannah, we ask from you to bring us 300
rub. on September 8, at 2 in the morning. . . . We’ll be waiting [for you], in
case of refusal a bomb will be thrown into your apartment, until we get that
what we request, your house will be blown up by bombs.”84
The stream of letters continued in 1916,85 but all of them belong to one
of the main types already seen in 1915. Their authors posed as either modern
expropriators (the gang Black Mask)86 or folklore robbers (razboiniki),87 or just
individuals extorting money completely anonymously. Unlike extortionists of
the first wave, they rarely pretended to pursue any political goals and never
had any actual relation to politics. Writing anonymous letters was divorced
from practical actions (except for collecting money), and in fact substituted for
any actions. A realistic description of an intended raid or conscious attempts
at reproducing a recognizable writing style as realistically as possible (first the

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 45

style of revolutionary leaflets, later of business correspondence) underlined the

break between writing and practice. A close reading of Odessa extortion letters
reveals no coherent discursive space, no common language for communicating
meaning and interests, and no single rationale for writing. In other words, it
would be misleading to assume on the basis of these letters that some of their
authors perceived themselves as noble robbers, some as political rebels, and
some as sleek gangsters. Behind the common form of anonymous letters of
extortion, we find a variety of life circumstances and intentions that had just
one thing in common: using scraps of familiar discourses, anonymous authors
tried to bully their addressees for fun or for money. These most authentic
written sources still did not document the “degree zero” of narrating personal
experience, instead citing literary clichés of different genres. Yet the very abun-
dance of incidents involving anonymous letters allows us to speak of them as
a particular social practice that communicates a certain meaning beyond the
immediate content of messages. In order to identify the stable component of
this practice (characteristic of different localities), we need to investigate the
situation beyond the case of Odessa.
Even though other locations could not boast the same intensity of blackmail
correspondence, we can recognize certain categories of Odessa anonymous let-
ters among those produced in other cities. For example, when in November
1908 the Kazan merchant Khvorov gave the police a letter written on behalf of
the Committee of the Party of Terrorists-Anarchists demanding 5,000 rubles
from him, no one believed in the anarchist version for even a moment. From
the outset, on the list of primary suspects police included: the bankrupt owner
of a shop recently sold at half price to Khvorov, the lawyers who arranged
the deal, and Khvorov’s sales assistant (who was eventually found guilty).88
Apparently, by late 1908 in Kazan, as in Odessa, the period of politically moti-
vated “expropriations” was over, and the police were aware that extortionists
were simply abusing the rhetoric of the recent revolutionary era. Another close
parallel with Odessa scenarios can be found in the case of an anonymous let-
ter received in January 1908 by Nikolai Iliashenko, the editor and owner of
the influential rightist newspaper Kazan Telegraph. An anonymous group of
shop assistants threatened to poison him by adding arsenic to the food in a
store where he usually shopped—all because he opposed the shortening of
working hours for shop assistants, “and mocked Miliukov” (the leader of
the Russian liberal party of Constitutional Democrats).89 One immediately
thinks of a letter received in the same year by Odessa City Council member,
Mikhailov, who also opposed the shorter hours for shop assistants. Two years
later, in February 1910, the female owner of a Kazan factory received a letter

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 46 Chapter One

demanding that she reduce working hours, under the threat of “material and
moral damages.”90 The letter was signed by the fictive Committee of Defense
from Excessive Exploitation of Labor (cf. the name of the organization that
threatened Mikhailov in Odessa: Committee of Laborers).
Another category of anonymous letters that we saw in Odessa can be
found in Nizhny Novgorod. On December 29, 1910, landowner Kurochkin
from a village located less than fifty miles from Nizhny Novgorod received
a letter written on behalf of the Party of Democrats. Kurochkin was ordered
to place 10,000 rubles under a tree near the village church, under the
threat of death. As it turned out, the letter was authored by two teenagers:
the son of the village shopkeeper, Mikhail Moriakov (then fourteen), and
his friend, Alexander Epifanov (fifteen).91 This case bears a striking simi-
larity to the practical joke played by Osip Grinberg and Shulim Shatailo
in Odessa in January 1910. It is interesting how the boys explained their
actions. Moriakov told the police that he just wanted to frighten landowner
Kurochkin: Moriakov decided to send an anonymous letter when his older
friend, Epifanov, told him about people called “democrats,” who intimidate
the rich and extort money from them. Epifanov admitted that they actually
wanted to enrich themselves. In this case, we observe in detail how exactly
the authors of anonymous letters worked with public discourses: Moriakov
learned what little he knew about democrats from Epifanov, who had over-
heard bits and pieces about politics elsewhere. They adjusted this knowledge
to meet their own needs: the younger one wanted to dominate, the older
one to get rich. Incidentally, they were tried in March 1912 together with
another teenager, then fifteen-year-old Ignatii Shelkov, from another village
near Nizhny Novgorod (just over ten miles away). Ignatii sent a letter of
extortion to his fellow villager just for fun because he knew that the victim
did not have money.92
In March 1912, a Nizhny Novgorod homeowner, Lopatnikova, received
an anonymous letter of extortion demanding that she put money under the
staircase—a situation reminiscent of several Odessa letters.93 The symbolic
violence of extortion letters implied indirect communication on some neutral
territory, which was utterly problematic for members of plebeian society, who
did not have control over any objects or places suitable as proxies in the trans-
action—hence using insecure locations such as staircases, benches, and other
elements of public infrastructure familiar and accessible to commoners.
There were, however, several anonymous letters written in Nizhny
Novgorod that did not have a parallel in Odessa (quite possibly simply
because some documents did not survive in the papers of the Odessa

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 47

police). These were anonimki of the type most familiar to students of twen-
tieth-century Russia, that is, denunciations sent to the authorities, inform-
ing on fellow citizens. One such letter, written in early February 1916,
had led to the arrest of a criminal ring of shop assistants who stole goods
from their shop owners in Nizhny Novgorod, then brought the goods by
cart to resell at a countryside railroad station.94 Another anonymous let-
ter, received by the criminal police on June 20, 1916, informed on the
whereabouts of a man who might have a problem with police and was thus
residing in the town illegally.95
Judging by the documents surviving in archives, the role of anonymous
letters in Vilna was opposite to that in Odessa. Despite the important politi-
cal role played by this city in the early twentieth century, there are no traces
of anonymous political letters in Vilna. At the same time, historians have
access to scores of letters that addressed the authorities with denunciations.
Most often, the inhabitants of Vilna charged each other either with illegal
prostitution or draft dodging. Many of these letters were nothing but unsub-
stantiated slander, so not surprisingly, their authors preferred to remain
anonymous. For example, a letter sent to the chief of police of Vilna on June
28, 1907, stated: “This is to inform Your Most Honorable Sir that Abram
Marmut keeps a secret den of vice at 16 Mikhailovskii Alley, . . . where some
girls have not reached the age of 15. The girls are not registered at the place
of residence, and because of the absence of sanitary control, patrons have
contracted venereal disease.”96
The subsequent police investigation found the girls to be of legal age, regis-
tered, and healthy. It was suggested that the letter was written by two jealous
patrons of the brothel who were in love with the girls.97 Two weeks later, a
letter signed by Isabella Kondrashovich of peasant legal estate (soslovie) alleged:
“one person—Jewish maiden Berta Freidengein . . . advertising herself as a
music teacher makes a living from secret prostitution. And so my husband,
who has a job in Vilna, has fallen into this trap.”98 Although signed, the let-
ter was essentially a typical donos (a denunciation); the charge of secret pros-
titution was just slander by a jealous woman. The motives of other authors
of anonymous letters were less clear, but their allegations remained invariably
unambiguous:

Your Most Honorable Sir!

Our apologies for daring to disturb you, but we hope that you will listen
to us and provide us with complete assistance. The fact is that at 3 B. Ste-
fanovskaia lives Iankel, a dyer by profession, who has received permission to

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 48 Chapter One

post a sign as a dye shop for show, even though he does not work in this pro-
fession but keeps two prostitutes absolutely unregistered and trades them, at
night time, the doorman regularly lets in men, who after hard drinking and
horrible lechery stage scandals, brawls, and various outrages. This behavior
of Iankel and his girls and guests insults and humiliates our prayer house
located in the building. . . . We earnestly ask that Iankel be expelled from
this building for the sake of respect for the prayer house.99

The district police sergeant did not confirm these allegations, claiming
that regular checks of Iankel’s apartment revealed no incidents of drinking
and lechery.100 Almost identical language can be found in other complaints of
tenants about their neighbors who were allegedly secretly practicing prostitu-
tion.101 The degree of authors’ sincerity or the accuracy of allegations did not
affect the language and poetics of Vilna’s anonymous letters. Thus, unlike the
antiprostitution letters, most of the accusations of assisting draft dodging were
found to be well substantiated.102 The English translations of some of these
letters do not do justice to the originals written in broken Russian and with
weird accents, but this helps to illustrate the fundamental similarities of these
letters to each other:

I declare that the village elder of the borough of Ianishki, Vilna district, Leib
Gurin, and Movsha Dogin residing in Vilna in his own house on Arkhan-
gelskaia str., and Tevel Itskovich Leibovich residing on Dvorianskii alley
in number 7 or 9, the three of them is a gang that under various pretexts
releases the rich from the military service, and we, the poor, have to serve
even when unfit and ill. I am a recruit from Vilna district.
1–Dogin Movsha, 2–Tevel Leibovits, 3–Leibe Gurin, ask 400 rubles and
release from the military service. Shame to excuse their misdeed.103

This letter was received by the criminal police unit of Vilna on October
18, 1911, and initiated an investigation that partially supported the infor-
mation provided,104 just as another anonymous letter denouncing a dif-
ferent draft evasion ring that was received in April of that year.105 The
authors of these letters wrote the truth (except, probably, grossly inflat-
ing the price list of the perpetrators), but opted to remain anonymous.106
Some who were unscrupulously slandering their enemies dared to sign the
denunciations with their full names—for example, a man named Abram
Goldberg of Vilna, who penned several letters to the police in February
1910 of the following type:

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 49

Denunciation [Donos]

Most Honorable Sir Police Chief of the city of Vilna

I inform you that on Kavkazskaia str. 10 there lives one man. . . . Blonde,
tall, called Salemon Sirota, he is a crook, a pickpocket, there are many stolen
goods in his apartment. He escaped the draft with [the assistance of ] a fig-
urehead, I am drawing your attention [to him].107

Many letters, signed and anonymous, in the same vein implicated residents
of Vilna in keeping dens of thieves, gambling, or illegally possessing firearms,
but subsequent investigations did not find proof of the allegations.108 All these
letters are fundamentally similar in their shared trope of public righteousness
and the mental mapping of urban society as a homogeneous community, and
the local authorities as its only protectors and arbiters. The real and imagined
troublemakers are presented as marginals from the point of view of both the
state and the community of citizens. In this respect, those letters can be seen as
direct precedents to the early Soviet culture of denunciation.
Aside from the whim of archivists who probably preserved some documents
better than others, the rarity or absence of anonymous letters to the authori-
ties can be explained by differences in the social homogenization of urban
society. Before discussing in detail the cases of Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod,
Odessa, and Vilna in subsequent chapters, this proposition can be advanced
only as a hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, the already mentioned
explosive population growth in Odessa can explain its difference with the
much less demographically dynamic Vilna in terms of the character of anony-
mous letters. Arguably, because of higher social stability in Vilna, it was seen
as more natural than in Odessa to fulfill one’s civic duty or settle personal
scores by sending an anonymous denunciation to the authorities. The much
more socially fluid Odessa society did not encourage a view of the state as the
sole arbiter vis-à-vis a homogeneous community: people would call the police
and go to court when they were threatened, but they did not use government
agencies to attack each other. After all, to this end there were anonymous
extortion letters, written on behalf of terrorists, robbers, and just friendly
neighborhood stalkers. This hypothesis is further confirmed by an exception
that seems to confirm the rule—the sole instance of an anonymous letter writ-
ten in Vilna by an individual to another individual (at least, the only one
found in the archive). On October 17, 1910, the owner of Maizel dry goods
store on Nemetskaia Street received an anonymous letter written in Yiddish. If

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 50 Chapter One

this were in Odessa, we could reasonably expect that, typically for this period,
the letter would likely have demanded about 100 rubles on behalf of some fic-
tive extremist political group. In Vilna, it was very different, as we can judge
from the translation of the letter commissioned by the police:

My good woman Maizel!

Although it is not a pleasure to write you telling you such news, but my
conscience disturbs me and thus I have to write you that they are going to
rob your store these days, your store and the silk store in the next build-
ing. The silk store I would not even warn, but I feel sorry for you and your
daughter, and therefore I am writing to you so you were alert and knew
what to do.
An old acquaintance of yours109

This exceptional letter only confirmed the overall impression of stron-

ger bonds of horizontal solidarity in Vilna, the city with the lowest rate
of population growth in our sampling (its population even decreased after
1909). There is also no elaborate discourse as such (borrowed or originally
produced) in Vilna letters, but they reproduce the general stable form of a
denunciation by a good subject to the just authorities. Whereas in Odessa
recent migrants did not trust social groups or the police more than their
neighbors, here we find a higher level of mutual trust—a topic that will be
discussed in chapters 4 and 5.
As in the cases of Odessa, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod, what matters in
Vilna’s anonymous letters (with their general consensus about the accepted
social norms that was shared by many in the city) is not the letters’ narrative
itself, but their addressees and genres. They reveal the existing magnetic field
lines of power relations in the society as well as the types of public discourses
more comprehensible and appealing to the urban lower classes. The letters
did not seem to contain an authentic “writing degree zero,” but the actions
of their authors did. Whether pursuing social justice, personal enrichment,
revenge on enemies, or entertainment, or sustaining the social order, people
used already available discourses to more or less skillfully advance their case.
It is their own intentions and actions that documented their inner selves in a
most direct and undistorted way.
For all four cities in our sampling, the social practice of writing anony-
mous letters is indeed very suggestive about the personality of the letters’
authors. Unfortunately, as with other social practices, we cannot speak of any

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 51

individual character, but rather of collective portraits construed by identify-

ing typical social gestures. Doubtless, this is a portrait of the subaltern, “the
infamous man” who preserves anonymity even when using the practice of let-
ter writing as a chance to formulate his (or her) inner desires and interests
on paper. Anonymous letters thus appear as an archetypal genre adopted by
the subalterns, who “cannot speak” yet attempt to express themselves through
the medium of textuality, equally foreign and attractive to them. The genre
of anonymous letters as a typical “weapon of the weak” presents urban sub-
alterns in a new light.110 It is certainly a subversive method of getting one’s
way without engaging in open confrontation with one’s opponents. But more
profoundly, it can be an attempt to confront discursive reality while having
no discursive persona of one’s own, and hence acting through avatars of fic-
tive roles. These roles represented the most powerful discourses of their time:
of revolutionary movement, capitalist success, and professional criminality. As
we have seen, some writers performed better than others who failed to emu-
late the chosen style or even to identify a suitable style. It is important that
these people knew about popular discourses in the public sphere, but of equal
importance is their inability to communicate their personal content using
discourses and tropes as a language: instead, we see them reproducing whole
borrowed “stories” about “barons of millionaires” and “Bandit Brothers.”
Moreover, they realized quite well the power of discourse as equal to the power
of a loaded handgun or any other instrument of direct physical violence.
A “weapon of the weak” does not make those using it any nobler because of
their weakness: they did not hesitate to use the power of emulated discourses
not against the oppressive state but against other individuals, mostly of lower-
middle-class status. The variations among dominant scenarios of writing
anonymous letters underline differing perceptions of authority and its source.
In Vilna letters, the writers identify with the state, whereas in Odessa, many
letters specifically stress their contempt for the police. There, as well as in some
letters in Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod, the real authority is associated with
agents of society beyond the government, and even with abstract discourses.
Thus, as a recurrent social practice, despite a great variety of topics and styles,
the letters characterize their subaltern authors as quite compatible with most
modern forms of social organization. Still unable to speak in their own voices
in the language recognized in the public sphere, they were capable of borrow-
ing ready statements and roles for an occasion. Thus, the nonverbal language
of self-expression and communication remained the main medium for these
people, unchallenged by any genuine discourses of the poor or ideologies of
the oppressed.

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 52 Chapter One

Plebeian Society

As anonymous letters demonstrate, plebeian society was capable of producing

narrative texts. It was open to popular discourses but was unable to produce
discourses of its own, and it was not manipulated by discourses. Rather, we see
that representatives of the lower layers of society borrowed elements of tropes
and discourses most suitable to their particular needs, freely arranging them.
This practice is reminiscent of the anonymous letter received by a protagonist
of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous The Hound of the Baskervilles, with a text
composed of individually cut-out words from the previous day’s Times using
manicure scissors. (Only the word “moor,” lacking in the paper, was handwrit-
ten.) This is a creative practice of bricolage, but not in the sense usually meant
by students of texts and discourses.
This brings us to the notion of plebeian culture as one that borrowed con-
cepts and conventions of high (aristocratic or middle-class) culture, but placed
them in its own particular social context, fitting them to its own needs and cul-
tural horizon. It should be added that “plebeian society” carries no pejorative
connotations, just as the term “plebeian culture” coined by E. P. Thompson
has been used as a useful analytical concept.111 This characteristic suggests the
existence of an asymmetrical dual system, in which the leading role is played
by “patrician” culture and society. The latter creates cultural products (includ-
ing fashion), social norms, and patterns of behavior that plebeian society
attempts to imitate and follow. In the social realities of Late Imperial Russia,
patrician society was represented not so much by aristocracy as by the middle
classes, which had the cultural and financial resources not only to produce
new culture and norms but also to disseminate them in standardized form and
advertise them as attractive and prestigious. While popular books and the-
ater, cinema and music, fashion and dance might cater to popular tastes and
enjoy success with the masses, they were products of modern mass culture
(commercial and textual), rather than of any authentic popular culture. The
social heterogeneity of the imperial space was amplified by the correspond-
ing imbalance between the common and fairly homogeneous public sphere
(obshchestvennost’) and the hodgepodge of numerous local knowledges (of par-
ticular ethnoconfessional and social groups and regions). The intelligentsia-
dominated public sphere was based on textuality and sustained through public
discourses, mostly in the Russian language. While different segments of the
Russian educated elite attempted to draw peasants and urban laborers into the
sphere of civil society and public discourses, this process was in its first stages
in the early twentieth century.112 Hence the real challenge for historians of

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 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond 53

Russian imperial society is to understand how the prediscursive agglomeration

of local knowledges made sense, and thus created a common space of imperial
society. The world of local knowledge was predominantly rooted in oral cul-
ture, communicated directly through personal contact, and in a wide variety
of languages and dialects. No impersonal mechanisms based on the mass cir-
culated printed word mediated those diverse pockets of local knowledge.
As further developed by historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Mona Ozouf,
and Hans Medick, the concept of “plebeian culture” can shed additional light
on the mores and specific rationality of late imperial Russian urban plebeian
society. Though tailored to describe a somewhat earlier history of European
society, the concept seems suitable as a more general characteristic of

the common people’s ways of life and experience during the transition to
capitalism. . . . “Plebeian” evokes well that obstinacy of behavior and expres-
sion characteristic of the “lower orders.”. . . It is this compound of simul-
taneous resistance and insurgency but also of dependence upon the ruling
orders and classes and upon the “civilised,” elite culture that we are after. . . .
Characteristic of “plebeian culture” was the twofold meeting of traditional
ways of perception, social rules, morals and customs with the new reality of
early capitalist markets and production relations on the one hand, and with
the politics of discipline in religion, morality and commerce, enforced by
the police powers of the early modern state on the other.113

That “twofold meeting” of lower-class practices with upper-class standards

is responsible for the elusive and fundamentally ambivalent character of plebe-
ian society. Plebeian society does not produce or partake in public discourses
as an equal partner, but only uses some of their elements to express itself in
narratives when it comes into contact with the power that “makes people act
and speak” (Foucault). It does not have an authentic “voice” of its own—other
than social practices. Thus the ambivalent stance of plebeian society vis-à-vis
the middle-class stratum explains all the tensions and frustration produced by
the constant incongruence between “appearance” and “reality” that became
central in the research of Roshanna Sylvester (in which this incongruence is
characterized as a “masquerade”).114
This demarcation of a plebeian society from the partially overlapping strata
of educated society (obshchestvennost’) and the middle classes is instrumental to
an understanding of the paradox revealed in recent studies of local societies in
Russian imperial cities, which discovered numerous formal structures of civil
society populated by surprisingly small cadres of activists making up a tiny
percentage of the town population.115

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 54 Chapter One

A combination of well-developed structures and low-level attendance can

be explained in two ways. The dominant explanation suggests a nascent stage
of development of civil society in Russia and the passivity of the majority of
the population eligible to join the institutions of civil society but hesitant to
do so. The alternative explanation requires a fundamental remapping of urban
educated society: many social groups that looked like petty bourgeoisie (or
middle classes) and emulated many aspects of bourgeois lifestyle in fact had
more in common with recent migrants from the countryside than with the
urban low-income but socially active groups. The main difference was not
in economic status or even occupations, but in the very different channels
of socialization: a minority sustained active engagement in public discourses
and expressed their sense of social solidarity through participation in public
associations, whereas a majority passively borrowed fragments of discourses
comprehensible to them and expressed themselves through partaking in cer-
tain social practices. Therefore, the formal class- or status-based distinctions
between the middle and working classes or between the intelligentsia and the
common people only partially reflect this fundamental distinction in accepted
epistemological practices.
The boundaries of those groups were porous and dynamic, and open to
the upward mobility of individuals. The most popular and commercially suc-
cessful writer of the epoch, Maxim Gorky, had embodied the possibility of
rising from The Lower Depths (the title of his famous 1902 play) to the role of
a supreme intellectual authority and manipulator of the public. Still, structur-
ally, the task of the primary socialization and acculturation of migrants was
carried out by plebeian society through the medium of social practices. Those
who became full-scale members of local society (identifying themselves pri-
marily in terms of local patriotism and collective interests) could go further to
join the public sphere defined by and mediated through discourses of corpora-
tive interests, class solidarity, party politics, or the nationalist agenda. Due to
the social dynamics of the late imperial period, even greater numbers of recent
migrants to the cities were coming to replace those who left plebeian society
to join the public sphere. To study the lives of people living largely beyond
discourses and to understand how the multiple sites of local knowledge inte-
grated into a universal sphere of common knowledge, we need to read the
narratives of social practices that appear in the following chapters of this book.

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 Chapter Two

The Middle Volga City

as the Middle Ground

Urban Plebeian Society

Multifaceted Diversity at the Core of Empire

The first step in adapting the sociological concept of “plebeian society” for a
historical study is to localize and contextualize its application—for example,
“Russian urban plebeian society.” Here, “urban” refers to big cities that served
as melting pots of people of particular, differentiated mindsets into a common
space produced by the “infamous men.” But what difference does it make
when a plebeian society is identified as Russian? Even when using “Russian” in
the same way as “urban,” thus further defining the location by referring to the
borders of the Russian Empire, the question remains: Did all those “Russian”
urban centers have the same plebeian society? What, if anything, was Russian
about plebeian society?
A recent attempt by a group of leading Russian historians to produce a
series of studies of Russian imperial borderlands has yielded an unexpected
answer to these questions.1 By singling out distinctive external parts of Russia
proper (the Baltic provinces and Poland, the Caucasus and Central Asia,
Bessarabia and Siberia, etc.), these studies have vividly demonstrated some-
thing that was rarely understood before: the Russian Empire may have had a
periphery, but it lacked any clear-cut and homogeneous core.2 Even the ulti-
mate heartland of the Russian Empire—the proverbial Russian river Volga—
was as multiethnic, multiconfessional, and economically diversified a region as
many of the recognized borderlands were. This means that diversity was not a
marker of imperial regions that were somehow different from the norm of the

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 56 Chapter Two

core, but of the fundamental principle of Russian imperial formation as such.3

After the Revolution of 1905, this structural diversity of regions and popula-
tions was complemented by the unprecedented upheaval caused by new social
mobility, both upward and horizontal (migrations). The most modern loci of
the Russian Empire, its urban centers, became the testing grounds for impe-
rial society’s ability to accommodate this dramatic escalation of its diversity,
including the rise of a profoundly different “nonspeaking” plebeian society.
Two major cities of the Middle Volga region, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan,
reveal a situation in the deep heartland of the empire that by no means could
be seen as the empire’s normative (homogeneous and dominating) core.4
Lower Novgorod (Russian: Nizhny Novgorod) was founded in 1221, five
hundred miles southeast of ancient Great Novgorod, in the estuary of the Oka
River flowing into the Volga. For centuries, it served as Muscovy’s eastern bas-
tion against the Turko-Mongol threat, not least against the Kazan Khanate.
The reputation of a frontier town gave way to the image of Nizhny Novgorod
as the heart of Muscovite Russia in the early seventeenth century, when it
played a decisive role in bringing closure to the notorious “time of troubles.”
It was in Nizhny Novgorod that the patriotic militia was formed that would
effectively drive out the forces of Rzechpospolita (the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth) from Moscow and prompt the election of Mikhail Romanov
to the Russian throne. The legendary popular leader of the triumphant mili-
tia, Kuz’ma Minin, was a native of Nizhny Novgorod. Thus, by the turn of
the twentieth century, Nizhny Novgorod was perceived as the embodiment
of Russianness. According to the 1897 imperial census, 94 percent of the
town’s population named Russian as their native tongue.5 The surrounding
Nizhegorod province presented a slightly more differentiated picture: about
4 percent spoke Finno-Ugric languages (Mordva and Mari) and 2.6 percent
indicated Tatar as their native language. Even more important, of those who
could be identified as Russians, about 6 percent belonged to various sects
of Old Believers—a very significant factor of social and cultural differentia-
tion, particularly in pre-1905 imperial Russia.6 But even those people who
told census-takers that their native language was Russian, in the eyes of eth-
nographers “presented an extraordinary mixture of ethnic [plemennykh] ori-
gins. . . . The Russian people today, they used to be Mordvins in some places,
Hill Cheremis [i.e., Mari] in other, and Lower Bank Cheremis [Mari] in yet
another [places].”7
The famous compiler of the magisterial Interpretive Dictionary of the
Living Great Russian Language (1861–68), Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’, indi-
cated that nowhere else had he witnessed such a variety of dialects and even

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 57

pronounciations as in Nizhegorod province.8 Between 1897 and 1914, the

population of Nizhny Novgorod increased by 24 percent (from 90,100 to
111,600), and the influx of migrants from the adjacent countryside and other
regions significantly increased the ethnocultural diversity of the city.
Kazan Khanate was conquered by the first Russian tsar, Ivan IV “the
Terrible,” in 1552, and by the twentieth century, Kazan was perceived as a
part of the Russian heartland not unlike Nizhny Novgorod, located two hun-
dred miles up the Volga River. In fact, Kazan was a lucky rival of Nizhny
Novgorod, boasting a slightly bigger population, an imperial university, and
the presence of several centers of regional administration, such as the Military
District Command (overseeing seven provinces), the Education District, and
the Transportation District. In 1897, 73 percent of the city’s population iden-
tified Russian as their native tongue, while in Kazan province this figure stood
at a mere 38 percent.9 Between 1897 and 1914, the population of Kazan
exploded, increasing by almost 45 percent (from 130,000 to 188,000).10
While the influx of migrants boosted the ratio of those who could be identified
as ethnic Russians to 81 percent,11 the quantitative increase in the numbers of
Tatars, Finno-Ugric peoples, and Jews, as well as their deeper integration into
all quarters of Kazan society, produced a popular perception of an even greater
diversity of Kazanians.12
Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the two heartland pro-
vincial capitals, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, represented two types of
Russianness. The former was as “ethnically Russian” as possible in the Russian
Empire (slightly yielding only to Moscow with its 95 percent of native Russian
speakers in 1897).13 The latter, with a more diverse population, was a key
imperial administrative and cultural center, and in this respect was perceived
as the backbone of the Russian state and society. This dual Russianness was
perceived as a given, and therefore passive, quality of being, but was extremely
limited in the readily available repertoire of acting. For those existing predomi-
nantly outside textuality (or on its outskirts), social gesture was the most avail-
able and meaningful mode of self-expression and self-representation. But for a
Russian speaker to act as a Russian meant little more than performing rituals of
the official Orthodox Church and obeying the laws and orders of the authori-
ties. The post-1905 epoch brought about the unprecedented social mobility
and cultural flux that challenged the feeble conventions of mainstream public
identities and behavior. The new meaning and modes of the emerging modern
Russian society were negotiated and contested daily in the myriads of routine
encounters and conflicts: of Orthodox Russians and Old Believers, Russian
speakers and Tatars, Tatars and Cheremis (Mordva), old-time city dwellers and

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 58 Chapter Two

recent migrants from the countryside, members of privileged social estates and
peasants or meshchane (town commoners).
Even when linguistically defined Russians constituted an overwhelming
majority (as in Nizhny Novgorod), they could not unilaterally impose their
norms and mores upon the newcomers and minorities because there were no
elaborated conventional Russian rules that would suit the needs of modern
urban life. There was no ready common knowledge about whether it was
acceptable for a Russian to hire a non-Russian hand or become an employee
of a Muslim; how to behave with a tenant of another faith; or how to coop-
erate with a coworker or business partner of another ethnoconfessional
background. In Kazan, the problematized Russianness of Russian speakers
was complicated yet further by the heavy presence of other ethnic groups,
so even theoretically the unilateral imposition of some normative social sce-
nario was all but impossible. Residents of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, as
of other places within the Russian Empire, had to negotiate a modus vivendi
with each other. This situation can be best characterized using the concept
of “the middle ground” as elaborated by Richard White in his classic study
of intercultural communication and conflict in the North American Great
Lakes region.14 As he put it,

The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples,

and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. . . . People try to
persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they
perceive to be the values and the practices of those others. They often misin-
terpret and distort both the values and the practices of those they deal with,
but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them
new practices—the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.15

As another perceptive commentator pointed out, “by refusing to have any-

thing to do with frontier debates,” the concept of the middle ground, as devel-
oped by White, transcended the dilemma of the frontier: whether it is place
or process.16 Thus understood, the middle ground is a state of relationships
between and dialogue among actors attempting to bridge the deep cultural
gap and social divide, and as such can be applied to certain situations and
places not necessarily related to specifically borderland or frontier zones of
North America. Recently, Sergey Glebov has demonstrated the productivity
of applying White’s model to the case of the Russian Empire.17 Indeed, the
imperial situation in Russia, particularly in its provincial capitals, ideally fits
the formulation of “middle ground” provided by White himself fifteen years
after the publication of the book:

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 59

I was fairly specific about the elements that were necessary for the construc-
tion of such a space: a rough balance of power, mutual need or a desire for
what the other possesses, and an inability by either side to commandeer
enough force to compel the other to change. Force and violence are hardly
foreign to the process of creating and maintaining a middle ground, but the
critical element is mediation.18

We find exactly this situation in Russian urban centers, even in the

heartland. The necessity for the locals to negotiate a compromise outside
any centrally imposed rules was produced there not by a deadlock of sev-
eral competing empires, but by the state’s (and much of patrician culture’s)
neglect of the everyday business of plebeian society, regardless of the ethno-
confessional status of its members. Looking at Russian urban centers, we
find people trying, with various degrees of success and enthusiasm, to find
common grounds, preferably to their own advantage. The new understand-
ing of Russianness was forging by the same forces at exactly the same time,
fostering cohesion among migrants. The spontaneous self-organization from
below defined the new social norm (Russianness) much more effectively
than the belated and ill-coordinated attempts of cultural figures—leaders
of public opinion within patrician society.19 The predominance of plebe-
ian social groups with partial or no access to the pan-imperial public sphere
determined that mediation became a critical basis for social cohesion, which
became associated not so much with any institutionalized and articulated
form of discourse as with everyday social practices.

When Crime Is Knowledge

Given that “the middle ground is . . . a process of mutual and creative misun-
derstanding”20 and that new—shared—meanings were derived from system-
atic mutual misunderstandings,21 it is not surprising that those social practices
of most of the urban lower-class population all too often fell within the cat-
egory of criminal misbehavior (as a violation of accepted norms). Crime, and
conflicts in general, shed light on the process of ascribing meaning to per-
sonal confrontations and making sense of cultural and social differences: in
a crisis, people are compelled to adjust their established world view, putting
to the test the common wisdom and producing new meaning. Thus, while
criminality can be a grave factor in societal disintegration and degeneration in
the long run, it plays an ambivalent role at a time of transition, both foster-
ing the deconstruction of archaic rigid social norms and often resulting from

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their dissolution. A closer look at social conflicts, including those identified

as criminal, can become a window on the dynamic middle ground of the
Russian cities of Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod, shedding light on the process
of ascribing meaning to personal confrontations and making sense of cultural
and social differences. This “middle ground” will be treated as a type of social
relations, more precisely as a particular social practice systematically sustained
and revealed in various settings and circumstances.
We can only indirectly assess the dynamics of criminality in imperial cit-
ies, as most of the available statistics usable for comparative analysis relate to
entire regions (provinces or court circuits) that included both urban centers
and the countryside. We also cannot equate the rate of criminality with the
numbers of people who stood trial, as many incidents were not even reported
to the police, and not all cases were ultimately brought to the court. Still,
we can get some sense of a general trend from the following figures: between
1874 and 1912, the number of convicted criminals in Russian courts of all
types had grown 3.2 times,22 while the population had increased just 1.9 times
over the same period. After the suppression of political unrest associated with
the Revolution of 1905–7, the annual increase of people who stood trial on
criminal charges in Russia was: +5.8 percent in 1910; +1.8 percent in 1911;
and +3.6 percent in 1912. In 1913, the proportion of people who went on
trial even fell 5.1 percent in comparison with the previous year.23 In the early
1910s, Nizhny Novgorod held first place among the crime-ridden cities of the
Russian Empire with 400–582 convicts per one hundred thousand inhabit-
ants per year, while Kazan followed close behind the leader, with 384–500
convicts (despite its reputation as the crime capital, Odessa had a rate of just
224–266 convicts per one hundred thousand).24
Although growing, the crime rate in Russia was neither sensational nor
uncontrollable. In notorious Nizhny Novgorod, with its more than one
hundred thousand inhabitants, police registered in 1912 a total of 888 cases
of theft and burglary (37 percent were solved by police); just four murders
(three cases solved); forty-nine robberies (29 percent solved); twenty-nine
incidents of swindle or blackmail (72 percent exposed); eight arsons (50
percent successfully investigated), one instance of counterfeiting (solved),
thirteen cases of cattle raiding (31 percent solved), and so on. Overall, police
registered 1,121 incidents, and identified 258 male and 42 female crimi-
nals.25 In July and August, when the famous Nizhegorod Fair attracted tens
of thousands of visitors to Nizhny Novgorod, the monthly crime rate dou-
bled or even tripled, which partly explained why the city held first place
in criminal statistics.26 For us, the outstanding criminal record of imperial

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 61

Figure 2.1. Fistfight in front of the Bugrov flophouse in Nizhny Novgorod. The
sign on the wall reads “Only sober allowed. Do not smoke, do not drink vodka,
do not sing songs, keep quiet.” Photograph by Maxim Dmitriev, taken around
the turn of the twentieth century. Photograph courtesy of the State Archive
of Audiovisual Documents of Nizhegorod Region, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
(slide 5-1880).

cities serves, first of all, as an invaluable and truly mass historical source of
people’s everyday life experience. Criminal cases registered by the police and
reported in the newspapers provide us with a unique opportunity to see how
people framed their differences in conflict situations. Even “deaf mute” sub-
alterns resorted to labeling opponents using concepts developed within the
public sphere—at least to report on their offenders.
For example, it is instructive how people identified strangers. The numerous
cases of street robberies in Nizhny Novgorod contain the same cliché describ-
ing the unidentified attacker: “an unknown male,” “unknown young man.”
In ethnoconfessionally homogeneous Nizhny Novgorod, there was no readily
available language to instantly mark a stranger, as formal social status could
not be discerned at first glance.27 In Kazan they always specified “an unknown
Tatar,” “a Russian,”28 or “unknown Armenians.”29 The following story reveals

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the degree to which this language of mutual ethnic projections and clichés
prevailed in Kazan. In January 1912, a man named Galimov, a Tatar, came to
the Kazan criminal police headquarters and claimed that he had been robbed
of 13 rubles by two “unknown Tatars” the day before. As it turned out, he
had spent the night drinking heavily in a pub and nobody had attacked him
(he had wasted all his money that night). Curiously, Galimov preferred to use
the clichéd image of brutal Tatar robbers, even though it would have been
easier to place all the blame on the equally fictive Russians, ideal strangers for
a Tatar, difficult to describe and hence to catch.30 Apparently, he did not think
that his story would be credible at all without at least the ethnoconfessional
profiling of suspects. In June 1913, a similar incident happened in Nizhny
Novgorod: a Russian Leont’ev reported to the police that “two unknown
males” had robbed him of 400 rubles. As the police found out, he had left the
house with 49 rubles in his pocket, and nobody had robbed him: like Galimov
in Kazan, he had squandered the money on alcohol.31
It is important to stress that there were occasional violent attacks by Tatars
in Nizhny Novgorod as well,32 but the imagined attackers had more to do with
popular stereotypes than with actual practice. In Kazan, with its heavy pres-
ence of Tatars, people (including Tatars themselves) were sensitive to influen-
tial discursive projections depicting Tatars as particularly prone to violence.33
In Nizhny Novgorod, Tatars composed a tiny minority,34 and markers of eth-
nocultural difference were of secondary importance compared to their impor-
tance in Kazan. It seems that the local Russian population had insufficient
knowledge about Tatars to ascribe to them any prominent role in their social
imagery. At the same time, Nizhegorod Tatars were more acculturated or at
least could not rely on isolationist social strategies in the absence of any com-
pact all-Tatar settlements in the city (unlike Kazan with its Old and New Tatar
quarters [slobody]). Consider the following two incidents illustrating these
points. On October 23, 1912, a policeman arrested a Tatar on the central
Bolshaia Pokrovskaia street of Nizhny Novgorod for using foul language. As it
turned out, the Tatar had merely asked someone “Where are you going?” (Sin
kaia barasyn?), which sounded like cursing to the Russian Nizhegorod ear.35
Such an incident would never have happened in Kazan, where even Russians
who did not understand a word of Tatar would still possess enough experience
to distinguish the alien language from Russian swearing. Several years later
on June 20, 1916, an anonymous letter warned the Nizhegorod police that a
person with a criminal record was hiding in the city without proper registra-
tion. It was a Tatar, Suleiman Mametev, “also known as Sergei Efgrafovich” (an
explicitly Russian name).36

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 63

Now, in Kazan, no Tatar would be “also known” as a Russian, and vice

versa. When in January 1908 the police solved the case of a recent “expro-
priation” attack by revolutionaries on the office of the city forester, they pre-
pared to arrest the leader, known by the Russian name “Aleksey.” Aleksey
turned out to be the Tatar Aligulla Bililiatdinov, a twenty-six-year-old worker
wearing “Russian” dress.37 The local nationalist newspaper Kazan Telegraph
expressed less indignation about the actual “revolutionary robbery” than
about the “imposter,” whom the paper depicted in Orientalist terms as a
typical Tatar criminal: tall, dark-skinned, gloomy, Mongoloid-looking, and
“of Muhammad’s faith.”38 Curiously, before the arrest, the three attackers
had been described by five victims (who saw them at close range and talked
to them) as “representatives of the [Russian] intelligentsia” “judging by the
color of their faces and their speech.”39 There was no mention of the typical
Mongoloid facial characteristics of the leader, or the primitive mores of his
two accomplices, who turned out to be twenty-year-old simple Russian work-
ers.40 This instance of mutual misunderstanding can tell us much about the
situation on the middle ground: in everyday practice, the differences between
Russians and Tatars, intelligentsia and workers were no greater in Kazan than
in Nizhny Novgorod. As we shall see below, these differences were often neg-
ligible, at least compared to other situational or structural divides. What really
distinguished Kazan from Nizhny Novgorod was the discursive exploitation
of misunderstandings and certain types of differences, which modern social
scientists call “the politicization of ethnicity.”41

Making Sense of Differences through Ethnicization of Politics

Paradoxically, the overwhelming Russianness of Nizhny Novgorod seems to

neutralize the explicit Russianization of politics in the city. Significantly vis-
ible were the local chapter of the monarchist and anti-Semitic Union of the
Russian People (the society White Banner), which enjoyed administrative sup-
port across the empire, but performed rather miserably in Nizhny Novgorod.
In September 1909, the meeting of the Union’s Committee members who
convened to discuss the problem of funding was attended by just ten members
out of sixteen, and even the chapter’s chairman did not show up.42 In contrast,
in Kazan monarchists formed four organizations in the wake of the revolution
of 1905: some of them were very small (e.g., the Society of Church Elders
with its fifteen members), and some had hundreds of members.43 A meeting
of Kazan reactionaries on June 1, 1906, held in the manège of Kazan Military
School in the Kremlin, was attended by one thousand activists.44

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 64 Chapter Two

In the early 1910s, Nizhny Novgorod had ten daily and weekly newspa-
pers.45 Of those, the most prominent was the liberal large-format daily Volgar’
(Volga native), and the most neglected was the weekly Koz’ma Minin, pub-
lished by the local monarchists. The story of Minin is the story of frequent
production interruptions, changing of editors, legal prosecutions, and finan-
cial crisis.46 In this city of over one hundred thousand predominantly “true
Russian” inhabitants, the Russian nationalist newspaper could not sustain
itself economically. Sales were insufficient, but in 1909, only two sponsors
each agreed to donate a meager 50 rubles monthly to the newspaper.47 Money
was so scarce that when the editor was once again fined 100 rubles by the court
for slander with an option to serve one month in jail, the editor chose to serve
the term in order to save the money.48 The newspaper was edited by unquali-
fied people (at best, by typography workers), who were paid a scant 10 rubles
a month for their direct duties (less than the lowest-paid shop assistants), or
30 rubles a month if jailed—but even this money had to be squeezed out of
the Union of the Russian People through litigation.49 The newspaper was shut
down several times and had to reopen, changing its names, which included:
Koz’ma Minin, Minin the Withered Arm (Minin Sukhorukii), the Voice of Minin
(Golos Minina). This means that members of the educated (text-centered)
society in Nizhny Novgorod did not support politicization of ethnicity.
In Kazan, the respectable Kazan Telegraph occupied the niche of ultrana-
tionalist periodical. A daily paper, it had the largest print run in town (4,200–
4,800 copies),50 rivaled only by the liberal daily the Kama and Volga Speech
(Kamsko-Volzhskaia Rech’). The Telegraph was a truly informative newspaper,
not just a bigoted rag, but many of its materials catered to the monarchist
and chauvinist audience. Its editor and publisher, Nikolai Iliashenko, was also
regularly fined and sued several times every year, and sentenced to as much
as six months in jail (in addition to serious fines).51 However, his newspa-
per successfully survived these blows and prospered financially. The fusion of
chauvinism with information services made it popular within certain circles of
educated Kazanians, while Koz’ma Minin in Nizhny Novgorod could not sell
bigotry and did not have the resources to compete with Volgar’ as mass media.
The difference between the popular perceptions of mainstream and mar-
ginal journalism in Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod can be seen in the following
parallel incidents. One August morning in 1908, a monk arrived in Kazan
by commuter train. On the platform, he asked the news vendor Oparin
what newspapers he had for sale. He had the Kazan Telegraph and the liberal
Volga Leaflet (Volzhskii Listok). “I know the Telegraph, show me the Leaflet!”
The monk purchased a copy of the newspaper, inspected it, and became so

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 65

outraged by its content that he tore it into small pieces. “This is the Antichrist
newspaper! Thank the Lord, I have just saved one soul!” Another newsboy
approached:

—What newspapers do you have?

—I have the Telegraph, the Leaflet, and the Speech.
—Give me the devilish antichrist the Leaflet and the Speech! How much do
they cost?
—5 kopecks! . . .
—I’ll take all that you have for 3 kopecks, even 40 copies! Forty souls will
be saved!

But the newsboy did not lower his price, and the monk did not have 2
rubles for soul-saving.52
Four years later, in Nizhny Novgorod, a news vendor Bobrov, who sold
only the Minin, was walking through the Troitsk square, passing by cabmen
waiting for passengers. One cabman asked:

—So is your newspaper any good?

—It is good!
—The newspaper the Voice of Minin is a hooligan one, same as Purishkevich
[a leader of the Union of Russian People]!
—Why are you scolding the newspaper? protested the vendor.

Instead of replying, the cabman punched him.53

People could sue the Kazan Telegraph for certain articles, but no Russian
resident of Kazan would challenge its status as the leading periodical by attack-
ing a vendor on the street, while leftist newspapers, such as the Volga Messenger
(Volzhskii Vestnik) and the Volga Leaflet, belonged to the sphere of contested
public opinion and had dubious standing.54 (However, a vendor attempting
to sell the Telegraph in the Tatar-dominated quarters of the city quite possi-
bly would have been beaten up.) In Nizhny Novgorod, nationalists had mar-
ginal public status. Apparently, respectable newspapers did not want vendors
to sell them together with the Minin (as was the case in Odessa with the local
nationalist press).55 Members of the Union of Russian People were insulted on
the streets by their brethren, not unlike the above-described incident concern-
ing news vendor Bobrov.56 In turn, nationalists in Nizhny Novgorod targeted
their Russian opponents, including open-minded clerics, thus camouflaging
personal and group rivalries by higher ideological considerations.57 When they
turned to their sworn enemies, the Jews, the purity of their ideological zeal

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was only further compromised. Thus, when the leader of the local nationalists,
the priest Orlovskii, attempted to justify his promotion (he was assigned the
best parish in town) by loud ideological rattling in an attempt to compensate
for poor organizational work, he spoke out against the “occupation” of Nizhny
Novgorod by Jewish commercial signs. (“You cannot imagine that you are in
Nizhny, and not in some Berdichev.”) As the acerbic liberal press pointed out,
Orlovskii himself was not an innocent victim of this supposed “occupation.”
The building in which he lived (owned by his church) was covered with signs
that would have been impossible to post without his authorization as the land-
lord. Two of the signs belonged to Jewish merchants because, by raising the
rent, Orlovskii had driven out the old Russian leaseholders, whose places were
taken by well-to-do Jews.58
In Kazan, Russian nationalists were guided by Kazan University professor
Vladislav Zalesskii (the son of a Polish nobleman exiled to Kazan) and the
successful journalist Nikolai Iliashenko (born to a Ukrainian gentry family
in Kiev province and exiled in 1879 for populist politics to Viatka, and then
to Kazan). The educated society’s support of the Russian nationalist agenda
in Kazan manifested itself in the social profile of nationalist leaders: they
belonged not just to the upper class, but to those in control of public dis-
course (a university professor and a popular journalist). In Nizhny Novgorod,
nationalists were headed by “true Russian” peasants, petty clerks, traders, and
clergymen (such as the priest Orlovskii)—at best occupying the border zone
between the public sphere and plebeian society, if not belonging to the latter.59
The significant asymmetry in attitudes toward nationalist politics as dis-
course in Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod tells little about the degree of
politicization of ethnicity within plebeian society. Moreover, the term
“politicization of ethnicity” seems to inaccurately characterize even the pub-
lic sphere in Kazan, as can be seen in the following example. In 1911, the
Kazan Telegraph published a rude and seemingly purposeless feuilleton that
parodied an exchange between two liberal newspapers, Russkoe slovo (Moscow)
and Kamsko-volzhskaia rech’ (Kazan), as a telephone conversation between two
“Yids,” in broken Russian.60 As anti-Semitic as it is, with its slurs and primi-
tive jokes, this feuilleton was actually aimed at discrediting liberal politicians
and liberal newspapers (rather than harassing a small Jewish community in
Kazan), using the language of ethnic hatred to smear political opponents. In
a certain cultural milieu, “Yid” was a universal stigmatizing label for all kinds
of opponents, and, therefore, anti-Semitic language could express a variety of
animosities not necessarily related to Jews.61 The conventional term “politi-
cization of ethnicity” implies that historical actors consciously and directly

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 67

engaged the analytical category of latter-day social analysis, in this case “eth-
nicity,” for political purposes. Here we see something else: no actual “ethnic-
ity” of liberal newspapers was politicized—rather, their political otherness
is what was underlined by ethnic slurs. Likewise, the article about the Tatar
Aligulla Bililiatdinov quoted earlier surely politicized the Tatarness of the
leader of the expropriators, but his exaggerated depiction as an ultimate alien
was not just about ethnicity (for once, Islamic faith is not the primary ethnic
marker). Confession, race, and politics were amalgamated in a syncretic imag-
ery of the Other. Thus, it seems more accurate to speak instead of the rhetori-
cal “ethnicization of politics.” This was part of a more general mechanism of
marking any social conflicts and differences in general by the most obvious
ethnocultural characteristics.
Even more fundamentally, the ethnicization of politics as demonstrated by
members of the elite public sphere revealed the type of operation with abstract
concepts that more characterized plebeian society. As with the imagery of
mass culture, political notions were taken out of their proper context (the
political discourse) and applied within the logic of creative misunderstanding,
communicating some very different meanings for some very different goals.
Technically speaking, elements of the secondary modeling system were used as
part of the primary modeling system: a concept with some embedded explana-
tory potential was applied as a simple label. For example, calling someone “the
baron of millionaires” in a newspaper feuilleton would imply that someone
occupied a position of special authority within the top strata of captains of
industry and finance. In an anonymous letter (as we saw in chapter 1), this was
simply a way to communicate a message of class disparity with the addressee,
Nikolai Rastorguev, who was perceived as being rich (although he did not own
any business or real estate). This was a double distortion of the correct usage of
the concept. First, Rastorguev was not exceptionally rich. Second, the proper
way to underline his upper-class status was to call him a “capitalist” or, at least,
a burzhui. Thus, the openness of the anonymous letter’s authors to influences
of the elite textual culture did not mean that they could adequately use the
borrowed ideas and concepts.
The only way to assess the actual degree of the influence of plebeian society
using the discursive sphere of politics is to look beyond the words and texts
to social gestures and practices. After all, even the developed public sphere in
Kazan demonstrated a purely performative kind of ethnicization of politics by
employing concepts as metaphors, ignoring their discursive connotations.
In practical terms, in Nizhny Novgorod there was little demand for the
readily available mechanism of xenophobic political mobilization. It was one

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of the few imperial cities that did not witness any serious reactionary mob
violence in the wake of the October Manifesto of 1905 (which culminated
in a horrible pogrom in Odessa and serious bloodshed in other places).62 The
notorious “black hundreds” showed no resolve or even coherence in Nizhny
Novgorod in the face of escalating revolutionary radicalism. Perhaps the lack
of support for the nationalist mob on behalf of the governor Konstantin
Frederiks also played a role.
In Kazan, the October Manifesto was followed by the formation of a de
facto revolutionary government by the town council members, who immedi-
ately announced several revolutionary measures (including shutting down the
central marketplace for profiteering).63 A patriotic demonstration gathered to
display loyalty to the monarchy received an additional impetus from traders
outraged by the town council’s decisions. The demonstration was very reluc-
tantly supported by the governor, Pavel Khomutov, and guarded by police-
men in civilian clothes. The violence escalated to the point where the agitated
demonstrators were attacked by revolutionaries shooting from the windows of
city hall. The ensuing urban riot targeted revolutionaries, students, and Jews.
There were instances of looting of Jewish businesses, destruction of the Judaic
prayer house, and the murder of a Russian militia leader. These events, habitu-
ally characterized as a “pogrom against Jews” and seemingly demonstrating
the strength of the Kazan “black hundreds,” provide a clue to the specificity of
ethnicization of politics in Kazan, in comparison to Nizhny Novgorod.
The Kazan “pogrom” was promptly investigated, which led to a series of
trials that were well publicized in the local press. Curiously, while official
investigators in other regions tried by all means to downplay the xenopho-
bic motivations of rioters, the state prosecutor in Kazan insisted on sen-
tencing the perpetrators not just for looting, theft, public disorder, and one
instance of homicide, but also for “acting out of ethnic or religious hatred”
(which would have seriously worsened their situation if they were con-
victed). The defenders of the accused pogromists, in turn, tried to dismiss
the latter charge, bringing forward abundant evidence proving that the riot
was orchestrated by a “third force” that provided free alcohol and identified
targets (including Jews) to be attacked,64 and demanded an investigation of
the link between that “third force” and the administration (something one
would expect from sympathizers of the revolutionaries). Finally, the victims,
mostly Jews, who could be expected to support the prosecutor, described a
more complicated picture.
Dentist Dymshits happened to rent an apartment in a tenement building
next to the apartment briefly occupied by revolutionary militia members. He

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 69

was with two Russian female patients when he heard the crowd entering the
building. He locked the apartment and was hidden by the personnel, while
the crowd stormed the militia room. Disappointed when they did not find
anyone, and attracted by the Jewish name on his sign, they broke down his
door. (They wrecked the place and robbed one of his Russian patients.) Dr.
Dymshits testified that he had never before observed ethnic or religious ani-
mosity on the part of the Russian population toward Jews.65 The owner of
a metal shop, Gleizer, was warned about the planned pogrom by a Russian
stove-setter. He left the town and wandered in the countryside for several
days, as did a number of other Jewish families. The mob took down Gleizer’s
sign from the building and broke windows, but did not attempt to loot inside.
People chanted, “We are breaking the windows of Yids!”—as if surprised by
their own actions—or reporting “mission accomplished.” Gleizer declared
that he had never encountered hostility toward the Jews before. His neigh-
bor, Gendel, fled the town later that night. He asked a cabman to take his
family to the pier—the cabman agreed, but charged a double fare (because
they were Jews, or because it was late and dangerous). When they reached
the destination, a night guard extorted 1 ruble for safe passage (“or else, I
will call the stevedores to beat up Yids”). However, Gendel also declared that
he had never experienced anti-Jewish feelings before. Shifrin, the owner of a
pillaged binding shop, was warned about the pogrom by his Russian acquain-
tances and left in advance; Mrs. Razdol’skaia was warned about the pogrom
by Moiseev, who was himself one of the accused pogromists.66 Likewise, Mr.
Ester was undressed by pogromists in his apartment, but one of them (Emel’an
D’iachkov) prevented any further violence, and two Russian women hid him.
Finally, Mr. Kissin, a Jew, himself participated in the “patriotic” (nationalist)
demonstration. He had been living in Kazan for forty years, had never seen
any animosity between Jews and Christians, and did not believe in the reality
of a pogrom until the very last moment. In turn, the accused pogromists, who
were mostly beggars and recidivists, pleaded no anti-Jewish feelings.67 By con-
trast, explicit anti-Semitic feelings were expressed at another trial of suspected
murderers of a Russian militiaman, and by a different category of pogrom-
ists—traders and merchants, members of monarchist unions (like the defen-
dants). These people voiced their indignation over the October 1905 ban on
trade imposed by the revolutionary city government, and protested against the
“Yids, Armenians, and those sponger students ruling the town.”68 They testi-
fied that the patriotic demonstration was inspired by the calls: “The town is
under control of kids, trade has halted, Yids are to be blamed!”69 Once again,
political and economic conflicts became superficially ethnicized out of a desire

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to stress the otherness of opponents, and in the absence of developed ideology

and institutionalized party politics.

Ethnicity-Based Mutual Misunderstandings: Creative and Not

The October riot as action directe most vividly demonstrates how the “middle
ground” works even in conflicts. Amid the general frustration caused by the
apparent collapse of the social order and the traditional world view, threat-
ening certain economic interests and social status, a significant part of the
population self-organized to restore the social and political status quo. The
patriotic demonstration included not only Russians but also many Tatars and
a few Jews. The only overarching idea for this diverse group was loyalty to the
regime, but there was no practical scenario of social action associated with this
idea, except for public rejoicing (which was inappropriate under the circum-
stances). “Black hundred” activists of the recently emerged nationalist unions
offered their own practice of mass politics: an aggressive march modeled after
traditional religious processions, and a pogrom directed against Jews. This was
already a primitive scenario of mass-scale social action, but it could have only
limited applicability in Kazan. The majority of those who joined the patri-
otic demonstrations were not ready to unleash violence; besides criminals, few
would have any motivation to pillage the Jews; non-Russians were reluctant
to support any Russian nationalist agenda. Indeed, Tatars participating in the
procession attempted to save the Russian militiaman who was beaten to death
by “black hundred” activists,70 while the mob did not really get beyond sym-
bolic violence in its anti-Jewish attacks. In fact, all Jews in Kazan who partici-
pated in the trials as victims were saved by local Russians, and not necessarily
out of philo-Semitism (remember the night guard earning an easy ruble from
Gendel): they just did not want to harm Jews (or anyone else, for that mat-
ter). In the absence of any other scenario of mass politics, some people got
involved in the ethnicization of politics, but very few would actually politi-
cize ethnicity. Many people who wanted to support social order found the
only outlet for their feelings in the patriotic demonstration orchestrated by
nationalists, but they did not really follow the readily available scenario to the
end—that is, a true Jewish pogrom (perhaps 1–2 percent of Jewish families
suffered any attacks in October 1905). In turn, Kazan radical nationalists for
tactical reasons had to seek the support of conservative Tatars, and invited
them to the Union of Russian People, promising them the honorary title of
“True Russian Muslims” (an oxymoron for nationalist leaders in Moscow or
St. Petersburg) and—as a symbolic gesture of local importance—recognition

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 71

of the “Tatarness” of the “Syumbeke” tower in Kazan Kremlin, the symbol

of Russian domination over the region.71 So much for the politicization of
ethnicity: the logic of political loyalism undermined the drive of ethnoconfes-
sional (nationalist) mobilization. Ethnicity was used as a label or metaphor
rather than as part of public discourse even within the public sphere.
We can apply this analysis to explain the popularity of Kazanskii Telegraf
among the educated public: in the situation of gradual emancipation of the
Tatar population, and its greater visibility and influence, many underprivi-
leged social groups of ethnic Russians felt that their only social capital (their
“self-evident” superiority over “Muslims”) had rapidly devalued. In fact, this
social capital was validated exclusively by the official public discourse and legal
norms, which were of little help in the predominantly nondiscursive plebeian
society and at a time of social upheaval. Besides the elusiveness of declared
advantages, it was dangerous to attempt imposing them by force; as Robert
Geraci concluded in his study, “Russians in close proximity to the Tatars
were more realistic about the consequences of provoking Russian-Tatar con-
flict.”72 Those educated Russians (including Iliashenko, the publisher of the
Telegraph), who were dreaming about restoring the dominant role of Russians
and felt anxious about the rising Tatar factor, had to restrain themselves in
their discourse and speak just of “Yids” (as the ultimate symbol of all things
non-Russian), only indirectly revealing their deep anti-Tatar sentiments (as in
the report of the forester’s expropriation). In turn, their use of anti-Semitic
rhetoric was sometimes merely a vehicle for the ethnicization of politics,
sometimes a legitimate cover for expressing hostility toward much more real
and dangerous “alien elements” (Tatars).
The actual state of individual and group anti-Semitism cannot be accu-
rately assessed by analyzing discourse. Social practices should be used as the
most informative language of self-representation of social groups that did not
produce an elaborated discourse of their own and only “borrowed for spe-
cial occasions” discourses produced by other groups.73 Thus, the anti-Semi-
tism of the most popular Kazan newspaper (the Telegraph) and the visibility
of Russian nationalists had no substantiation in popular social practices: in
Kazan, people did not reveal particular anti-Jewish animosity even in the rage
of a staged pogrom. From this vantage point, the differences between Kazan,
with its explicitly ethnicized language of differences in the public sphere, and
Nizhny Novgorod, with its dominating but unqualified Russianness, seem
superficial. In both cities, people used languages and tropes borrowed from
the discursive sphere to frame their social experience, but those readily avail-
able tropes only partially expressed their own agendas. In a sense, many people

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did not practice what they preached—for example, did Father Orlovskii actu-
ally call his leaseholders “Yids” and demand that they get out of a Russian
town? This disconnection of discourse from social practice forms an important
aspect of the systematic misunderstandings of the middle ground: it is not that
Russians and Tatars did not understand each other well in Kazan (although
this was also the case), the major problem was their usage of invalid categories
and language to articulate their commonalities and differences. We can trace
these misunderstandings to mundane and absolutely trivial social interactions
as reflected in textual reality.
For instance, there was a universal standard of newspaper ads for part-time
and professional tutors, offering their services to various categories of students
(from primary school to university). These ads would mention the tutor’s qual-
ifications and contact information, but rarely any additional relevant details
because every additional word cost extra. In general, there was no difference
between Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod in such ads. An ad published in a Kazan
liberal newspaper in 1908, however, was a bit different. It began with the
heading “Mathematics student BRONSHTEIN TUTORS AND PREPARES
. . .” with “Bronshtein” set not just in all caps but also in a font size three times
bigger than the regular text of the advertisement.74 Given that the locale was
Kazan, we might suspect that the ad had a hidden message, informing poten-
tial clients about the tutor’s Jewishness.75 At least the ad differed radically from
ten other advertisements of private tutors in the same issue. Two weeks later,
another student tutor published an ad highlighting his name, although with a
slightly different accent: “STUDENT KUNIN prepares for school graduation
exams.” The former ad stressed only the tutor’s name in the provided list of
his social identities (academic specialization, occupation, surname), the latter
highlighted the formal title of the tutor (compared to, for example, “Professor
Kunin” or “Mr. Kunin”).76 Whatever the motives of the student Bronshtein,
his original ad was perceived by fellow tutors simply as a good marketing trick.
“Student Kunin” discontinued his ads, but apparently contributed to the nor-
malization of a new practice. Within a few months, another professional tutor
began using his name as a brand (printing it in all caps and in a much bigger
font than the main text): “A. M. BASOV: a student . . .”77 The subtle differ-
ence between these ads is the function of using the tutor’s name: stressing that
“Bronshtein tutors” implies that it is self-evident who or what “Bronshtein”
is (without the first name or initials). “Student Kunin” and “A. M. Basov”
report the actual identity of the advertisers. What may have been intended
as a marker of belonging to a minority group was misinterpreted as a new
mainstream practice, and in fact became one. By the same token, the student

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 73

Bronshtein’s voluntarily accepted and displayed stigma of minority alienation

(as a Jew) was unexpectedly weakened by a misunderstanding that generated
“new meanings and through them new practices—the shared meanings and
practices of the middle ground” of Kazan.78 He wanted to communicate that
he was special because he was “Bronshtein”—but there were people chal-
lenging his exclusiveness, because being a Russian Basov or Kunin was no
worse in their eyes (and thus no different) than being a Jewish Bronshtein.
A very different incident in Nizhny Novgorod also tells the story of an erro-
neous assumption based on prior habits of thought. On February 24, 1909,
thieves broke into the jewelry shop of the Jewish merchant Kuperman, steal-
ing goods worth almost 8,000 rubles. Kuperman accused the son of the neigh-
boring teahouse owner, Vasiliev, who was arrested as the primary suspect.79
Apparently, there was a history of conflicts between the wealthy Jewish mer-
chant and his Russian neighbor. Several weeks later, police cracked the bur-
glary: the crime was committed by two Russian recidivists in cooperation with
a Jew, Israel Peisel’. Peisel’ arranged to sell the stolen goods and was also able
to guide the thieves to the shop in the first place.80 This criminal alliance was
not accidental: on January 8, the same two recidivists burglarized the cloth
shop belonging to Ivan Takin on the central Bolshaia Pokrovskaia street, steal-
ing goods worth 1,500 rubles. As it turned out, they broke in from the metal
shop located one floor below in the same building, with the participation of
the shop owner, who happened to be the same Israel Peisel’.81 There were pos-
sibly more episodes of their criminal collaboration between early January and
late March (when Peisel’ fled town).82 Thus, rather than exploiting the readily
available explanation of interethnic conflict, Kuperman would have done bet-
ter to search for a clue in interethnic cooperation. This case demonstrates that
in their interaction with the society at large or with the authorities (as when
reporting a crime), in the public sphere, people could use ready tropes and
discourses to mark conflicts in familiar categories of “us” and “them,” while
for practical purposes it was more rational to rely not on abstract principles
of social groupings, but on informal networks and practices of neighborhood
solidarity and comradeship.
In this perspective, the case of Peisel’ should not be seen as extraordinary,
and it was not. In December 1906, police raided a well-known hideout in
Nizhny Novgorod searching for stolen goods. The apartment belonged to a
Russian woman of peasant legal estate, Kozlova, who lived there with her boy-
friend, Jewish recidivist Iosif Golubev. Also in the apartment at the time of
the raid were two Russian thieves. The search produced some burglary tools,
which one of the Russians declared he had purchased for thievery.83 He might

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have been covering for someone else (perhaps for the Jewish recidivist who
lived there), as that Russian thief was the only one without proper identifica-
tion documents, and was therefore subject to deportation from the city any-
way. In September 1909, Nizhegorod criminal police operatives spotted three
Russian thieves in a tavern in the company of a Tatar nicknamed “Saliaika.”
The detectives had no interest in familiar faces, and they attempted to arrest
“Saliaika.” However, the Russians intervened to the point of staging a brawl
with the police. While they let “Saliaika” escape, they were arrested themselves
for attacking the policemen.84 Similar, if less dramatic cases of Russo-Tatar
thief partnerships were registered in Kazan as well.85
The partnerships were anything but evidence of friendship among peoples,
just as opposite cases of conflict did not reveal any conscious interethnic ani-
mosity: most townspeople just did not operate in these discursive categories.
They lived their lives trying to make sense of spontaneous circumstances that
usually transcended formal legal and sociological divides. Another police
search in Nizhny Novgorod on February 25, 1906, produced no results,
except for the peculiar social composition of the inhabitants in the apart-
ment they searched. The apartment owner, Praskov’ia Lanenkova (a Russian
woman of peasant background), lived with Makhmud Musin (a Tatar peas-
ant) and Tatiana Obrezkova (a Russian, the wife of a hereditary honorary citi-
zen, who probably lived separately from her husband without getting a formal
divorce).86 A combination of personal circumstances, the pressures of the real
estate market, and pure chance brought together people of different ethnocon-
fessional and social status, and forged new social ties above any formally and
discursively enforced divides.
In Kazan, on July 4, 1907, a Russian worker witnessed a young Russian
lad pickpocketing a Tatar. The worker pointed to the thief, who was severely
beaten by a crowd of Tatars and arrested.87 On almost this very date five
years later, when the Tatar owner of a grocery store in a building owned by
a Russian landlord was attacked by two raging Tatar customers, he was saved
by a Russian worker who rented a room in the same building.88 More often
we learn of long-lasting Russo-Tatar relations from reports of their confronta-
tions: a Mrs. Presniakova had a male Tatar friend, but when someone stole a
silver icon lamp from her worth 27 rubles, he became the primary suspect.89 A
couple of days later, a Russian merchant, Podoprelov, invited his Tatar friend,
Zabirzianov, to the pub. After a drinking session, when Podoprelov could not
find his wallet containing 94 rubles, he suspected Zabirzianov of stealing.90
A week later, there was another similar situation: a Russian, Bratikov, after
heavy drinking with a Tatar, Nasybullin, seized him by the throat, took his

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 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground 75

wallet, and threw him out of the pub.91 In these cases, it would be a typical
misunderstanding produced by the middle ground to read the conflicts as a
moment of truth signifying the fundamental dividing lines. Police records and
newspaper criminal chronicles of the period are full of depictions of seemingly
unmotivated assaults on brethren and even family members. Understandably,
any conflict mobilized all markers of differences to validate or at least explain
an assault, and ethnoconfessional differences were the most common markers,
particularly in Kazan. The anomic life of an urban society in flux automati-
cally generated conflicts; what required a personal decision and choice was not
confrontation, but cooperation. To a social historian, the facts of friendship
tell more about late imperial society than do momentary acts of violence.

A Mistaken Identity: Between a Social Persona and Social Practices

The best illustration of the middle ground nature of late imperial Middle
Volga towns can be found in the mysterious case of a fraudulent check cashed
by a stranger in August 1906 at the Kazan Merchant Bank. Someone with-
drew the handsome sum of 8,200 rubles (equivalent to three annual salaries
of an upper-middle-class civil servant or professional) from the bank account
of the wealthy Tatar merchant Akhmet Khusainov. The police failed to crack
this case, which resembles an Agatha Christie mystery: in the seemingly patri-
archal firm, every employee close to the head of the business was under suspi-
cion.92 Ethnicity played a prominent part in the logic of the investigation, but
proved futile in the end. The missing sum was discovered by a Jewish lawyer,
Alexander Bat, who was auditing the firm’s finances in March 1907, after the
death of its head. Two of the late merchant’s Tatar assistants (or rather confi-
dants), who had vague duties, were in charge of keeping the checkbook and
the personal seal of Akhmet Khusainov, but these respected gentlemen were
beyond the suspicions of the auditor. He suggested that the clerk Mukhamet-
Valei Saidashev (also a Tatar) had the opportunity to steal a check when he was
summoned to the main office: on his meager salary of 35 rubles a month, in
the fall of 1906, Saidashev made a few expensive purchases, and then moved
to Semipalatinsk (in present-day Kazakhstan).93 The director of the Kazan
Merchant Bank, Boris Sapozhnikov, defending the bank’s reputation, sug-
gested that the check had been accepted because it was authentic: why else
would no one notice the misappropriation of such a considerable sum for over
half a year? Sapozhnikov declared that after such a long time, neither he nor
his employees would recognize the person who had cashed the check, but sug-
gested that he was dressed like a Russian, had a “French beard,” and did not

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look “like a Tatar.”94 The only person fitting this description was Mukhamed
Davletshin, one of the confidants of the merchant Khusainov, who looked
after the checkbook. As it turned out, on his small salary of 50 rubles a month,
Davletshin had the means to pay for his wife to live in a spa in Groznyi, and
in the fall of 1906 he lent more than 1,000 rubles to another employee.
Davletshin spoke Russian without an accent and lived with his Russian lover
in Kazan in a predominantly Russian neighborhood.95 Naturally, Davletshin
denied all accusations (he claimed that he had won the money gambling) and
pointed out that while the Russian signature on the check in question was
quite typical of Khusainov’s, the second, Tatar, signature was very differ-
ent and had been done by someone unable to write in Tatar (i.e., in Arabic
script). There was a Russian capable of doing the forgery—the accountant
Kliucharev, who for some reason did not request statements from the bank
for six months, which was a direct violation of his duties and resulted in the
overly late discovery of the missing money.96 The investigation reached a
dead end after interrogations of a dozen people failed to uncover any deci-
sive evidence to put forward official charges. The date of the crime led to
two interpretations: August 11, 1906, was Friday, the Muslim holiday. Some
saw this as proof that the perpetrator belonged to the Tatar circle around
Khusainov, who had cunningly arranged a perfect alibi for himself.97 Others
perceived it as revealing a Russian trail of evidence. The real problem was
the meaninglessness of ethnic markers as self-explanatory codes of social
practice: what kind of patriarchal relations end up in a fraudulent financial
scheme? What does someone’s “Tatarness” mean if a person has a Russian
lover, gambles, and probably steals from his brethren? How can a Russian
steal if the checkbook and the seal are kept by two Tatar confidants of the
boss? It is quite possible that the entire affair was a collective enterprise,
requiring the cooperation of both Russians and Tatars. The greatest mystery
behind this story is not the identity of the perpetrators, but the mechanisms
of social cooperation transcending the rigid cultural boundaries (although,
clearly, with criminal intentions).
The Khusainov affair suggests that discursively constructed social identities
(and even those consciously interiorized by historical actors) are fairly inde-
pendent from actions and individual choices of people living “beneath any
discourse.” This disconnection between the static social persona and dynamic
behavior is characteristic of the process of acquiring a new common knowl-
edge that arose through misunderstandings of mutual projections. Tatar writ-
ers of the epoch documented this dialectic process of alienation of actual
practices from life scenarios implied by someone’s social identity. Thus, in the

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play characteristically titled Tigezsezliar (Mismatched), written in 1914, Fatih

Amirhan introduces the main protagonist,

Gaziz, [whose] religious identity is based on private Islam and is juxtaposed

to the hypocritical public religiosity of older generation. In the first act of
the play, Gaziz’s father accuses his son of “not performing the ritual prayer,
studying Russian to get into Russian university, dressing like a European,
and socializing with Russian women.” The father complains that Gaziz is
trying to be someone else, “not Tatar.” Gaziz makes fun of the father’s “real
Tatar” friends, who are known to visit the brothels, have Russian lovers,
drink alcohol and have very little scholarly knowledge about Islam.98

Truly spiritual Muslim believers could look utterly Russianized, while tra-
ditionalists by appearance could privately indulge themselves in all kinds of
“alien” sins: both scenarios of “mismatch” served as important bridges between
different cultural worlds. The most mundane instances of shifted meaning
or outright misunderstanding concerning someone’s identity could lead to
important practical consequences. Thus, the significance of the advertising by
the private tutor, student Bronshtein, may be dismissed as a whim of a type-
setter, but it fits well into the general pattern of professionals’ practice in the
region. Both practitioners and their clients knew who was Jewish and what
that Jewishness implied, with that knowledge based in some cases on occa-
sional anti-Semitic attitudes. Yet neither party systematically used the Jewish
social identity in everyday practice, either positively or negatively. All Jews did
not, for example, uncompromisingly follow the Judaic traditions, nor did non-
Jews systematically boycott services provided by Jews. To be a Jew or a Tatar
was not the same as to act as one. And it was not only minorities who dis-
covered the contrast between normative social identity and lived experiences.
Even in “Russian” Nizhny Novgorod, the seemingly self-evident Russianness
of the population became problematized by its traditional association with
religion. The significant presence of Old Believers in town made marriages
between the Orthodox and sectarians not infrequent, but the formalities
involved were so complicated that sometimes legal prosecution resulted.99
Basically, two “pure Russian” people had almost as much hassle marrying each
other as did a Russian and a Tatar!
It is possible that the new common knowledge arising through misunder-
standings of mutual projections in everyday life and within plebeian society
itself was affecting the domain of public discourses. This influence was visible
in the most practice-oriented sector of the bourgeois public sphere, namely, in
the space of professional services and commerce. In Nizhny Novgorod there

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were two private clinics that employed medical doctors with established repu-
tations. The first private clinic was located in the central Bolshaia Pokrovskaia
street, and half of its specialists were Jews. The second private clinic was situ-
ated in the neighborhood of petty townspeople, along a busy route. Four out
of eleven physicians working together were Jews.100 In Kazan, there was just
one private clinic of this type. Characteristically, it was located on the sym-
bolic border between the traditional Tatar and Russian parts of the city, on
Moscow Street. Forty percent of its specialists were Jewish.101 Incidentally, all
Jewish doctors in both Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan scheduled their reception
hours on Saturdays (the traditional Jewish day of rest), opting to have days
off on other days of the week. Likewise, Tatar shopkeepers in Kazan not only
traded on Sundays, causing constant complaints on the part of their Russian
competitors, but also during Muslim holidays, this time provoking protests
from Tatar traditionalists.102
Practical interest in the “Other,” coupled with the need to seek a com-
promise, gradually changed the outlook of the public sphere. In Kazan, the
constant self-constraint of the Russian, Orthodox Christian majority vis-à-
vis the all-too-visible presence of the Tatar population resulted, as we have
already concluded, in frustration that manifested itself in the passive sup-
port of nationalist organizations and publications. However, there was also a
productive result of that self-constraint: a virtual taboo on any practical eth-
nic discrimination, and growing knowledge about the Other. This knowl-
edge was produced on all levels, from personal communication on the street
to mass media that catered predominantly to the groups integrated into
educated elite society. All Kazan’s major newspapers, including the crypto-
Tatarophobic Telegraph, had regular sections “From the Life of Muslims” or
simply “The Muslim Life.”
The liberal Volga Leaflet was the most active in this respect, informing its
readers about new periodicals in the Tatar language and reporting on impor-
tant events in the Tatar community, including Muslim holidays. In doing so,
it demonstrated its own agenda, juxtaposing progressive elements and fanati-
cism, paying particular attention to those aspects of Tatar social life that can
be interpreted in categories of European modernity (female emancipation,
Russian language classes, theater performances, cooperative associations,
etc.).103 Although full of sympathy toward Tatars, these publications still pro-
duced misunderstandings and mutual dissatisfaction caused by attempts “to
persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they
perceive to be the values and the practices of those others” (in the words of
Richard White). The emerging dialogue was not necessarily gratifyingly polite:

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for instance, a Tatar newspaper Baianulkhak was outraged by the seemingly

neutral reference to it in the Volga Leaflet as “a fairly moderate publication.”
The editors of Baianulkhak misinterpreted the characterization of their news-
paper as “a reactionary and conservative publication,” and responded with a
harsh critique to the Volga Leaflet. The Russian newspaper was offended, its
writers having had the best intentions, and published a letter signed “A Tatar
reader,” arguing that Baianulkhak was indeed a conservative publication.104
Despite this conflict, we should add that Baianulkhak was in turn prominent
in bridging the Russo-Tatar divide. The next year, the newspaper commis-
sioned and published as a separate volume a Tatar translation of writings by
Leo Tolstoy,105 popularizing Russian culture but possibly also causing new
misunderstandings among educated readers.
The emerging common social sphere of the middle ground was based on
relativization of confessional boundaries (and hence identities), instinctively
opting for universalizing categories of European modernity. For example,
extensive coverage of the Tatar folklore summer festival Sabantui was delib-
erately presented by the Volga Leaflet in the language of modern sport: it was
characterized as the “Tatar national sport festival,” in which “Muslims want
to see the pure celebration of strength and dexterity,” with the participation
of “sportsmen Tatars.”106 (Note another novelty in this interpretation of a
festival common to all Middle Volga peoples: calling it “national,” and con-
ceptualizing Tatars as a nation, rather than a confessional group, as was com-
mon before.107) Sport—as well as business, cooperative associations, and other
universal and transnational institutes of modernity—allowed the creation of
a new (both social practices-based and discursive) common space of the mid-
dle ground; “folklore festivals” and religious piety did not. The vast majority
of townspeople, however, did not read newspapers, and were little affected
by new discursive strategies. They relied on the local knowledge of a specific
social milieu and street, and expressed themselves regularly through body poli-
tics. Joint drinking meant sympathy, a punch in the mouth indicated a dis-
agreement, a stolen watch could mean a pretense of being smarter.
Thus, the middle ground of two Middle Volga cities was a two-tier phenom-
enon, involving semiautonomous spheres of discursive projections and social
practices. The dominant role of plebeian society in the social composition of
Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod made particularly prominent social practices
and firsthand experiences, rather than abstract concepts. Social status could
inform the way people processed information and made choices, but not the
outcome of decision-making as such. To complicate matters further, in the
society of recent migrants, people were caught between their social personae

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and habits of thought, formed before moving to town, and the challenges of a
new social environment. This, in part, explains a peculiar economic rationality
that allowed regular people (not professional criminals) to opt for petty crime
while risking a seemingly stable income and social status. As Hans Medick
perceptively pointed out with regard to Early Modern European society, the
masses of townspeople “continued to act according to the rules of a peasant
or craftsman, family-based, subsistence economy,” where “money income that
exceeded the expenses of meeting the immediate, short-term demands of sub-
sistence was . . . viewed as a surplus above life’s necessities.”108 To many people,
who did not know how to invest additional income, or were afraid that any
available cash would be immediately consumed by paying off debts, rents, and
taxes, “a strategy of money saving or, indeed, one of maximizing earning was
. . . neither rational nor possible; what was rational was to minimise the con-
tinually threatened losses, and that implied the immediate spending of money
income.”109 “In comparison with the principles of bourgeois thrift and fore-
sight, . . . the economy of the plebeian orders distinguished itself by the fact
that their expenditure stood in no ‘proper’ relation to their revenue.”110 In the
historical context of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, this meant a hit-and-run
strategy for people like Israel Peisel’, who preferred (illegally) real money and
abandoning financial and symbolic capital in the form of a metal shop and
unblemished social reputation, which they could not utilize efficiently anyway.
Rather than emulating “a ‘middle-class’ ethic of life and work,” members of
plebeian society invested in strengthening “the bonds of kinship, neighbor-
hood and friendship,”111 often across ethnoconfessional and social lines. Social
knowledge and personal contacts became the dominant form of capital—
much more important than financial assets.
Thus we can see that the middle ground situation in late imperial Russian
cities was characterized by the intensified contacts of different ethnoconfes-
sional groups, the radical divorce of articulated public discourses with social
practices on the ground, and by the distinction between social ideals and
norms introduced by the upper classes and economic rationality of plebeian
society. Each of these divides was gradually breached through conflicts, mis-
understandings, and cooperation. Middle-ground behavior with its embedded
strategy of creative misunderstanding can be identified as a stable social prac-
tice, one of the main social practices providing coherence and sustainability of
the plebeian society. Whenever strangers agreed on a modus vivendi beyond
the norms of institutionalized society, we may speak of the social practice of
the middle ground at work.

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 Chapter Three

The Patriarchal Metropolis

Trespassing Social Barriers in Late Imperial Vilna

Vilna: Two Portraits of the City

It was one o’clock in the morning on Friday, July 5, 1913, when the chief
of police of Vilna, Lt. Col. Fedor Deminskii stepped out of the city police
headquarters on Blagoveshchenskaia Street (now Dominikonų gatvė). He
strolled one block along the street, and turned right to Ignat’evskii Lane
(Stiklių gatvė today). Over the next three hours, accompanied by his aides,
he walked through the streets of downtown to the railroad station and back,
meticulously registering any violations of official regulations and public order.
Overall, he noticed fifteen wrongdoings. Just across the street from his office,
the main entrance to a building was not locked for the night, nor were two
other buildings along the way. The janitor (dvornik) of another building was
found asleep (resolution: a fine of 2 rubles or arrest for one day); his col-
league a few blocks away did not have a whistle (resolution: a fine of 1 ruble or
arrest). In the American hotel, one of the rooms was occupied by a carpenter,
who also worked there (resolution: to prohibit this in the future). Prostitutes
were discovered at a refreshment shop that sells drinks, and its courtyard was
found to be unsanitary (resolution: to write up a police report), while in the
Gentry Club there was a wedding with orchestra (“I do not have information
about this event. Why was it not reported to me?”).1
For a bustling city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, in the early twen-
tieth century, these transgressions strike one as incredibly innocent, and the
fact that they deserved the attention of the city chief of police is puzzling.
In the wake of the 1905 Revolution and in the context of modernization of
all branches of government service, the figure of the Polizeimeister personally

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inspecting the city at night on a weekly basis seems a ghost of the good old
days of direct patriarchal authority, unmediated by bureaucratic machinery
and legal procedures. Chiefs of police in other urban centers of the Russian
Empire could also personally intervene in the everyday lives of inhabitants
of their cities, but they did not walk the streets at night on a weekly basis,
and their resolutions did not have the effect of direct patriarchal rule.2 As a
custodian of public morality, Police Chief Deminskii personally censored the
choices of films shown at movie theaters: “One manufacturer of films for cine-
mas has produced . . . the movies Deadman the Murderer and The Black Circle.
I require gentlemen superintendents to inform the Vilna cinema owners that I
will not authorize the showing of these movies.”3 In other places police inter-
vened hesitantly and only in response to requests from the governor’s office,
which were motivated exclusively by political considerations.4 Deminskii’s
daily orders produce an impression of Vilna as a backwater characterized by an
archaically patriarchal system: policed by a senior fatherlike figure who treated
his public office like a highly personal and intimate, almost family matter. On
May 30, 1913: “(1) Take measures to find the owner of male galoshes no. 9.”
On May 31: “(4) Take measures to find the ‘fox terrier’ dog . . . with a mon-
key-like mug.” On July 24: “(7) The crime police are looking for the owner of
a billygoat with gray hair.”5 These concerns were hardly matters deserving the
personal attention of the chief of police of any town with a population greater
than five thousand people.
To be sure, the police in Vilna had problems more important than serv-
ing the local Lost and Found office. Crimes were committed in Vilna, and
criminals were searched for and apprehended. In March 1910, the Vilna
police composed a list of town criminals that included forty-two burglars, six
grifters (pigeon drop scam),6 eleven pickpockets, four shoplifters, and some
twenty conmen.7 In 1907, Vilna police registered 367 thefts and burglaries
(27.5 percent solved by the police), eighteen murders (83 percent solved), six-
teen robberies (19 percent solved), and three instances of blackmail and scam
(one case was solved). Similar figures characterized the city’s crime statistics in
1904–6.8 Five years later, in 1912, with the rate of homicide remaining stable,
the number of property crimes more than doubled: registered altogether were
794 thefts and burglaries (57 percent solved), eighteen murders (all solved),
and forty-two robberies (57 percent cases solved).9 It is instructive to put
these figures into a broader perspective, and compare the level of criminality
in Vilna with the imperial crime champion, Nizhny Novgorod. With a city
population exactly two times smaller than Vilna, in 1912 Nizhegorod police
registered 888 cases of theft and burglary (as compared to 794 in Vilna);

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 83

just four murders (22 percent of the Vilna homicide level); forty-nine rob-
beries (almost as many as in Vilna); twenty-nine reported cases of swindle or
blackmail (twenty-three in Vilna); eight arsons (six in Vilna), one instance of
counterfeiting (three in Vilna), thirteen cases of cattle raiding (five in Vilna),
and so on.10 Characteristically, Vilna demonstrated an increase in petty theft
during winter months (60–90 percent above the annual average), whereas in
Nizhny Novgorod, the number of thefts doubled and even tripled in sum-
mer, when the famous Nizhegorod Fair attracted many thousands of wealthy
visitors.11 In Nizhny, crime rose with the opening of new opportunities and
influx of migrants in the summer; in Vilna, theft was probably the last resort
of locals deprived of many extra paid jobs available during warmer months
(e.g., in agriculture and construction). In general, with the important excep-
tion of homicide, the crime rate in Vilna was two to three times lower per
capita than in Nizhny Novgorod. Although located in the borderlands, Vilna
was a safer and calmer place to live than Nizhny Novgorod or Kazan in the
empire’s heartland.
Population dynamics in Vilna also displayed a pattern of stability, if not
arrested development between the first imperial census of 1897 and the early
1910s. Vilna lagged far behind other cities included in my sampling of four
provincial centers. In comparison to 1897, its population had increased by 19
percent to 190,100 in 1909. Over this period, the share of ethnic Lithuanians
in Vilna had marginally grown from 2 percent to 4 percent, the presence of
Jews slightly decreased from 41 percent to 34–36 percent, and the figure for
Poles fluctuated at 31–33 percent. Various categories of Russians, Ukrainians,
and Belarusians combined accounted for about a quarter of the city’s pop-
ulation. Unlike other urban centers of the empire that demonstrated sus-
tained growth during the post-1905 period, after 1909 the population of
Vilna seemed to stabilize, or rather began fluctuating, from 190,100 (1909)
to 178,500 (1910) to 181,500 (1911). At least, this is what police reported,
according to official registration books and parish records.12 The City Council
held an alternative opinion on the dynamics of Vilna’s population. Municipal
statisticians believed that in 1908 the total population (excluding military
personnel) amounted to 205,000 (police statistics indicated only 185,000).
In 1909, the city limits were extended to incorporate several adjacent vil-
lages, which, coupled with the normal rate of population growth, should have
driven the number of inhabitants to 250,000 in 1912.13 Thus, the two meth-
ods of obtaining information and the methodologies of statistical analysis col-
lided, producing two estimates of Vilna’s population that differed by as much
as 25 percent.14 Arguably, police sources did not take into consideration the

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full scale of inward migration and possible flaws in vital statistics, especially of
the Jewish population (who tended to underreport male newborns for fear of
conscription).15 On the other hand, municipal statisticians may have put too
much faith in mathematical extrapolations and ignored the demographic con-
sequences of a stagnating economy. Two statistical portrayals of Vilna present
two alternative interpretations of its social milieu—as either a traditional town
or a burgeoning, modernizing city.
These two different images of the city are not necessarily conflicting because
even those scholars who stress the role of Vilna as the modern center of rising
Lithuanian and Belarusian national movements and an important center of
Jewish political activism (be it Bund or Zionism), speak of less than 3 percent
of the city’s population even at the very peak of political mobilization.16 At the
same time, the dominant narratives of national history (Lithuanian, Jewish, or
Polish) tend to focus on a respective national community isolated from other
population groups, thus reifying the perception of Vilna as an old-fashioned,
segregated society even when depicting modernization processes. One way or
another, Vilna is presented as a partially modernized traditional society.
Behind official statistical portraits of the city is a truly different, hidden face
of Vilna. It can be recovered when one looks beyond the numbers and other
statistical or discursive generalizations into the palimpsest of social gestures
and practices—those numerous irregular brushstrokes that together produce
a more impressionistic and dynamic picture. The very existence of this hidden
portrait of a modern society becomes evident from the contrast between his-
torical narratives based on nation-centered discourses and the structural situa-
tion on the ground.
Thus, on the one hand, even the most well-informed historians speak of
the “Jewish quarter” or even “Ghetto” in pre-1915 Vilna.17 This is a logical
conclusion from the dominant historical perception of Vilna as a city divided
by several semi-isolated national communities. Only this “apartheid” arrange-
ment could easily explain why there were no interconfessional conflicts in
the multiethnic city, in sharp contrast to other urban centers in the western
and southwestern borderlands of the empire.18 On the other hand, the spatial
distribution of Vilnians of various ethnoconfessional backgrounds reveals no
signs of actual segregation. Neither Jews, nor Poles, nor Russians (Orthodox
Slavs) formed compact enclaves in imperial Vilna.
In 1911, Jews made up a majority of the inhabitants (68 percent) in only
one out of eight of the city’s districts, and only 24 percent of all Vilna Jews
lived in this district. The remaining three-quarters of Jewish Vilnians were
more or less evenly distributed throughout the city, accounting for no less

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 85

than 22 percent and no more than 39 percent of the population in the other
seven districts (this particular police survey indicated the total share of Jews
in Vilna as 34 percent).19 Likewise, five synagogues, seventy-six Judaic prayer
houses, and 101 seats of Jewish communal administration (communal elders,
treasurers, etc.) were spread throughout the whole town (as were sixty-six
Christian churches).20 This means that contrary to contemporary and mod-
ern-day discursive portrayals of the city, the dominant model of ethnoconfes-
sional arrangement in Vilna was not separation in ghettoized areas but mutual
intermingling.21
This, in turn, raises the issue of the mechanisms behind the demonstrable
stability of Vilna society. With rising Lithuanian nationalism determined to
debase Polish cultural dominance in the prospective Lithuanian national capi-
tal, Poles being unhappy with the russification of Vilna, Russians relying on
anti-Jewish legislation in a city with such a substantial Jewish population, and
Jews developing several modern nationalist projects, including creation of the
first armed units of Jewish self-defense, what prevented imperial Vilna from
exploding in intersectarian confrontations? With representatives of all these
ethnoconfessional groups living intermingled on the same blocks and in the
same buildings, no nighttime inspections by the chief of police were capable
of sustaining the peace and order registered in all the official accounts. There
must have been some more fundamental forces at work, accommodated by
the Russian imperial order.
The reality of the threat would become visible almost immediately after
the collapse of the imperial order in Vilna, with the unleashing of intereth-
nic rivalries that in less than two decades culminated in the mass-scale anti-
Lithuanian, anti-Jewish, and anti-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s.22 This
became possible with the utter politicization of ethnicity that had somehow
been muted through the imperial period, during which the existing multi-
faceted social divisions were not consolidated into distinctive communities of
belonging or arranged spatially. What was it about the old regime that did
not allow the escalation of intercommunal conflicts? Besides the absence of
institutions of political democracy, which are indispensable for any type of
mass mobilization, the old Vilna differed from post-World War I Vilnius by its
deliberate exploitation of the imagery of patriarchal social order through the
elaborated discourses of religious orthodoxy, preservation of traditions, and
ethnic purity (that are still reproduced in some modern studies).
It is in this sense that the notion of patriarchality will be used in this book:
as a complex social imaginary that reinvents tradition by idealizing all things
archaic. Self-archaization was a very modern phenomenon that projected the

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newest rational concepts onto a past that knew none of these pure forms of
holistic simplicity.23 Male patriarchy was one element of this complex fantasy,
along with the cult of simple stratification of society (composed of homoge-
neous social and ethnoconfessional groups) and authority based on “natural”
arguments of seniority (of age and status) rather than divisive political factors.
A complex industrial society at the turn of the twentieth century cannot be
called “archaic” or “traditional” even metaphorically, and thus I call this fan-
tasy about its harmonious purity “patriarchality.”
The contrast between the actual state of things and the artificial archaization
of the Vilna society was manifested on many levels, but who was responsible
for the propagation of the image of Vilna as a patriarchal metropolis? Perhaps
the historian Darius Staliunas is right in his interpretation of the intentions
of the Russian authorities: in order to counter the Polish influence in Vilna,
“it was necessary to reduce Vilnius’ influence in the region” by provincializing
it.24 However, the Russian imperial regime never had the symbolic authority
required to dominate the public sphere through hegemonic discourses: this
role belonged to charismatic writers who used the powerful venue of Russian
literature, to ideologists working through the pan-intelligentsia sphere of
Underground Russia, and later, to professionals and experts. And even if pro-
duced on purpose, the discourse of parochialism in Vilna could not play the
decisive role in containing the absolute majority of the plebeian city popula-
tion living “beneath any discourse.” These people were self-regulated through
social practices, not public discourses.
The persistence of the image of Vilna as divided into self-sufficient eth-
nocultural compartments would have been impossible had the social prac-
tice of the middle ground (“the creative mutual misunderstanding”) played
such a decisive role there, as in Kazan or Nizhny Novgorod. To make every-
one believe that one of the most European cities in the empire, the hotbed
of modern mass politics in Russia (be it social democracy or nationalism),
was a parochial and archaic town, a different logic of societal self-organization
and integration would have had to be in place. Therefore, it seems logical to
assume that the demonstratively patriarchal mode of everyday interactions in
Vilna was performed by its inhabitants (including Polizeimeister Deminskii)
as a distinctive social practice. The language of patriarchality as a social prac-
tice informed the elite public discourses of archaism and arrested development
that helped to minimize the conflicting potential of modern ideologies of class
and nationalism.
This hypothesis can explain the paradox of social stability in the modern
city, the center of several competing nationalist projects: it took a Vilnian

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 87

making a conscious and persistent effort to ignore the pressure of conflicting

discourses by fashioning himself or herself as a member of the patriarchal
society, a-modern and nondiscursive. Even many participants in the public
sphere could use this defensive practice to emulate the discourse-less stance
of plebeian society vis-à-vis potentially destructive discourses and ideologies.
This defense broke once the imperial policy of provincialization of Vilna
gave way to a succession of government-sponsored projects of moderniza-
tion and nationalization of the city after 1918: making it Lithuanian, Polish,
Soviet anti-Lithuanian, Lithuanian anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish, and Soviet
Lithuanian anti-Polish. To various competing nationalizing projects, any
archaism and patriarchality were seen as undesirable references to the real or
imagined past that was always a common past, unfit to substantiate a single-
handed claim for domination at present.
As a distinctive social practice, patriarchality in late imperial Vilna was a
complex construct that communicated various connotations of the notion:
archaism, traditionalism, stability, and male domination. It included the gen-
der regime of patriarchy but could not be reduced to it, implying a whole
complex of invented traditions. There was no clear differentiation among these
connotations, so gender (as a key category of patriarchal order that included
patriarchy) emerges as the most visible marker of the social practice of patri-
archality. It is instructive to see how the population and the local authorities’
performance of patriarchality in Vilna contradicted the actual social relation-
ships on the ground, whether it was the role of women in society or an adher-
ence to traditional moral standards.

Polizeimeister Deminskii and Prostitution:

Performing Patriarchality in Late Imperial Russia

Patriarchality—a practice of avoiding the explosive effect of discourses by

mimicking the prediscursive world—was performed even by representatives of
elite society, including Police Chief Deminskii.
Indeed, let us return to the beginning of this chapter, to Lieutenant Colonel
Deminskii personally patrolling the town on night guard. His censorship of
potentially “immoral” films and outrage over a janitor’s missing whistle, cou-
pled with personal involvement in guarding the public order at night, produce
the image of Vilna’s police chief as representing a particular social type: an old
soldier, a remnant of another epoch, perhaps that of Nicholas I. Meanwhile,
Fedor Alexandrovich Deminskii was anything but archaic. He began his career

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 88 Chapter Three

as a junior police officer in 1886 in a godforsaken corner on the outskirts of

the Russian Empire, in the mountainous Kuba district of Baku province (one
hundred miles from Baku, today the capital of independent Azerbaijan).25 In
this region, whose population was only 2 percent ethnic Russian (mostly sec-
tarian), the young police officer invested his leisure time in scholarship, pub-
lishing articles on the ethnography of local nationalities in the major Baku
newspaper Kaspii and in the prestigious Proceedings of the Caucasian Division
of the Russian Geographic Society.26 Over the next sixteen years, closely fol-
lowing in the footsteps of his superior, Ivan Alexandrovich Deminskii, who
was one rank senior (and most likely was his older brother), Fedor Deminskii
was gradually promoted in the provincial police hierarchy, rising through four
officer ranks.27 In 1904, Capt. Fedor Deminskii was appointed chief of police
of Baku, the capital of the province.28 This was a rather successful career for
someone who apparently did not have connections or the means to start work
in a better place.29 His career suffered a sudden blow only several months
later, when he was fired for his failure to prevent a large-scale anti-Armenian
pogrom in Baku in February 1905.30 There is conflicting evidence concerning
the actual role of Captain Deminskii during the pogrom.31 Failing as admin-
istrator, he nevertheless left a certain political legacy behind by cofounding a
monarchist society, Anchor, in Baku in late October 1905, in the wake of the
fateful October Manifesto.32 The aim of the society was “to unite citizens of
Russia, regardless of their nationality, origins, and confession, who love their
fatherland and are faithful to the tsar as the monarch of free, constitutional,
whole, and undivided Russia.”33 If the multiculturalism of the society’s pro-
gram can be explained by the specificity of Baku, where a typical “black hun-
dred” agenda of Russian exclusiveness would have no chance, its embrace of
constitutionalism and the language of citizenship (rather than subjecthood)
was really remarkable for an officially endorsed political union. Soon there-
after, Captain Deminskii was transferred to Vilna, and became lieutenant
colonel only in May 1913, two months before the night inspection briefly
described in this chapter, and ten long years after his previous promotion to a
higher rank—apparently, a consequence of his Baku fiasco.
At his new place of service, Deminskii found himself in a situation poten-
tially as explosive as that in Baku. The multiconfessional population of Vilna
was claimed by competing nationalist movements. Moreover, only one-third
of the Vilna police force could be qualified as ethnically Russian (or at least
as Russian native speakers), and two-thirds were Catholics (i.e., of Polish,
Lithuanian, or Belarusian background).34 The key third police precinct in
the downtown was headed by Superintendent Matvei Poltorzhitskii, who

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 89

was most likely an ethnic Pole or a representative of local Polonized gentry.

In early January 1913, the recently appointed governor of Vilna province,
Petr Verevkin, left the following comment on the margins of a report by
Superintendent Poltorzhitskii: “Mr. Superintendent should have known that
‘varta’ in Russian is ‘guard,’ and not used Polish words in official correspon-
dence.” Obliged to respond to the governor’s criticism of his subordinate,
Police Chief Deminskii reprimanded Poltorzhitskii for using Polish words
in official reports and demanded that other officers censor their language.35
After serving for seven years in Vilna, Polonisms in official documents and in
the speech of administrators of various ranks could hardly have been a nov-
elty to Demisnkii, and there is no indication that ethnocultural difference
was of any concern to him. Responding to an ideologically driven comment
by the governor (who was not upset by flawed grammar and punctuation
as much as with the usage of foreign words), Deminskii did not question
the political loyalty of Poltorzhitskii as a non-Russian and did not seek his
removal. He treated the wrong choice of word as a mundane issue of the
official protocol, beyond any politics.
In 1913, in the epoch of rising nationalism and emerging mass politics,
when many top officials in the Russian Empire (including the late prime min-
ister Petr Stolypin) indulged themselves in political and ethnoconfessional
partisanship, a deliberately archaic style of leadership could become a form of
avoiding the pitfalls of nationalizing politics. In the absence of a new political
and legal model accommodating the demands of disenfranchised social and
national groups, the deliberate personalization of authority by Vilna’s police
chief effectively downplayed the destructive effect of the nationalizing state
on the integrity of the Russian Empire. Deminskii’s patriarchal style implied
that it was the figure of the watchful police chief himself, rather than Russian
rule, the autocratic regime, or the repressive police apparatus, that became the
main agent of sustaining order. Deminskii condemned the use of Polish words
in paperwork not as a Russian official, but because his instructions required
it, just as they ordered all janitors, regardless of their confession and ethnicity,
to keep whistles at hand. Perhaps this was the only effective strategy for com-
manding a multinational police force in such a multicultural town as Vilna.
At least an alternative modernist policy of Baku administrators—mobilizing
one part of the population to suppress the alleged subversiveness of another
part—led to disaster in 1905 (and not only in Baku).
Recent research has shown that Deminskii’s demonstratively archaic style of
administration was not unique in the Baltic region during the interrevolution-
ary period.

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[Minister of the Interior] Durnovo’s demand to “manage affairs in a routine

manner” was apparently the clue to successfully representing the empire in
the Baltic provinces in late imperial Russia. Today, this strategy would be
called “managing diversity” in the interests of the whole state. Whereas per-
forming the nation in a strategically sensitive and culturally as well as demo-
graphically non-Russian, non-Orthodox, and non-Slavic region simply
caused too much risk for imperial integrity, one can only speculate where
“routine manners” might have brought relations between the center and its
Baltic periphery without world war and revolution.36

Fedor Deminskii not only did not “perform the nation,” he very deliber-
ately performed patriarchality as a style of administration. It is easier to rec-
ognize the artificial character of this patriarchality as a skillful practice in the
example of such an educated person as Deminskii, who was well integrated
into the public sphere. The very same practice was employed by members of
Vilna’s plebeian society, even if less self-consciously: as we will see below, they
certainly were aware of their differences and of the discursively sanctioned
prohibition of transgressing intercommunal boundaries. Like Deminskii, they
just preferred to turn a blind eye to those differences and taboos.
The instrumentalized patriarchality as performed by the Vilna police chief
implied a degree of ethnic blindness: he operated within categories sanc-
tioned by imperial legislation (of legal estate, occupation, and confession), and
applied them within their proper context. This meant that a reference to one’s
confession would usually be made only in connection with religious affairs
or if certain rights and privileges were conditioned by religion. By the same
token, any wrongdoing was described in terms of the felon’s legal estate and
occupation, but not ethnicity or confession.37
We return to the point when Polizeimeister Deminskii discovered prosti-
tutes at a refreshment shop that sells drinks. It was important to him that the
shop should have been closed at night and that prostitutes had no business
in such a place. Two and a half months later, on another night inspection,
Deminskii discovered a similar offense: in a closed beerhouse, three prostitutes
were drinking beer and vodka with their patrons. This time, there were sev-
eral violations at once, the entire company was arrested, and their names were
entered in the text of Deminskii’s order: prostitutes Tamara Grinevich, Eva
Verzhbitskaia, and Ida Lifshits; patrons Frants Gan, Stanislav Mazurkevich,
and Leiba Sher.38 Deminskii never mentioned either the ethnicity or even
confession of the people arrested in the beerhouse—however, even written in
Russian transcription, these names explicitly betray the interethnic composi-
tion of the party. Clearly, there were Poles and Jews among both the ladies

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 91

and gentlemen attending. Furthermore, some could be Russian, Lithuanian,

or Belarusian.39
This was a double transgression of a patriarchal world view should it indeed
dominate the plebeian Vilna society: a vice that also violated the purity of the
ethnic body. The trope of national purity and endogamy had been fundamen-
tal for nationalist projects in Eastern and Central Europe since the nineteenth
century,40 and “sexuality was an integral and constitutive part of nations
defined on ‘ethnic grounds.’”41 Male promiscuity, including the patroni-
zation of prostitutes, was an element of patriarchy as a gender regime built
into many national movements, a symbol of national virility. Female sexual-
ity could also serve the national cause (“provided that women were nationally
endogamous”).42 Selling sexual favors was another thing, a sign of social infe-
riority, whereas selling oneself to a patron representing a different ethnocon-
fessional group meant symbolic submission to an alien lineage of patriarchy,
an acceptance of domination by another national body. These stable elements
of nationalized and colonial public discourse are revealed in many parts of the
world.43 It is thus noteworthy that in patriarchal Vilna the problem of vice
itself was downplayed. In the Jewish public discourse, for instance, Odessa
appeared as the ultimate sin city, while Vilna was a place of piety and tradi-
tion.44 The fact that numerous Jewish prostitutes (along with their Christian
colleagues) catered indiscriminately to the multiethnic male population of
Vilna has been a taboo topic for Jewish community leaders, nationalist activ-
ists, and present-day historians alike.45 This fact is important because it shows
that even the seemingly fundamental gender regime of patriarchy (as male
domination) revealed the elusiveness of Vilna’s patriarchality. By the same
token, the performed character of patriarchality relativizes the dogma of uni-
lateral male domination (patriarchy): patriarchy as a discourse becomes disso-
ciated from social practices that were only partially complied with it.46
The ambiguous status of prostitution in the Russian Empire ideally fits
the structural dualism of normative public discourses and the prevalent social
practices structuring plebeian society.47 Theoretically, prostitution was out-
lawed by the 1876 Statute on Prevention and Suppression of Crime. This was
a legal code that did not specify punishments for breaching its norms, but
rather outlined the normative behavior preventing the possibility of crimes: a
position that outright divorced the norm (discourse) from practice. Its Article
187 almost verbatim repeated the corresponding article of the 1782 Statute
of Decency and Police of Catherine II, with its strikingly archaic language
(by the standards of the late nineteenth century).48 However, whereas the
article in the 1782 Statute concluded with the reference to concrete penalties

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for opening a brothel, becoming its patron, or engaging in prostitution, the

article in the 1876 Statute ended with the note: “Medical-Police Committees
in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Vilna established for medical and police con-
trol over women making a living by lechery, are guided in their activities by
rules issued specifically for this purpose.”49 In other words, the law explicitly
banned prostitution, but the legislator immediately specified the rules that
regulated its existence in practice. Catherine’s statute remained on the books
in the early twentieth century, and, theoretically, the penalties for prostitution
that it stipulated (fines for brothel-keeping, six months in jail for streetwalk-
ing) did not lose their power. But neither did Article 214 (the shortest in this
code: “Drunkenness is forbidden to one and all”), which was making it no
more effective.50
A leading historian of prostitution in late imperial Russia stresses the con-
spicuous absence of centralized legislation of prostitution in the empire until
1903, with individual municipal ordinances substituting for it, and often con-
tradicting each other.51 Indeed, there was not a single instruction for police
physicians to conduct medical checks of prostitutes until the end of the impe-
rial regime, with very few cities formalizing this procedure at all.52 Thus, the
public discourses on prostitution, so well analyzed in recent historical scholar-
ship, concerned a reality that in practice was not homogenized and standard-
ized even on paper. The authorities, including the police, mostly improvised
the regulation of prostitution in each city, seeing little help in publicly upheld
general truisms. In this respect, not just members of plebeian society but also
those participating in the public sphere were left to their own devices by the
legislator. These people operated within the context of individual pockets of
“local knowledge” (in the Geertzean sense),53 which were integrated into the
sphere of common knowledge through different mechanisms. For those living
“beneath any discourse,” the main role was played by the social practice of
the middle ground (creative misunderstanding), which was discussed in the
previous chapter. When the available public discourses appeared to be not just
unavailable or of little use, but directly counterproductive (just like the ver-
bal ban on prostitution or drinking), the social practice of patriarchality (as
feigned ignorance) was employed to isolate from them.

Prostitution: Beyond Sexuality

To begin with, neither Vilna prostitutes nor their patrons saw any wrongdoing
in this business and its transcommunal scale. The specificity of the available
historical sources on the “infamous men” make almost all their records result

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 93

from some initial scandal, but the story reconstructed from this initial conflict
is usually that of stable coexistence and partnership. For example, on June 28,
1907, an anonymous letter informed the Vilna police chief that a man named
Abram Marmut (Mormut in other documents) was maintaining a secret den
of vice. By itself, this was not a crime (the term was yet another instance of a
radical break between practice and its discursive representation), as long as no
more than two prostitutes worked there, were older than twenty-one, and peri-
odically passed medical checks by the local Medical Police Committee (those
with a greater number of personnel had to officially register as a brothel).54
Therefore, the letter alleged that Mormut’s girls were under the age of fifteen,
unregistered by the police, and spreading venereal disease to patrons.55 The
police promptly inspected the apartment in a building located slightly more
than one block away from the governor’s palace, on Mikhalovskii Lane. As it
turned out, there were just two girls, age twenty-two and twenty-six, registered
residents, who regularly underwent medical checks and were found to be per-
fectly healthy.56 In Vilna, neighbors often complained to the police, asking
them to shut down this or that brothel or informal den because of the noise,
security threat, and devaluation of property values.57 What is interesting in
this particular case is that the anonymous letter was most likely written out of
jealousy by two patrons of Mormut’s den of vice. Mikhail Sukhovskii (prob-
ably a Russian) and Mikhel Zaidel (apparently a Jew) lived on the opposite
side of downtown Vilna, on Shirokii Lane, but often visited girls living with
their Jewish landlords, the Mormuts: Sofia Nikolaevna Dudar (a Belarusian or
Russian)58 and Alina-Katerina Malkhin (probably a Catholic with a distinc-
tively German surname [Malchin]).59 Not only did the jealous gentlemen see
no problem with the ethnoconfessional otherness of their love objects (and of
each other), they apparently did not see the profession of prostitute as inferior
to any other low-class trade.
Prostitutes living in a multicultural town could not discriminate against
patrons on grounds of confession or ethnicity, but they also regularly chose
companions of different ethnoconfessional backgrounds.60 Some of them were
alternating prostitution with other jobs (e.g., as housemaids), while others
got married and continued profiting from prostitution in other capacities as
managers and owners of bordellos or smaller apartment-based dens of vice.
Police materials reveal a preponderance of Jewish entrepreneurs in the Vilna
prostitution business and a high visibility of Jewish prostitutes.61 Whereas
the available statistics suggest that Jewish engagement in prostitution was
quite proportional to the share of Jews in the Vilna population,62 which can
be explained by traditional socioethnic divisions within Vilna society (with

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 94 Chapter Three

Jews dominating small-scale enterprises and the services sphere in general), it

certainly implies that the Jewish community had a de facto tolerant attitude
toward prostitution. Keeping a bordello could be seen as not contradicting
the strict observance of religious traditions.63 To a skilled mechanic, the open-
ing of a bordello by his acquaintance of higher (low middle-class) status was
a legitimate subject of polite conversation.64 Issues of moral judgment and
even the criminality of prostitution arose only in the context of interacting
with official (public) discourse. In a typical application for permission to keep
prostitutes in her apartment, thirty-six-year-old Tema Surapsinskaia “of Judaic
faith” excused her implied asocial behavior by claiming that her own status
was socially and demographically marginalized: “I am the plaintiff. Having
positively no means for life, to feed myself and my family, [I] was compelled
to keep two prostitutes in the very house where I live. . . . [I] cannot expect
any other help to support [our] existence, as I and my husband cannot earn an
income because of our old age and being incapable of physical labor.”65
We may still suspect that Surapsinskaia, thirty-six with a spouse who
had no special medical conditions, had other reasons to engage in this busi-
ness.66 Statistically, she belonged to the most typical group of brothel-keep-
ers: she was in her mid-thirties, Jewish, and married.67 She felt it necessary
to use rhetoric that stigmatized prostitution in her communication with
the authorities, but her life strategy was not actually regulated by antipros-
titution public discourse. A typical case for Michel Foucault’s project on
the “infamous men,” Surapsinskaia’s story shows that the moment a sub-
altern entered the discursive sphere for the first time was anything but the
“moment of truth.” She had to speak in a language that was foreign in more
than one sense (Russian and higher society), using arguments that were valid
to her correspondent but not to her.
It appears that prostitution was not necessarily the last resort of the poor-
est, most oppressed, promiscuous, or morally degraded women. Since most
prostitutes, both Jewish and Gentile, came to Vilna from elsewhere,68 it seems
legitimate to suggest that “the oldest trade” was a traditional practice mobi-
lized to accommodate the unprecedented upsurge in female labor migration.69
The actual scale of this very modern phenomenon is underestimated in both
historiographic narratives and official records of the epoch. Most of the resi-
dency registration books have not survived in Soviet-era archives, and there is
no way to calculate the turnover of temporary migrants statistically. It is just
known that in 1897, only 47 percent of Vilna’s inhabitants were born in that
city; the rest had moved there at some point from elsewhere: 24.5 percent of
Vilnians came from other places in the province, and even more (28 percent)

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 95

migrated from other provinces of the empire.70 In Minsk, a provincial capital

resembling Vilna in many ways and located just 120 miles southeast of Vilna,
the annual turnover of prostitutes reached 70 percent (as new prostitutes came
in to take the place of those who dropped out), and we can reasonably expect
the same dynamics in Vilna.71 Under cover of the rhetoric of patriarchality
and in the structural situation of gender patriarchy, ever increasing numbers
of young women were leaving their households at the turn of the twentieth
century to seek employment and better luck in places hundreds of miles away
from home. The surviving police records profile mostly prostitutes, criminals,
or crime victims, but these categories constitute just the tip of the iceberg
of mass-scale female migration, as can be seen even from the newspaper ads
of women seeking employment. The very structure of the job market at the
peak of industrialization, prompted by the available technologies, heavily dis-
criminated against women seeking independent employment. As elsewhere in
industrialized societies, women had to rely on prostitution as a temporary or
final resort in unfavorable employment conditions. Recently, Keely Stauter-
Halsted has made a powerful case for presenting prostitution in the Polish
lands of the Russian, German, and Habsburg empires as a vehicle for wom-
en’s self-determination against the odds of hostile socioeconomic realities.72
It should be added that for many living “beneath any discourse,” prostitution
was not just a necessary evil, but a regular choice among other equally unin-
spiring choices.
A Jewish girl, Dveira Galatskaia, was only eighteen when she left her native
Kremenchug and traveled over a thousand kilometers to Vilna to engage in
prostitution in the apartment of her brethren, Leia Grinshtein, one block
away from the Vilna police headquarters.73 What made her leave her home?
How did she find money for the trip? What was her family’s reaction to her
decision to move out? After all, why did she not head to Odessa, the renowned
city of sin and many opportunities, located 2.5 times closer to her hometown?
A paradoxical answer to the latter question may be found in the very patriar-
chal reputation of Vilna as an antipode of Odessa. For many, this was a choice
between trade (including prostitution) and explicit lewdness: an important
difference that too often escapes scholars’ attention.
There is a dominant trend among historians to sexualize turn-of-the-twen-
tieth-century prostitution and the motivation of the women who engaged in
it. Doubtless, it was about selling the (mostly female) body, but in a more
syncretic way than the usual formula would suggest: “Prostitution involves the
exchange of sexual services for money.”74 It is not accidental that when mod-
ern historians search the past for “sex” in its modern meaning, as a distinctive

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 96 Chapter Three

practice of getting pleasure from physical contact and entertaining fantasies,

they invariably focus on three groups within late imperial society: the mid-
dle-class bourgeois elite; educated professionals producing a medicalized or
criminalized discourse of sexuality; and a faction of the most self-conscious
sex-industry workers.75 Only these groups dealt more or less consistently with
the modern understanding of sexuality conceptualized by Michel Foucault as
a universal and abiding (in fact, hegemonic) discourse.76 The plebeian society
still experienced sexuality in terms of individual urges regulated by traditional
norms and guided by locally accepted social practices, but dissociated from
certain universally acknowledged institutionalized forms and discourses. This
is why—although the concentration of prostitutes per capita in Vilna was 1.5
times greater than in Odessa, according to the 1897 census, and the share of
Jews among prostitutes was also higher in Vilna77—Vilna was popularly per-
ceived as a parochial and quiet town whereas Odessa played the role of a sinful
metropolis: in Vilna there was no developed sphere of sexual discourses and
imagery but in Odessa there was.78

An Indecent Proposal: Breaching Social Boundaries

Behind the facade of performed patriarchality as an imagined social reality

structured by clear-cut hierarchies (of gender and authority) and a popula-
tion segregated into insulated communities of belonging (ethnoconfessional
or class), there is a complex dynamics of incongruent social statuses, personae,
and strategies. This complexity of patriarchality as an actual social practice is
revealed in the case of the petty Jewish entrepreneur Boruch (Alter) Dubnik—
its public (discursive) appearance colliding with a story communicated in the
language of habitual practices, revealing the anatomy of Vilna’s pseudo-patri-
archal plebeian society.
In Vilna, as in other Russian provincial towns, criminal police units in their
everyday practice operated with the notion of “known criminals.” Despite their
small staff, detectives personally knew all habitual offenders in their city, from
pickpockets to fences buying stolen goods. This seemingly patriarchal (simple
and intimate) interconnectedness and the transparency of different social net-
works in one city were combined with modern principles of law enforcement:
detectives turned first to the usual suspects in the case of any transgression,
but they could not prosecute them without sufficient evidence. For example,
at about noon on December 6, 1913, when two police detectives met Alter
Dubnik at the Vilna train station, accompanied by two women, they knew he
was up to something, but could not arrest him without good reason.79 They

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 97

knew that Dubnik was a forty-two-year-old flesh-peddler, who was sentenced

back in 1903 for theft. Their only hope was that the women accompanying
Dubnik would testify against him, so detectives briefly detained these women
for interrogation.
Why would the police want to go after someone allegedly involved with
adult prostitutes? Vilna police detectives immediately realized that Alter
Dubnik was about to dispatch two prostitutes to another town, most likely
to a brothel, expecting a finder’s fee from its owner. It was legal for Dubnik
(with official permission from the authorities) to exploit prostitutes in a bor-
dello or to keep them in his apartment registered as a den of vice, but he
could not give them a ride to the train station, pay their fare, and provide
them with the address of a potential employer (which these prostitutes could
choose to ignore).
As was already mentioned, the lack of a meshing of the hegemonic public
discourses with social practices was producing the effect of systematic double-
think about prostitution: in general, it was castigated as a social evil, but in
the context of local knowledge, it was tolerated (when certain women were
properly registered with the authorities, or when they were good neighbors or
friends). Prostitution existed in a gray zone between legitimate business and
illegal activity, which was reflected in its conspicuous invisibility in the police
criminal statistics (like that of sex crimes in general). There was one significant
exception, though: in the list of eight crimes that had recently become promi-
nent and attracted the special attention of the police authorities, “white slav-
ery” (in Russian, literally “flesh-peddling”) was ranked higher in importance
than “stealing weapons and government property from the War and Navy
Departments.”80 This was a truly new modern public discourse that could not
be ignored or relativized through the practice of patriarchality, where every-
thing has a different meaning under different circumstances. “White slavery”
meant the same in Vilna and Minsk, on the train and at a hotel.
The hype of “white slavery” was at its high point in Western Europe and
North America at the turn of the twentieth century,81 and Russia was at the
vanguard of countries with the most advanced anti-“white slavery” legisla-
tion.82 A powerful discourse of transatlantic modernity thus collided with the
patriarchal practice of middlemen, arranging for a better match of supply and
demand. This discourse had strong anti-Semitic overtones, both because in
the regional ethnoconfessional division of labor the role of middlemen had
traditionally been reserved for Jews (jobbers were called zukhers83 from the
Yiddish zukhn, to seek), and because the narrative of Jewish flesh-peddlers
“made it possible to externalize paid sex and its economy” for those obsessed

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 98 Chapter Three

with national purity.84 People who had been traversing the realm of gray-zone
business from the lighter segments of the gradient to its darker sectors and
back—finding customers for a load of poultry here and a better-paid job for
a couple of prostitutes there—suddenly acquired the status of serious crimi-
nals, “white slave traders.” The middlemen who coordinate the employment
of prostitutes are identified now as involved in human trafficking. The new-
est study by Keely Stauter-Halsted problematizes the simplified reading of
this phenomenon, returning agency to women engaged in prostitution in the
Polish lands and demystifying the ominous figure of the Jewish human traf-
ficker.85 Besides de facto endorsing the world view of male patriarchy (pre-
senting women as lacking any control over their bodies), the trope of white
slavery supported the archaic economic discourse. It is easy to recognize here
the obsession with the alienation of the organically produced value from the
producer by capitalists and middlemen, and the view of brokers as exploiters
of producers that are extracting natural resources.
Be that as it may, Alter Dubnik was in trouble when he met police detec-
tives at the train station. He was accompanied by Francziska Baranovskaia
(twenty years old, probably a Pole) and Mariia Orlovich (twenty-one years
old, perhaps a Russian Old Believer or a Belarusian). Francziska had already
been engaged in prostitution for several months, working in Białystok in the
brothel of Slobodsky. Mariia identified herself as a peasant of the nearby Trakaj
district. Both of them knew what to tell the police: they had only recently
arrived in Vilna; they had never seen Alter Dubnik before; Dubnik had come
to their hotel in Vilna and proposed that they go to Kovno (Kaunas) to find
jobs, and provided them with an address in Kovno; they were traveling to
Kovno by their own will.86 This information reaffirmed the local reputation of
Dubnik as a flesh-peddler, but was not sufficient for a criminal case. Francziska
and Mariia did not testify against Dubnik.
Alter Dubnik ran out of luck three weeks later. On the evening of December
31, 1913, two women came to the Białystok criminal police office and made
the following deposition: they were professional maidservants who came to
Białystok from Vilna. Tatiana Balakina, twenty-nine years old, a Russian
Old Believer, was a native of Chernigov province in the Ukrainian lands (her
hometown was located almost 400 miles from Białystok and some 450 miles
from Vilna). Mariana Khaetskaia, nineteen years old, Catholic, came from
Oshmiany (Oszmiana, about 200 miles from Białystok and only 30 miles
from Vilna). On Sunday, December 29, they attended a party at the home of
a laundress in Vilna. That evening, an unknown Jew knocked on the window.
They came out, and he proposed that they come to Białystok for a good job.

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 99

He identified himself as Alter, told them to come for instructions the next
day, but left his address only with Khaetskaia. The friends needed work, so
they went to Alter on the evening of December 30. He gave them a letter
without an address and said that every cabdriver in Białystok knew where to
find their future employer, “Bonda.” They took a night train to Białystok and
in the morning arrived at Bonda’s place. He offered them a room to rest, but
when they got up at four o’clock that afternoon, they realized they were in
a bordello. Full of indignation, they went to the police at eight o’clock that
evening, accusing the Jew Alter, a resident of Vilna, of recruiting women for a
brothel under the pretext of finding them good jobs.87 This was a typical dra-
matic narrative of naive maids who by sheer chance escaped the trap of white
slavery, set by a crooked Jew.
The police produced for identification the owner of a Białystok brothel,
Leiba Slobodsky (forty-eight years old, a Jew), aka “Bonda” (incidentally, it
was the same Slobodsky, who had employed another acquaintance of Dubnik,
Francziska Baranovskaia). Slobodsky said that the two women gave him a let-
ter from an unknown person, in Yiddish (“in the Jewish language”), and he
tore it into pieces.88 The only evidence of Dubnik’s sinister role was lost. The
resourceful Tatiana Balakina from Chernigov attempted to compensate for
the loss: she said that Slobodsky/Bonda had not read the letter anyway (he
could not), and invited the owner of a neighboring brothel, Mereino, to read
the letter aloud. (As it turned out, Mereino’s house was where the women
had rested after their trip.) As Mereino was reading the letter, Balakina, “as
someone who spoke Jewish well, overheard that the letter was addressed to
Bonda, and it read, in Jewish: ‘I am sending you two girls, one for 25 rubles,
the other for 20 rubles.’”89 Neither these details nor Balakina’s claim to speak
Yiddish could be corroborated late in the evening, and everyone was asked to
leave the police station. The clear plot of the initial story became excessively
complicated: a second brothel-keeper appeared, the women realized that they
had been deceived in his whorehouse (but why did they implicate Slobodsky/
Bonda in the first place?), while the Russian maid revealed fluency in Yiddish.
Tatiana Balakina did not give up easily. She returned to the criminal police
headquarters at 4:00 a.m. on the first day of the New Year and reported that
she had just spotted “that Jew” at the Białystok train station, arriving from
Vilna. Detective Shulzhenko was dispatched to accompany Balakina. On her
instructions, the detective arrested a Jew, who had just arrived from Vilna
and attempted to enter Slobodsky’s brothel. The arrested man identified him-
self as Borukh Dubnik, of the Judaic faith, married, a trader of poultry and
eggs. He said that three years ago he had kept a bordello in Oshmiany, and

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 100 Chapter Three

that Mariana Khaetskaia used to work as a prostitute there. Dubnik declared

that he had never met either Balakina, who identified him to the police, or
Slobodsky, on whose doorstep he was arrested.90 A melodrama turned realist
novel was evolving into a farce.
Over the next year, the police interrogated all of those involved in the
events of New Year’s night. Their testimonies considerably adjusted the initial
“Christmas Carol” as presented/performed by Tatiana Balakina. Her compan-
ion, Mariana Khaetskaia, turned out not to be nineteen years old (and hence
underage when working as a prostitute in Oshmiany several years earlier), but
twenty-seven years of age. She had spent two years in the den of vice kept by
Dubnik, but conflicted with Mrs. Dubnik and left for Minsk. She lived for a
year and a half in Minsk, her occupation unspecified. There she met “prostitute
Balakina.” Balakina invited her to move to Vilna: Khaetskaia found a job as a
housemaid, and Balakina was a prostitute in the Kovno hotel (the same hotel
where Dubnik had met Baranovskaia and Orlovich in early December).91 On
Christmas, Balakina proposed that Khaetskaia move to a new town again, this
time to Białystok: Khaetskaia would find a “job,” and Balakina herself would
go into a brothel. At this point, Khaetskaia’s testimony lost all coherence, as
she presented their twenty-four-hour stay in Białystok (from their arrival to
the arrest of Dubnik) as at least a week long. Her absolutely fantastic story,
mentioning Dubnik’s coming to town to an eye doctor and his arrest while
procuring money for their trip back to Vilna, contains two persistent themes:
Dubnik had no connection with their coming to Białystok, and she had noth-
ing to do with filing a complaint against Dubnik (it was the practical joke of
drunken Balakina).92
Iesel Mereino, the brothel owner who read the note for the illiter-
ate Slobodsky, declared that Dubnik kept a bordello in Vilna at 5 Bakshta
Street (when arrested, Dubnik gave a different address, several blocks away).
According to Mereino, in the note he could read only the address of Slobodsky
and the signature, “Scwarz,” the rest was “illegible” (according to Balakina, the
note was without any address). Slobodsky refused to accept the women, and
Mereino offered them a room in which to rest. He also advised them to file a
complaint against Slobodsky (not Dubnik), who did not want to pay their fare
back to Vilna. As to Dubnik, Mereino only quoted Balakina and Khaetskaia as
saying that Dubnik had dispatched them as prostitutes to Slobodsky, paying
for their train tickets.93
When interrogated in November 1914, Leiba “Bonda” Slobodsky changed
his initial deposition. He acknowledged that in fact he knew Dubnik as
someone who hosted prostitutes in his apartment in Vilna, but stressed that

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 101

“Dubnik does not recruit girls for bawdyhouses.”94 The girls came with a note
without signature that read, in Yiddish, “These are women for you.” Slobodsky
called another bordello owner, Mereino, to help him read the note, “and he
could not read it either.” Slobodsky did not accept Balakina and Khaetskaia
because “the girls were not pretty and did not match [the standards of ] my
brothel, number one in Białystok.” The girls did not say who gave them
the note and his address; perhaps they came to him because of his brothel’s
acclaimed reputation.95
The Białystok police detective, Nikolai Kravchuk, who handled Balakina’s
initial complaint, remembered that according to her original story, Dubnik
sent them to work as barmaids in Białystok but they found themselves in
a brothel. Brothel-keepers Slobodsky and Mereino asked that Dubnik be
released from arrest, calling him a trader of clothes or oats (Dubnik him-
self claimed to be selling poultry).96 The disappearance of the mysteriously
unreadable note and the mutually contradictory testimonies of the multieth-
nic corps of witnesses did not allow Dubnik to be prosecuted. On March 3,
1915, the case was transferred to the Vilna Circuit Court, which alone could
legally close it, according to article 277 of the Statute of Criminal Justice.97 Six
months later, on September 5, 1915, Vilna was occupied by German troops,
and the old patriarchal city forever withdrew from the Russian Empire. The
latter-day annexation of Vilnius by the USSR was already about a very differ-
ent city and a different state.
Even though acquitted, it was clear to everyone that Alter/Borukh Dubnik,
living on Zavalnaia or Bakshta Street in Vilna, and officially selling poultry,
oats, or clothes, was recruiting prostitutes for brothels in the Vilna region,
from Kovno to Białystok to Polotsk.98 It would be more than just a figure of
speech to call his business “the second oldest trade,” at least in the context
of East European societies with their institutionalized ethnoconfessional eco-
nomic specialization of different groups of the population. This is how the
social function of Dubnik could be formulated in the language of social prac-
tices (and how he and his clients must have perceived it). At the same time,
in the early twentieth century, from the vantage point of the public sphere
and modern discourses, Dubnik’s business appeared as part of the machin-
ery of white slavery (which was not necessarily an exclusively Jewish busi-
ness).99 Using the Kovno hotel as a hub (Baranovskaia and Orlovich spent
only sixteen hours in the hotel before departing for a new destination with
Dubnik’s instructions),100 he recruited at least four Christian girls a month for
the members of a network of Jewish brothel-keepers. Neither the narrative of
performing patriarchality as ignorance about the generally accepted meaning

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 102 Chapter Three

of such activity, nor the modern discourse of criminal conspiracy fit well into
the story of the New Year’s night scandal and what preceded it.
The social practice of patriarchality did not imply that the social relations
and motivations of people employing this practice were actually patriarchal:
naive, archaic, irrational, and completely male-controlled. Dubnik knew, as
did everyone else, that he was engaged in illegal business. It was not very patri-
archal of Balakina to set him up even if she was upset about being rejected by
“Bonda”/Slobodsky (apparently, Dubnik assured her that she was guaranteed
a place in the “number-one brothel in Białystok”). It was equally not patriar-
chal of Mereino to conspire against his brethren, neighbor, and competitor,
Slobodsky, inspiring Balakina to file an official complaint (initially, she did not
mention Mereino at all, but fully explicated the role of Slobodsky as accepting
prostitutes from a flesh-peddler). On the other hand, the remarkable scale of
social mobility, when single low-class girls from backwater towns could move
freely for hundreds of miles in search of a job, was a result of more fundamen-
tal processes than any “white slavery” networks run by zukhers. If we are to
believe Khaetskaia, self-employed women with no means occasionally alter-
nated prostitution with more respectable businesses, and it was not their fault
(and even not the fault of their agents such as Dubnik) that there were more
jobs available in prostitution than in housekeeping.101
It would have been very important to learn whether Balakina indeed under-
stood Yiddish. On the one hand, she had lied enough in her testimony, so
this could be another completely made-up episode. But on the other hand,
why would a woman who spent several years with Jewish employers and cus-
tomers not learn their language? Slobodsky summoned his rival, Mereino,
to read a message that he could not read himself. If it contained his address
and Dubnik’s signature, it was hardly secret information: it could have been
conveyed both to the girls and to the authorities in Russian (Balakina and
Khaetskaia knew who had sent them and they were prepared to find “Bonda”
in Białystok even without his formal address). Balakina’s claim that the mes-
sage mentioned a finder’s fee would be the main reason to write the note in the
first place, and the most important part of it, which could cost Dubnik a year
or two in prison but also could influence Slobodsky’s decision to send the girls
away if he found the commission (45 rubles) too high. In any case, there was
no reason for Slobodsky and Mereino to translate this strategic information
into Russian for Balakina. Thus, it is not impossible that she indeed grasped
the meaning of the Yiddish message.
A Russian Yiddish-speaking woman—whose best friend is a Catholic, and
who settles a score with her potential male employers by exploiting the police

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 103

to her advantage through a new hegemonic discourse—does not fit well into
either the conventional patriarchal or modern national narrative. But in Vilna
alone there were hundreds of women who came to the city from afar, over-
coming the misogynistic barriers of the prevalent gender regime and using the
social practice of patriarchality to their advantage. In the absence of the social
mechanisms of a modern mass society of anonymity and equal opportunities,
the inhabitants of the heterogeneous Russian imperial society built their own
networks of social mobility, integrating isolated circuits of local knowledge
and practice by means of the individualizing agency of clientele relations.

Patriarchality as a Melting Pot

The differentiation of prostitution from sexuality, and the subversive role of

prostitution in providing women with socioeconomic agency within the gen-
der regime of patriarchy is conveyed in Isaac Babel’s novella “My First Fee,” a
conscious experiment at presenting in textual form a principally nondiscursive
perception of plebeian experiences.102 The story of the obsession of a young
man in another peripheral imperial town, Tiflis (Tbilisi), with a middle-aged
prostitute has a subtext written in body language, behind the explicit plot and
another layer of the story, about the building up of an emotional connection
between the strangers.103 In his intense and vivid manner, Babel contrasts the
sexual desire and fantasies of his protagonist with an ultra-realistic, physio-
logical, and deliberately antierotic depiction of his love object and their inter-
course. Babel compares their synergetic lovemaking to the joint work of two
village carpenters,104 which is a great metaphor for the collaborative psycho-
logical process, but seems jarringly at odds with conventional, romantically
tinged descriptions of sexual interaction. The prostitute, Vera—whose appear-
ance, attitude to her trade and to her client (before they became spiritually
intimate)—indeed can be best compared to a carpenter, another skilled arti-
san, or a latter-day socialist female Stakhanovist. The implied masculinity of
Vera (highlighted by the young man’s imagined identity as a male prostitute,
which helped him to win her heart) betrays the gendered code of skilled trade
as a male domain par excellence in late imperial Russia. In contrast, it is her
male client who appears dependent on her consent to accept the job and to
perform it at her whim.
Attitudes to prostitution were formed within this broader complex of
patriarchality and were indicative of it. The performed patriarchality of
Vilna and other provincial towns was sustained by the patriarchal prac-
tices of households as families and production units. The social practice of

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 104 Chapter Three

patriarchality relied on certain structural socioeconomic conditions. One of

them was the process of translating labor relations into contract-based, mon-
etary forms that, as E. P. Thompson writes, could be ascribed in England to
the eighteenth century, but that was only taking off in Russian provinces at
the turn of the twentieth century:

This was a transitory phase. . . . First was the loss of non-monetary usages
or perquisites, or their translation into money payments. . . . They favored
paternal social control because they appeared simultaneously as economic
and social relations, as relations between men not as payments for services
or things. Most evidently, to eat at one’s employer’s board, to lodge in his
barn or above his workshop, was to submit to his supervision. In the great
house, the servants . . . spent a lifetime ingratiating favors.105

Indeed, in Russian provincial cities, employees of petty enterprises lodged

with their masters well into the early twentieth century.106 Not infrequently,
they lived in the same room. Today, a regular job requiring such a high degree
of physical intimacy and dependence would be identified with few social ven-
ues other than prostitution, but it was a norm in the world of petty common-
ers in late imperial Russia. Both psychologically and physically, chambermaids
and shop assistants experienced the absence of privacy and the domination of
their masters, and providing occasional sexual favors was only one intrinsic
(even if marginal) aspect of this literally patriarchal, archaic hegemony.107 In
terms of the economic exploitation of women, by all accounts, prostitution
was the most lucrative option for unskilled female labor. Finally, the physical
experience of the prostitute was not confined to nakedness and intercourse.
A very substantial part of the job involved consuming alcohol, singing, and
dancing, as a complex rite of carnal festivity. It is not accidental that the
majority of police reports concerning prostitutes (including those cited in this
chapter) mention them drinking with their customers. Scores of theft victims
claimed that they were robbed by prostitutes after excessive drinking together
(besides occasional incidents of Murphy games, when prostitutes purposefully
set up and swindled customers).
Morally condemned and legally stigmatized in public discourse, prostitu-
tion in many aspects was indistinguishable from other habitual social prac-
tices: cohabitation with employers, submission to patriarchal authorities,
close physical contact (both nonsexual and sexual), and alcohol consumption.
This is not to say that the stigmatization of prostitution was exclusively an
elite phenomenon, alien to common people. But the practices of censoring,
or, alternatively, embracing the fact of one’s engagement in prostitution are

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 105

related to circumstantial and contextual attitudes. For instance, it was shame-

ful to be known as a prostitute in one’s native town or village, to a degree that
the dishonor could be vindicated only by blood, but it was not a big problem
in another town.108 Rising social mobility broke apart formerly homogeneous
moral communities, which resulted in the relativization of prostitution’s stig-
matization even in the most conservative neighborhoods.109 These attitudes
can be regarded as markers of more general social processes. The deliberately
technical perception of prostitution in Vilna (and elsewhere) on the interper-
sonal level and the politics of rhetorical denial of its existence suggests that
intimate intergroup contacts were based on pretended ignorance about the
meaning and symbolism of differences. This, in turn, could clear the way
for the situation of the middle ground. Pretended ignorance (patriarchality)
played the role of a kind of insulation, shielding people from the influence of
conflicting hegemonic discourses and, in their absence, making possible cre-
ative misunderstanding as a way to construct a common social sphere.
Indeed, unnoticed in mass periodicals and expert surveys, grassroots
social practices were eroding various intergroup barriers in late imperial
Vilna. In some areas, the new transcommunal social networks were even
formally recognized by the authorities. For example, on March 1, 1906, the
Mutual Aid Society of Associated Cart-drivers was registered in Vilna. Its
founding members represented all the major ethnoconfessional and social
groups of Vilna society: two Jewish town commoners (meshchane), one
Russian Orthodox town commoner, one Russian Old Believer town com-
moner, a Roman Catholic nobleman (perhaps, a Belarusian), and a Catholic
town commoner (perhaps a Lithuanian).110 A different pattern was revealed
by self-organization of the tanning industry in Vilna. Although ethnically
diversified, the local tanners’ trade union had an all-Jewish board (probably
due to the hegemonic role of the Bund in Vilna’s worker organizations).111
On the contrary, the proverbially Jewish-dominated corporation of tailors
elected a board of nine members on August 12, 1906, only four of whom
were Jews (including the chairman). Moreover, two of the board mem-
bers were women of peasant legal estate—not a small achievement for the
epoch and the social milieu.112 Equally remarkable was the official seal of
the society, which read “The Vilna Professional Society of Tailors” in three
languages: Russian, Yiddish, and Polish.
The multilingualism of Vilna plebeian society was documented in the
politics of commercial signs, ever since it was allowed to produce them in
languages other than Russian in the fall of 1905 (on the condition that the
Russian text had an equal or larger share).113 Every year, hundreds of shop

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 106 Chapter Three

owners and artisans applied for permission to produce a sign advertising their
business.114 In general, it was typical of Poles to ask for permission for two
symmetrical signs, in Polish and in Russian, while Jews usually planned to have
signs in Russian only, or in Russian and Polish, with a larger one in Russian.
Occasionally, Jews advertised their services in three languages, adding Yiddish
to Russian and Polish. This was typical of stores selling the most common
items, including shoes, leather goods, and textiles.115 One can speculate that
the shoe store of a Jew, Tsalka Galperin, did not have a sign in Yiddish because
it was located in the building of a Lutheran Church (which still indicated the
nondiscriminatory politics of landlords toward leaseholders of other confes-
sions).116 On the other hand, a Jewish merchant selling furs, Iudel Gurliand,
had signs in three languages, but instead of Yiddish, one sign was in German,
in addition to the two in Russian and Polish: apparently, a German sign indi-
cated the respectability and international status of the business (while still
comprehensible to Yiddish-speaking customers who knew the Latin alpha-
bet).117 A Russian resident of Vilna wanted to have signs in Russian and Polish
on her dairy products store,118 and the midwife Antonina Solovei (who could
belong to any Slavic ethnic group) planned to have three signs: in Russian,
Polish, and Yiddish.119 (Incidentally, a Jewish midwife, Doba Miron, thought
it was sufficient to have signs just in Russian and Polish, apparently relying on
informal social networks for recruiting Jewish clients.120) A Turkish national,
Ibragim Bol-Ogly, opened a bakery on Zhmudskaia Street that had many
Jewish residents; he called it “The Jerusalem Turkish Bakery of Bol-Ogly,” with
signs in Russian and Yiddish.121
With Lithuanians making up just 2–3 percent of the Vilna population,122
signs in Lithuanian were rare, but not nonexistent. The owner of the Bristol res-
taurant, Ataula Tubakaev (a representative of an ancient Tatar family, one of some
two thousand Lithuanian Tatars), wanted to have billboards in Russian, Polish,
and Lithuanian: “Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper.”123 “The Modern Laundry of
Silvina Knobliaukh” was to be advertised in Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian.
Characteristically, in this case, the owner’s name would have to appear in two
different spellings in the same Latin alphabet: “Sylwiny Knobljauch” (Polish
sign), and “Sylwinos Knoblauch” (Lithuanian sign).124 There was even a project
of a sign in four languages (Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and Lithuanian) on the
headquarters of the Vilna Society of Tenants and Store Lessees (apparently, also
multiethnic by the composition of its membership and board), but it seems that
only the Russian sign was permitted by the authorities.125
Thus, the “patriarchal denial” in Vilna allowed people to step out of com-
munal isolationism and explicitly acknowledge their common interests across

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 The Patriarchal Metropolis 107

the ethnoconfessional divides, to sell goods and services to someone of a dif-

ferent faith or language. There was no readily available discourse capable of
accommodating this new social stance, and plebeian society was incapable of
producing discourses independently—this was the function of the patrician
society of the middle-class public sphere. The social practice of patriarchality
sustained performative parochialism that did not allow for generalizing and
institutionalizing the categories of belonging (to a national community) and
otherness (of aliens). It also sanctified authority defined in nonnational (and
thus archaic) categories of seniority, male domination, and formal officehold-
ing, even though the power of this authority was nominal. The sustaining of
order and security in the city were not due to the night inspections of Police
Chief Deminskii, but to the invisible threads of social practices and compro-
mises that were making those inspections safe for Deminskii himself in the
first place.
In a genuinely patriarchal society, everyone is local and different; alter-
natively, the public discourses of modernity construct large-scale aggrega-
tions of “us” versus “them.” Balancing between these two often-overlapping
cognitive modes in the social practice of patriarchality, up to a certain point,
Russian late imperial society managed to accommodate the challenges of
modernity surprisingly well, keeping mobilization of intergroup confronta-
tion relatively low.

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 Chapter Four

“We Only Kill Each Other”

The Anthropology of Deadly Violence

and Contested Intergroup Boundaries

In Struggle You Will Find Your Rights!

Little affected by public discourses elaborated within patrician educated circles,

Russian plebeian society employed the social practice of patriarchality when in
a potentially explosive cultural and political environment of competing eth-
noconfessional groups, and relied on the practice of creative misunderstand-
ings of the middle ground to expand and stabilize the sphere of intergroup
cooperation. The fundamental weakness of the hold of public discourses over
plebeian society, and the latter’s inability to use discourses systematically as a
mediator of social relations and transactions resulted in the previously men-
tioned persistence of carnal knowledge (not constrained solely to the sphere
of sexuality, as elaborated by Ann Stoler).1 Explicit social gestures conveyed
much of the relevant information in the language of body politics. There was
a darker side to this reliance upon nonverbal modes of communication, as
the most intensive meaning could be cloaked in an act of violence, including
deadly violence.
Long before action directe became associated with the name of a notorious
French urban guerrilla organization in 1979,2 the principle of direct action
became dominant in the sphere of Russian mass politics that was emerging
during the first years of the twentieth century. “In struggle you will find your
rights!” was the official slogan of the most popular and influential revolution-
ary party of Socialist Revolutionaries. Despite the efforts of the factions of
Russian socialist parties that were better educated and integrated in the sphere

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 109

of public discourses to rely on propaganda and political education of the

masses, both Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats regarded highly
symbolical assassinations as the most efficient vehicle for popular mobiliza-
tion. During the troubled years in the wake of the abortive 1905 Revolution,
revolutionary terror overwhelmed the country. In 1906, 3,108 people were
killed and wounded as a result of terrorist attacks, which averaged eight or
nine casualties a day.3 Politics and politically motivated violence did not play
a decisive role in the functioning of plebeian society, except for the periods of
general strikes and armed uprisings. Rather, in their attempts to mobilize the
urban lower classes for the revolution, radical political activists themselves had
to intuitively rely on the language and social practices understandable to their
target audience. The revolutionary deadly violence was not so much about
intimidation of the authorities (i.e., terror) as about imposing an alternative
world view, in which supremacy was validated by the sacrificial victim of the
terrorist. Violence was broadly perceived as a sacral rite reassuring the moral
supremacy of the revolutionary social order.4 The well-studied symbolism of
revolutionary violence gives us a sense of how the less politicized (or com-
pletely apolitical) acts of violence were perceived within plebeian society: as
making a statement regarding the status of the perpetrator and victim on the
map of the composite and hierarchical society.
The scale of less politically motivated violence after 1905 was even greater
than the outright political terrorism, although the difference between the two
was quite vague.5 As the story of anonymous extortion letters in Odessa and
other imperial cities shows, it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between
ideologically motivated attacks and racketeering under the rhetorical cover
of revolutionary slogans. The revolution of 1905 became a major discursive
event, so powerful that even traditionally indifferent plebeian society became
permeated by the tropes and rhetoric of revolutionary politics. As we have
seen in anonymous letters, the hold of revolutionized discourses had weak-
ened by the 1910s, when the most popular discursive devices borrowed by
plebeian society were those of modern mass culture, but for a few years after
1905, the fanciest way to wrap one’s actions in words was to “speak anarchist.”
This period witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the number of extremist
groups not belonging to any mainstream political party but committing vio-
lence under the cover of revolutionary rhetoric. This was a truly pan-Russian
phenomenon, but Odessa was the ultimate champion in terms of numbers
and visibility of urban guerrillas preaching action directe and appreciating cold
cash. Members of those groups raiding private businesses in the name of social
justice usually declared themselves “anarchists-communists,” but there were

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 110 Chapter Four

variations, including “anarcho-syndicalists,” “anarchists of the free commune,”

and the “Odessa Group of Jobless Communists” (not to mention numerous
“black banners” and “black ravens”). Odessa’s police collected five thick vol-
umes featuring dossiers on hundreds of members of these groups.6 Ethnicity
and confession are mentioned in police dossiers only occasionally, and it is
therefore impossible to produce any accurate statistically meaningful gener-
alizations, but the names suggest that representatives of all ethnoconfessional
groups partook in this movement.
Available sources suggest the absence of any specific ethnic agenda in the
actions of any of these “free radicals”: Jews, alongside Russians, Ukrainians,
and Moldavians, in mixed groups or separately, attacked both Jews and
Gentiles, racketeering under the cover of revolutionary slogans.7 This time, we
can speak of the “economization of politics,” rather than the “politicization of
ethnicity”: revolutionary rhetoric became a commercial brand because it was
more prestigious to be an “expropriator” than a prosaic “robber.”
Exceptions only confirm the rule. Thus, in June 1906, in the wake of a
bloody Białystok pogrom (June 1) and under its direct influence, eight
Jewish activists founded a nonparty committee of self-defense in Odessa’s
low-class neighborhood of Moldavanka, which was later renamed the Odessa
Moldavanka Flying Group of Self-Defense. The majority of its members were
very young, seventeen to twenty-one years old, and did not belong to any
revolutionary organizations. Only the head of the group, Iankel Esterman (aka
Meyer) and Iosol Tsigelnistkii were older, twenty-seven and thirty-three years
old, respectively.8 This was seemingly a classic case of people turning to action
directe in response to a potential threat to their ethnic group identity, and even
more as the only available way to communicate their strong feelings of indig-
nation, compassion, and hatred.
The group began its activity with fund-raising: in less than two weeks, they
received hundreds of donations, each acknowledged with a formal receipt.9
This scrupulosity notwithstanding, we can easily imagine the process of gath-
ering contributions from the case of Moisei Volsky described in chapter 1,
and many similar instances: in three words, philanthropy at gunpoint. The
money allowed the unit to purchase several revolvers and a simple printing
press. The press was used to print up to one thousand copies of a proclamation
that explicitly betrayed the utterly superficial command of a mosaic of public
discourses (and of the literary Russian language, for that matter):

Insanity and horror consume each of us as we read about more new brutali-
ties of the pogrom committed by a pack of hooligans, under the guidance
of policemen and spies, and protected by loyal servants—the troops. New

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 111

streams of innocent blood covered the land of one of the towns of our great
motherland, Białystok. Once again all the Jewish population is in quivering
anticipation of something threatening. Once again the best fighters of the
liberation movement are laying under a measure [sic] of earth and on their
deathbed wait for vengeance to their executioners.
Comrades! . . .That’s enough waiting and hoping for assistance from else-
where! It is time to come to our senses at last and realize that we cannot get
help from anyone but our own hands!
We have organized a “nonparty and independent party of self-defenders”
that has as its slogan the protection of all peaceful citizens from hooligans,
and we call all of the conscious proletariat, all citizens without exclusion
. . . to organize themselves into our ranks for the protection of the Jewish
population from pogrom! Remember, comrades, that pogrom is counter-
revolution, this is a death convulsion of the dying regime. . . . Remember
that when we come forward against counterrevolution, we thus deliver a
lethal blow to the dying despotism!10

No special textual analysis is needed to see in this proclamation how recent

migrants to Odessa from shtetls in the Pale of Jewish settlement (not a single
member of the group was born and registered in Odessa) came to self-iden-
tification with “our great motherland.” Revolutionary violence in the form
of action directe functioned as a channel of their ultimate socialization into
the wider society. The initial impulse to self-organization and organized vio-
lence came from a sense of solidarity with the Jews of Białystok. However,
they found legitimization of their actions in the Russia-wide revolutionary
struggle with counterrevolution, despotism, and secret service, rather than
in the politicization of ethnicity, through the noble cause of combating anti-
Semites/pogromists. The choice of discursive borrowings can be explained by
the fact that the revolutionary rhetoric was still very powerful in the summer
of 1906. Its all-embracing civic inclusiveness resonated with Jewish minorities,
and was also more accessible to representatives of plebeian society than the
elite inclusiveness of the liberal middle-class civic project. Still, they chose a
particular scenario of belonging to the revolutionary nation—one associated
with violence rather than with collective labor action and assimilation into the
international body of the class of proletariat. Incidentally, the newly founded
group of urban guerrillas could not unproblematically validate its actions
through the discourse of Jewish avengers (in the same way that they could
rely on the revolutionary rhetoric), as by this time Jewish society, including
traditional revolutionary parties, had condemned the unattached Jewish mili-
tants and even threatened to ostracize them from the Jewish community by

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 112 Chapter Four

officially proclaiming herem (Hebrew: excommunication) on them.11 Thus, by

choosing a particular rhetoric from the several available discursive strategies,
Meyer’s group demonstrated that they were looking for the most suitable way
to endorse violence. It is the choice of a social practice (action directe) that pre-
ceded and predetermined the selection of a mode of its verbalization from the
repertoire of the available fragments of public discourses, not the other way
around. Subsequent events only confirm this conclusion.
The proclamation was intercepted by the secret service in early July, but
searches for the mysterious new fighting unit initially proved futile.12 Meyer’s
group moved to combat activity on July 11, 1906, by shooting at Cossack
barracks from afar (no information on any resulting casualties was registered).
After that, the direct confrontation with the regime was put on hold. On the
same day, two group members (Fedor Sysoev, a Russian peasant from Orel
province, and Eva Mitatser, a Jewish meshchanka from Odessa) arrived at
the fancy photography shop of Iosif Pokornyi (a Jew) at 17 Deribasovskaia
Street and demanded money “for the unemployed.”13 They were arrested and
jailed for illegal fund-raising. On July 13, the leader of the group, Esterman
(aka Meyer), showed up at the police precinct where the arrested were being
held, in an attempt to secure their release (possibly through bribery), but was
arrested himself. This happened because on the previous day, July 12, three
other members of the organization were arrested, and since one of them lived
at the group’s headquarters, police unexpectedly discovered the entire archive
of the group. The circumstances of the fateful arrest were described in the
police report:

On July 12, Tarnopolskii, Gorshtein, and Berkovich arrived at the brothel

at 62 Bolgarskaia Street, and holding loaded revolvers declared that they
[were] members of self-defense and feared nobody. From there they headed
to the Seltzer water kiosk at 53 Bolgarskaia Street, where they were arrested.
The personal search produced the revolvers mentioned above, 66 cartridges
for them, and 11 copies of the “Proclamation” of the Moldavanka group
(Leaflet No. 1). Searches of their apartments followed afterward.14

In the absence of the actual threat of a pogrom in Odessa, the initial psy-
chological motivation to found a group of urban guerrillas and its rhetori-
cal legitimization rapidly became disconnected from actual social practices.
The group did not even think about targeting ultranationalist (“black hun-
dred”) organizations, who were regarded as the primary instigators of Jewish
pogroms. The sole attack against the regime (barracks shooting) had no vis-
ible consequences—at least no one was arrested for this act of revolutionary

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 113

terrorism. On the contrary, everyone was caught red-handed in pursuing

activities typical of Odessa anarchists-communists. This is not surprising, giv-
ing that Fedor Sysoev and Eva Mitatser, who attempted extortion of a Jewish
photographer at the Deribasovskaia Street, did not belong to the core group
of the combat unit’s founders. They were recruited several weeks later, appar-
ently, because of their reputation as experienced militants: “The abovemen-
tioned Sysoev, by the way, explained that the group of ‘raiders’ known to him
included, among others, Zhenia Burderlikh, currently observed in the well-
known group of anarchists of the ‘Free Commune,’ . . . Simkha Stoliarovskii,
currently hiding abroad, [and] a certain ‘Aron’ and ‘Savushka,’ whose identi-
ties have not been established yet.”15
It seems that professional anarchist raiders specializing in robberies were
occasionally recruited by leftist groups in need of experienced fighters. This
symbiosis provided militants with a moral excuse, while stimulating in the
revolutionaries a taste for blood.16 On a more fundamental level, we see that
in Odessa an attempt at politicization of ethnicity (creating an all-Jewish
antipogromist combat unit) could not be effectively sustained. The inclusive
revolutionary rhetoric was more durable, but the actual actions of numer-
ous anarchist groups had more in common with ordinary criminality than
with political struggle. The question of who those militants were in reality:
criminals or revolutionaries is irrelevant if we acknowledge that social prac-
tices served as a specific language of self-expression for predominantly non-
discursive plebeian social groups that selected elements of available tropes and
discourses furnished by the middle-class elite public sphere. There was not
necessarily an ultimate goal in their actions (revolutionary or criminal), but
definitely a certain intention that they attempted to communicate and imple-
ment. The little personal information we have about the founding members of
the Odessa Moldavanka Flying Group of Self-Defense is telling enough. They
were young people, recent migrants to Odessa, inhabitants of the predomi-
nantly Jewish-populated Moldavanka district. The few documented actions by
these people tell a story of moral indignation, dreams of secure financial status
(or at least unlimited quantities of Seltzer and syrup on a hot July day), success
with women (or at least a solid reputation in a local brothel), and integration
into a larger society (at least, when arrested, the three young men were walk-
ing along the main street of Moldavanka in the direction of the prosperous
downtown of Odessa). A loaded revolver might look like a master key to solv-
ing all their problems, and although public discourses did not determine their
actions, it is still significant that they chose to take arms in the name of the
oppressed people and the noble cause, rather than the selfish ideals of criminal

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 114 Chapter Four

enrichment. In the analysis of violence, the context and circumstances of its

application are no less important than the results. The choice of partners and
victims makes the practice of direct action meaningful, even if its immediate
results are senseless, as is any outburst of violence.

Violence as a Demarcation of Intercommunal Boundaries

After 1906, the surge of violence gradually subsided, parallel with the erosion
of the political component in its motivation. The post-1905 Odessa social
landscape was characterized by the individual exercise of routine violence
directed toward both strangers and familiar people. The criminal chronicle in
Odessa newspapers and police records does not reveal any ethnic specificity in
the exercise of deadly violence: Jews and Gentiles seemed to be equally prone
to brutal aggression.
Violence stemmed from the most routine everyday encounters, particu-
larly in the situation of commercial competition. In December 1908, a man
named Fridman (a Jew) came to the fish shop of Groiszun (also a Jew) at the
New Market to demand payment of a debt. After brief negotiations, Groiszun
became so upset that he grabbed two heavy packing cases with goods and
threw them at his creditor’s head, hurting his hand and face. Groiszun chased
Fridman out of his shop and punched him several times.17 Two weeks later,
a more dramatic confrontation took place between two competing groups of
bread sellers on the busy Malaia Arnautskaia Street. At dawn, a person named
Mazurkevich (most likely, a Ukrainian) tore down the sign “Bread by Weight”
from the store of the spouses B. and T. Babichevs (apparently, located not far
from the Old Market).18 Despite the early hour, Mazurkevich was immedi-
ately surrounded by angry bread sellers: the Babichevs, I. Frenkel, and “the
old woman Chechlnitskaia.” Mazurkevich filed a complaint about a “group of
Jews” who attacked him, ruthlessly beat him up, stole his watch, tortured, and
even wanted to murder him.19 Judging from their surname, which is still to be
found in Odessa, and its occurrence in genealogical databases, the Babichevs
were most likely Gentiles, which makes an attempt at the rhetorical ethniciza-
tion of their conflict even more futile.
On March 20, 1912, two women, Fima Lifshits (a Jew) and Mariia
Krivtsova (a Russian or Ukrainian), who were selling fruits at the central Privoz
Market, quarreled. The Jewish woman’s teenage son hit his mother’s opponent
in the face with a three-pound weight, breaking four of her teeth. Incidentally,
the Christian victim was rushed to the nearby Jewish Hospital.20 In another
fight at a marketplace (in the neighborhood of Slobodka-Romanovka), on

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 115

January 17, 1913, the Russian owner of a grocery store, Vasilii Volkov, fired
two revolver shots at his competitor, the Jew Ovsei Morgulis.21
Criminal assaults were even more violent, and seemingly equally indiscrim-
inate. On October 6, 1912, four robbers attacked Petr Luzhetskii (a Russian
or Ukrainian), beat him up, and stole a meager 4 1/2 rubles. Two of them
were identified as registered “dangerous robbers,” the Jew, Srul Gershkovich,
and Ioakim Khoruzhenko (most likely, a Ukrainian).22 Sober descriptions of
assaults in police reports read like the scripts of thrillers. Already mentioned
was the attack on the shoe store of Moisei Volsky by raiders claiming to belong
to the Black Banner group on April 9, 1907, when Mrs. Volsky was fatally
wounded.23 One month later, in the evening on May 10, 1907, three young
Jewish men entered the grocery store of the Jewish merchant Iosif Gafanovich.
Two of them fired four shots at the owner and his three shop assistants, and
a bullet hit Gafanovich in the temple. The prehistory of this murder makes it
even more dreadful: the day before, two Jews had asked Gafanovich for tea
and sugar “for the unemployed” (just as Sysoev and Mitatser attempted to
swindle the photographer Pokornyi). Gafanovich refused to give them any-
thing. They warned him: “Tomorrow we’ll show you then!”24
During just one week in that same October of 1907, at least four armed
assaults involving Jewish bandits were registered: an armed robbery of the
apartment of M. Reich and M. Bronz; a raid on the grocery and tobacco
shop of Kh. Shtein; attempted racketeering against the businessman Mikhail
Tsukerman; and the murder of another shop owner, Leonid Musman.25 In
January 1908, seven armed robbers, both Gentiles and Jews, attacked the
delicatessen shop of Borukh Faingolts on prosperous Ekaterininskaia Street.
When the owner attempted to sound the alarm, he was gunned down with
two precise shots, both hitting him in the head. A bystander attempting to
seize the attackers was shot in the chest.26 When in August 1906, two strangers
attempted to extort 25 rubles “for the unemployed” from Nison Veksel’shtein,
and three days later a bomb was thrown into his hat shop on downtown
Preobrazhenskaia Street,27 he apparently decided to take no chances in the
future and fully armed himself. In October 1907, on the way back from his
shop, he was attacked by a street robber, Ignatii Gudzi (probably, a Ukrainian),
who then attempted to escape. Veksel’shtein pulled out a gun and fired at the
robber, who was eventually captured.28
What is truly remarkable in these and many other cases is not that Jews of
Odessa habitually committed acts of deadly violence, contrary to both anti-
Semitic and philo-Semitic stereotypes, but that their victims were invariably
only Jews. Out of many hundreds of cases reviewed for this study, not a single

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instance of criminal homicide committed by a Jew in Odessa purposefully tar-

geted a Gentile.29 Jewish crooks easily trespassed across the boundaries of eth-
noconfessional communities selecting Gentile targets to pickpocket, defraud,
burglarize, or even rape.30 But an invisible wall seemed to emerge between
the communities in cases of capital crimes. Characteristically, Russian and
Ukrainian bandits murdered Jewish robbery victims without hesitation, but
it was never the other way around. For some reason, Jews could not cross
the invisible line, the final frontier on the way to complete integration into a
larger society where taking someone’s life is truly an indiscriminate crime.
The intracommunal direction of deadly violence in Odessa was characteris-
tic not only of Jews, who were just the largest and most visible of the minority
groups. A remarkably bloody confrontation between two Armenian entre-
preneurs took place on June 6, 1913. According to the report of the Odessa
Court Chamber prosecutor, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, Mikhail
Maksimov, a Russian shop assistant of the merchant Boiadzhian, was working
upstairs alone when he noticed

that a stranger had entered the office of his boss, separated by the glass wall
from the room where he [i.e., Maksimov] was. When soon afterward . . .
noise was heard and gunshots sounded, Maksimov arose from his place and
through the glass saw his boss and the stranger standing in the office facing
each other, holding handguns and shooting at each other. Maksimov rushed
to the street and called a constable. When he returned, he jumped into
the office and helped Boiadzhian to run out to the street, where the latter
collapsed on the sidewalk. He was picked up and carried to a neighboring
shop, where he immediately passed away. On his chest, by his right nipple,
two dagger wounds were found. No other damage or traces of coercion were
found on the body. The victim had a handgun (a small Browning) with an
empty magazine. He was holding this gun in his hands when he rushed
out of the office. At the same time, the stranger remained in the office. He
told the constable he would shoot him with the revolver he was holding,
and then would shoot himself. He repeated this to the superintendant of
the Boulevard [police] precinct. . . . In view of this situation, firemen were
summoned on the order of the superintendent, and a stream of water was
directed at the perpetrator, after which criminal police unit detectives dis-
armed and arrested him.31

The perpetrator identified himself as a Turkish national, Rupen Fetvazhan

from Trabzon in the Ottoman Empire, apparently a member of Trabzon’s
significant Armenian community that accounted for about 10 percent of

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 117

the town population before the Genocide. Police found on him a dagger, a
revolver, and eighteen cartridges. After over a year of interrogation, the motive
for the murder was still not fully clear: a tangle of kindred relations, smug-
gling of weapons, the victim’s alleged membership in the Dashnak Party, and
Fetevazhan’s repeated attempts to return a debt of 2,225 rubles.32
All details of this bloody conflict, including the futile shooting at each
other at point-blank range (Boiadzhian wasted the entire magazine, at least
six bullets, and Fetvazhan must have also emptied his gun), and the fatal
double stabbing with a dagger indicate the excessiveness and even redun-
dancy of the violence. None of this was necessary if the goal was actually to
settle a business conflict, to return the debt, and even to murder each other.
Following the anthropologist Anton Blok, “rather than defining violence a
priori as senseless and irrational, we should consider it as a changing form
of interaction and communication, as a historically developed cultural form
of meaningful action.”33 For the plebeian society of Odessa, violence was
not only the most extreme form of the action directe social practice, but also
a particular mode of communication in its own right. The technical act of
taking one’s life clearly could not express all the bitterness and irritation
that Boiadzhian and Fetvazhan felt for each other, without all the yelling,
shooting, punching, and eventually fatal stabbing. In the language of body
politics, the two men quite eloquently elaborated their disagreement, and
one of them redefined the order of things in their common social milieu in
accordance with his own sense of justice.
How then to explain the intercommunal direction of Jewish deadly violence
in Odessa? Why did Jews choose exclusively other Jews as victims? One expla-
nation could be that because of they socialized exclusively within the Jewish
“ghetto,” they just did not know any non-Jewish potential victims. Another
explanation (also based on the premises of the ghetto-like organization of
the Odessa Jewish community) suggests that Jews were afraid of provoking a
pogrom. Both explanations are fundamentally erroneous because the Odessa
Jewish community was never homogeneous, and was anything but an isolated
ghetto. On the contrary, by all accounts this was the most integrated Jewish
population in the Russian Empire. Only by turning to the anthropology of
violence we can interpret the demarcation line “us/them” and the strategies of
crossing the boundaries between ethnoconfessional groups in the seemingly
intermingled Odessa urban society.
A key to the meaning of the Odessa Jews’ discriminative approach to
deadly violence can be found in the motto coined by the notorious American
Jewish gangster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, in the late 1940s: “we only kill each

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 118 Chapter Four

other.”34 Siegel meant that Mafiosi never targeted innocent outsiders on pur-
pose, regardless of their confession or ethnicity (he did not of course use those
terms or think in these categories).35 Regardless of the actual record of homi-
cide, it is important that gangsters perceived killing as drawing a symbolic
boundary of their community. The proper right to murder (or be murdered)
belonged only to the members of an exclusive social group, which differenti-
ated them from the rest of the world—something particularly important in
the situation of fluid social identities in an anomic society. This means that
the most profound restraint for Jewish social integration originated not in the
outer social world with its legal discrimination and popular prejudices (specifi-
cally targeting Jews, but also Tatars, Poles, or Armenians), but within the very
same Jews, who strived to become members of Odessa society just like anyone
else. The members of that “anyone else” also experienced social discrimination
in one or another way: a Russian Orthodox artisan because he belonged to
a lower social class, an Armenian merchant because he was not Russian and
a nobleman, a Polish nobleman because he was not a Russian nobleman, a
Russian nobleman because he, most likely, was very short on money and envi-
ous of the Jewish and Greek plutocratic elite of Odessa, and so on. The ghetto
paradigm envisions imperial society as comprising a fairly homogeneous
majority of equals and an array of oppressed and discriminated against minor-
ities. This model does not stand up to empirical verification: in the language
of modern-day nation-centered social sciences, we can rather describe imperial
society as a society of minorities, each with its own share of stigma, obliga-
tions, and privileges. But besides the absence of the institutionalized sphere
of equal (modern-type) citizenship, complete integration into this society was
hampered by the ethnocultural particularism of its would-be members. The
social practice of the middle ground helped to bridge the deep cultural divides
between communities, but as the pattern of Jewish deadly violence in Odessa
suggests, it could not completely erase the deep sense of one’s own otherness.
There was a need for a common cultural space, in addition to the universal
political rights regime, in order to overcome this cautious self-isolationism.
Only the public sphere was capable of this, while plebeian society could pro-
duce similar results under favorable circumstances by relying on social prac-
tices of patriarchality and the middle ground.
For those engaged with the public sphere, the revolutionary project was
one such possible political cum cultural version of the common social milieu,
allowing its participants to step over their self-isolationism. It is only in the
context of the revolutionary action directe that Jews purposefully targeted
Gentiles as objects of deadly violence. This can be seen in the case of the Odessa

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 119

Moldavanka Flying Group of Self-Defense shooting at Cossack barracks, and

even more prominently in the story of the gang of Grigorii Kotovskii (a future
charismatic Red Army commander), which moved its operations to Odessa
between late 1915 and early 1916. Kotovskii was a charismatic Robin Hood,
the elegant robber of the rich, who distributed the loot among the poor.
In the wake of the 1905 Revolution, Kotovskii called himself an anarchist-
communist, but in the 1910s he dropped this affiliation and stopped acting
on behalf of any political group. A fan of detective stories, he constructed a
self-image that, in the pop culture of the late twentieth century, would have
been identified as a superhero. It seems that he successfully substituted the
discursive appeal of revolutionary rhetoric with the symbolism of violence as
practices. Contemporaries agreed that Kotovskii was not an ordinary crimi-
nal, while in his 1920 autobiography, he explained his motives as follows: “I
could not during those years cram myself into any definite framework. My
nature demanded immediate actions, vengeance upon those who humiliated
and exploited the entire mass of toiling people” (emphasis added).36
Kotovskii, a patriot of Bessarabia, a descendant of a Polish aristocratic fam-
ily and a Russian middle-Volga peasant clan, and fluent in Moldovan and
Yiddish, created a truly emancipatory social environment of violent action
directe. Eight Jews made up at least half of the gang that was quite indiscrimi-
nate in its attacks.37 Incidentally, the Jewish gang members were not novice
migrants to the multiethnic urban centers: many had experienced socializa-
tion in prison or in army service (Nukhim Averbuch was even wounded in
battle and discharged from the army with honors). This only confirms the
important role of violence as a mechanism of symbolic demarcation when
social, economic, and even cultural markers of difference vanish or become
insignificant. The pattern of Jewish violence in Odessa reveals the transitional,
semi-integrated status of Jews in Odessan plebeian society, with a clear trend
toward greater assimilation, whenever they found themselves in the cultural
and political context of a common cause.

Violence as a Vehicle for Cooperation

In Kazan, the obvious difference and distance between Russians and Tatars
did not create the necessity for any additional invisible boundaries. Russians
were unlikely objects of tatarization, while Tatars were reluctant to russify to
the extent of betraying their Tatar self-identification. Representatives of both
communities took each other’s lives indiscriminately. Discursively, Tatars were
particularly visible as villains prone to violence.38 Indeed, some incidents

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reveal the most lighthearted attitude toward violence (though hardly a char-
acteristic exclusive to Tatars). Nobody was surprised to learn that when an
elderly Russian civil servant asked two Tatars to show him the way to the hotel
in October 1905, he was robbed of 34 rubles by his new acquaintances on the
bank of the downtown Bulak canal, yet the victim himself saw nothing wrong
in asking the Tatars to show him the way to the hotel in the first place.39 (On
the other hand, a month earlier, a mullah had been robbed of 100 rubles in
the New Tatar Quarter [sloboda]; in both cases, the victims were not locals but
people just arriving in Kazan from other places.40)
A most gruesome double murder took place in late November 1916: after
a night of heavy drinking, a group of Tatar carters (in their late twenties and
early thirties) decided to replenish their finances by stealing firewood—a
popular business in Kazan, often involving Tatars because of their prepon-
derance among cart drivers—in the Archbishop’s Quarter.41 On their way,
they encountered six carts loaded with goods (mainly groceries) dispatched
by a Kazan merchant to the town of Chistopol, accompanied by only two
Russian adult carters and the teenage son of one of them. Thirty-three-year-
old Shagivalei Sabitov, who had just come to Kazan from a village in the
Laishev district to join his compatriot-cart drivers, killed the two Russian
men, while the boy managed to escape and call the police. Instead of fire-
wood, the criminal cart drivers brought home goods worth 2,000 rubles.42
We can only speculate on whether the Tatar cart drivers would have attacked
their own brethren as easily as they attacked the Russians. It is worth not-
ing, however, that they brought the stolen goods to their rented apartment in
the house of a Russian named Zubarev, located in the predominantly Russian
Cloth District (Sukonnaia sloboda). This circumstance is very characteristic of
interethnic relations in Kazan, as all conflicts were staged in the broader con-
text of interaction and cooperation.
On a night in May 1906, Nikita Makarov, the Russian driver of Kazan’s
provincial engineer, was sleeping in the coach house in downtown Kazan. After
midnight, two thieves broke in: a medium-height Tatar and a tall Russian. The
Tatar attacked Makarov with an ax, attempting to kill him, while the Russian
began stealing harnesses and other useful items.43 It is worth observing that
the stolen goods cost scarcely more than a few dozen rubles, a meager price for
a human life (Makarov managed to survive the attack), indicating a very low
threshold of deadly violence and, perhaps, a certain ethnicity-based division
of labor. At the same time, the interethnic aspect of the crime had more than
one dimension. In another attack some three years later, the victim was a Tatar
clock-shop owner, while the perpetrators were a mixed company of two males

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 121

(a Russian and a Tatar) and two females (a Tatar and, probably, a Russian).
The Tatar shop was located in a newly built tenement building in the tradi-
tional Russian part of the downtown, yet the tenant who called the police was
a Tatar woman. As it turned out, the Russian, Il’in, hit the shop owner first
and beat him to death, while Il’in’s Tatar buddy assisted him, and one of the
girls watched out for the police.44 Three years later, in July 1912, in a largely
Tatar district on the outskirts of Kazan, two drunk Tatar men attacked the
Tatar owner of a grocery shop, located in the house of a Russian landowner.
Allegedly, the quarrel resulted from the unfair trade of illegal alcohol, both
sides accusing each other. Yet one drunk customer was hit on the head with a
five-pound weight, and the shopkeeper was seized by the throat. The conflict
could have resulted in deadly injuries, but a Russian worker residing in the
same house rushed into the shop and stopped the fight.45
One can see from these three very different incidents that there was no
ethnic monopoly on deadly violence, and that it was directed nearly as often
toward aliens as toward representatives of the same ethnoconfessional group. A
stable trope of the “ruthless Tatar” in the public discourse was complemented
by the criminal chronicle routinely featuring Russian delinquents who did not
hesitate to pull out a knife. As if to parody orientalizing stereotypes about
the wild Tatar temperament, a Russian resident of Kazan could stab another
Russian man, who had just slapped him on the face,46 or knife a tenant (an
Iranian national) out of jealousy.47 Even the style of physical violence did not
distinguish Russians from Tatars. During a brawl between two Tatar males,
residents of Nizhny Novgorod, on April 24, 1909, one of them bit off part of
his opponent’s right ear:48 in the eyes of a Russian nationalist, that would have
been a proof of the animal-like brutality of Tatars. Yet just over a week later,
during a clash between two drunk Russian middle-Volga sailors, one of them
bit off the other’s upper lip.49
Two cases of criminal murders committed by Russian residents of Kazan,
described below, elucidate a correlation between a criminal’s choice of a vic-
tim and his image of the world as divided between “us” and “them.” Matvei
Trifonov, a junior porter in a hotel located on the main commercial Prolomnaia
street of Kazan, had planned the holdup of a store in advance, and he was
ready to kill from the very beginning. One evening in late February 1908, at
about eight o’clock, he entered a fruit shop on the same Prolomnaia Street,
across from the hotel where he worked, but it was packed with customers,
and Trifonov did not dare to act. The trade of fresh and dried fruits in Kazan
was almost exclusively Muslim business, run by local Tatar and Azerbaijani or
Turkish merchants. Prolomnaia Street was located in the historical “Russian”

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part of Kazan, and even though by the early twentieth century Tatar resi-
dents and enterprises had spread throughout the city, the majority of shops
on Prolomnaia Street were not Muslim. Besides, shops selling jewelry or furs
were more likely than a grocery store to have a significant amount of money in
their cashbox by the end of the day. But Trifonov seemed determined specifi-
cally to rob a Tatar store. He went to the neighboring shop belonging to the
Tatar Zagansha Rakhmatullin, but customers were there too. He returned to
this shop later, murdered the owner, Rakhmatullin, and the Tatar night watch-
man, Akhmadullin, but could not actually break into the cashbox, and fled
the city without money. Conscience-stricken, the next day Trifonov decided
to surrender to the police. He held a church service in one of the monasteries
in the vicinity of Kazan, and then went directly to the Kazan provincial prison
to surrender himself to the authorities (symbolically bypassing both the police
and the court).50
A very different attitude toward murder was demonstrated by three Russian
residents of Kazan belonging to the same lower plebeian social stratum as
Trifonov. The Rantsevs had a house but no regular occupation, living in a
neighborhood situated between the working-class-dominated industrial area
and a cluster of several monasteries, across the river from the historical parts
of Kazan. In November 1910, Kseniia Rantseva brought home a young man,
Stepanov, and declared that he would live with them. Her husband did not
object, and they began living together, referring to Stepanov as their “nephew”
when communicating with other people. Kseniia decided to go into business
delivering milk from suburban cow owners to downtown residents, so she
asked Stepanov to get her a horse. Several days later, Stepanov indeed brought
home a horse that he had taken by force from a Russian peasant near the main
city park and cemetery in Kazan. Apparently, they did not consider a more
lawful business plan.
Soon, on December 1, after heavy drinking, the three of them were return-
ing home in the sledge of the Russian carter, Gavrilov. Gavrilov was also drunk,
he sang songs on the way, and asked to be paid in booze. They arrived home,
and Rantsev hurried to buy more vodka. When he returned, his wife told
him that Stepanov wanted to strangle the drunk carter. Rantsev agreed. They
murdered Gavrilov, took his sledge and two horses (including the one that
Stepanov had stolen earlier), and headed out of town. Dumping Gavrilov’s
body in the bushes about one mile from their house, they continued on their
way into the countryside. The next day, they visited Kseniia’s cousin, who
served as chambermaid for the local land captain in the village of Alat, just
over thirty miles to the north of Kazan. Perhaps the perpetrators were looking

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 123

for a place to hide, or Kseniia was still thinking about finding potential clients
for her future milk trade. In any case, by the next evening, December 3, they
arrived at a nearby Tatar village, where they asked the Tatar peasant Salimov to
let them stay overnight. Their host showed an interest in buying their horses
for 63 rubles (an equivalent of two months’ income for someone like Trifonov
or Rantsev), and the fugitives immediately changed their plans. Rantsev sold
the horses to Salimov, identifying himself on the official deed of purchase by a
Tatar-sounding surname, Guzelev (from the women’s name, Guzel). The three
murderers hired a Tatar carter and returned home.51
We can only speculate about the motives of the people who committed
those gruesome and truly senseless crimes, but it is clear that Trifonov felt
conflicted both before and after the murder, while the Rantsevs and Stepanov
did not hesitate to kill a guest in their home in cold blood. Tormented by
guilt, Trifonov chose explicitly alien victims, Tatars, to make it easier for him-
self—or to make the sin less serious by taking Muslim, not Christian souls.
Still, he did not travel the few blocks to the traditional Tatar district of the
city, but committed the crime close to home, across the street from his place
of work and, possibly, residence. The trio who killed the carter Gavrilov had a
most opportunistic attitude toward murder (to put it mildly), yet, ethnocon-
fessional boundaries also played a role in their actions. With their easy attitude
toward crime, they had no problem in taking the life of a fellow Russian: the
victim was more likely to belong to their own network of socialization, and
they dealt mostly with Russians. It should be remembered that the first horse
was stolen also from a Russian, even though strategically it might be safer to
attack a Tatar, who could be expected to have difficulties describing the per-
petrator to the police. Apparently, they knew better how to deal with their
own brethren and were more comfortable with Russians (“We only kill each
other”), and with committing murder literally at home. Acting spontaneously
and anonymously (bringing the second man into the family, a hit-and-run
horse rustling, a murder without witnesses), they indulged their own urges
without concern for society.
Selling two horses, a sledge, and other loot, however, required a formal
economic transaction in order to get a fair price. At this point, the trio
decided to go beyond the boundaries of their “natural” social environment:
from a Russian neighborhood on the city’s outskirts to a Tatar village. They
hoped that even when notarizing the sale at the county administration, they
were on the safe side, forty-five miles away from Kazan. The move was quite
rational, but as if the physical distance were not enough, Rantsev took a
“Tatar” name: obviously, he could not expect to be perceived as a Tatar, but

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he would clearly have loved it if that had happened. Trifonov and Rantsev
differed in their perception of social and moral responsibility, but both of
them naturally chose Tatars as objects of actions deemed threatening to their
immediate social environment. On the other hand, those Tatars were not
perceived as the real Other, as an alien social element, but more as a neigh-
bor from across the street.
Thus, despite the strategic opportunism of plebeian urbanites, who were
often recent migrants with few stable social ties, certain situations and actions
stimulated them to draw a symbolic boundary between the zones perceived as
their primary social environment (familiar) and the unexplored (foreign). For
Trifonov, murder was a deadly sin, and he sought the most alien among famil-
iar places to commit his crime. Psychologically, the petty homeowners, the
Rantsevs, could easily kill someone, but they could not publicly sell recently
acquired property (two horses and a sledge) in view of their neighbors because
that would create suspicion. Hence, they searched for a foreign (but still famil-
iar) environment for a transaction that was technically much more innocent
than first-degree murder. It is important to stress that drawing such a symbolic
boundary delineated social territories, not necessarily grouping people into
friends and enemies. Someone could behave utterly aggressively in his or her
primarily social environment (an ecological metaphor seems appropriate in
the context of analysis of an underinstitutionalized and largely nondiscursive
social milieu), taking advantage of an intimate command of local knowledge.
Rantsev killing the Russian Gavrilov in his own house in Kazan, and Jewish
thugs murdering their Jewish victims in cold blood in Odessa preferred to
act on familiar territory, which did not imply that they should have felt any
special solidarity with Russians or Jews. A systematic application of violence
across the boundaries of enthnoconfessional groups and localities indicates the
erosion (or the initial nonexistence) of those boundaries. In a perverted way,
violence (specifically, sexual violence) could communicate interest and even
sympathy toward the other.

Sexual Violence

In the syncretic body language of carnal knowledge, lust was one of the main
forces driving the process of interconnecting pockets of local knowledge
among the different groups under study here. Today we can identify very dif-
ferent and often conflicting components in that syncretic carnal urge: sexual
desire, curiosity, aggression, or even intense amity. In various individual cases,
different aspects of that emotional drive came to the fore. A hundred years

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 125

later, we cannot hope to learn all the true circumstances and motives of the
historical protagonists. More important, no historical interpretations are
required to make a solid moral judgment condemning any form of violence:
symbolic or physical, sexual or psychological. A historian’s job begins with the
attempt to obtain additional information from the facts and actions that have
already received society’s unequivocal moral verdict.
Thus, it is important to keep in mind the significance of sexual relationships
as a message communicated in body language: just as with assault or murder,
sexual interaction, assaultive or otherwise, can reveal a distinctive politics of
inclusion and exclusion. As we have seen in the case of Vilna, the seemingly
clear-cut community boundaries became particularly porous and unstable in
regard to commercial sex: its consumption, its management, and the staffing
of its cadres, so to speak. In cases of cross-ethnoconfessional liaisons, “he knew
her” often meant that he also better understood her—and she him—including
having learned the language of the other. In Kazan, the overall trend toward
Tatar prostitution was to become more ethnoconfessionally inclusive (judging
by the changing preferences of the patrons and the prostitutes).52 The grue-
some instances of rape can be read as men’s symbolic attempts to confirm their
dominant social status or take revenge upon someone, which in turn can func-
tion as forceful acts of realigning a common social space or underlining the
mutual otherness of the victim and the perpetrator.
As noted earlier, police did not keep statistics on sex crimes, so for infor-
mation on this phenomenon we can rely only on narrative sources, which
reveal some stable prejudices and blind zones. Apparently, for reporters, sex-
ual violence was news only when scandalous enough for lower middle-class
sensibilities (which means that heterosexual rape remained grossly underre-
ported). For example, we learn that in April 1909, in Nizhny Novgorod, a
man named Timofeev was put on trial for raping a 103-year-old woman in the
working-class neighborhood of Sormovo.53 The attempted rape of a fifty-year-
old Russian homeowner by her thirty-six-year-old Russian guest, in the lower-
class neighborhood of Kaluga on the outskirts of Kazan, was reported in a less
scandalous tone.54 It is possible that the former case was selected for reporting
out of scores of other instances of rape in a big city due to the age difference
between the perpetrator and the victim.
Still more numerous were the reported attacks of pedophiles. In July 1907,
a person I., owner of a tenement building in downtown Kazan, was arrested
after several instances of molesting and raping girls eleven to thirteen years old
who lived in his building.55 In the summer of 1911, fourteen-year-old Anna
Akerman of Odessa was raped by her adult neighbor, Abram Nutels (both

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 126 Chapter Four

Jewish).56 On February 9, 1912, two women residing on Uspenskaia Street in

the center of Odessa, Lubov Klimakova (a Russian) and Basia Veisman (a Jew),
complained to the police that their neighbor, Gelman (a Jew), had attempted
to rape their daughters, Anna and Zina (five and six years old, respectively).57
On March 1, 1912, Evdokiia Kravchenko (a Ukrainian or Russian) reported
to the police that her boyfriend, Iranian national, Armenian Agabala Khadhi-
Ogly had infected her four-year-old daughter with gonorrhea.58 On November
26, 1912, in Vilna, a fifteen-year-old Jewish teenager, Iosel Kadyshevich, raped
seven-year-old Anna Bartosevich (a Pole or Belarusian) at 26 Kalvariiskaia
Street (Kalvarijų gatvė), on the northern outskirts of the city.59 Probably highly
nonrepresentative of the general trend in sexual crimes, these cases, aside from
their common thread of brutality and depravity, reveal a certain pattern: the
crime was most likely to have been committed by a neighbor or close acquain-
tance, often belonging to a different ethnoconfessional group.
Open violence was used when victims were expected to put up more active
resistance than helpless children. Once again, we can expect that only the most
outrageous cases were reported in the press, with less spectacular instances of
coercive sex remaining under the radar. Even these instances betray a compli-
cated relationship between violence, otherness, and attraction, as can be seen
in the following cases from Kazan.
In broad daylight, on August 11, 1906, a group of eight young Tatar males
met a young Chuvash woman with her little sister on the two-mile dam con-
necting the downtown with piers on the Volga. Wastelands along the deserted
dam (flooded in spring and muddy in autumn) turned the dam into a trap
with no escape. The Tatar men raped the elder sister, and, even though their
sheer number made any resistance impossible, they beat up both girls.60
On a busy city route, along the Bulak Canal in the center of Kazan, a Tatar
woman who had recently arrived from the village, was confronted by Petr
Poletaev, a Russian unskilled laborer, on the morning of October 17, 1911.
He made her “a disgusting proposal” and attempted to drag her under one of
the bridges across the canal. When she resisted, the raging Poletaev beat her
up, grabbed her shawl, and attempted to run away.61
Back in 1906 (in late December), a Tatar cart driver went to the apartment
of his friend and fellow driver, Galiaskerov (also a Tatar), in the Tatar Quarter
(sloboda) of Kazan. (The account of the incident implies that the guest lived
elsewhere in the city.) Galiaskerov was not at home—only his young wife was
present. She asked the guest what he wanted, but she got no answer. Several
minutes later, he grabbed her by the throat. She managed to break the win-
dow, thus drawing the attention of neighbors, who rushed to help her. At

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 127

this point, the testimonies of the parties diverged. The attacker claimed that
he came to Mrs. Galiaskerova to order several pairs of shorts to be sewn for
himself. The victim declared that the perpetrator demanded money from her
(and he was tried for attempted robbery). However, according to eyewitnesses
(the neighbors who arrived at the apartment and saved Mrs. Galiaskerova), the
assault was an attempted rape. The victim did not even tell her husband about
it out of shame.62
The last episode from this sampling occurred in late 1907 or early January
1908. A twenty-year-old Tatar man, Hustnutdinov, was accused of raping
a young Tatar woman, Akhmadullina, and he attempted suicide afterward.
Hustnutdinov vigorously denied the charges of rape. He said that they had
engaged in consensual sex, but when the girl’s family insisted that he now had
to marry Akhmadullina, he preferred to stab himself with a knife to avoid the
unwanted marriage.63
These very different episodes have one thing in common: even the most
uncontrolled forcing of oneself on a victim that violated every aspect of her
personal and social autonomy revealed certain seemingly odd self-imposed
restrictions. It is the contrast between purported total domination (which in
the symbolism of body language could be envisioned only through an act of
violent rape) and the seemingly illogical partial restraint from exercising this
domination to its fullest that allows us to read some additional information
into otherwise senseless acts of violence.
The August 1906 attack by eight Tatar males embodied the unlimited power
of an aggressive crowd over a weak minority victim (minority both ethnically
and in the sense of being outnumbered). Strictly demographically speaking,
it is this structural situation—and hence, the result of a certain social imag-
inary—that revealed itself in the intercommunal pogroms in 1905 (e.g., in
Baku, Odessa, or Kazan) or as recently as June 1906 (in Białystok). As was dis-
cussed earlier, physical violence was the last resort of the “infamous men” liv-
ing “beneath any discourse” in a situation where they thought they were losing
their only social capital—the demographic quality of belonging to a dominant
ethnoconfessional group (or gender). Demoralized migrants from the coun-
tryside could channel their frustration over losing their former social status (as
young males—the strongest workers and most eligible bachelors in the native
village) by demonstrating their physical superiority over a minority. In Kazan,
this attitude led Tatar male migrants to assault a Chuvash woman (represent-
ing a less numerous Turkic-speaking group). The socially meaningful subtext
of the brutal attack was underscored by the fact that the victim’s younger sister
was not raped but “only” beaten up (although rape could have been expected

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 128 Chapter Four

judging by the instances of child sexual abuse mentioned earlier). This selectiv-
ity of physical abuse could be attributable to the perpetrators’ communicating
a certain vision of social order. Conveyed in demographic (carnal) symbol-
ism, it suggested that everyone but the Russians were subordinate to the Tatars
in Kazan: women of marriage age were legitimate sexual objects to the Tatar
lineage of patriarchy (as the national body), while control over children was
demonstrated by corporal punishment.
In the same logic, the Russian Poletaev could also choose his victim, a Tatar
peasant, because he regarded her as a subaltern even compared to his own low
social status. Indeed, it comes as little surprise that an attempted rape was
accompanied by battering, but the episode with the stolen shawl creates an
additional dimension to the attack. Since his initial motivation was not theft,
we may see Poletaev’s grabbing of the shawl as an attempt to seek material
compensation for the failed physical assault—which means that, in his moral
economy, the Russian Poletaev believed he had a natural right to abuse a non-
Russian woman.
The story of the cart driver Galiaskerov’s young wife illustrates that
incidents of rape remained vastly underreported by victims (although the
Russian newspaper that published an account of the incident suggested that
the silence surrounding sex crimes was typical only of Muslim women). The
anonymous attacker opportunistically attempted to rape the wife of some-
one in his immediate social circle—an acquaintance, perhaps even a friend.
He exercised the minimum violence necessary to force Mrs. Galiaskerova
into sex. It can be speculated that the perpetrator lived outside the Tatar-
dominated district, and was therefore spoiled by the uprooted way of life
of the interethnic urban plebeian society. However, a very similar incident
reported in the news in the fall of 1895 suggests that the attacker was relying
more on the traditional silence of his victim than demonstrating behavior
alien to the mores of the Tatar district.64
The double victimization of those who suffered from sexual violence (mak-
ing them ashamed even to file an official complaint) is a phenomenon known
in various societies and epochs.65 This mechanism works best within a socio-
culturally homogeneous community, as the very social pressure to keep silent
is achieved by the invisibility of social distinctions. The inability to conceptu-
alize the offender as truly different makes it harder to explain why his actions
were breaking a social norm. As noted earlier, members of plebeian society
(and plebeian culture) process information with the help of syncretic images
rather than rationalized discourses. The other side in a conflict has to be clearly
marked as the Other in order to be fully implicated as a perpetrator, otherwise

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 129

the victim herself appears to be a possible deviant. It was literally unimagi-

nable to recognize a fellow member of the community as a breaker of the
foundation of the social order—the regime of normative gender roles.
In the same logic, a person who ignored the traditional norms became an
outcast and was therefore open to rape accusations. Thus, while Galiaskerova
concealed the fact of even an attempted rape (and preferred to accuse her
attacker of robbery), neither coercion nor open violence were reportedly
involved in the last case, when Hustnutdinov was charged with rape. Regardless
of how “consensual” his relationship with Akhmadullina was, it is important
to stress that the public allegation of rape was made only after Hustnutdinov
refused to follow the standard scenario of dating that leads to marriage. It is
equally significant that, facing the prospect of forced marriage, he preferred
to direct violence against himself (attempting suicide). In plebeian society,
the vector of violence usually reveals the perpetrator’s image of an ideal social
order (when a target of physical abuse serves as an equivalent to the concept
of subaltern in the discursive sphere of the educated elite). Under coordinated
social pressure from his own community, unable to personify his problem as
an adversary figure (a distinctive Other), Hustnutdinov stabbed himself as the
only true outcast according to the locally prevailing world view. In a sense, his
reaction was analogous to self-censorship by sexual abuse victims who were
forced into the role of marginals/minorities by the inability to implicate the
perpetrators—fellow community members. The homogeneous nondiscursive
local society relies on the formal structures of kinship and social status and
experiences difficulties with conceptualizing one of its regular members as a
delinquent without undermining the very foundations of its social order.
Arguably, only the ethnicization (and hence politicization) of sexual vio-
lence in the multicultural environment of migrant cities changed the situation.
The rising number of incidents in which victims and perpetrators belonged to
different ethnoconfessional communities helped to articulate the problem and
attract public attention to it. The case of an Odessa Jewish dentist, Naum
Furmanskii, relatively well documented due to his high social status, reflects
this new trend.
On the morning of October 11, 1912, nineteen-year-old Ekaterina
Belendir, a young woman from the community of German colonists in the
vicinity of Odessa, came to Furmanskii’s dental surgery on the corner of
Deribasovskaia and Preobrazhenskaia streets. She had already been coming
to Dr. Furmanskii for several days, and this time he filled another tooth for
her, and then applied some substance to her gum. According to Belendir, at
this point she experienced a fit of weakness. Furmanskii seemed concerned:

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 130 Chapter Four

he asked her whether she had tachycardia, unbuttoned her blouse and bodice,
and listened to her heartbeat. After that, he undressed her to her chemise and
carried her to the sofa in another room, where he had sex with the patient
without her desire or consent. In a state of fatigue, the young woman could
not resist or call for help, but later promptly complained to the police.66
A police search discovered menstrual blood on the underwear of both
Belendir and Furmanskii, which completely exposed him. Furmanskii
acknowledged having intercourse with his patient, but insisted that he had
acted with her consent.67 Medical examination did not find traces of physi-
cal violence on Belendir and it was concluded that she had become sexually
active long ago.68 Three expert professors of pharmacology from Novorossiisk
University in Odessa studied the medications found in Furmanskii’s office.
All of them concluded that none of these medicines or any other substances
could have caused the paralysis of will described by Belendir.69 It was pos-
sible that the charges of Belendir, a maid in the home of the village Catholic
priest Shönfeld, against the successful middle-class urbanite, Furmanskii,
would be dismissed. However, the inconclusive evidence was interpreted in
favor of Ekaterina Belendir, and on January 16, 1915, Furmanskii was sen-
tenced to thirty-two months in jail70 because it turned out that he had a
record of sexual assaults.
Furmanskii married no later than early 1907, but it is unclear whether he
already had a wife in June 1905, when Rosa Ternian (probably a Jew) accused
him of sexual assault.71 He was sentenced to one year in jail, but the sentence
was repealed for insufficient substantiation of a crime. Soon thereafter, the
parties reconciled, and Furmanskii was cleared of all charges.72 In 1911, when
his wife was away, Furmanskii attempted to force sex on their housemaid,
Fevroniia Gavriliuk (most likely a Ukrainian), and even hit her, but she would
not yield. This time he avoided punishment for lack of evidence.73
It is possible that these three cases do not exhaust the list of sex crimes
committed by Furmanskii, the rest remaining unreported for various rea-
sons. Even these incidents reveal a stable pattern: Furmanskii’s sexual pursuits
were confined to his immediate social circle and even the physical space of
his house. (Judging by the scattered references in the file, it is likely that Rosa
Ternian was not a stranger but a neighbor or domestic help with some history
of relations with Furmanskii, which explains their reconciliation after the first
trial.) Also, in choosing his victims, he relied on his higher social and finan-
cial status, hoping to silence them or influence a possible investigation in his
favor. This made Furmanskii’s case quite a typical example of taking advantage
of one’s superior social standing. At the same time, regardless of the motives

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 “We Only Kill Each Other” 131

that guided him, Furmanskii proved himself absolutely nontraditional in his

indiscriminate choice of victims. Three women—a Jew, a Ukrainian, and a
German—accused Furmanskii of sexual harassment and rape. For a Jew, tradi-
tional Judaic regulations categorically forbid sexual contact during menstrua-
tion and for five to seven days afterward. This rule has the same sacral status
as Kashrut and the observance of Shabbat.74 But even if baptized, Furmanskii
would have overstepped some fundamental cultural archetypes to have sex
with Ekaterina Belendir, particularly if it was indeed forced sex.
Dr. Furmanskii’s contempt for ethnoconfessional differences makes his
case an example of a new type of social imaginary emerging in the imperial
city that was effectively overcoming the habit of perceiving society as divided
into insulated communities. The fact that he did not succeed in silencing
Rosa Ternian (by rape-shaming a brethren, as Galiaskerova was), Fevroniia
Gavriliuk (by discrediting a low-class woman), and Ekaterina Belendir (by
allegedly drugging her) testifies to the emancipatory potential of the emerg-
ing new urban society.
For the purposes of this study it is important that, regardless of its moti-
vation, violence, including sexual coercion, can be indicative of the mental
mapping of social spaces and human collectives and, like any language, can
communicate very different meanings. It is not accidental that most of the
episodes mentioned earlier involved attacks on people within the immediate
social milieu of the perpetrator, thus indicating his claim to dominate (or at
least demarcate) it. It is in this function of a language that violence can be
productively analyzed because attempts to classify violent acts and identify
their true intentions are quite futile. Retrospectively, it is usually impossible
to reconstruct all the circumstances of a conflict or understand how its partici-
pants perceived it. Thus, rape bordered on generally tolerated within-family
child abuse in some instances of pedophile attacks, or on an employer’s mis-
use of power in certain instances of assaults on adult women. Similar diffi-
culties are encountered in studying instances of deadly violence. However, as
an element of a secondary modeling system (see Chapter 1), violence can be
much more informative. It may sound paradoxical, but violence can commu-
nicate even friendliness, albeit only in a most awkward way, as the following
episode shows. In September 1908, in the Bolshoi Fontan seafront neighbor-
hood of Odessa, a Jew, Nutovich, met his Ukrainian neighbor, the shopkeeper
Stetsenko, on the street. Because of their history of heated arguments, this
time Stetsenko picked up a stone and smashed Nutovich in the face with it.
Formally (and actually) this was a hate crime, but it was also something more:
a Gentile shopkeeper used the latest argument to induce his Jewish neighbor

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 132 Chapter Four

to become his customer, not to ban him from his shop, as can be assumed
from a general outline of the incident.75
In plebeian society, violence as a social practice was multifaceted, playing
the important common role of a communicative medium. It was therefore
excessively expressive, spoken in the body language of injuries, rape, and muti-
lations, but it was the only alternative to verbalized communication based
on borrowed discourses with built-in explanatory schemes. It was mostly an
extreme way to express one’s individual position, and is thus invaluable for a
study of social arrangements beyond the normative groupings into ethnicities,
confessions, legal estates, or classes. The language of violence tells the story
of intensive contacts and spontaneously emerging power fields of social soli-
darity and confrontation across the conventional map of social composition.
The social practice of violence did not have the constructive potential of the
middle ground or even of patriarchality, the latter being more about sustain-
ing the status quo and stability of a heterogeneous social milieu. On the other
hand, rarely employed in the course of politicization of ethnicity as collective
action with a single uniform target and goals, in late imperial plebeian society,
violence did not fully unleash its destructive force, which was capable of split-
ting communities or mobilizing one group against another. This would change
later in the twentieth century (especially after the outbreak of the Great War
in 1914), once plebeian society became integrated into the political nation by
imposing a normative discourse, or rather an ideological canon. Then, habit-
ual tolerance for violence and a low threshold for its unleashing brought about
truly hideous consequences.

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 Chapter Five

The Transformative Social

Experience of Illegality

A focus on social practices helps to make sense out of the seemingly chaotic
social interactions of low-class urbanites, so it seems logical to inquire whether
those practices formed a social space (if not a social order) of their own. In
our attempt to understand the motivation and rationality of people who left
a trace in written records mainly by their seemingly unjustified outbursts of
rage, petty theft, or ethnic slurs, we have looked into social practices as a factor
that structured plebeian society and mediated the communication of mean-
ings within it. Judging “every man according to his works,” we have thus far
skipped the elusive problem of human nature: how certain values and world
views affected the formation of social practices of the middle ground, patri-
archality, and violence, and how the integrating potential of these practices,
in turn, resulted in the change in basic social attitudes. In essence, this is a
question of the relationship between social dynamics and structures, and how
rapid social transformation creates a social space in its own right—something
that the usual transitological approach treats as a marginal phenomenon
between the real states of the old regime and the normative future endpoint of
transition. The old regime of the Russian Empire was well attuned to handle
the challenges of modernity and human diversity, but only before the advance
of mass society. “The imperial rights regime” granted a certain degree of legal
recognition to self-evident “natural” social collectivities,1 but there was noth-
ing self-evident about the emerging plebeian mass society, with external and
internal boundaries unstable and negotiated through self-organization. In
many ways, this new social milieu reproduced the logic of the imperial situ-
ation and was a product of it, but its formal institutionalization would have
required very different political and legal arrangements. The imperial rights

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 134 Chapter Five

regime made the emergence of Russian mass society possible, but it could not
legalize it formally.
To people living in a society in flux, this was the only and ultimate reality,
much more significant than anything they had left in the past or could antici-
pate in the future.

The Moral Economy of Economic Crime: Possible Explanations

On June 12, 1909, a resident of Nizhny Novgorod, the cart driver Khonin,
went to the police and declared that the day before, three “unknown males”
met him on a busy Oka embankment at four o’clock in the afternoon. In
broad daylight, they ordered Khonin to hold his “hands up!” and robbed
him of 95 rubles.2 This case—a street robbery by “unknown males”—seems
absolutely typical for Nizhny Novgorod. But when the police investigation
revealed that Khonin did not carry this money while on the job, and nobody
had attacked him, it was discovered that this was not a usual fake story cover-
ing for wasted money, as the police might have expected. It should be added
that Khonin’s story was particularly lame story: Why would robbers strike in
daylight, in front of an inn, yell “hands up,” at the unarmed driver, and why
did he have this considerable sum (probably equal to three months’ income)
in his pocket? As it turned out, Khonin did not lose his money, did not squan-
der it on drink and prostitutes, and he indeed had this sum with him. The
truth was that he voluntarily handed over 95 rubles (perhaps all his savings) to
three strangers. They offered him “a lot” of counterfeit money, and he agreed.
For 95 rubles they gave him several packs of 3-ruble bills (probably, at a rate
of ten fake rubles for every good ruble). Unfortunately for Khonin, he fell vic-
tim to a classic confidence trick: he was given doublets, stacks of blank paper
trimmed to the size of a bill, with several real 3-ruble notes on top of each
stack.3 Naturally, Khonin was outraged and wanted to punish the grifters,
but he clearly understood that he did not look like an innocent victim either.
(Incidentally, in this case he was more harsh on himself than were the police,
who seemed to be more interested in finding the swindlers led by a peasant
named Muraviev, who had cleaned out another victim of the hefty amount of
4,000 rubles.)
The story of Khonin was by no means unique: on March 22, 1912, in the
same city of Nizhny Novgorod, a man named Kulikov of peasant legal estate
arranged to buy counterfeit money (also in 3-ruble bills) for 500 rubles from
two strangers, a man and a woman. They brought him to the administrative
center of Nizhny Novgorod, to the monument to Emperor Alexander II in

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 135

front of the city hall. Kulikov gave them the money, and received a metal case
with the “stuff,” when—what a surprise!—a third stranger ran up to them.
He said he was a police detective, grabbed the case from Kulikov’s hands,
and threatened to arrest everyone. Frightened, they all rushed to escape, and
Kulikov found himself empty-handed!4
At first glance, these are stories of mutual deception (“sending a thief to
catch a thief ”) and social disintegration. This is particularly evident in the
case of Khonin: a buyer of fake money was cheated, so he lied to the police,
hoping they would go after the offenders. On second thought, we can detect
a more nuanced social scenery behind the seemingly two-dimensional screen
of mutual alienation and cynicism. To begin with, these Nizhegorod stories
present what we can preliminarily define as different modes of criminality.
Both Khonin and Kulikov knew they were doing something illegal (buying
counterfeit money obviously intending to pass fake bills around in the future).
Yet, at least at this stage, they did not deceive or hurt anyone: they knew they
were dealing with crooks, although apparently they underestimated their
business counterparts. Perhaps they would have preferred to avoid doing any
social harm whatsoever, if there was a benign path toward rapid enrichment.
In another instance of this type of crime, peasant Korkin believed that he
had found such a path when he purchased a “magic drum” from the peasant
Karelov in Nizhny Novgorod or its vicinity in the summer of 1911. Karelov
showed Korkin how the magic drum worked: he inserted three pieces of paper
into the drum, rotated it, and the drum produced three real 3-ruble bills (this
banknote seems to be a persistent symbol of prosperity for Nizhegorod folks)!5
Both Khonin and Kulikov would have gladly taken a drum that printed real
money, but in the meantime had to compromise on its substitute (counter-
feit money, a lot of it). It should be further noted that all the people in these
incidents, which could be set in New York or London without changing a
single detail of those classic confidence tricks, were peasants (both the marks
and the swindlers). All of them were urban residents without any actual ties
to agriculture, but their official social status was defined through their formal
membership in the peasant legal estate. To renew their documents every year
or every few years, both cart driver Khonin and the swindler Muraviev (like
Kulikov and the grifters who took his 500 rubles) had to travel back to their
home villages in the districts of Nizhegorod province, located some twenty to
seventy miles away from the city.
Characteristically, in all these cases the swindlers offering to sell counterfeit
money used authentic 3-ruble bills: recent migrants to the city, they were just
not the type of people who could engage in the criminal business of fabricating

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 136 Chapter Five

counterfeit money. Paradoxically, forging money required a much more solid

social status within established society, not to mention capital investments.
Instances of fabricating money were relatively rare. In 1912, just one case of
forging money was registered by the Nizhegorod police (and was reportedly
solved).6 Over the same year, Vilna police registered three cases of money
counterfeiting, of which two were solved.7 Typically, counterfeiting was a very
sophisticated criminal business that required serious investments and highly
skilled labor. When metalworker Moskvichev in Kazan attempted to manufac-
ture 15- and 20-kopeck coins in his apartment in April 1911, using his crude
tools and small kerosene Primus stove (“out of utter need”), he did not even
last for three days. Moskvichev was arrested in a small shop when he produced
a fake coin to pay for a bag of sunflower seeds.8 The large-scale and high-
quality production of 50-kopeck and 1-ruble coins in Odessa in early 1909
was sustained by a well-coordinated and managed team that included three
masters.9 Another workshop in Odessa that forged golden and silver coins in
1907 was described as a “factory” “furnished as a mint.”10
Still more important was the fact that all the unfortunate Nizhegorod buy-
ers of counterfeit money were actually willing to pay for the fake money rather
than steal or counterfeit the currency themselves. They were not accidental
and thus innocent victims of fraud, but they were not the criminal perpetra-
tors either. They acted as subjects with independent will and rationality, com-
parable to businessmen who invested in a risky but potentially very profitable
scheme. Of course, this comparison can be made only ignoring the general
and abiding category of legality as imposed by the Russian imperial state.
Using three cases of fake sellers of counterfeit money in Nizhny Novgorod
as a window on the peculiar world of Russian plebeian society, we can pre-
liminarily identify several key problems that will be further analyzed in this
chapter. First, a gradient of illegality underlined the entire story, making some
shades of illegality overlap, which produced strange effects. Essentially, every-
thing was fake: the sellers of counterfeit money in reality did not have any
forged banknotes, which caused them to give their victims several real 3-ruble
bills. The victims willingly and knowingly broke the law by agreeing to pur-
chase counterfeit money, and were betrayed in their expectations. But even
had the swindlers and their customers not been engaged in their risky scams,
they were already marked by the stigma of social marginality and fake identity:
legally, they were all peasants who had no business in the city. And yet, the
majority of them were city dwellers, engaged in urbanite social practices. The
second key aspect that became particularly visible in these stories is the prob-
lem of trust and its close counterpart, social capital. A confidence trick, by

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 137

definition, is about abusing someone’s trust, and as such can indicate a grow-
ing erosion of social bonds and networks of solidarity. On the other hand,
trust was the sole social capital of urban migrants who could not survive in
the city without mutual assistance and trust—both swindlers and those whom
they conned.
The persistence of illegal activities within plebeian society, including the
proliferation of various con games, raises the question of whether it can even
be considered an integrated social sphere, or just the destructive fallout of the
stable old-regime society. As social scientists underline, “social capital is . . . a
societal not an individual property, and should be studied as a social or collec-
tive phenomenon, not at the individual level as if it were a property of isolated
citizens.”11 But since this quality of the “social system as a whole” is based on
individually generated and conveyed trust (“the concept of social capital boils
down to networks, norms, and trust”12), it is imperative to understand the
extent to which individual abuses of trust affected the capacity of the whole
system to act as a coherent society.13 We shall depart from this question in our
exploration of plebeian society as a social sphere.

Trust

While con games give the best example of the unscrupulous exploitation of
someone’s trust, a segment of regular social life that is entirely based on mutual
trust is the economic sphere. Entrepreneurs have to rely on their employees
and business partners on a daily basis, often to their utter disappointment.
One of the most common complaints of businessmen to the police in the
early twentieth century was about sales assistants or traveling salesmen stealing
from their employers, often running away with cash or goods with which they
were entrusted. The mischievous employees were a much more real threat than
a raid by racketeers-anarchists in Odessa, who appeared in criminal chron-
icles on a weekly basis. The father of Isaak Babel, the future bard of Odessa
Jewish gangsters, was robbed by his runaway clerk in mid-March 1912.14 A
week later, the traveling salesman Pinkus Ukrainskii pocketed 1,000 rubles
from his boss, the merchant Kuderman.15 In late February, the owner of a
postcard warehouse, Tsalia Shkucher, caught his manager Boris Berenshtein
stealing postcards worth 300 rubles.16 Earlier that month, the owner of a
tobacco warehouse, Iakov Itskovich, discovered that the manager of one of his
stores, Israel Buchakher, had embezzled a handsome sum of 1,300 rubles.17
(Characteristically, this same tobacco trader, Iakov Itskovich, was caught red-
handed himself in June 1912, selling untaxed—that is, contraband—cigarette

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paper.18) Several weeks earlier, a clerk in the firm of Rosenberg, Leiba Galant
escaped with almost 2,000 rubles.19 In these, and many other instances, the
acceptable price for betraying one’s social reputation and running away with
the employer’s money to start a new life in a new place ranged from one to two
(or even three) annual incomes of the salesman-turned-fugitive. It is therefore
all the more surprising that the sales assistant Lazar Racht escaped with a mea-
ger 7 rubles (less than his weekly salary) stolen from his employer, the owner
of a tobacco store, Mendel Shain, in early June 1912.20
Untrustworthy employees were not an exclusively Odessa phenomenon.
In late March 1909, in Nizhny Novgorod, a junior agent of the Singer
Manufacturing Company, Diatlov, ran away with material he got from the
local Singer shop director, and cash received from a client, at a total value of
70 rubles (between one and two months’ salary).21 Two weeks later, a migrant
from Rostov, Sergei Petrov, was hired by a Nizhegorod shop owner, Bubnov,
to draw two commercial signs for 30 rubles. Petrov received 9.30 rubles in
advance, collected goods worth 7 rubles from the store, and escaped.22 In
late March 1913, a systematic theft of the clothes shop of Khaim Braisnan
in Nizhny Novgorod was uncovered: over two months, his two Jewish sales
assistants and a Russian helper had stolen goods worth at least 1,000 rubles
(probably what they would earn together in a year).23
During just two weeks in January 1912, in Kazan, several similar incidents
were reported. The seventeen-year-old son of a Tatar shopkeeper, Abdullin,
stole 130 rubles from his father’s cashbox and ran away.24 A craftsman from
the Tatar tailor shop of Galiakberov disappeared after stealing goods also
worth 130 rubles.25 After petty merchant Khaibullin commissioned hat-
ter Saifutdinov to decorate fifty hats, the latter sold the hats provided by
Khaibullin and ran away.26 Merchant Sabitov provided hatter Zabbarov with
material worth 2,000 rubles to make Tatar skullcaps. Zabbarov completed the
order, but opted to sell all the skullcaps himself and pocket the money.27 Sales
assistant Akmetov was sentenced to six months in jail in March 1912 for sys-
tematically stealing from the shop where he worked.28
This eagerness to risk one’s social reputation for a handful of easy money
can have several interpretations. Obviously, these incidents were about breach-
ing trust, but how do we assess the median level of trust in that society? Was it
shockingly low or surprisingly high (given the unsettled urban life) if it could
be betrayed for a sum equal to one month’s (or one year’s) income? In all the
cases mentioned above, treacherous employees or contractors were brethren
of their employers, which should have served as an additional guarantee of
their loyalty (or the only one, given the dislocated nature of the urban social

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 139

milieu). Obviously, ethnicity played some prominent role both in building

trust networks and abusing the trust their members had in each other. Open
questions remain: What was the function of ethnicity and confession? How do
we assess the average threshold for breaking the law? And how do we account
for the absurdly strange circumstances of many felonies?

Rationality

Besides trust, the problem of rational choice is at stake here. However low
mutual trust was, what sense did it make to run away from the job after stealing
just 7 rubles—the minimum weekly wage of a sales assistant in a most neglected
shop? Perhaps there were some personal circumstances that caused that man to
seek escape in the first place, taking with him whatever sum he discovered in the
cashbox. It is equally possible that Sergei Petrov in Nizhny Novgorod opted to
run away with 9 rubles (and 7 rubles worth of goods) rather than earn 30 rubles
for the completed job because he had no idea how to handle the brush in the
first place, and was performing an Ostap Bender-like confidence trick.29 Still,
the question of the social and economic rationality of these hit-and-run scams
remains open, as can be seen in the following story.
In late May or early June 1912, a grocery store owner from the Odessa dis-
trict of Moldavanka, Zelman Rubalskii, masterminded a highly complicated
scam. He ordered his salesman, Avrum Stoliar, to approach a central district
dweller, Itsik Zhelkover, under the phony name of Srul Shepetovski. Stoliar/
Shepetovski asked Zhelkover for a cart of coal worth 16 rubles (about 50 puds
or 1,805 pounds of coal in current prices) on behalf of Zhelkover’s friend,
Ms. Feldman, but brought the coal to his boss.30 All the actual and fictitious
participants in this episode were Jews, bound by ties of trust and even friend-
ship. In this story, we may speak of the exploitation of firm trust, rather than
of its betrayal. One trust network attempted to take advantage of another:
salesman Stoliar agreed to participate in an illegal operation at the risk of get-
ting in trouble with the law only because he was loyal to his employer. Indeed,
would Zelman Rubalskii fire Stoliar over that coal worth 16 rubles had not
Stoliar agreed to this shady affair? How much could he promise to pay Stoliar
for pulling a fast one—half of the premium (8 rubles)? This is what Stoliar
earned in several days at his legitimate job. (We can turn these questions the
other way around: What sum of cash would have prompted Stoliar to betray
his loyalty to Rubalskii and run away with his employer’s money?)
Still more important is the question of why a store owner would opt
for petty theft in the first place if he could afford to hire at least one shop

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 140 Chapter Five

assistant. A brick oven consumes about 1.5 puds of coal (two buckets) for
a whole day of heating, so that cart could last for just a month, making
little difference for a shop in winter, particularly when stolen in June, while
the whole intricate operation gained perhaps less than the equivalent of the
weekly salary of the salesman Stoliar, not to mention major problems with
the police and public dishonor.
It is not that Rubalskii and Stoliar were plotting a totally senseless crime:
coal was an important commodity in Odessa, particularly in cold months.
Professional con men could use a similar scam to steal coal—but their oper-
ations were unquestionably commercial (albeit illegal). Thus, at the end of
the dank Odessa winter of 1909, a professional swindler, A. Kreizer, ordered
the delivery of a load of coal (at least 7.5 tons) for 150 rubles from the solid
firm Jacobi Oven and Co. He placed his order over the phone, on behalf of
the director of the Bessarabian-Tauridian Land Bank, a representative of the
respected Jewish banking family, G. Khari. Kreizer personally supervised the
unloading of coal in the courtyard of the bank (perhaps, on a weekend), only
to load the coal on his own transport and move it out later on the same day.31
Kreizer also exploited someone’s trust and, possibly, some insider information
and his own Jewishness, but he acted anonymously, stealing a large quantity of
coal in winter, when it was easy to resell it. It was his main job—appropriating
valuables that did not belong to him—and the constant risk of being appre-
hended was an intrinsic and accepted cost of making a profit. By contrast,
Stoliar had to deal with his victim in person (even though he acted under
a different name) and he stole a commercially insignificant quantity of coal,
impossible to sell and not needed to burn in June. Too many traces were left,
with a profit too insignificant and at a social cost that was obviously too high
for people involved in legitimate business. The structural similarity of these
and a number of analogous cases may indicate a stable pattern or even a social
practice, but this cannot explain the obvious differences in the rationality and
motivations of the perpetrators.

Opportunism

If there was rationality in the actions of Rubalskii and Stoliar, it links to a

very high level of opportunism. It could be argued that in an economy and
society that did not have tax breaks and returns or grants for small businesses,
cutting corners might be seen as an acceptable part of one’s business plan.
After all, saving on heating for an entire month is not insignificant to a small
firm. The problem with this argument is that pragmatic lawlessness was not a

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 141

prerogative of petty entrepreneurs in Odessa, when small cheats correlated to

small overall profits. Some well-established businessmen had been implicated
in supplementing their main legitimate and large-scale operations with petty
illegal profits.
Moisei Ozyrskii was the owner of a fur shop on the central Deribasovskaia
Street, a merchant of the second guild, which in the early twentieth century
was little more than an honorary title. To keep this vanity title, Ozyrskii had
to pay 145 rubles a year for a trade patent and guild certificate. And yet, on
October 25, 1913, police confiscated twenty-five contraband muskrat furs
in his shop at a total estimated value of 25 rubles.32 A businessman so con-
cerned about his reputation that he paid real money for a hollow title opted
to get involved in contraband worth only 15 percent of the sum he spent
every year to sustain his social status. Another example is Gersh Klozner, the
owner of a clock shop selling very expensive merchandise for which consider-
able capital was required to sustain operations. He also occupied an honorary
and responsible position as treasurer of the Mlekhet-Zuov prayer house next
to the Old Market.33 In September 1914, in the repair section at Klozner’s
clock shop, police confiscated five golden pocket watches (worth 150 rubles)
that did not have official Russian assay marks.34 It is unlikely that Kozner’s
potential profit could have exceeded several rubles for each watch, so the eco-
nomic rationality of selling golden watches that were not properly hallmarked
(which would involve paying dues), contraband, or even worse, counterfeit,
was questionable.
The next logical step up from selling several contraband items along with
regular merchandise might be to base the entire business plan of an enterprise
on illegal activity. For instance, the problem of drug falsification was endemic
in Russia. While manufacturers of fake drugs used substances that were up to
two hundred times cheaper than the advertised patented drug, owners of drug-
stores and (more rarely) of specialized pharmacies across the Russian Empire
earned hundreds of rubles reselling counterfeit medicines.35 Sometimes they
did not know that they were dealing with forged drugs, although what did
they expect when they purchased brand-name medications from distributors
at 30–50 percent of the regular price, and made a profit over 100 percent?
This was the profit rate of several drugstore owners in Odessa, members of a
ring of pharmacists and distributors discovered by the police in April 1912.
Iosif Volshtein, Berko Zelman, and several other drugstore owners allegedly
knowingly distributed large quantities of fake substances, including popu-
lar drugs of world-renowned firms Merck and Knoll, such as the opiate pain
relievers codeine (first discovered in 1832 in France) and dionine (invented in

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 142 Chapter Five

Germany at Merck in 1884), and the newest sleeping aid Veronal (barbital,
first synthesized in 1902 in Germany and marketed since 1904 by the Bayer
company).36
It was not a professional swindler but the owner of a dry goods firm in
Odessa, Iakov Shapiro, who made a major investment in a deliberately crimi-
nal operation in February 1913. He had sufficient capital to write a check
for 1,000 rubles, chipping in with his business partners, Abram Shraer and
Benzion Zolotarevskii. He thought that for 1,800 rubles they would illegally
purchase a large quantity of distillate at a low price at an Elisavetgrad distill-
ery, ship it to Odessa by railroad documented as “ink,” to sell it there at a
much higher price. Judging by the current prices of spirit, it seems that they
planned to buy a whole tank car of alcohol, and make a profit of over 50
percent.37 Alas, Shapiro’s business partners had an easier and more profitable
scam in mind. They took the check and gave Shapiro a consignment note
for the freight, but no distillate materialized in Odessa.38 Characteristically,
Shapiro found it appropriate to seek the assistance of the police in recovering
his money: apparently, to him, his partners’ embezzlement of his money was
a bigger crime than their little joint venture with the Elisavetgrad untaxed
alcohol/ink.
Killing two birds with one stone seemed a good business strategy to
some Odessa entrepreneurs, who figured out how to profit at the expense
of competitors. The owner of a wholesale grocery business, Rakhmil
Khutoretskii, bribed a manager at Iosel Ratner’s warehouse specializing in
sunflower oil. For a bribe of 100 rubles, the manager, Duvid Pikovskii,
released two barrels of sunflower oil to Khutoretskii every time he pur-
chased one barrel from Ratner.39 Khutoretskii’s cost of implementing the
“buy one get one free” marketing strategy (the one-time bribe) was equal
to the cost of just one oil barrel,40 thus his profit rate was close to 100
percent, plus the ruin of a competitor’s business. The owner of a small gro-
cery store, Ovsei Rozenkrants, chose a less complicated way to take advan-
tage of competitors. He personally participated in burglarizing the larger
store of Eidelman and Khutorianskii. In January 1910, together with two
professional burglars, Nakhman Raiman and Meer Sluchanskii, he broke
into the store through a hole in the ceiling, from the second floor, stealing
goods worth 3,000 rubles. Police discovered part of the loot, 5 puds (180
pounds) of tea, in Rozenkrants’s store.41 If this was all he got, his share was
just over 10 percent,42 but since he most likely tipped off the thieves in the
first place, part of the compensation was purely moral.

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 143

Ethnicity

The patterns of criminality as demonstrated by different layers of the busi-

ness community do not conform to any of the conventional explanatory
schemes. Neither the ambivalent performance of trust networks, nor absent-
minded opportunism, nor moral unscrupulousness in the pursuit of profit
can explain the broad toleration of illegal methods. Another possible expla-
nation remains: certain ethnic groups’ essential propensity to crime. Because
of a special focus on ethnically marked criminality in this study, priority has
been given to cases featuring Jews (in Odessa) or Tatars (in Kazan). Moreover,
the indistinct ethnic identification of perpetrators with Christian names (who
could be Russians, Ukrainians, representatives of various Turkic and Finno-
Ugric peoples, etc.) makes the cases with their involvement less characteristic;
indeed, they are almost invisible episodes of anonymous statistics to a modern
observer accustomed to racial or ethnic profiling. Thus the very selectivity in
the processing of materials and a higher visibility of certain population groups
can produce an impression of the extraordinary criminality of those groups.
The same mechanism was at work in popular discourse and in some scholarly
works influenced by popular stereotypes,43 and this is a key element of nation-
alist political ideologies. However, the available narrative sources and statistics
do not support such allegations.
Although criminal statistics cannot be regarded as an accurate estimate of
the actual number of all people committing crimes, it is still indicative of the
general trends and relative share of various ethnoconfessional groups in crimi-
nal activities. The median rate of empire-wide criminality gradually declined
throughout the 1910s, as can be judged by the number of people convicted
as criminals by all types of courts: from 112 convicts per every one hundred
thousand of the population in 1909 to 107 in 1910, 108 in 1911, 105 in
1912, and 104 in 1913. Compared to these cumulative averages, Poles rou-
tinely comprised the highest level of convicts, 25 percent above the imperial
median. Lithuanians and Latvians held second place, 11 percent above the
median. Close behind were Russians (this category lumped together ethnic
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), whose share among the convicts was
stable throughout the period, oscillating between 115 and 120 convicts per
every one hundred thousand of this group (growing from 7 percent to 11
percent above the declining imperial average). Against this background, the
involvement of Jews and Turkic peoples in problems with the law seemed
truly negligible. Tatars (the category included all Turkic groups of the Middle

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Volga, Central Asia, and the Caucasus) lagged almost 50 percent behind the
all-imperial median, while Jews (with the exception of 1910) were 4–13 per-
cent below the average.44
In Odessa, Jews comprised 18.6 percent of the 870 men and women con-
victed for various crimes by the Odessa Circuit Court in 1911,45 and 16.1
percent in 1913.46 Their share among convicted criminals was almost two
times lower compared to the percentage of Jewish population in the city of
Odessa, the main site of Jewish residence (and criminality) in the region.
Odessa was the largest city of the Kherson province, and almost two-thirds
of all Jews in the province lived in Odessa. Despite Odessa’s ominous rep-
utation and its heavy weight in provincial Jewish statistics, in 1913, Jews
made up 9.7 percent of all those convicted by justices of the peace in all of
Kherson province,47 which was below their representation in the population
of the province (11.8 percent).48
Unlike the Jews of Odessa, in the Kazan region, the majority of Tatars
resided in the countryside, making up 31 percent of the population of Kazan
province according to the 1897 census.49 In 1913, their share among the peo-
ple convicted by the Kazan Circuit Court was 22 percent,50 and 20.6 percent
among those convicted by justices of the peace of Kazan province.51 Although
these numbers could be higher for some years (e.g., among the 1,324 people
convicted by the Kazan Circuit Court in 1911, 36 percent were Tatars52), they
tended to correlate with the share of Tatars in the population of the province
and the city of Kazan, or remained well below this figure.
In Vilna province, Jews made up 43 percent of the urban population, and
12.7 percent of the entire population of the province.53 Compared to these
figures, the 8 percent of Jews among those convicted by justices of the peace
province-wide and 14 percent among those sentenced by the Vilna Circuit
Court appear to be quite moderate numbers.54
Thus, the actual participation of non-Russians in criminal activities did not
support the stereotypes about “ruthless Tatars” and “Jewish crooks” even in the
places of highest concentration of these ethnoconfessional groups.

The Norm and Real Life

In view of the obvious inadequacy of the suggested explanations of persis-

tent lawlessness of urban plebeian society during this period, we probably
have to revise the embedded assumptions that structure the very logic of
thinking about deviant social behavior. We expect that the norm is consti-
tuted by relatively secure employment, stable income, and solid reputation.

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 145

We view ethnicity as a basic structure of groupness, either securing loyalty

to the employer and business partners, or forging the criminal networks of
crooked employees and treacherous associates. This is true to the extent that
any other normative social values of the epoch were true: for example, that
subjects of the Russian Empire should be devoted monarchists, that mem-
bers of one confessional group should never closely interact with various
“infidels,” or that belonging to a legal estate should define one’s occupation,
social status, and morals. Naturally, there should have been no prostitutes
catering indiscriminately to patrons of various ethnoconfessional back-
ground, or friends belonging to different ethnicities and confessions. But
there were, as we know.
The level of public tolerance toward all kinds of illegal behavior can be
quantitatively (even if indirectly) measured by the statistics of acquittals in
different courts. In 1907–13 the average rate of acquittal in all types of courts
oscillated between 35.7 percent and 38.4 percent. In trials by jury (in circuit
courts) this rate was even higher: between 42.3 percent and 46.7 percent.55
Jurors demonstrated an understanding of individual circumstances that could
encourage people to commit the most horrendous crimes, even murders, par-
ticularly when those circumstances were familiar and understandable. Three
randomly selected cases contextualize those figures and illustrate the premise
that, while almost half of all those put on trial were acquitted by jurors, this
was not necessarily because guilt had been insufficiently proved. The cases were
reported routinely in the accounts of court sessions, in passim, but each of
them can be given a title of its own because of their extraordinary typicality, so
easily fitting into clichéd images of criminal dramas of the time. Accordingly,
they will be presented below in the genre of docudrama:

“The housing problem has corrupted them”56

A peasant Kalashnikov and his wife rented a room in the apartment of
the floor polisher Listov, in downtown Nizhny Novgorod. On February
4, 1910, Kalashnikov went to sleep early, as most likely his work started
before dawn, typically for all manual laborers. That night, the Listovs had a
party with guests and Listov’s employee, peasant Ometov, who also resided
in that apartment. Kalashnikov got up from his bed several times and asked
the party to keep it down and give him some peace. Ometov confronted
Kalashnikov: he said that Kalashnikov would loudly quarrel with his wife
every evening disregarding other inhabitants of the apartment, and therefore
had no right to complain. We can vividly imagine what life in that apart-
ment looked like on a regular day—as in many other apartments across the
town, where peasants-turned-townspeople rented corners and rooms from

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 146 Chapter Five

better-off members of plebeian society. In conflict, the usual discomforts

and tensions rapidly turned into a nightmare. At some point, Kalashnikov’s
wife intervened, but Ometov hit her with such force that she had blood
running from her ears. It was already four in the morning, when the wife
of floor polisher Listov began heating the samovar, with all the noise and
smoke. The unfortunate Kalashnikov, who must have had to get up for his
job soon anyhow, went to the kitchen, where he had one more quarrel with
Ometov. Kalashnikov grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Ometov twice,
then ran to the street and surrendered to the police. At the trial, Kalashnikov
admitted his guilt, and explained the murder by his irritation at Ometov,
who had beaten up his wife.
The jury acquitted Kalashnikov.57

“Broken heart”
Also in 1910, the peasant girl Matrena Panisaeva found a job as a dish-
washer in a tavern owned by a man named Gorbunov, in the Fair district of
Nizhny Novgorod. Gorbunov promised to support the girl in exchange for
intimacy. He did not keep his word, and after some time fired her, leaving
her without any means. When she attempted several times to talk to him at
the tavern, Gorbunov ordered his employees to take her out by force. One
year passed and Matrena, now absolutely desperate, approached the local
constable and complained about Gorbunov’s maltreatment of her. She said
that if the situation did not change for the better, she would spill sulfuric
acid on Gorbunov (a common choice of weapon for women at the time).
The constable promptly informed Gorbunov about Matrena’s threats, but
Gorbunov disregarded the warning. Then, late in the evening on July 21,
1911, Matrena Panisaeva waylaid Gorbunov as he left his tavern. She spilled
acid on his face, badly burning his skin and fatally damaging one eye. Pani-
saeva fully admitted her guilt in this crime.
At the trial in January 1912, her attorney asked the jury to put them-
selves in her shoes. The jury acquitted Panisaeva.58

“So what’s the big deal?”

On a hot summer night in 1908, recidivist Pavel Zaitsev got in through an
open window of the summer house of Nizhegorod engineer Karas when
everyone inside was asleep. He stole valuables worth 300 rubles, and was
arrested later in Nizhny Novgorod when he attempted to sell the loot. Zait-
sev was a professional thief who had been stripped of all civic rights by a
previous court order, and had no sentimental story to explain his crime (for
example, an abused childhood). He admitted his guilt in court. Zaitsev’s

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 147

attorney, Alexander Borisovich Zakhoder,59 addressed the jury, merely reit-

erating the obvious. He said that Zaitsev had problems finding a regular
job because of his stigmatized legal status. To an unemployed man, an open
window and expensive objects inside the house presented a temptation, and
Zaitsev gave in to this temptation.
The jury acquitted Zaitsev.60

The normalizing attitude to burglary as revealed in the latter episode was

verbalized by a participant in a similar robbery in Kazan. On the hot night of
August 2, 1907, two thieves climbed through an open window into the room
of a man named Ivanov. Dogs sensed the strangers and raised the alarm, the
thieves rushed out of the house, and one of them was caught red-handed, with
a stolen pocket watch and wallet on him. When he saw that there was no way
to escape, he stubbornly declared, “So what’s the big deal! [I] have stolen a
watch and a wallet, it’s not like I broke the lock or something!”61 This position
explained the jury’s verdict in Zaitsev’s trial and in scores of similar cases.62 The
acquittal did not mean that the jurors had doubts regarding who exactly had
broken into the house, or whether this constituted a crime. They responded
not to the crime and the violation of the norm as defined by law, but to the
actual and typical social conditions around them. In the social context of a
Russian imperial city, leaving windows open at night was a sure invitation to
trouble. Taking real life at face value, it was more abnormal to carelessly leave
the door or windows unlocked than to expect a stranger to resist the tempta-
tion to check for valuables inside.
The attitude of the jurors, who were just regular representatives of the
same plebeian society that systematically produced examples of lawlessness,
shows that the social reality of Russian imperial cities dominated by lower-
class inhabitants was taken quite seriously by them as one that produced social
norms of its own. The majority of people lived their lives as they were able
under rapidly changing socioeconomic and political circumstances, with little
concern about officially imposed values and norms. To really make sense of
these lives and restore agency to the members of plebeian society, we have
to accept their own life experiences as the only norm effectively determining
their social behavior. A variety of possible social scenarios (whether earnest
service in a legitimate workplace or petty theft) were open-ended opportuni-
ties with uncertain relative value. This is not to claim that those people did not
know what was criminal, or why it was morally bad to engage in illegal activi-
ties; it is just that this knowledge did not play a decisive role in their actual life
choices. To some, this knowledge had no practical value at all.

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Anomie and Illegality

This world view, radically disconnected from the norms and values imposed
by the official institutions of society, can be best characterized as anomie.
The society in flux of migrants and people caught in upward and downward
social mobility produced “a situation characterized by indeterminate goals and
unlimited aspirations, the disorientation or vertigo created by confrontation
with an excessive widening of the horizons of the possible, in a context of
expansion or increasing upward mobility.”63
Thus understood, anomie is just a technical term describing the situa-
tion of one’s encounter with the emerging new social order that could not
be understood entirely in the categories of old communal traditionalism and
the legal code of the ancien régime. This encounter produced a state of cog-
nitive ambivalence or even unawareness, and a lack of public consensus on
normative social scenarios and reactions to certain circumstances.64 Rapidly
changing social conditions resulted in confusion, and confusion prompted
improvisation that could elevate the most marginal social scenario to the sta-
tus of a new mainstream practice. The following episode reveals the mecha-
nism of social creativity unleashed by the state of anomie. As World War I
progressed, amid the worsening economic situation, copper and silver coins
became a scarce commodity in Odessa. In late August 1915, a chambermaid
(probably a Christian) of the Jewish photographer, Belotserkovskii, was shop-
ping in a bakery. She expected to receive 50 kopecks in change. The cashier
asked, “Are you from the Russians?” “No.” “Then no change is available.”65
This incident was reported in a newspaper as an unheard-of example of dis-
crimination, and the bakery owner fired the cashier. But there is more to the
story: the dismissed woman was absolutely puzzled by the entire affair and she
apologized. She explained that before the scandalous conversation, another
female customer had advised her to ask shoppers “who they are; if they are not
Russians, give them no change.” Both the Jewish photographer and the jour-
nalist who told the story asked the bakery owner to excuse the cashier for her
“thoughtless question” and give back her job.66
Essentially, the cashier pleaded ignorance: thinking she had found an easy
and reasonable way to refuse to give small change to customers, she was very
surprised when it was perceived as a “refusal based on nationality consider-
ations.”67 The rationing of a scarce commodity (in this case, metal coins)
during the war could equally target wealthy people or those not working for
military industries. Confused and under pressure from the queue of custom-
ers, the cashier chose the easiest of the available solutions without assessing its

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 149

deeper implications beyond the immediate result. Luckily, in 1915 Odessa,

the idea of discrimination against any ethnoconfessional groups was unpopu-
lar, so this particular scenario was not accepted and was not even taken seri-
ously. The offended photographer went out of his way to contact the journalist
and the bakery owner to defend the fired cashier: he too did not see himself as
a victim of ethnically based discrimination. But under different circumstances,
in a different place, or if slightly modified, a similar social scenario could rap-
idly institutionalize itself as a new common knowledge and the dominant
modus operandi.
In the predominantly nondiscursive social milieu, this persistent anomic
condition left the exploration of new social possibilities and the elaboration of
new norms entirely to the stochastically forming social practices, the process
of self-organization, through trials and errors. This underreflected process can
be most accurately characterized as one of permanent self-organization, the
building of a new social order out of chaotic dislocations of the old order. This
was the only mechanism that provided for the complicated task of integrating
different plebeian groups and population strata into the single social space of
the city (and, by the same token, of the modernizing empire). Structurally, this
transitional social arrangement characterized by anomie and self-organization
(that is, no longer bound by old structures and not yet crystallized into any
new order) can be characterized as the sphere of illegality. This Foucauldian
concept (underdeveloped by Foucault himself in his Discipline and Punish. The
Birth of the Prison)68 seems very useful in describing the locus of spontane-
ous societal transformation, unregulated by any formal institutions and thus
potentially open to criminal prosecution. Foucault envisioned illegality as a
fundamental human condition that cannot be completely eradicated by the
disciplinary mechanisms of society.69
The question of the validity of this essentializing understanding of ille-
gality lies beyond the scope of this study. The concept of illegality seems
useful inasmuch as it allows the social situation of radical transition and
anomie to be cast as a structure in its own right, not defined in terms
of being derived from some real and stable conditions of the old regime
or modern societies as their inferior and twisted representation. Illegality
implies the existence of a gray zone as a locus where new social structures
and values emerge. Anything new by definition cannot fully comply with
the existing norms and rules, which does not mean that it should radically
challenge them either. Illegality does not necessarily imply criminality—
either in the intent of the actors (perpetrators) or in the outcome. This
thesis is perfectly illustrated in the story of a Kazan Tatar woman, who in

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the public discourse of the epoch would be expected to embody the pro-
verbial “Muslim obedience.”
On March 28, 1906, Mrs. Galiullina appeared before the local imam,
accompanied by a gentleman, whom she introduced as her husband, and wit-
nesses. The husband asked that they be divorced, the imam agreed, and the
woman received an official document confirming her single status. A few days
passed, and the imam learned that Galiullina had deceived him by present-
ing a fake husband and phony witnesses in order to get permission that her
real husband did not want to grant! The imam appealed to the Kazan Circuit
Court, asking that the “con-woman” be punished. After two weeks of investi-
gations, the court decided that Galiullina had breached the imam’s trust, but
the document that she obtained from him was perfectly legal.70 This was a
juridical formulation of the state of illegality as a breach of traditional norms
and even legislation that, nevertheless, produced an absolutely legal, new, and
desired result.
The broadening sphere of illegality had transformed the world of the lower
classes of the pre-1905 period into a new plebeian society. The anomic and
even subversive nature of illegality erased the many social and cultural barriers
that divided multiple pockets of the old world of the common people, while
at the same time forging a new solidarity of shared experience, a foundation
of the modern mass society. The sheer numbers of people mentioned in vari-
ous types of statistical reports suggest the advent of a truly mass society. It was
more than statistics, an agglomeration of abstract numbers: live people came
together to forge real crowds. In 1914, the network of streetcars in Kazan,
a city with a population less than 190,000, transported an unheard of 15.5
million passengers (and almost 22 million in 1916).71 Just during the three
Easter days of 1908, the company operating streetcars in Kazan earned 20,000
rubles, which meant that they served over half a million passengers (at fares of
3 kopecks in the popular second class and 5 kopecks in first class). The routes
were served by trains of four and even five joint streetcars, and still throngs of
people could not get on the packed trams.72 Kazan would not again witness
a sustained yet mobile mass of passengers of that proportion until the mid-
1930s,73 a seemingly very different epoch of socialist mass society.
The image of an early twentieth-century urban crowd storming tram cars
may be a familiar cliché, but this was a new type of crowd compared to the
pre-1905 period. Statistically comparable numbers of people in earlier times
were segregated into packs distinguished from each other by class, language,
confession, and other primary markers. The new crowd was indiscriminate,
exactly because of the state of illegality characterizing the new social order.

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 151

Figure 5.1. Crowd on Bolshaia Prolomnaia Street, in the center of Kazan, 1912.
Photograph by Arnold Brening. Reproduced by permission of Tatyana Brening.

The Erosion of the Old Social Order by Illegality

Ethnicity

A mundane conflict on the Odessa streetcar heading downtown from the

Langeron seashore district in September 1913 well illustrates this point. Two
“intelligent ladies” and a gentleman accompanying them were conversing
loudly in Yiddish. An army colonel was so appalled by this liberty that he
yelled, “Gentlemen! It’s insulting! Yids have captured the city and prattle in
the Yids’ language to their utmost!” A retired colonel supported this outcry;
the two of them stopped the car and called for a policeman to document the
alleged offense. At this point, a “Russian gentleman” stood up and, showing
his business card, volunteered to be a witness for the Jewish ladies. “Gradually,
the passions calmed down, and by the time the car reached its destination the
incident was resolved even without writing up a police report.”74
In this incident, army officers represented the old imperial order that, one
may argue, was characterized by built-in anti-Semitism and the idea of russifi-
cation as a synonym for normality. It is instructive how this attempt to appeal

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 152 Chapter Five

to the established order (up to calling for the police) was dismissed by the rela-
tivizing situation of illegality that the colonels interpreted as outright crimi-
nality. The local norm (as opposed to the norm of the officers, who were likely
to change their stationing often) seemed to be not so much philo-Semitic but
rather less sensitive to any ethnocultural markers. Speaking non-Russian lan-
guages in public could not be legally prosecuted, and the entire conflict must
have been translated by the passengers on that streetcar into the question:
What would the reaction of the two officers have been had the two women
conversed in the same expressive Odessa manner in very loud Russian? Thus
framed (following the practice of creative misunderstanding of the middle
ground), the conflict potentially concerned not only the two Jewish women
but everyone in the homogenized crowd of passengers, and the two officers
were marginalized.
On a densely packed streetcar, ethnic differences were all but irrelevant,
particularly in the face of pickpockets, for whom ethnicity was the least
important factor in the choice of a victim. Characteristically, despite the usu-
ally heightened attention in Kazan to ethnoconfessional identity, the national-
ist Kazan Telegraph reported on the arrest of two female pickpockets on a tram
in October 1916 without any mention of the victims’ ethnicity or confession.
The perpetrators, Zinaida Gromova and Vera Savina, were named, and it was
stressed that this was not the first time they had been seized for pickpocket-
ing, but the figure of the victim remained anonymous: anyone could be in his
or her place.75 Odessa provides more detailed information on the activities of
pickpockets and thieves on streetcars: police arrested them on a regular basis.
Thus, on February 24, 1912, the Jewish thief Khaim-Duvid Dubov was caught
when he stole a Karakul hat from a Jewish passenger.76 On April 23, the Jewish
professional pickpocket, Iankel Barskii, was arrested as he stole a wallet from a
Russian tram passenger, Grigorii Shchegolev.77 One month later, Jewish broth-
ers Menashche and Srul Nepomniashii were caught on a streetcar when they
stole a purse with cash and jewelry from a Ukrainian woman of peasant legal
estate, Mariia Didichenko.78 Soon thereafter, on May 27, the Jewish profes-
sional pickpocket Aron Kisler was apprehended in the streetcar after stealing a
golden pocket watch (valued at 50 rubles) from a Gentile, Dmitrii Susarev.79
This list of Jewish pickpockets targeting streetcar passengers regardless of their
ethnoconfessional status can be continued, but the most telling incidents hap-
pened to the unfortunate Nikolai Ivanovich Grechukhin (most likely ethnic
Russian and possibly the owner of a fancy hairdressing salon).80 On about
June 23, 1912, recidivists Iosif Kupershliak (a Jew) together with brothers Petr
and Ivan Stepenichevy (most likely Russians) stole an expensive golden watch

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 153

from Grechukhin’s pocket as he traveled on a tram, just a few blocks from his
home.81 One week later, riding a tram along the same route, Grechukhin was
pickpocketed again: this time it was the Turkish national, Apastoli Dimitri
(apparently a Greek), who stole his wallet.82 Obviously, Grechukhin was
equally attractive as a victim for Jewish, Russian, and Greek thieves.
The homogenization of the crowd did not imply the dissolution of multiple
distinctions based on various categories of groupness. People certainly contin-
ued to identify a different accent or a somewhat unusual dress, but they were
just no longer ready to read them in the clearly defined and unquestioned
traditional way. Judging by pictures of the epoch (including photographs from
police dossiers), some people could be easily identified by their appearance as
Russian peasants, Jews, or Tatars, but the majority were indistinguishable from
the average type of urbanite. Since plebeian urban society did not speak the
literary Russian language of high culture, virtually everyone spoke with some
accent, using odd words and twisted grammar. The accent of Bessarabian Jews
differed from the accent of Lithuanian Jews, but was closer to the accent of
other southern ethnic groups: Moldavans, Southern Ukrainians, and Russians.
The latter spoke a Russian language different from that of Russian peasants
from Arkhangelsk or Nizhny Novgorod. In the new crowd, the differences
persisted—but everyone was different in one way or another.
The most amazing testimony to the actual misunderstanding of ethnic
markers on the ground can be found in a series of confidence tricks by fake
police detectives that were successful only because neither the perpetrators nor
the victims operationalized ethnicity as a meaningful social category.
It should be mentioned that the proliferation of criminal police units
throughout the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century introduced an
absolutely revolutionary novelty: plain-clothes police detectives. Formerly, any
representative of state authority, even those holding the most insignificant
office, had to wear a uniform, and a uniform was the indicator and proof of
one’s official status, rather than any identification papers, which meant little
to the illiterate majority of the population. The uniform’s role had been epito-
mized by Nikolai Gogol back in the 1840s, but as late as the 1910s, even
representatives of such bucolic professions as agronomists in the government
service had to wear an elaborate and strictly regulated uniform.83 The unau-
thorized wearing of a uniform, particularly with all the required decorations
and accessories (e.g., the sword, which was mandatory for policemen) was pro-
hibited, and uniforms were both difficult to obtain and expensive for potential
imposters. Naturally, the appearance of police detectives routinely dressed in
civilian clothes while on duty (despite earlier requirements that they wear their

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 154 Chapter Five

Figure 5.2. Police photograph taken in 1910 of Srul Shulman, a typical lower-
class urbanite from Vilna, who also happened to be a professional burglar with
four court convictions in ten years. Lithuanian State Historical Archives, Vilnius,
F. 420, ap. 2, b. 3194, l. 72. Reproduced by permission of the archive.

police uniform; see chapter 1) opened new opportunities for swindlers. As

early as 1909 in Kazan, two young people, Serebriakov and Popov, posed as
agents of the criminal police unit requesting goods in stores on behalf of “their
boss.”84 We can also mention the fake plain-clothes detective in a con game
that cost the peasant Kulikov from Nizhny Novgorod 500 rubles.
There was one invisible uniformity distinguishing police agents: they all
had to be Gentiles, preferably Russians or Ukrainians, who had served their
army term. Lists of police personnel from Odessa, Kazan, Vilna, and Nizhny
Novgorod confirm that at least in this respect, the actual practice did not dif-
fer from official regulations,85 and people were certainly aware of these rules
of the police. The ethnicity of police detectives was a marker of little impor-
tance in Nizhny Novgorod and even in Kazan, but in places like Odessa it
became a significant factor, comparable to wearing a sword and a badge. It is
all the more amazing then that Jews in Odessa successfully posed as under-
cover police agents. On March 27, 1912, three strangers approached a Jewish
resident of Odessa, Gershon Shimelnik, and introduced themselves as crimi-
nal police detectives. They threatened Shimelnik with conducting a search of

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 155

his apartment, and agreed to skip this procedure for a bribe of 50 rubles.86
Obviously, Gershon Shimelnik had a reason to avoid a police search, and it
was expected that police detectives could be bribed (50 rubles was a good
monthly salary for a low-class employee—for instance, an undercover police
agent).87 The question is why did Shimelnik believed the three imposters—
Duvid Davidzon, Iankel Kreimerman, and Mordko Kuldiner—all of whom
were Jews? Even if he suspected foul play but was overwhelmed by their sheer
force, would pointing out their Jewishness at least have lowered the sum of the
extorted bribe?
In January 1913, a similar scam involved a Ukrainian (or Russian) woman,
Anastasiia Gerasimenko. Three men came to her place in the slums of “Little
Sakhalin” (behind the railroad station) and declared themselves to be police
detectives. They conducted a search, “confiscating” the valuables they discov-
ered. It is possible that they also offered her the option of trading a search for a
bribe, but either Gerasimenko was short of cash or she believed she had noth-
ing illegal in her home, and the fake policemen had to waste time and take
goods rather than money. Again, the key question is why did Gerasimenko not
confront the “international” team of tricksters, which included a Ukrainian,
Petr Vdovichenko, and two Jews, Arnold Kotenbakh and Konstantin
Fredenberg?88
It could be argued that Gershon Shimelnik was not surprised that the false
policemen were Jews because, being a Jew himself, he perceived Jewishness as
a natural (and hence unremarkable) quality of people around him. This logic,
however, cannot explain why Anastasiia Gerasimenko did not immediately
recognize the ultimate Other in the intruders, particularly by contrast to their
Gentile accomplice, Petr Vdovichenko. The most plausible explanation is that
there was nothing specifically “Jewish” about any of these imposters, and that
ethnic otherness was not prioritized in any way outside specific discursive con-
texts. Even more importantly, it is an anachronism to imply that “Tatarness,”
“Jewishness,” or “Russianness” were as stable categories in the early twentieth
century as they had become by the end of that century, after many decades of
the development and evolution of competing national projects. In the 1910s,
only anti-Semites or nascent Jewish nationalists believed in the reality of some
homogeneous “Jewishness.” The idea of a nation as an imagined community
can exist only in and be communicated through public discourses, and in the
predominantly nondiscursive plebeian society of this period, this abstract idea
existed as an isolated marker. We have seen how this marker failed to commu-
nicate likeness when Jewish swindlers deceived Jewish victims, and there is evi-
dence that some Jews used Jewishness as a trope of victimization and otherness

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 156 Chapter Five

against other Jews. This usage was revealed during a mundane conflict over a
lady’s hat in Odessa.
In early November 1913, the Jewish owner of a hat shop, Mrs. Goldenberg,
made a hat for her Jewish customer, Ms. Dina Sakherzon. The latter changed
her mind, refused to take the hat, and demanded that her down payment for
the order be returned in full. Goldenberg did not return the money. Then Dina
Sakherzon, together with her sister Frida and brother Sergei (a student) rav-
aged the shop, calling the owner “a Yid.” They returned to the shop one more
time, with the third Sakherzon sister, Sarah, who told Mrs. Goldenberg that
in case of a new Jewish pogrom, she would be the first “to pillage the yids.”89
We do not have sufficient personal information to support an explanation
of the Sakherzons’ action based on the concept of Jewish self-hatred, which
seems redundant in this case anyway—for one, why would Dina Sakherzon
do business with a Jewish hatter? Dina Sakherzon, who became so outraged
over a small sum of rubles, most likely was typical of the majority of Odessa
plebeian society—she had modest means, a modest education, and a standard
network of socialization. At least she had no objections regarding the hatter’s
Jewishness when she placed her order. Sakherzon hated Goldberg, not “Jews”
(or any other abstract collective entity), and she used ethnic slurs against her
opponent—just like the Nizhegorod wrestler Znamenskii-Moor, who called
the irritating Russian Pal’tsev “a Yid.” In imperial Russia, ethnoconfessional
status was just one of a number of categories that defined one’s social standing
by a specific combination of different elements (legal estate, education, occu-
pation, settlement, etc.). As an element of this old taxonomy, Jewishness (or
Tatarness) was rapidly losing any sense because it was difficult to instrumen-
talize in everyday life, except for situations when “nationality” affected one’s
civil rights (access to education, civil service, or freedom of residence). In the
city of Odessa within the Pale of Jewish Settlement, these practical implica-
tions of Jewishness were minimal for representatives of plebeian society who
did not aspire to higher education or government office. Hence, the indiffer-
ent or even negative reaction to ethnic identification.

Legal Estates

The proliferation of fake police detectives revealed another aspect of the rela-
tivizing influence of the sphere of illegality upon the social structure of the
old regime. One June night in 1912, the Jewish woman Nesia Nekhankis was
returning home along Malaia Aranutskaia Street, but was stopped at the doors
of her building by two men. They told her that they were criminal police

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 157

detectives and were going to take her to the police station to be photographed
“as a prostitute.” Nesia did not have any cash on her to bribe her way out of
this, but promised to bring them 5 rubles the next day, if they would meet
her at the streetcar stop by the Old Christian Cemetery (located a few blocks
away). The fake detectives agreed, which allowed Nesia Nekhankis to report
them to the police in the morning, and the swindlers were arrested when they
came to pick up their petty ransom.90 This ordinary story sounds truly ironic
when told in the language permeated by categories of the old regime society,
that is, of official police reports. Police remained indifferent to the ethnicity
and confession of the parties in this conflict, at least, on paper. What was
meticulously registered, however, is the legal estate status of everyone. Nesia
Nekhankis belonged to the estate of petty town commoners (meshchane), as
did most Russian Jews. The false detectives were Nikolai Iasinskii, of peas-
ant estate, and Veniamin Nikolaev, nobleman (both Russians). This time, the
victim, apparently, immediately recognized the fake identity of the swindlers
(even though they were Gentiles). Even if she had not, the attempted crime
looks pathetic: a Russian nobleman in tandem with a Russian peasant are so
desperate to trick a Jewish town commoner out of 5 rubles (a weekly wage
of an unskilled manual laborer) that they agree to wait a whole day for the
money and secretly meet by the cemetery. To Nikolai Iasinskii and Veniamin
Nikolaev, this scam might seem a logical and profitable enterprise, but what
was the sense of a social system in which the difference between the most
privileged and unprivileged strata all but disappeared?
Plebeian society was indifferent to titles and ranks: people who joined it
were treated according to their practices of socialization, without any respect
for official distinctions. Criminal chronicles routinely registered the involve-
ment of representatives of privileged social groups in all kinds of disgrace-
ful activities. Particularly prominent in these stories were “honorary citizens”:
unlike noblemen, to whom joining plebeian society meant downward
social mobility, holders of this title had always belonged to plebeian groups.
Peasants, town commoners, or petty merchants received this high-flown but
hollow title through a variety of activities that all involved (in one way or
another) spending considerable sums of money. The changing social landscape
and economic rationality in the early twentieth century was making the title
less attractive, while more and more former “honorary citizens” were losing
their “honor.” In August 1905 a hereditary honorary citizen named Bobkov
was wandering along Voskresenskaia Street, a main street in Kazan, begging
for alms and bed. While addressing passersby, he introduced himself with his
full title, and angrily attacked those who would not give him anything.91 On

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the same street a few years later, the honorary citizen Skvortsov stole cloth
from the Chernoiarov department store.92 In Odessa, in March 1912, a well-
known thief, hereditary honorary citizen Abram Boretskii, attempted to
snatch a handbag from a woman on upscale Rishelievskaia Street.93 A month
later, honorary citizen Bibikov stole a gold watch from a careless student.94
Returning to nobles, it should be said that they were more visible in Nizhny
Novgorod than in Odessa. The fifty-seven-year-old Baron von Fitingof-Shel
(Vietinghof-Scheel) died after he accidentally drank a bottle of vinegar essence:
usually, when he ran out of vodka, he would drink eau de cologne or dena-
tured alcohol, but one unfortunate February day in 1909 he made a fatal mis-
take.95 Baroness Morgenshtein was sentenced to seven days in jail for beating
an eight-year-old girl on the street.96 In Vilna, Kazimir Nosovich, a twenty-
eight-year-old married nobleman, assaulted and robbed a Jewish woman on
the street just after dark on October 4, 1912.97 An alliance of crooks, a noble
and a peasant, reminiscent of the team of Nikolai Iasinskii and Veniamin
Nikolaev in Odessa, was recorded in Nizhny Novgorod. As in Odessa, their
victim was also a town commoner, only in Nizhny Novgorod all gender roles
were reversed: in September 1909, two skillful female pickpockets managed to
take a golden ring from the finger of a man named Churkin during an impro-
vised conversation on the street.98
Court statistics documented this process of erosion of privileged legal
estates: during the four years after the first Russian Revolution, the number of
noblemen and honorary citizens among convicts grew every year, both in abso-
lute numbers and proportionately as compared to other social groups. From
1907 to 1911, the number of sentenced representatives of privileged legal
estates had grown by almost 70 percent.99 This clear trend reversed after 1911:
in 1913, the number of convicted nobles and honorary citizens dropped by 25
percent compared to 1911.100 This swing in court statistics, just like the real-
life examples of deviant behavior of nobles and honorary citizens mentioned
above, supports the thesis about the social erosion of privileged estate groups
(rather than their growing criminalization). After the initial dramatic upsurge
in the numbers of convicts with high social status, it no longer mattered how
many of them got involved in shady activities. It was not important whether
two or twenty barons got into the criminal chronicles in Nizhny Novgorod:
the social capital and reputation of privileged legal estates had been ruined
by the rapid expansion of the sphere of illegality. A high (or low) individual
reputation was no longer determined by one’s belonging to a particular legal
category. From the research presented here, we can conclude that the rigid
social structure of legal estates (sosloviia) was rapidly disintegrating in towns

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 159

(a conclusion that is contrary to the view that dominated historiography some

thirty years ago).101 The mass influx of migrants from the late nineteenth
century on made people formally registered as “peasants” the majority in the
population of towns.102 Just as honorary citizens were no longer champions of
honor, being registered as a peasant did not imply that one actually tilled land.

Identification Papers

The most immediate result of the expansion of the sphere of illegality onto
the old social order was the crisis of population control through the system
of identification papers and registration. The state could not cope with the
tide of social mobility in the country, despite the liberalization of the passport
system in the wake of the 1905 Revolution and the best efforts of the police
administration.103 Police and court archives are full of cases mentioning viola-
tions of the “Passport Statute.” In their search for mobility (both spatial and
social), some people turned to the market of more or less skillfully fabricated
passports. Occasionally, police succeeded in apprehending the manufactur-
ers of the forged passports. In March and April 1912, almost simultaneously
in Kazan and Odessa, police discovered workshops for counterfeiting docu-
ments.104 In Odessa, the felon and the majority of his clients were Jews, the
latter being mostly army deserters or those wishing to obtain an international
passport in order to emigrate.105 In Kazan, the offenders were Russians, and
their clients were most likely peasant migrants who did not have proper per-
mission from their village communes to leave the countryside. Of course, the
business of fabricated identification papers catered to criminals on the run,
who, in turn, provided counterfeiters with much sought-after authentic pass-
port print forms that were stolen from communal boards.106 Still, the majority
of customers for forged documents represented the broader sphere of illegality,
beyond its narrow segment of criminality. Buying a passport for 8 rubles in
Odessa (with its higher-than-average cost of living) might be seen as a reason-
able alternative to the time-consuming and costly commute to the hometown
or village to renew expired documents or replace lost ones, not to mention the
red tape involved.107 The urban plebeian community of migrants preferred
to solve problems fast and on the spot, which was often not just illegal but
explicitly criminal.
Those who did not have several spare rubles or did not know where to shop
wandered around without any documents, at their own risk. In 1913, the
majority of the 1,448 people detained by the police in Vilna were peasants who
could not produce a passport to prove their identity and legal residence.108 In

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Nizhny Novgorod, a single roundup operation by the police in a slum district

on the night of July 29, 1909, resulted in the arrest of eighty people without
passports.109 In Kazan, in 1911, police routinely arrested an average of seven
people a day without passports on the streets.110
It is important to distinguish in the muddy waters of illegality the currents
produced by new societal transformations from the elements of traditional
patterns of marginality. Migrants to the cities without proper identification
should have been (and actually were) registered separately from beggars and
other paupers who had constituted a segment of the population for centuries.
The traditional (isolationist) disregard for official documentation was juxta-
posed with the modern disregard (aimed at social mobility and integration),
and was not an exclusive prerogative of paupers, as can be seen in the follow-
ing incident. In early January 1912, an old woman came to the Nizhegorod
City Police Administration. She wanted to exchange her permanent passport
(so much coveted by any migrant to the city) for a five-year temporary one.
When the amazed officials asked her why, the woman explained, “God alone
is eternal.” She did not want to be equal to God by holding a permanent (lit-
erally, indefinite-term) passport.111 Hers was the defensive reaction of a rep-
resentative of the old-regime sedimentary society, who opposed not only the
erosive potential of the advancing sphere of illegality but also the government’s
halfhearted reformism. She preferred to live without a passport, but for a very
different reason than a migrant to Nizhny Novgorod from a village located
hundreds of miles away, whose temporary one-year passport required regular
renewals in order to be valid.

Religious Norms

For a study that registers the dynamics of changing attitudes and values largely
without recourse to the records of elaborated opinions and discourses (which
are all but peripheral for plebeian society), and only through direct interac-
tions and conflicts, the religious sphere remains the most opaque. The most
intimate and spiritual sphere of human activity has fewer outlets for expres-
sion through explicit social practices than any other type of social activity.
As we have seen in the case of the erosion of the old social order, the impact
of illegality was not one of direct confrontation but rather of growing indif-
ference to, and relativization of, old institutions of authority and categories
of difference. Nobody demanded the abolition of the nobility; it is just that
nobles (or honorary citizens) were becoming increasingly indistinguishable
from peasants in their actual social status and pursuits. With religion, we may

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reasonably expect that the society of migrants was much less regulated through
traditional parish structures than it had been in the past, an expectation that
is supported in recent scholarship.112 This lack of regulation or structure did
not necessarily affect the patterns of popular religiosity, including attendance
at churches, mosques, and prayer houses, both because this was a most funda-
mental social habit and because migrants could seek support and encourage-
ment in religion. The official statistics showed the steady increase of religious
crimes throughout the interrevolutionary period, but given the relative mar-
ginality of this type of misdemeanor (just 1–2 percent of all the convictions)
and the need for a felony to show an explicitly theological aspect in order to be
registered in this category, these statistics at best reveal a certain vector of more
general social processes.113 What could serve as a more representative indicator
of the changing attitude toward religion is the growing association of violence
with religion-related activities.
Religious holidays have been very important as days of rest and commu-
nal festivities since ancient times. As has already been mentioned, over the
three days of Easter in 1908 streetcars in Kazan carried an enormous crowd
of passengers: obviously, people were not only getting from one church to
another but also paying Easter visits to each other and getting out of their
neighborhoods to enjoy rare leisure time. Over the same three Easter days in
1906 in Kazan eighty fistfights were officially registered by the police (which
should be a fraction of the total number of less important or undocumented
clashes).114 In 1911, twenty people with stab wounds were delivered to just
one Kazan hospital over a single day of the Easter holidays. Forty-eight peo-
ple were arrested citywide for violent behavior while under the influence of
alcohol.115 There was nothing dramatically new in mass-scale Easter festivities
in Kazan associated with heavy drinking and eating (celebrating the end of a
long and strict Lent). Even the outbreaks of violence were hardly new phe-
nomena, but their rising scale probably was. We could imagine that the lei-
sure crowd celebrating in Kazan, with its population three times smaller than
that of Odessa, somehow coordinated its spontaneous violent outbursts and
directed all of them toward the same category of people, for example, the Jews.
Proportionate to the overall city population in Odessa, this would have meant
a series of fights provoked by a crowd of at least 150 raging and intoxicated
men, leaving some sixty people stabbed—all during just one day. Thus a regu-
lar Easter celebration in Kazan would qualify as a fierce Easter pogrom if we
add to the present level of violence just one (albeit crucial) element: coordina-
tion of the isolated outbursts of anger. A real pogrom has a logic and driving
force of its own, rapidly escalating from a more restrained initial intensity of

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 162 Chapter Five

attacks. As we know, in Kazan the militant mobilization of ethnoconfessional

communities was not a common scenario, but in those places where it did
happen, it is little wonder that Easter celebrations were marked by large-scale
outbursts of ethnic-related violence.
The point is to stress the menacing scale of violence on the most venerated
Orthodox Christian holiday. Apparently, there was nothing about Easter that
made Russians in Kazan so violent: they attacked each other, not “infidels”
(Jews or Tatars). On the contrary, the reason for drunkenness, violence, and
other excesses lay beyond the religious sphere—in long holidays, the sudden
lifting of dietary restrictions, and intensive socialization. The religious sphere
was shrinking at the expense of various lay activities, as can be judged by the
expanding sphere of illegality. All those hooligans were probably devoted
Christians, but their faith played a remarkably low role in the way they cel-
ebrated Holy Easter.
Luckily, debauchers in Kazan did not get together in mobs to victimize the
“aliens,” as happened on the periphery of the empire. However, there was a
disturbing specificity of Kazan as well, which, with its predominantly Russian
Orthodox population (and a significant community of Old Believers), became
the site of mass-scale church robberies committed by Christian (Russian) per-
petrators. The peak of these crimes occurred between 1904 and 1907, during
the period of the revolutionary upheaval, starting with the notorious theft and
destruction of the famous icon of Our Lady of Kazan, and ending with the
routine theft of charity boxes (or the quite extraordinary theft of a bell from
the bell tower of the Kazan Temperance Society).116 Even in 1913, the Kazan
Circuit Court convicted seven people for sacrilege, while the Vilna Court
convicted five, and Odessa just one.117 As a rule, the more homogeneously
Russian Orthodox regions had a higher rate of convictions for sacrilege, which
indirectly confirms the hypothesis that this was a side effect of emancipation
from the bonds of official state religion.118
In many cases, churches were not just burglarized but demonstratively van-
dalized and desecrated, which stressed the symbolic aspect of a dramatic rebel-
lion against Church authority. When thieves broke into the chapel of Kazan
Zemstvo Hospital on the night of September 14, 1905, they stole 220 rubles
from several church donation boxes (which was a good hit for an ordinary
chapel), but they also wreaked havoc on the altar.119 Varfolomei Stoian (aka
Fedor Chaikin), the mastermind of the theft of the Our Lady of Kazan icon
and a native of Ekaterinoslav province in Ukraine, had a more ambitious goal:
the decorated setting of the icon cost at least 100,000 rubles.120 Although
Chaikin arrived in Kazan and began planning the crime in winter, he and

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 163

his accomplices struck only on June 29, 1904, one week before a major local
church festivity, “the appearance of the miracle-working icon of Our Lady,”
celebrating the acquisition of the icon in the sixteenth century. This was per-
ceived as particularly cynical. When the ancient icon was stripped of its pre-
cious decorations, Chaikin ordered that it be burned in the stove to conceal
the evidence. Before his death in prison in 1916, he refused to confess to the
prison chaplain: he said that he believed in neither God nor the Devil, and
that he had personally burned the icon back in 1904 to prove that there was
nothing sacred about it.121
How religious vandalism and religion-related violence can be an indicator
of renouncing one’s social identity (or at least as a protest against it) can be
seen in the comparison of two incidents. One night in mid-March 1912, a
Russian resident of the commercial Moskovskaia Street in Kazan, Gorshnev,
became so upset with his relatives that he rushed out of the house to the street
and smashed eight windows of his own (apparently, quite spacious) apart-
ment.122 This gesture of material self-destruction carried a clear message:
Gorshnev perceived his social persona in terms of the property that belonged
to him, and his own personality as intrinsically tied to his family. Therefore,
his anger against his immediate social environment (family members) turned
upon his property: the only part of him that had a recognized social value.
Gorshnev did not physically harm his relatives and did not even violate their
rights: he resorted to symbolic violence by rightfully damaging his own house
and thus protesting against the people who lived there with him.
A twenty-year-old young man named Kiselev did not have any material
embodiment of his social status because he had no distinctive social status of
his own. He lived in a house that belonged to his sister’s husband on the out-
skirts of Kazan (not far from the place where the murderous Rantsevs lived).
Two weeks after Gorshnev broke windows in his own apartment, Kiselev also
had an intense outburst of anger and frustration. He found no other way to
express his feelings than to grab the icon of the Savior and chop it into tiny
splinters.123 It is most likely that the cause of Kiselev’s anger was similar to
that of Gorshnev, and that he redirected his aggression. Unlike Gorshnev,
Kiselev had no socially meaningful medium for symbolic violence but reli-
gion. Apparently not wishing to physically hurt his brother-in-law and sister,
and unable to express himself beyond body language (just like Gorshnev, who
belonged to the upper stratum of the same plebeian society), he turned against
the religious symbol as the only article of social capital at his disposal.
Once again, we are speaking here about attitudes and the language of
expressing these attitudes, not about any statistically proven type of behavior.

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 164 Chapter Five

Chopping icons was not a popular social practice in Kazan, but a few iso-
lated instances allow us to understand the mindset of those few committing
sacrilege, and also to see a deeper meaning in the mass-scale outbursts of
debauchery and violence on Easter holidays. The expanding sphere of illegality
disintegrated the former syncretism of religious bonds: now religion was effec-
tively losing its function of social control, as can be seen from the rising scale
of asocial behavior on the holy days and toward sacred objects.

From Illegal Love to “Mutual Sympathy”

The dialectic of illegality as both causing the disintegration of institutions of

the old social order and creating new opportunities for social solidarity is best
seen in the sphere of intimate relationships, once closely policed by the over-
lapping authorities of state legislation, religious regulations, communal opin-
ion, and interiorized cultural norms. The crisis of this complex censorship and
the entanglement of personal life and social order was epitomized in quite
popular newspaper ads—even in Kazan, with its patriarchal communities,
including some Old Believers and Muslims—such as the following: “Divorce
cases for all confessions. Adoption and legalization of illegitimate children.
Obtaining a permit for residence separate from a husband. Changing status
from peasants into meshchane [petty townspeople]. Assigning personal honor-
ary citizen status . . .”124
In the Russian Empire the institution of marriage was regulated by con-
fessional congregations, and hence official marital status implied that both
spouses belonged to the same confession.125 Instances of interethnic official
marriages were extremely rare:126 Iakov Bukshpan (1887–1939?), a well-
known St. Petersburg economist, prominent in the zemstvo special com-
mittees during World War I, was notorious for his open-mindedness in
theory and private life. When in 1914 he met his future wife, the Tatar Sara
Akhmerova of Kazan, the Jew Bukshpan converted to Islam to participate in
the Muslim marriage ceremony Nikakh.127 Otherwise, as we saw in chapter
2, even a couple of pure ethnic Russian residents of Nizhny Novgorod could
face formidable obstacles to their marriage if one of them was an Orthodox
Christian and the other an Old Believer. Divorces were prohibitively com-
plicated and costly for the majority of members of plebeian society and even
for the middle classes. Therefore, the spread of extramarital affairs with the
advance of illegality was creating a more intimately integrated social sphere
than the old regime society was, as social ties became more closely inter-
twined with emotional bonds.

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 165

In the fluid society of migrants, the function of social security traditionally

performed by official marriage was effectively weakened as scores of married
men traveled hundreds and thousands of miles away from home to the cities.
It was now up to their personal discretion whether to sustain close contacts
and regularly share their earnings with their families. Many would become
involved in new relationships in the city, forgetting about their official families
or going home only occasionally, once a year. Extramarital relationships were
becoming a much less marginal alternative to wedlock.
The high social cost of illegality that compromised the institution of mar-
riage was to a certain degree offset by its productive role of social cohesion.
Formerly isolated ethnoconfessional communities were gradually integrat-
ing into the common space of new plebeian society through myriads of close
interpersonal, including sexual, contacts. They ranged from occasional liai-
sons with prostitutes to long-term partnerships. Numerous examples of these
relationships have already been mentioned earlier in this book. By singling
out instances such as cohabitation between the Tatar merchant’s assistant
Davletshin in Kazan and his Russian lover, or between the Russian woman
Kozlova with the Jewish thief in Nizhny Novgorod, we implicitly assume the
exceptional nature of such unions. But what exactly was exceptional about
friendship or sexual relationships between members of different ethnoconfes-
sional groups? Obviously, they were much rarer in previous decades, when
people lived less mobile lives, largely confined to relatively homogeneous local
communities. The invisible social revolution of plebeian society at the turn of
the century radically breached this isolationism.
There is also another explanation for the sense of the exceptional in inter-
ethnic unions. The public sphere at the turn of the century was dominated by
nationalizing or at least nation-centered social thinking. Therefore, the variety
of public discourses of the time (from belles lettres to psychology to sociol-
ogy) communicated the same assumption that people of the epoch had preju-
dices against intimate contacts with representatives of a different ethnicity or
confession. Based on modern nationalist imagery of the individual body as
representative of the culturally and physically distinctive social body, this tacit
assumption implies that choosing a partner was a political act of discriminat-
ing against or endorsing certain human collectives. This can be illustrated by a
famous line from Babel’s The Odessa Stories musing on behalf of a Jewish man:
“You can spend the night with a Russian woman, and the Russian woman will
be satisfied by you.”128 Babel suggests that a young Jewish male in pre-1917
Odessa should have had an inferiority complex toward “a Russian woman,”
and, most important, that a Russian woman would respond not to the actual

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 166 Chapter Five

partner but to the ethnoconfessional identity he represented as a self-evident

sociobiological quality.
Incidentally, Isaac Babel’s own life experience negates the thesis of ethnicity
as a physically recognizable quality. Babel himself was not identified as a Jew
when, under the fictive Gentile name Cyril Liutov, he spent several months
with the First Cavalry Army in 1920, in tight physical and emotional contact
with a notoriously anti-Semitic, undisciplined force of déclassé warriors. In the
context of specifically sexual relations, a Russian girl, Praskoviia Kulundina,
did not realize that Shoel Fraerman was a Jew when they met in the Crimean
seashore resort town of Eupatoria in early May 1912. He proposed to her, and
she agreed to marry him and move to his home city of Odessa.129 Several days
later, in Odessa, the couple broke up: Kulindina complained to the police that
Fraerman had forced her to prostitute herself, while Fraerman claimed that
she used him to move to Odessa and attempted to extort money from him.
Whoever was telling the truth, it is certain that the two were intimate, and
that Kulindina learned that Fraerman was Jewish only from the police.
This particular story does not suggest, of course, that sexual partners were
unable to tell a Tatar from a Jew or Russian, but only that someone’s ethnicity
was not a self-evident and self-referential social trait. As to the psychologi-
cal complexes of (sexual) inferiority or superiority vis-à-vis a particular ethno-
confessional group, there is no evidence of the existence of such mythologies
within Russian plebeian society—either in practices or in rhetoric. On the
contrary, there is a well-documented turn toward a conscious openness to the
possibility of choosing a life partner (not a temporary affair!) of another eth-
nicity and faith, as can be seen from marriage advertisements.
The post-1905 epoch witnessed the emergence and subsequent burgeon-
ing of a new type of commercial periodicals: marriage newspapers, almost
entirely dedicated to private ads. Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two capi-
tals and major megapolises, led the trend, followed by several cities: Rostov-
on-Don, Tiflis, Piatigorsk, Tomsk, Riga, Kiev, and Odessa.130 Of these very
different cities that had just one common trait—their peripheral or even bor-
derland location—Odessa was the ultimate champion in terms of the number
and sustainability of marriage periodicals. These newspapers catered mostly to
the upper layers of plebeian society and middle-class representatives: to those
who not only had at least some modest means but also felt comfortable com-
municating through texts, first in a newspaper ad, and then in private cor-
respondence with marriage candidates. Because of their openness to textuality
and discursive mechanisms, this is precisely the category of people we may
reasonably expect to actually operate with abstract categories of nationality,

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 167

ethnicity, or confession in their personal affairs. A closer look at the most pop-
ular Odessa marriage newspaper provides a rare opportunity to monitor, on
a mass scale, the mindset of people as they were making conscious choices
regarding the ethnoconfessional status of their prospective life partners.
A special weekly Odessa and South Russia Marriage Newspaper was pub-
lished in Odessa beginning in 1910, featuring twenty-five to forty personal
ads in every issue (nothing of the kind existed in Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, or
Vilna). Only about 25–30 percent of all the ads somehow mentioned ethnic-
ity or confession: sometimes among the most important factors and some-
times at the end, in brackets, almost bashfully. A good portion of those ads
mentioned only the background of the author, thus leaving the question of
the future partner’s identity open, in any event, theoretically. And there was
always at least one ad in which the author explicitly stated his or her indiffer-
ence regarding the ethnoconfessional status of a potential partner:

Strongly aspiring toward acquiring higher education, a likable attractive

young man, handsome, brown-haired, Russian Orthodox, medium-height
. . . seeks wife—the love of my life, from a good family, from mature age
to middle-aged, a maiden, widow, or divorced, with the purpose of mar-
riage . . . free of prejudices, preferably educated, but not necessarily, a [solid]
material standing is required, needed to obtain a higher education ([I am]
engineer by calling) or at least with small means. Height, the past, national-
ity, and confession (primarily Russian Orthodox) do not matter.131

Seriously and discreetly seeking a wife-friend, a dentist, so that we would

work in the same profession, and she would understand me, who knows,
everything is possible, nationality and confession make no difference . . .
Nikolov.132

An intelligent young man with means, have a business of my own. Annual

income 1,500 rubles. Seeking wife-friend. Preferably Russian Orthodox.133

A lonely, intelligent young man, striving for love, is seeking an acquaintance

with an intelligent person. Age, social and material status, past, and confes-
sion do not matter.134

An intelligent young man with middle-level education, having small capital,

occupying a serious position. Wishing to marry an intelligent girl from 16
to 22 years of age. Nationality does not matter.135

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 168 Chapter Five

Seeking a wife not younger than twenty-five years old and no older than
thirty years, a widow or maiden with a small dowry, confession is of no
concern. For Vania.136

The most important characteristic of these and similar ads was not their
more or less cautious internationalism, but their reluctance to politicize the
ethnoconfessional status of their prospective life partners in principle, either
positively or negatively. Indifference is the underlying mode of treating cul-
turally constructed otherness here, indifference and also pragmatism. Those
people were motivated by things that were more important to them: romance,
greed (when accompanied by a demand for dowry), or pressing libido. In this
respect, they were not too far away from those 70–75 percent of the adver-
tisers, who simply did not mention their confessional preferences. Judging
by similar publications in Moscow and St. Petersburg, it was typical of the
genre of marriage ads in principle to omit mentioning ethnicity and confes-
sion at all, except for cases when people specifically stressed their preferences
or own identity (“A widowed man, forty-eight-year-old, Russian, Orthodox
Christian, Slav, Siberian . . . Wish to marry an educated middle-aged per-
son.”)137 By not specifying one’s ethnoconfessional identity or preferences,
a resident of Moscow could reasonably expect to receive an answer from a
Russian Orthodox Christian partner. In Odessa, the same publicly displayed
indifference had absolutely different implications. Most likely, people who did
not state their preferences clearly were not ready for any bold interethnic or
interconfessional matrimonial experiments. However, they should have been
prepared to be approached by candidates of the “wrong” ethnoconfessional
identity, and apparently did not see any particular inconvenience in this situ-
ation (besides the usual stress of meeting strangers through newspaper ads).
This absentmindedness bordering on open-mindedness, and the accompa-
nying pragmatism suggest that even the most discourse-sensitive strata of
urban plebeian society did not view the marriage market through the lenses
of nationalist “stockbreeding.” Just like those people who did not resort to
the intermediary role of the printed word, advertisers in marriage newspapers
explored their usual networks of socialization or hoped to expand them by
appealing to potential partners through the press. These networks could be
built around circuits of parishioners, neighbors, and coworkers, who could
be expected to be brethren. This was not necessarily the case, particularly in
such multiethnic cities as Odessa, but people usually did not reflect on the
ethnic composition of their circle at all. At the same time, there was a much
more conscious understanding that there was a premium on going beyond

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 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 169

one’s immediate social environment. People were ready for greater inclusive-
ness when expecting to profit from new contacts, and openly admitted this.
A pragmatic openness to new social experiences became the driving force
that was crystallizing a new type of society within the sphere of illegality.
Pragmatism and opportunism that made illegality such a powerful destruc-
tive force that disintegrated the old social order played an equally decisive
role in forging new patterns of social cohesion. Compromising trust based
on references to the law, tradition, or self-evident order of things, illegality
encouraged a proliferation of new trust networks, based on personal relations
and individual choices.138 Therefore, illegality was nothing resembling the
anarchic state of war of everyone against everyone, and relied on practices of
solidarity, rather than undermining them. The growing popularity of search-
ing for potential spouses through newspaper ads is just one more illustration
of people’s readiness to trust total strangers in the most important personal
affairs—although only within the social networks they created themselves, for
their own purposes. Clearly, this emerging new sphere did not encompass the
entire imperial society—or even the whole of urban plebeian society. We are
speaking of only one segment of plebeian society (although a quite significant
one), its most dynamic section creatively exploring and exploiting the state
of illegality: between the still numerous strata of people complying with the
norms of the old regime and a marginal group of professional criminals. It is
this dynamic social group that was the driving force behind the ongoing social
transformation, defining the dominant course of change by means of prolif-
eration of the most popular social practices.
If human sympathy was the foundation block of society and social capital,
as John Dewey theorized at about the same time,139 then illegality, prioritiz-
ing personal associations over formal structures, was producing a new type of
social bonds. The new social sphere emerged out of myriads of personal con-
tacts based on human sympathy that often was not unselfish, but also not ide-
ological. This social sphere differed from the old regime in one very important
aspect: while not ignoring the reality of human diversity (ethnic, confessional,
linguistic, or economic), it did not legitimize boundaries between variously
defined human collectives as the foundation of the social order. Thus, there
was no special treatment of Jews, Poles, Tatars, or Armenians (or Muslims, or
Catholics) irrespective of the actual circumstances and purposes. Boundaries
between “us” and “them” were drawn every time in accordance with prag-
matic considerations and tasks. Russians would team against Tatars in tradi-
tional winter fistfights on the ice of Lake Kaban in Kazan that separated the
traditional Tatar Quarter from the Russian/Old Believer district—but not in

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 170 Chapter Five

everyday life, as we saw in chapter 2. Moreover, by the early twentieth century,

the Russian bank of the lake had been so densely inhabited by Tatar residents
that in 1914 the construction of a big mosque in this neighborhood was initi-
ated (completed in 1926). It is quite possible that ethnic Tatars constituted a
significant part of the “Russian” team in ritual fights on the frozen lake because
the primary principle of groupness in this ritual was that of neighborhood,
which was no longer monoethnic. Friends and employers, thieves and lovers
chose counterparts for their pursuits on the basis of personal sympathy or ani-
mosity. Paradoxically, out of these idiosyncratic motivations and contempt for
discursive (reasonable) generalizations, a very rational and pragmatic society
had been emerging.

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 Epilogue

Gerasim in Power

A Plebeian Modernity

This book has told a story of plebeian society in four cities of the Russian
Empire during the interrevolutionary period of 1906–16. The story has had
to be reconstructed mostly from the actions and gestures of the members of
plebeian society, who expressed themselves more accurately in social practices
than in written or even spoken words. To their educated contemporaries, who
perceived reality through textual representations, as well as to modern histo-
rians looking for textual primary sources, those people in many ways seem
analogous to deaf nonspeakers. Like the protagonist of the 1852 novella
Mumu by the Russian classic writer Ivan Turgenev, the deaf and nonspeaking
serf Gerasim, members of late imperial urban plebeian society could not com-
municate their experiences and formulate their attitudes even to each other
in the same way as participants in the elite public sphere. Of course, they
were not completely aphasiac: as we have seen in the previous pages, they were
capable of emulating popular tropes and applying them rationally, or could
themselves become objects of discursive manipulations. Still, this was not their
preferred form of communication or one that they really trusted. It was not
theirs almost by definition because it was developed and sustained by a dif-
ferent social stratum: the patricians of the middle class, the primary agents of
the public sphere. Even the notion of “them” as a group is the hypothesis of
a modern historian as an outside observer of their shared social practices and
way of life because these people themselves did not produce self-descriptive
narratives of their unity or assume a common name.
It is amazing that members of a socially diverse plebeian society, living lives
“beneath any discourse” (Foucault), succeeded in integrating innumerable
pockets of local knowledge and particularist experience into a common social

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 172 Epilogue

sphere that revealed certain structural similarities in Kazan, Odessa, Nizhny

Novgorod, and Vilna. This became possible because the common plebeian
social sphere was coordinated and communicated through the medium of a
specific common language of social practices. One of the main social prac-
tices that helped to integrate individual experiences and distinctive pockets of
local knowledge into a single social sphere can be called the middle ground.
This was achieved through mechanisms of mutual creative misunderstanding,
when even the most fantastic ideas about the “Other” were communicated
through everyday interactions and eventually formed a truly common sphere
of mutual projections. Another important social practice can be dubbed patri-
archality—a way of performing demonstrative ignorance about the issues that
could escalate tensions, whether it was one’s immoral behavior (such as prosti-
tution) or alien nationality. This was the most efficient way to cross rigid social
barriers and forge a common modern social sphere without relying on the
institutions and public discourses of civic equality or multiculturalism (non-
existent at the time in Russia). The third universal social practice was violence,
which, in addition to its destructive role, performed the crucial function of
remapping existing intergroup boundaries. With no access to societal mecha-
nisms of institutional adjustment and relying little on public discourses, ple-
beian society challenged the existing borders in a most direct physical way,
which almost automatically meant violence.
This story ends before the collapse of the imperial regime in 1917, which
leaves open a no less intriguing question: What happened to urban plebeian
society after the revolution? How did social upheaval affect the former imperial
subalterns, or, to put it another way, how did perpetual illegality as a habitual
social environment of plebeians fare under the Bolshevik dictatorship?

Weathering the Imperial Revolution

Speaking of plebeian society in general, we can see that the revolution itself
became possible only because a common social sphere of lower-class urban-
ites had crystallized in Russia after 1905 as the primary social base for collec-
tive action. The numbers of active members of all political parties in February
1917 were negligible, perhaps even lower than in 1905; potential party mem-
bers were politically polarized and hardly capable of reaching a compromise
among themselves. In contrast, after the post-1905 decade of enhanced hori-
zontal mobility, negotiations of mutual misunderstandings, and making sense
of (or censoring) its utter internal diversity, Russian plebeian society had
reached the unity required for sustained collective action. The persistence of

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 Gerasim in Power 173

plebeian isolation from the elite public sphere of discourses also explains the
failure of “liberal” ideologies (which were in fact more Social Democratic and
progressive) in 1917 to affect the risen masses, who were responsive only to
the slogans communicated in the language of direct action. War experiences,
both in the rear and on the front line, only enhanced the interconnectedness
and semi-isolation of plebeian society.
Only, contrary to the mainstream revolutionary narrative, this isolation
was not produced mainly by formal social distance between the working
classes and the bourgeoisie (the educated publics) in Russia’s modern and
highly dynamic urban centers. For one, the democratizing effect of food
rationing and rising incomes of workers somewhat leveled the socioeco-
nomic gap.1 By the same token, the social distance between the soldiers and
the officers in the trenches under fire became even less. To the contrary, the
gap formed by the radically different ways of conceptualizing and communi-
cating social experience became much more conspicuous. In this sense, even
Russians barely understood each other as they were speaking totally different
languages: the textual language of public discourses and the nonverbal lan-
guage of social practices.
The question of the plebeian society’s role in the events of 1917 requires
a special study. Perhaps it will become a part of the long overdue discussion
of the 1917 Revolution as an “imperial revolution” par excellence, one that
resolved some of the predicaments of empire, rather than bringing it to an end.
In the past, most historians concentrated solely on the novel forms brought
about by revolutions, and the rupture with the old regime. This perspective
logically prioritized the question of where the “new people” of the postrevolu-
tionary era were coming from, hence the fixation on the “conscious proletar-
iat” in Russian history, and the mystery of its numerical insignificance, which
had nevertheless accomplished such a tectonic social shift.2 There is, however,
another way of looking at revolutions. Rather than retrospectively ascribing
to them a teleological goal of constructing the exact future that eventually
became reality, it seems reasonable to ask whether supporters of the revolution
were longing for some familiar but apparently forfeited conditions in the past
that inspired them. Indeed, taking the Marxist concept of social revolution
seriously means recognizing that the political upheaval becomes but a culmi-
nation of the long process of structural realignment of major social forces and
actors before the revolution and within the old regime. As the historian of
Iberian empires Jeremy Adelman put it,

Revolutions were imperial in nature; that is to say, they were part of empire-
wide transformations in that they yielded new social practices in defining

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 174 Epilogue

the internal life of sovereign politics, as efforts to put empires, and their
parts, on a different footing in order to confront external pressures. . . . Sub-
altern actors . . . asserted their own views of government. . . . Some of these
understandings inhabited the very hybrid infrastructures of imperial sover-
eignty, only to acquire autonomous leases with civil war and revolution.3

This logic of inquiry prompts historians to look into imperial regimes on

the verge of revolutions as the main culprits in upsetting the status quo, and
to identify elements of larger imperial agendas in the programs of even the
most radical enemies of the old regime. In the case of Russia, this would imply
checking whether the nationalist regime of Nicholas II and the nationalist fac-
tion of the elite were so heavily upending the imperial system as a “no one’s
place” (and hence acceptable to almost everyone) that they provoked a revolu-
tion in the name of restoring the original empire’s promise to accommodate
diversity. In any case, this is the underlying argument of Liliana Riga’s pio-
neering prosopography of the “Old Bolshevik” elite, The Bolsheviks and the
Russian Empire, in which she examined the biographies of almost one hundred
Central Committee members between 1917 and 1922.4 She concluded that
“Bolshevism’s class universalism offered an alternative rossiiskii representation
of experiential narrative, an effective mobilizational response to key sources of
old regime conflict, exclusion, and marginalization.”5 This made this most rad-
ical revolutionary group essentially an imperial phenomenon in its roots and
implicit motivation, responding to the concerns and frustrations of the broad-
est social stratum of urbanites: the plebeian society. Bolsheviks were seeking
to counter the forces of nationalist mobilization that threatened to split the
formerly entangled lower-class society of shared experiences and attitudes.6
As it seems now, at this very preliminary stage of conceptualizing the phe-
nomenon of imperial revolution in Russia,7 the 1917 Revolution was brought
about not by a spontaneous rising of the lower classes. Rather, they responded
to the radically changed social environment and the new opportunities
that opened, but their massive participation in the revolution left a distinc-
tive imprint on the events and predetermined their course to a large degree.
Arguably, the Bolshevik coup became possible not only as a result of the
political dynamics following February 1917 but also because Bolsheviks com-
municated in the language of direct action. Thus, they managed to reach out
to the plebeian majority in the cities, which was less affected by the abstract
rhetoric of even the most revolutionary-minded parties. Whether Bolsheviks
were appealing to the crude instincts of the people, as Maxim Gorky alleged
in his Untimely Thoughts in March 1918, is a matter of moral and political
judgment.8 In terms of historical analysis, it is more significant that they

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 Gerasim in Power 175

consciously and very successfully employed the nondiscursive language of ple-

beian society through social practices. As if responding to Gorky’s comments a
year later, Lenin explained at the Eighth Party Congress:

While formerly we carried on our propaganda by means of general truths,

we are now carrying on our propaganda by our work. That is also preaching,
but it is preaching by action—only not action in the sense of the isolated
sallies of some upstarts. . . . Our decree is a call, but not the old call “Work-
ers, arise and overthrow the bourgeoisie!” No, it is a call to the people, it
calls them to practical work. Decrees are instructions which call for practical
work on a mass scale . . . they contain material for practical action, and the
purpose of a decree is to teach practical steps to the hundreds, thousands,
and millions of people who heed the voice of the Soviet government. This is
a trial in practical action.9

As a side note, it should be mentioned that this conscious attempt to “speak

plebeian” better explains the horrible writing style of Stalin and, in particular,
Lenin (a university graduate), marked by endless repetitions and oversimplifi-
cations, peppered by clichés and avoiding any nuances of literary style.10 We
can only speculate about how their peculiar mode of writing expressed their
inner selves, but it is safe to conclude that this type of rhetoric was the most
efficient way to reach out to their intended audience—plebian society.
Whereas the events of 1917 can be largely explained within the model of
the imperial revolution by prior societal forms and dynamics, the result of
the revolution as a longer process that spanned several years (including civil
war) was a radically new society. Everything changed in the Soviet Union: the
socioeconomic system and the political regime, the penal code and the offi-
cially endorsed moral values. The patrician elite were physically decimated and
politically annihilated, which normalized plebeian society as the mainstream
form of mass society. By all accounts, the Soviet regime aspired to cultivate
the new, conscious, socialist subject, but how the reality of the structurally
still plebeian majority (essentially nondiscursive or at least nontextual) affected
this goal remains an open question.
Had Turgenev’s Gerasim lived after the Revolution of 1917, he would have
been a different person in many ways. His symbolic aphasia (highlighted by
his being deaf and nonverbal) might have been relativized just as conditions
for deaf nonspeakers were becoming somewhat improved in Late Imperial
Russia. Several methods of education for the deaf were developed after 1861,
implemented at zemstvo-run and private schools of various levels.11 Created in
1898, by 1905, the Imperial Highness Maria Fedorovna Trust for Deaf-Mutes

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already had fifteen provincial branches. The trust sponsored and managed
schools for the deaf of various ages and workshops teaching trades to adults.12
One of the most successful branches was in Kazan: in 1905, the Kazan Society
for the Welfare and Education of Deaf-Mute Children built a new three-story
building for the School for Deaf-Mutes in the downtown area, accommodat-
ing five classrooms, two workshops, a cafeteria, and dormitories. By 1913, the
school had eighty-three male and female students enrolled in its six-year study
program followed by two years of vocational training.13 People with impaired
speech and hearing began to be more actively socialized into the larger society
and they developed ties of solidarity with each other. These dynamics culmi-
nated in 1917, when elite activists of the deaf-mute movement published a
pamphlet, An Appeal to Deaf-Mutes.14 Forty delegates attended the All-Russian
Congress of Deaf-Mutes, in a session of July 17–22, 1917, debating the prob-
lem of legal discrimination against the deaf nonspeakers, who, under imperial
law, shared the legally impaired status of the insane.15 Local branches for deaf
members of the Communist Party began emerging after 1921, and several
deaf-only Soviet farms (sovkhozy) were created after 1928.16
This optimistic story of social mobilization and integration of the deaf and
nonspeaking resonates well with the Bolshevik narrative of the revolution as
the ultimate emancipatory event, bringing the dark and even mute masses to
the light of full consciousness. This narrative has been endorsed by students of
so-called Soviet subjectivity, who tell the story of development of the modern
subject through painstaking soul searching along the lines suggested by the
Communist ideology, learning to “speak Bolshevik” in order to express one’s
inner self.17 Using Gerasim as a metaphor for the isolation of the subaltern
from the modern sphere of public discourses, within this model we can envi-
sion him by 1937 as a Party member, or at least as an ardent Soviet citizen
engaged in intensive soul searching (apparently, tackling the reasons for his
murder of his dog/friend Mumu). Moreover, by then, Gerasim should have
mastered “speaking Bolshevik” in some text-compatible language (keeping a
diary or writing to newspapers).
There is nothing incredible about the reincarnation of the archaic subaltern
Gerasim as a new Soviet man, now able to express himself and recognize the
word of the Party—except that by 1917 we have to speak not of individual
“Gerasims” but of the existence of a distinctive urban plebeian society, sustained
through specific social practices and a subculture of its own. As noted earlier, the
possibility of upward mobility always existed for individual members of urban
plebeian society, a group whose numbers continued to grow. Compared to this
human sea, the channels of integration provided by Late Imperial and even

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 Gerasim in Power 177

Early Soviet modernizing projects look like rivulets. We may never know the
exact figures, but we can get a sense of the general proportions by looking at the
fate of real-life “Gerasims”: the number of members of the All-Union Society
of the Deaf (VOG) had reached five thousand in 1929. At the same time, the
number of deaf and nonspeaking individuals in the country stood at 112,000
according to the 1926 census and was more than twice that according to special-
ists’ estimates.18 By 1937, the share of those integrated at least formally into the
VOG network that provided opportunities for education and professional train-
ing had grown from 2 percent to 16 percent,19 which was a tremendous feat of
state intervention into the social sphere. Still, on the eve of World War II, only
one of six “Gerasims” had access to the structural preconditions for learning “to
speak Bolshevik” and joining institutionalized Soviet society.

The Persistence of Illegality: “The Revolutionary Sense of Justice”

Not only did plebeian society persist through the first Soviet decades at the
expense of an underdeveloped social state, but it was officially institutionalized
and established as the backbone of the new regime by the authorities. First,
the state of illegality (as a regime of sustaining order through self-organiza-
tion) was recognized as the foundation of the new legal culture under the slo-
gan of “revolutionary legal consciousness.” The tone was set by Vladimir Lenin
himself, for instance, in a series of public speeches in March 1919, discussing
the new program of the Bolshevik Party as the real constitution of the country
on the eve of and during the Eighth Party Congress:

The October Revolution . . . turned out the old judges and made the court
a people’s court. The court could have been simplified; for this there was no
need to know the old laws but simply to be guided by a sense of justice.20

Having repealed the laws of the deposed governments, the Party gives the
judges elected by Soviet electors the slogan: enforce the will of the prole-
tariat, apply its decrees, and in the absence of a suitable decree, or if the rel-
evant decree is inadequate, take guidance from your socialist sense of justice,
ignoring the laws of the deposed governments.21

Take, for example, the courts. Here, it is true, the task was easier; we did not
have to create a new apparatus, because anybody can act as a judge basing
himself on the revolutionary sense of justice [revolutsionnogo pravosoznaniia]
of the working classes.22

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This might be a revolutionary but hardly novel understanding of justice

as based on the moral economy of the working classes: Precisely this regime
of justice and rights constituted the essence of illegality within which plebe-
ian society operated. The proletariat was a sociological fiction in more than
one sense: even among the delegates to the Eighth Congress (crème de la
crème of the Party as “the vanguard of the proletariat”), the self-identified
workers accounted for only 35 percent.23 The initial draft of the revolu-
tionary Decree on Courts (November 1917) by the People’s Commissar of
Justice, Petr Stuchka (Pēteris Stuðka), openly spoke of the need for the laws
“to reflect the sense of justice of the broad popular masses” (emphasis added).
After Lenin’s intervention, this reference was replaced by the ideologically
correct “revolutionary sense of justice” in the final text of the decree.24
The concept and the practical political and legal measures it engendered
are usually perceived as an example of Bolshevik utopian dogmatism and
revolutionary legal nihilism.25 This is understandable, particularly since the
“revolutionary sense of justice” was the driving force behind not just the
improvised new revolutionary courts but also the deadly machine of the
constantly intensifying Red Terror. Yet, behind the revolutionary rhetoric
was a sound legal theory that can be viewed as specifically tailored to serve
the plebeian society existing in the gray zone of illegality.
That a leading Russian legal theorist of the early twentieth century (author
of the “intuitive law” theory) and prominent member of the liberal Cadet
Party, Leon Petrazhitskii (Petrażycki), had influenced early Soviet legal dis-
course and practice was well known to Soviet legal scholars and was never
denied by the Bolshevik ideologues themselves. In 1928, the influential
Marxist historian and social scientist Mikhail Pokrovsky announced that the
Soviet legal theory of the first postrevolutionary decade was dominated by
“Petrazhitskiism.”26 The leading Bolshevik legal theorist and author of the
1918 Soviet Constitution, Mikhail Reisner, was a student of Petrazhitskii and
a great supporter of his theory. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar
of Enlightenment and prosecutor at political trials, in 1918 spoke of the
“intuitive law that reflects the class interests of the masses.”27 Even Commissar
Stuchka, trained in a different legal tradition, paid tribute for a while to the
orthodoxy of the intuitive theory.28 What attracted Bolshevik ideologists to
Petrazhitskii’s legal system was its emancipatory potential and dynamism. He
challenged the normative legal theory, which regarded the state as the only
legitimate source of law, suggesting that anyone can be a subject of the law,
regardless of his or her formal capability, even, for example, a four-year-old
or an animal. (Petrazhitskii can be viewed as one of the pioneers of animal

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 Gerasim in Power 179

rights, and in his system Gerasim was violating the rights of Mumu as an
animal—“the subject of the right, and the subject of obligation.”29) As Reisner
quite accurately noticed, Petrazhitskii revived the idea of natural law that had
been monopolized by the state, viewing it as an ongoing dynamic process
constantly under way in society as a self-organization process.30 Whether for-
malized or not, legal norms exist within any group, even criminal (of “robber
bands, pirates, gangs of thieves, and the like”).31

And in those numerous fields of life where the relevant problems of conduct
are foreseen and decided by positive law (such as renting a lodging, hiring a
servant or buying things in shops), people are in fact ordinarily guided not
by what is enjoined as in this regard by the civil or criminal laws (which are
ordinarily unknown to the vast majority), but by their intuitive law and the
directions of their own intuitive conscience.32

In his treatise, in the abstract language of legal theory, Petrazhitskii offered

a somewhat cumbersome but remarkably accurate dynamic model of societal
self-organization and self-stabilization through informal and unspoken norms.
This model completely embraced plebeian society, including its symbolically
“mute and deaf ” members, who were ignorant of normative (state-enforced)
legality, and ignored or stigmatized by hegemonic legal and social discourses.
Our modern concepts of moral economy and illegality, more adjusted to
empirical historical and social studies, serve the same goal. Bolsheviks had
drawn practical conclusions from Petrazhitskii’s legal theory, and were deter-
mined to allow individuals and various collectives to renegotiate their legal
status and relationships as the true subjects of the really “natural” law. Thus,
plebeian society with its persistent condition of illegality was not just reha-
bilitated, but fully legitimized as espousing the new social norm. Even when
they turned to enforcing their political agenda in 1918, the Bolshevik regime
acted according to the logic of plebeian society’s illegality, rather than that of
the regular state defined in terms of normative law. The Red Terror (just like
the Great Terror of the later period) was propelled to its horrific proportions
by mechanisms of self-organization through crude adjustments of conflicting
interests, whether these were the petty settling of personal scores by pragmatic
individuals or major ideological goals of the regime. Terror acquires a dynam-
ics of its own precisely because of its reliance on the “intuitive law and intui-
tive conscience” of citizens, rather than on the formal legal norm of the state,
even the most repressive one. In the latter case, the symbolic and exemplary
violence would be superseded by modern routine disciplinary practices. In this
context, Foucault spoke “of the pastoralization of power in the Soviet Union

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 180 Epilogue

. . . [and] bureaucratization of the Party . . . [and] also pastoralization of the

Party” after Stalin’s death, whereas “basically terror is not the culmination of
discipline but its failure. In the Stalinist regime, the Chief of Police could
himself be executed one fine day after leaving the Council of Ministers. No
NKVD chief has died in his bed.”33
The Foucauldian scheme of the historical evolution of authority and coer-
cion from premodern, public, highly symbolic, and very selective punish-
ments to individualizing, invisible, and systematic repression has been debated
for the past forty years.34 To further complicate matters, Foucault’s own ideas
on the subject changed over time, and many discussants are driven by politi-
cal partisanship more than scholarly considerations. Regardless of one’s stance
in this theoretical debate, however, by its very definition and self-proclaimed
intentions, terror is meant to impress the public no less than to suppress (or
eliminate) the prosecuted victim.35 Terror is a type of body politics used to
communicate meaning and instill a desirable social norm, substituting in this
role for hegemonic public discourses, or at best providing discourses with the
very hegemonic authoritative status they cannot otherwise acquire. This is the
same mechanism that was discussed in chapter 4, which described the employ-
ment of the social practice of violence as an element of the peculiar nonverbal
language developed within the discourse-less plebeian society. This is also the
mode chosen by Turgenev to communicate an ambiguous hidden message in
the novella Mumu, centered on the idiom of wordless bodily communication.
The proliferation of jokes and parodies on Turgenev’s Mumu in the late
twentieth century in Russia (including several songs and even an opera) may
be viewed as a psychological abreaction after decades of terror supplanted by
omnipresent references to terror.36 Indeed, if anything, Turgenev’s novella,
which has psychologically traumatized generations of Russian children, is a
horror story, and the most disturbing aspect of its psychological effect is the
anonymous and unspeaking nature of the source of violence—social relations,
rather than any exotic psychopath. The effect is amplified by the mirroring lev-
els of aphasiac submission to completely arbitrary violence (arbitrary in terms
of both its irrationality and the physical inability of all those involved to grasp
any justification of it, even of what is provided by those inflicting violence).
Deaf and nonspeaking Gerasim is abused by the landlady, who has made him
give up the woman he fell in love with and the dog Mumu he befriended.
Unable to grasp the reasons for his troubles (probably even misunderstanding
the order to get rid of Mumu), Gerasim is perfectly aware of his victimization
by the arbitrary authority. He takes Mumu to the river—and the mute dog
does not anticipate any danger coming from her mute master and would never

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 Gerasim in Power 181

have understood why he murdered her. “She watched him confidingly and
without any fear, faintly wagging her tail.”37 And then comes our turn, readers
and witnesses of this scene of silent terror, to suffer from its inexplicable and
irrational gruesomeness. In vain, literary scholars and school students keep
asking, “Why did Gerasim drown Mumu?”38 Turgenev did not provide an
unequivocal answer, we cannot ask him and cannot recognize any clue left in
the text, finding ourselves almost as aphasiac as Gerasim.
The barbaric violence of the Soviet terror has prompted some scholars to
view it as a sign of archaism. The mechanization and systematization of terror
throughout the 1930s, along with the general expectations of a revolutionary
regime to be at the vanguard of modernity, have encouraged the opponents
of this position to conceptualize the Stalinist regime as a modern one.39 This
discussion seems largely scholastic and implicitly politicized outside the con-
text of particular research questions. One of these is why did the Soviet regime
of the 1920s and 1930s, while consciously pursuing a very modernist agenda
of large-scale social engineering, employ the systematic politics of terror as a
sustained practice of body politics, so reminiscent of the social practices of
plebian society? Modern or not, this was a radical departure from the political
culture and practice of the Russian imperial state, but not of the late impe-
rial subculture of discourse-less illegality. Regardless of one’s esteem for the
theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, terror was indeed counterproductive
for statehood, even if it was efficient in achieving tactical goals: for one, it
destroyed the human capital that was so scarce in Russia. Even more impor-
tant, terror compromised the project of a mass society sustained and coordi-
nated through public discourse and uniformly applied disciplinary practices.

Lifesaving Practices, Deadly Discourse

In terms of formal definitions, official ideology in the Soviet Union was a

quasi-discourse: it had a single authoritative author known to everyone and
it allowed no modifications or even creative additions by those willing to par-
take in it. To the contrary, such creative contributions constituted a political
crime epitomized in the tropes of deviations and opportunism. As such, this
hegemonic discourse lacked the plasticity and dynamism required to adjust to
the ever-changing situation and multiple individual circumstances. Therefore,
its authority depended not on its ability to assist participants in the public
sphere to navigate in their everyday needs (which is possible only by constant
adjustments of the public discourse by numerous agents located throughout
society). It was the direct terror and, later, the possibility of becoming a victim

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 182 Epilogue

of terror that bestowed authority upon this monological discourse (called the
“ideology”): it is hardly accidental that the hold of the Soviet ideology began
weakening right after the diminishing intensity of the threat of terror follow-
ing Stalin’s death. Even the Great Terror could not make this discourse literally
a household name helping to make sense of everyday life.
To the contrary, attempts to embrace the official discourse with its ideal of
self-sacrifice in work and war directly diminished one’s chances for survival.
Characteristically, judging by the works of historians of “Soviet subjectivity”
almost all the individuals who at some point in their lives in the 1930s attempted
to interiorize the official ideology fell as victims of more or less harsh repres-
sions.40 Those who remained discursively mute and deaf were not protected
from the arbitrariness of terror either, but entering the spotlight of the Soviet
public sphere in the structural situation of “the permanent purge” left virtually
no chance of escaping some form of prosecution. In this public sphere, social
control was disciplinary (as in modern bourgeois mass society) and individual-
izing, affecting everyone directly. With the authority of the hegemonic discourse
(official ideology) enforced by terror, this meant that everyone partaking in that
discourse had to face the politics of terror in some way. The majority of those
abstaining from active participation in the Soviet public sphere (by just demon-
strating the required signs of conformity with it) experienced terror as sporadic
and arbitrary attacks against randomly selected victims. It was unspeakably hor-
rible to observe, but becoming a possible victim was more a matter of statistical
probability than any personal choices. It was safer to be a silent Gerasim or just
stay in the background, paying lip service to the official ideology and avoiding
the risk of saying publicly something that might be turned against the speaker.
Not unlike religion (an often-cited comparison), the Soviet ideology could
make people patient, socially passive, or passionate in labor and war. In all
the other more routine circumstances, in the role of hegemonic discourse
Soviet ideology fared no better than religion under the old regime with its ten
commandments, distrust of “infidels” and “schismatics,” and respect for the
authorities. If the Soviet bureaucracy, even on paper, failed to enlist more than
16 percent of the country’s deaf people in the VOG social network by 1937,
why should we expect that the ideology backed by terror succeeded in turning
a bigger proportion of Soviets into “new Soviet men,” which involved a much
more complicated process “enacting revolutions of their souls, paralleling the
revolution of the social and political landscapes”?41 With 16 percent or even
25 percent of the population at least theoretically integrated into the pub-
lic sphere regulated by the Soviet ideology as quasi-discourse, the remaining
majority had to be governed by some other means.

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 Gerasim in Power 183

It is important to see this model as a dynamic one, taking into consider-

ation the generation factor and the cumulative effect of truly mass institutions
such as schooling, Pioneer, and Komsomol organizations. School experience
is particularly important in developing the skills necessary for partaking in a
public discourse (beyond mimicking the official ideological rhetoric through
brief exposure at occasional Party meetings). Throughout the 1930s, a new
socially active cohort entered the scene: according to the 1937 census, almost
two-thirds of Soviet citizens (57 percent) were twenty-seven years old or
younger (born after 1910).42 This means that whatever schooling they had
received was already Soviet schooling. Even among young school-age people
(six to nineteen), however, all of whom were born after 1917, only 51 percent
had had any schooling experience at all in 1937.43 Within society in general,
this number was several times lower. Less than 5 percent of Soviets had seven
grades or more under their belt.44 Overall, only a minority of Soviet citizens
was exposed to systematic socialization into the Soviet public sphere through
schools (and the army probably played a more ambiguous role by exposing
conscripts to a very crude ideology while promoting the practices of plebe-
ian society as indispensable to survival in the hierarchical and multicultural
male milieu). The share of this minority in the population can be estimated
at 15–20 percent (similar to the share of the deaf and nonverbal population
socialized into VOG). By the late 1950s, the prerevolutionary generation had
all but gone,45 and the population of the USSR had become more thoroughly
Sovietized.46 Under Stalinism, the former overwhelming predominance of the
old-type plebeian society had been gradually decreasing, and the initially tiny
public sphere had been expanding. The situation in 1937 differed from the
situation in 1927 and in 1957, but only in terms of relative proportions: ple-
beian society was gradually ceasing to embody the absolute norm and, with
great variations from one spatial or social location to another, came to play the
role of a significant majority or a substantial minority to be reckoned with.
There are two possible explanations for the construction of the new Soviet
regime on the foundation of the same social mechanisms and practices as pre-
revolutionary plebeian society. First, it was a consequence of the Bolshevik
leaders’ reliance on the particular—very modern and analytically productive—
legal theory of Leon Petrazhitskii. As an analytical device, it explained the
logic of plebeian society’s state of illegality. When introduced as an instrument
of practical policy, Petrazhitskii’s theory, adopted in its most radical version,
promoted the regime of illegality it was intended to explain. Plebian society,
largely insensitive to formal norms and institutions, was responsive only to
the “body language” of social practices, including the practice of symbolically

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 184 Epilogue

meaningful violence. Second, Stalin’s was, of course, a revolutionary society

with its unheard of upward social mobility. Lenin’s proverbial thesis that “an
unskilled labourer or a cook . . . are capable of administering the state” has
been criticized for its “Maoist” dismissive attitude to expertise. The reality was
more complicated: those “cooks” were not tabulae rasae when they got to the
“training in the work of state administration.”47 Only a few of them were the
“conscious workers” who have been praised in Bolshevik mythology and stud-
ied by historiography inspired by Social Democrats (Bolsheviks in Russia and
Mensheviks in the emigration to the United States). “Laborers and cooks” in
power brought with them more than their prior habits of thought and cultural
stereotypes: a whole repertoire of social practices and epistemological strate-
gies of plebeian society that were put in the service of new governing tasks.48
And the former plebeians constituted the bulk of new administrative cadres,
even in the backbone of the Soviet regime responsible for enforcing its hege-
monic quasi-discourse through terror: the secret political police.
According to the available statistics, by May 1, 1924, in the central appara-
tus of the All-Union State Political Administration (OGPU, the Soviet secret
service), less than 10 percent of the officers were former workers. Further sta-
tistics concern only Party members, who constituted the absolute majority of
officers. Of 486 officers in the central apparatus and local branches, in January
1925, only one-third indicated their social background as former workers. This
does not mean that the rest were representatives of the middle classes before
1917: 60 percent of all the officers had an elementary school education or were
autodidacts. By October 1, 1929, in the elite Special and Counterintelligence
Departments, 51 percent of the officer-communists had a primary education
background or no schooling at all. In the Secret Department (political police),
this proportion was 55 percent. Given the very ambiguous meaning of social
categories used in Soviet personnel files, we can still identify just 5 percent
of the officers of Special and Counterintelligence Departments as former
professionals (in addition, 24 percent vaguely classified their background as
“students”). In the Secret Department, out of sixty-three officers with known
social background, there was just one “intelligent” and thirteen “students.”
Out of thirty-five officers in the Superintendent Department (in charge of
guarding and executing prisoners), 57 percent had finished only elementary
school or were autodidacts. All the officers in the department were former
workers, peasants, and petty servicemen—a social composition typical of ple-
beian society.49
Soviet society was ruled by former members of the imperial plebeian society
using mechanisms developed within that imperial plebeian society, and was

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 Gerasim in Power 185

experienced quite similarly to the old urban plebeian society. According to

the architect and historian of Early Soviet architecture, Dmitrii Khmelnitskii
(Chmelnizki), in 1923 the average living space of an urban dweller in the
USSR was about 70 square feet of floor area. Industrialization brought about
urban overpopulation that could not be compensated for by building new
housing. The average floor area per person decreased to 60 square feet in 1926,
and to 51 square feet in 1932. These are average figures for the entire coun-
try. In most rapidly industrialized centers the numbers were even smaller. In
Magnitogorsk, where workers were supposed to learn to “speak Bolshevik,”
they had on average 17.2 square feet (1.6 square meters) of floor area (Stephen
Kotkin gives the figure of 1.8 square meters).50 Given that a single bed has a
footprint of about 21 square feet, this means that people slept not just in bunk
beds but also on shared platforms that ran wall to wall (polati), as in poor
peasant huts or concentration camp barracks. When in 1940, according to
official statistics, the all-Union average living space in cities reached 68 square
feet, in modestly industrializing Penza this figure stood at just 40 square feet.51
This was a deterioration of living conditions even for many members of the
former plebeian society—after all, the serf Gerasim had private quarters in his
garret. But the Soviet housing conditions were not as unfamiliar and shock-
ing to the lower classes of the imperial period as they were to members of the
former middle-class elite.52
Food shortages and deficits of most basic household items and clothes
under Stalinism are a well-studied topic in historiography.53 Oral and written
testimonies of the epoch invariably mention hunger as a routine sensation—
something that characterized the life experience only of the most destitute
members of the prerevolutionary plebeian society. Yet, bodily discomforts
of various intensities were familiar to every unprivileged urbanite, food was
regarded as one of the main valuables, and few could afford clothing beyond
the necessary minimum even before 1914. Many years of gradually deterio-
rating living standards during the period of wars and revolutions had facili-
tated adjustment to the Soviet misery of the 1930s and 1940s. True, even the
poorest plebeians at the turn of the century were not accustomed to queuing
for bread for hours: when they had a spare kopeck, they would simply buy a
pound of bread (or steal from one of the numerous bakeries when they had
no money). But they knew how to spend many hours in rain or heat wait-
ing to be hired for a temporary job at the docks or railroad station, how to
fight for their lives in the aggressive crowd, and how to ration scarce resources.
Circumstances had changed, but not the demand for particular social skills and
knowledge. Former plebeians knew how to travel long distances in unheated

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 186 Epilogue

train cars, how to work long hours, and how to appreciate a shelter deprived
of any privacy and basic conveniences. This is why they managed to adapt to
the inhumane conditions of industrialization and wartime evacuations, forced
relocations, and enduring deficits of basic commodities.

The Early Soviet Union as a “Plebeian Civilization”

Thus, when scholars, overwhelmed by “an almost endless flow of words” pro-
duced within the Stalinist public sphere, speak of “the self-proclaimed new
civilization of socialism” and “Stalinism as a civilization,” following Stephen
Kotkin,54 they are not simply yielding to the ideological manipulation of
Stalinist imagery. Unaware of the imperial prehistory of early Soviet social
dynamics (due to rigid intradisciplinary segregation and historiographic frag-
mentation), they tend to misinterpret the chronological framework of the
story: “The story of socialism was nearly indistinguishable from the story of
people’s lives, a merged personal and societal allegory of progress, social jus-
tice, and overcoming adversity—in short, a fable of a new person and a new
civilization, distinct because it was not capitalist, distinct because it was better
than capitalism.”55
As demonstated in the previous chapters of this book, there was nothing
distinctly different in the life experiences of imperial plebeian society, and not
even anything particularly capitalist. Judging by the plans that were temporar-
ily halted by World War I, if not for the revolutionary upheaval of 1917, peas-
ant migrants to Moscow most likely would still have been riding the subway
in 1935,56 and the “magnetic mountain” would have been attracting indus-
trial labor to newly built steel works (only in much better living conditions).57
The Bolshevik regime did not change the social landscape and the rules of the
game for its main constituency—the urban lower classes—as dramatically as
Stalin’s propaganda claimed. There was nothing distinctively Bolshevik in the
grand projects of the 1930s (except for their excessively incompetent manage-
ment), and hence nothing specifically socialist in the attempts of those who
sought upward social mobility into the discourse-based public sphere. Even
having in mind the bright socialist future, the young idealist Soviets of the
1930s had to socialize daily in the urban plebeian society that preserved many
of its prerevolutionary traits and habits. For survival, they had to rely on the
social practices developed within this milieu, including the defensive practice
of patriarchality (rendered as “backwardness” in the Soviet parlance) to evade a
dangerous collision with the discursive sphere. The discovery of new historical

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 Gerasim in Power 187

sources reveals the distinctive “Soviet plebeian subjectivity” of nonnormative

Soviets as a distinctive social phenomenon in its own right.58
The social skills and practices of plebeian society were the sole reason that
Stalinist policies did not fail as spectacularly as might have been expected
under normal circumstances, given the horrific scale of resource mismanage-
ment. No ideological indoctrination and individual determination can com-
pensate for the lack of vital survival skills—for instance, those that would be
needed in a winter forest without warm clothes and ready dwellings. Arguably,
fanaticism can make the experience of hardships more tolerable to some, but
alone, it cannot help people to survive these hardships for years and even
decades. The dramatic social dislocations of the 1920s and early 1930s did not
destroy early Soviet society precisely because the social practices of plebeian
society were all about stabilizing stochastic social processes. People from dif-
ferent parts of the vast country, speaking different languages, found a mode of
coexistence not because they were conscious communists and internationalists
(World War II and other ideologically framed conflicts produced horrendous
examples of interethnic atrocities),59 but because they knew how to relativize
their multiple differences through the mechanisms of creative misunderstand-
ing or patriarchality.
Moreover, the very monopoly of Soviet ideology as the hegemonic discourse
could not have been established and sustained for several decades without the
majority of Soviets belonging to the self-sufficient plebeian society. As a largely
nontextual social sphere, plebeian society does not have a particular stake in
public discourses. Its literate members are capable of interacting and comply-
ing with them, but their world view depends only partially on discourse—
unlike members of the public sphere, for whom “textuality has become a
metaphor for reality in general.” This is why delegitimization of the official
ideology began exactly when the official public sphere had begun broadening
at the expense of the plebeian society as a result of the ambitious social policies
of Nikita Khrushchev.60
The quintessential “Soviet civilization,” as truly different from other con-
temporary societies beyond the obvious ideological distinctions, in a nutshell
was a civilization of urban plebeian society. It was sustained throughout its
high period under Stalin through the same social practices of the middle
ground, patriarchality, and violence as under the old regime. At the turn of
the twentieth century, people were already eager to join a new crowd—and a
new mass society accommodating that crowd, which blurred all the internal
social barriers formerly enforced by confessional communities, ethnic groups,
and regional solidarities. The impact of illegality on plebeian society created

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 188 Epilogue

patterns of social behavior that correlated surprisingly well with the demands
of urban life in global modernity. The self-regulating social mechanism accom-
modating migrants and turning peasants into urbanites performed remarkably
well, thus sustaining a dynamic equilibrium of the vibrant and complex late
imperial society. The ad hoc policy of the imperial authorities for harnessing
societal self-organization in the interests of modernizing the economy would
be greatly enhanced and widely mobilized after the Bolshevik revolution. The
new regime developed the main trends that originated within plebeian soci-
ety—sanctioned internationalism, significantly curbed and eventually sup-
pressed interconfessional separation—and obliterated the patrician part of the
dual social construction (including bourgeois ethics), thus making plebeian
culture the dominant form.
This thesis significantly corrects a popular interpretation of the early Soviet
regime as an offshoot of the modernism of the late imperial elite strata of
professionals and artists,61 and revitalizes the initial revisionist model of the
1970s, which emphasized the mechanisms of self-organization from below
as having a crucial impact on Soviet society independently of any ideologi-
cal zeal.62 This also explains the notorious plebeian outlook of the Soviet
(Stalinist) version of modernity, with its contempt for avant-garde art, adora-
tion of realism, appreciation of simple and vivid signs of higher status, and
most important, the weak presence of public discourses—with the striking
exception of the one dominant, rigid, and institutionally enforced quasi-dis-
course of official ideology. Even the most revolutionary and politically loyal
modernist art fell victim to the aesthetic norms of plebeian society elevated to
the position of authority.63
Plebeian society contributed to the Soviet social project everything that
could be used for large-scale modernization, both the secret of social cohe-
sion within a heterogeneous society and the deeply embedded pragmatic
lawlessness. All the most positive aspects of the Soviet regime were inherited
from the old plebeian society: its egalitarianism, tolerance of differences not
politically stigmatized by the regime, and creativity in facing the challenges of
ever-changing social conditions. However, not producing sustained public dis-
courses of its own, plebeian society, both prerevolutionary and Soviet, could
not be expected to stage a sustained political opposition or resistance to the
ideological regime, nor was it likely to withstand ideological manipulations.64
The real challenge to the Soviet system was produced by the regime itself,
when it finally accepted and sanctioned the emergence of the new privileged
class of intellectuals, bureaucrats, and technical specialists, which became a
self-conscious social group with the end of the permanent purges after Stalin’s

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 Gerasim in Power 189

death.65 This group began interpreting the dominant ideology as if it were a

public discourse, and producing increasingly autonomous new discourses: on
national identity, historical legacy, literary canon, fashion, and other seem-
ingly politically benign topics. The advent of this growing stratum of educated
society that sustained public discourses without reliance on the authority of
terror (or even challenging this authority) marked the demise of plebeian cul-
ture and practices as the main foundation of Soviet society.66 That was when
plebeian society (already shrinking for demographic and cultural reasons) was
recognized as a distinctive subculture, a subaltern condition (in the original
sense), and all the attributes of its material culture and social practices acquired
the tinge of parochialism and underdevelopment: cramped life in communal
apartments and queuing in lines for basic goods, streetwise manners and a
lack of interest in abstract ideas—that is, everything that was only recently
perceived as universally Soviet and mainstream throughout the 1930s and
1940s. Both the autobiographic narratives of the period and academic studies
highlight the interconnection of generational experience and the elite status
of new practices, social groups, or even locations that came to symbolize the
new epoch (whether it was moving from communal to individual apartments
and demonstrating taste for modern global culture in music, film, literature,
and fashion, or belonging to the new intelligentsia of “physicists and lyrics,” or
residing in Moscow’s Arbat neighborhood).67
From the 1950s onward, the urban plebeian society of the old type, arti-
ficially conserved by hardships and the war on educated society during the
first decades of the Soviet regime, began rapidly disintegrating. Its practice of
patriarchality became a topic of nostalgic memories of the half-fictional broth-
erhood of the communal apartment or the courtyard, the diversity-bridging
social skill of creative misunderstanding was now mocked as a sure sign of
provincialism and illiteracy, while violence became a theme of both horrifying
and romanticized lore. The secret of nondiscursive social cohesion and self-
organization of the old urban plebeian society seemed to have been lost in
subsequent generations, at least until the early 1990s.
There was, however, a principal difference between the plebeian society of
the early 1910s and the mid-1930s (or even the mid-1950s). The prerevolu-
tionary plebeian society had its ideal in the lifestyle and values of the patri-
cian society, or at least in what was understood and perceived as its lifestyle
and values. Playing the indispensable social role of a giant melting pot, urban
plebeian society attempted to accommodate and interiorize the elements of
modernity as defined by patrician middle-class society (from urban fashion
to respect for education to economic success). After the Revolution of 1917,

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 190 Epilogue

plebeian society itself was recognized as the ultimate subject producing norms
and values for the entire society. From the powerful first stage of the carrier
rocket of modernization, plebeian society was reconsidered as its final and
main stage, the payload. It was in principle poorly suited to the task of gener-
ating new responses to newly identified challenges, which constitutes the prac-
tical aspect of any politics of modernity. Thus, there may be little ground for
the conceptualization of any special Soviet modernity: what the Soviet Union
had in common with other industrial societies was a continuation of pre-
Soviet achievements (culture or science) or direct borrowings (from industrial
technologies to institutional building). What set the Soviet Union apart (mass
terror as a routine policy or collectivism) had little potential for the future and
was abandoned soon after Stalin’s death: so much for the politics of modernity.
It seems more intriguing to look into the ambitious Soviet historical
experiment at the emancipation of the subalterns through endowing them
with real political authority and power—having “Gerasims” (“laborers and
cooks”) “administering the state” replacing the former imperial (“colonial”)
elite. Most of Stalin’s henchmen were themselves typical members of ple-
beian society. No “revolution of their souls” was required to elevate Nikita
Khrushchev or Lazar Kaganovich to the Pantheon of communist leaders.
This status hardly made them open to public discourses (or at least less
tongue-tied in articulating their ideas in public). Having already envisioned
Gerasim as a Soviet man, can we specify and test him in the role of if not a
Politburo member then at least a city mayor, or the chairman of a kolkhoz
(such as the historical deaf-only collective farm)? As Turgenev informs us,
“he did the work of four men; work flew apace under his hands,”68 and
he was not at all lacking in intelligence, so it is quite conceivable that he
would have coped successfully with “training in the work of state adminis-
tration.” However, the position of authority would not have made Gerasim
less a subaltern (as conceptualized by Spivak or Prakash), just as it would
not have given him the faculty of speech and hearing. In Stalin’s version of
the “Soviet civilization,” a person in the public spotlight had chances to sur-
vive only by mimicking the normative style of conduct and reproducing the
hegemonic discourse without even minor alterations—that is, behaving in
the manner of a skilled plebeian rather than as a true member of the public
sphere. A real emancipation for an “infamous man” such as Gerasim, then,
will not be obtaining a successful formal career and not even mastering how
to “speak Bolshevik” (or imitating any other version of Newspeak). The sub-
altern is heard only by other subalterns in their plebeian society. In a soci-
ety of sustained, self-propelled, and open-ended modernity, based on public

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 Gerasim in Power 191

discourses and textuality, their mode of communication as reconstructed in

this book is perceived as muteness. Gerasim, as a metaphor for the subal-
tern, would have to change his very physical properties (and thus, inevitably,
his personality) to begin hearing and speaking. Of course, this would make
him a different man entirely.
Individual “Gerasims” can learn new social skills and knowledge. By
acquiring new skills and habits of thought, they trade their former plebe-
ian subjectivity for membership in the modern public sphere (even if their
economic status does not change). At the same time, as a social category,
the type of plebeian subjectivity embodied in the metaphor of Gerasim per-
sists, thus making it necessary for politicians and intellectuals to take it seri-
ously. Moreover, it is possible that plebeian subjectivity is not restricted to
developing societies—the main focus of subaltern studies. As recent political
developments in the United States, Britain, and some other European coun-
tries have demonstrated to many surprised political observers, even in devel-
oped democracies in this postindustrial age with its overwhelming presence
and accessibility of mass media, a very substantial segment of the electorate
demonstrates strikingly “irrational” behavior. This irrationality—contempt
for scientific arguments (whether the prospects of global trade or global cli-
mate change), and obsession with seemingly superficial factors (such as the
physical appearance of political candidates or immigrants)—is nothing new
to a student of plebeian society at the turn of the twentieth century. In all
likelihood, Gerasim and his incarnations in other countries will stay around
for quite a while: no longer silent and not necessarily poor, but perceiving
reality differently from active members of the public sphere—as a rule, col-
lege graduates.69 The future of our societies depends on finding a way to
communicate with the Gerasims of the twenty-first century, or at least to
recognize their existence and specific rationality.

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Gerasimov.indd 192 11/16/2017 5:29:27 PM
 Notes

Introduction
1. Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” in Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo
iazyka 2 (Petrograd: 18 Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1917), 3–14; English trans-
lation: Viktor Shklovskij, “Art as Technique,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed.
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell, 1998), 15–21.
2. Leslie Poles Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: New York Review Books,
2002), 17.
3. Cf. A. Vdovin, Baza dannykh po russikim i provintsial’nym uchebnym
khrestomatiiam 1800–1905, http://www.ruthenia.ru/canon/.
4. Ivan Turgenev, The Novels: The Torrents of Spring. First Love. Mumu (Lon-
don: William Heinemann, 1920), 355–406.
5. I. S. Aksakov, “Pismo I. S. Turgenevu, 4 (16) oktiabria 1852 g.,” Russkoe
obozrenie, no. 8 (1894): 475, 476.
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Mac-
millan Education, 1988), 271–313.
7. Members of the ruling class of one of the great powers of their time, Slavo-
philes spoke of their country as a “colony” of homogenized “Europe.” They were
at pains to find words to explain the nature of the alleged European domination
that had been imposed upon Russia without a single shot—“the oppression (gnet)
of the rationalistic systems of European philosophy.” See Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey
Glebov, and Marina Mogilner, “The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Rus-
sian Historical Experience and the Postcolonial Moment,” Ab Imperio 14, no. 2
(2013): 97–135.
8. Western European languages do not convey the decisive difference between
“Russian” denoting belonging to the country (rossiiskii) and “Russian” as an “eth-
nicity” (russkii). The latter meaning has been contested and historically evolving
through various combinations of such factors as the Russian language, Orthodox

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 194 Notes to pp. 2–4

Christianity, territory, peasant social status, a certain cultural canon, and even
race. I use the notion of “the Russian ethnoconfessional nation” to denote this
type of Russianness.
9. Gyanendra Pandey, “Notions of Community: Popular and Subaltern,” Post-
colonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 411.
10. See Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian Society
and History, vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).
11. Thus, back in 2008, a prominent Ottomanist, the late Donald Quataert,
suggested that workers and peasants of the Anatolian “heartland” of the empire
could be productively conceptualized as “subalterns” despite “the centrality of
the Turkish state in the minds of many scholars.” Donald Quataert, “Pensee 2:
Doing Subaltern Studies in Ottoman History,” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 40, no. 3 (August 2008): 379. Recently, Nora Lafi has attempted (if
only somewhat cursorily) to reframe the urban history of the late Ottoman period
in terms of Subaltern Studies. Nora Lafi, “The Ottoman Urban Governance of
Migrations and the Stakes of Modernity,” in The City in the Ottoman Empire:
Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike Freitag et al. (London:
Routledge, 2011), 8–25. In the context of Russian studies, Alexander Etkind uses
the metaphor of “internal colonization” (based on a somewhat biased reading of
postcolonial theory and subaltern studies) as the central theme of the Russian his-
tory of the post-Petrine period. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s
Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
12. Gyan Prakash, “The Impossibility of Subaltern History,” Nepantla: Views
from South 1, no. 2 (2000): 287.
13. Ibid., 287.
14. David Moon, “Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Inter-
nal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c. 1800–1914,” in Coerced and Free
Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002), 345–46.
15. N. V. Iukhneva, Etnicheskii sostav i etnosotsial’naia struktura naseleniia
Peterburga, vtoraia polovina XIX—nachalo XX veka: Statisticheskii analiz (Lenin-
grad: Nauka, 1984), 36–37.
16. At the time, the public sphere is effectively limited to a tiny layer of urban
“bourgeoisie” participating in town council elections and formally registered asso-
ciations of bicycle riders or lawn tennis clubs. Cf. Guido Hausmann, ed., Gesell-
schaft als lokale Veranstaltung: Selbstverwaltung, Assoziierung und Geselligkeit in
den Städten des ausgehenden Zarenreiches (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2002); Lutz Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung: Die Wolgastädte Kazan’
und Saratov, 1870–1914 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2004).

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 Notes to pp. 4–5 195

17. N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi impe-

rii 1897 goda, vol. 14, Kazanskaia guberniia (St. Petersburg: Tsentral’nyi statis-
ticheskii komitet, 1904), x.
18. R. U. Amirkhanov, “Nasledie, dostoinoe izuchenie: Kazanskie dorevoliut-
sionnye periodicheskie izdaniia na russkom iazyke (1881–1917),” Ekho vekov, no.
1 (1999): 312–20. I have projected the demographic structure of the city popu-
lation as revealed by the 1897 census on the population of Kazan in 1913. See
Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia, 14:10–11.
19. Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of
Society Two Decades Later,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Ter-
rence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 208.
20. More than twenty years ago, Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg made a
case for the productivity of “the seemingly archaic term lower-class” in the context
of Russian society at the turn of the century as reflecting “the tenuous relativity
and ambiguity of social boundaries.” Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg,
“Introduction,” in Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistance in
Late Imperial Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Stephen Frank (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.
21. The predominantly nondiscursive and in general irrational character of
social interactions of the lower classes was broadly discussed at the time by Rus-
sian Social Democrats. Leopold Haimson famously identified this condition with
“spontaneity,” as opposed to “consciousness,” as the ability to embrace public dis-
courses (including Marxist ideology). See Leopold Haimson, The Russian Marxists
and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955),
209–10; and Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia,
1905–1917 (Part One),” Slavic Review 23, no. 4 (1964): 634. Recently, Marina
Mogilner has demonstrated that the concern with the irrational and “instinctive”
foundation of social interactions was dominant within Russian educated soci-
ety at the turn of the twentieth century across the political divides (and that the
opposition between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was more dynamic and less
pronounced than Haimson would argue). Marina Mogilner, “The Empire-Born
Criminal: Atavisms, Survivals, Irrational Instincts, and the Fate of Russian Impe-
rial Modernity,” in Born to be Criminal: The Discourse on Criminality and the Prac-
tice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russian and Early Soviet Union, ed. Riccardo
Nicolosi, Anne Hartmann, and Marc Junge (Munich: transcript Verlag, 2017),
10–31.
22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and
the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 475.
23. Ibid., 476.

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 196 Notes to pp. 6–10

24. Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Essential Works of Foucault,

1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2001), 3:160, 161, 162.
25. Cf. Lynn White, “The Life of the Silent Majority,” in Life and Thought
in the Middle Ages, ed. Robert S. Hoyt (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis
Press, 1967), 85–100; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1982).
26. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 172.
27. Turgenev, The Novels, 360.
28. Established by Vasily Kliuchevskii in his 1887 essay, “Eugene Onegin and
His Ancestors.” V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh 9 (Moscow:
Mysl, 1990), 84–100; and continued by historians such as Nikolai Rozhkov and
Vasily Semevskii.
29. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 172.
30. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” 478.
31. Victoria Somof, “No Need for Dogs or Women: Muteness in Turgenev’s
‘Mumu,’” Russian Literature 68, no. 3–4 (October 1–November 15, 2010): 501–2.
32. Turgenev, The Novels, 401.
33. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of
Culture,” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New
York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.
34. Prakash, “The Impossibility of Subaltern History,” 294.
35. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 162.
36. Aksakov, “Pismo I. S. Turgenevu, 4 (16) oktiabria 1852 g,” Russkoe obozre-
nie, no. 8 (1894): 476.
37. The systematic study of Russian late imperial cities began thirty years ago
with the agenda-setting collection edited by Michael F. Hamm, The City in Late
Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). The seminal book
by Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), which appeared one year ear-
lier, set the standard for the genre of urban history writing. Bradley’s book was
followed by a whole gallery of individual city portraits covering many decades
and even centuries of a selected city’s history: Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History,
1794–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard University Press for the
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1986); Michael F. Hamm, Kiev: A Por-
trait, 1800–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); David Wolff,
To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Michael F. Hamm, “Kishinev:
The Character and Development of a Tsarist Frontier Town,” Nationalities Papers
26, no. 1 (1998): 19–37; Erwin Oberländer and Kristine Wohlfahrt, eds., Riga:

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 Notes to pp. 10–11 197

Portrait einer Vielvölkerstadt am Rande des Zarenreiches 1857–1914 (Paderborn:

Schöningh, 2004); Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and
Cityshape (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Since approxi-
mately the late 1990s, historians have become interested in writing urban por-
traits throughout the divide of 1917, focusing on the elements of persistence and
change. Cf. Bruce W. Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of
Modern Russia (Boulder, CO: Basic Books, 2000); Kristina Küntzel, Von Niznij
Novgorod zu Gor’kij: Metamorphosen einer russischen Provinzstadt. Die Entwicklung
der Stadt von den 1890er bis zu den 1930er Jahren (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001); Jeff
Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 2007). After 2000, urban histories have more often been
written through the prism of interethnic and interconfessional relations. See Rob-
ert Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist
Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Natan M. Meir, Kiev, Jewish
Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
These diverse approaches to writing portraits of individual cities share the general
assumption that the portrayed cities were in many ways typical imperial urban
centers, but there was no way to substantiate this thesis in the monographic treat-
ment of isolated examples. A groundbreaking attempt to write a social history of
the imperial town as a generic phenomenon was the book by Daniel R. Brower,
The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1990). He advanced the model of the migrant city
as a typical imperial urban center on the basis of statistical data for almost sixty
towns. A different approach was taken a decade later by German historians who
attempted to create a general model of the imperial city by studying the pan-
imperial structures of urban civil society. See the now standard works: Hausmann,
Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung; Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung.
Brower’s concept of the migrant city raises the key problem of the mechanisms
of socialization at work in the late imperial urban society, which he himself could
not pursue due to the limitations of his statistical sources (mainly the data of the
1897 census): statistics can offer a snapshot of the structural disposition, but can-
not elucidate the complex social mechanisms at work. Hausmann and Häfner
revealed the formative role of self-organization in Russian urban society, but their
focus on the narrow layer of educated middle-class townspeople and the bourgeois
public sphere has excluded the majority of the urban population from the scope of
their analysis. In this book, I want to keep the emphasis on the processes of soci-
etal self-organization but include in the picture the broad masses of inhabitants of
the migrant city in the period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
38. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” 484.

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 198 Notes to pp. 14–16

39. The term “self-organization” is understood in this book in the same way
that it is treated in the branch of modern physics studying complex open systems
(synergetics): as a seemingly hectic process of forming order out of chaos in a
state of nonequilibrium, under the influence of internal and external factors. Cf.
Gregoire Nicolis and Ilia Prigogine, Self-Organisation in Nonequilibrium Systems:
From Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations (New York: Wiley, 1977);
Hermann Haken, Information and Self-Organization: A Macroscopic Approach
to Complex Systems (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1988); Gregoire Nicolis and Ilia
Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction (New York: Freeman, 1989). It
is the task of this book to show this complicated process at work in a plain form,
through actual life stories and events.
40. Incidentally, the theme of patriarchality comes to the fore in the analysis
of both Turgenev’s Gerasim and the Hindu widows committing self-sacrifice, and
in both instances patriarchality turns out to be performed as part of a silent state-
ment, rather than reflecting some essential inborn quality.
41. Anton Blok, Honor and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 104.
42. Quite in line with studies by Rogers Brubaker, James D. Fearon, or David
D. Laitin, this study does not take for granted the innate connectedness of vio-
lence, conflict, and ethnicity as a “natural” format of mobilization in group
conflicts. Cf. James D. Fearon, “Ethnic Mobilization and Ethnic Violence,” in
Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, ed. Barry R. Weingast and Donald A.
Wittman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 852–68. The accumulated
body of empirical evidence does not support any sustained and universal char-
acter of interethnic confrontations in four distinctive regions of the Russian
empire, but rather endorses the thesis that “‘ethnic violence’ is . . . a category of
practice, produced and reproduced by social actors . . . that should not be (but
often is) taken over uncritically as a category of analysis by social scientists. . . .
Ethnicity is not the ultimate, irreducible source of violent conflict. . . . Rather,
conflicts driven by struggles for power between challengers and incumbents are
newly ethnicized, newly framed in ethnic terms.” Rogers Brubaker and David
D. Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” Annual Review of Sociology 24
(1998): 423–52.
43. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Lon-
don: Penguin Books, 1979), 102 and passim.
44. Cf. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Peters-
burg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Laurie Ber-
nstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural

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 Notes to pp. 16–20 199

Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of Califor-

nia Press, 2000).
45. Roshanna Patricia Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a
City of Thieves (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Daniel Mark
Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News: Vienna, 1895–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
46. For an attempt to outline a positive theory of crime as a by-product of
social development in its own right (e.g., acknowledging an important role of
crime in social integration) without surrendering to a pessimistic nihilism (claim-
ing that crime unavoidably results from the deficient human nature) or immoral
apologetics (relativizing the morally corruptive and socially destructive effect of
crime), see Kai-D. Bussmann, “Variation, Selection and Stabilization: An Evolu-
tionary Theory of Crime and Control,” in Social Dynamics of Crime and Control:
New Theories for a World in Transition, ed. Susanne Karstedt and Kai-D. Buss-
mann (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000), 243–56.
47. Turgenev, The Novels, 405.

Chapter One

1. Hartley, The Go-Between, 17.

2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5, The Captive (New York: Ran-
dom House, 2010), 343.
3. Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” in Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo
iazyka (Petrograd, 1917), 2:3–14; English translation: Shklovskij, “Art as Tech-
nique,” 15–21.
4. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 5:343.
5. Isaac Babel, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” in Isaac Babel, The Com-
plete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. with notes by Peter Constan-
tine (New York: Norton, 2001), 146.
6. A. N. Zorin, Goroda i posady dorevoliutsionnogo Povolzh’ia (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo
Kazanskogo universiteta, 2001), 106.
7. Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794–1914, 251.
8. Zorin, Goroda i posady dorevoliutsionnogo Povolzh’ia, 107.
9. Troinitskii, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897
goda, vol. 14, table 1.
10. Anna Mazanik, “The City as a Transient Home: Residential Patterns of
Moscow Workers around the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Urban History 40,
no. 1 (2013): 55.

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 200 Notes to pp. 20–21

11. At the current exchange rate of approximately 2 rubles per dollar, this
income translated into $17–$25 a month, or a wage of $4–$6 a week. In con-
temporary money (April 2017), that $6 converts to almost $150 a week or about
$7,800 per annum. See US Inflation Calculator, available at http://www.usinflation
calculator.com. Back in 1913, the wage of unionized bakers (third hands) in Chi-
cago was about $15 a week. See United States Department of Labor, Bureau of
Labor Statistics, Union Scale of Wages and Hours of Labor, May 15, 1913 (Wash-
ington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 22. This was rather the lower
end of the male manual labor wage scale in the United States; only waiters could
be paid less ($12 a week). See Missouri Bureau of Labor Statistics, Thirty-Fifth
Annual Report (Jefferson City: Hugh Stephens Printing, 1913–14), 681. Unfor-
tunately, direct comparisons can be used only as a superficial illustrative device
that cannot claim any degree of accuracy on methodologically sound grounds.
It would take special research to translate the ruble value of the early 1910s into
modern currency using the method of index numbers and comparing not just
wholesale prices but the analogous “consumer baskets.” For a discussion of the
methodology for constructing historical price indices, see John J. McCusker, How
Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money
Values in the Economy of the United States, 2nd ed. (Worcester, MA: American
Antiquarian Society, 2001). A more complex calculator explains that in 2015
prices, $6 in 1913 was the equivalent of $623 earned by an unskilled worker
(or more than $32,000 a year) in 2015: “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative
Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount—1774 to Present,” MeasuringWorth.com, accessed
August 7, 2017, www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/. Thus, for illustration
purposes, we can imagine that income of 35–50 rubles a month in 1913 Russia is
the equivalent of modern minimum wages in the United States ($7.25 to $11.00
per hour)—just above subsistence level, particularly for families with dependents.
Very approximately, we can equate one Russian ruble in 1913 to $50 in 2017 in
the United States.
12. Petty postal service employees were very representative of this category.
13. V., “Iz nizhegorodskoi zhizni,” Volgar, October 15, 1912, 4.
14. Volzhskii Listok, September 1, 1907, 3.
15. See Alexander Kaplunovskiy, “Revolutionieren oder reformieren? Die
kaufmännisch-industriellen Angestellen in der Revolution 1905,” in Jan Kusber
and Andreas Frings, eds., Das Zarenreich, das Jahr 1905 und seine Wirkungen (Ber-
lin: Lit Verlag, 2007), 145–209, esp. 188, 194–95.
16. This was practiced even by relatively well-to-do people, for example, apart-
ment owners renting their rooms out. In Vilna, a landlady sleeping in the cor-
ridor of her own apartment was attacked one June night in 1915 by the son of

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 Notes to pp. 21–26 201

her tenant, who attempted to rape her. See Lietuvos valstybės istorijos archyvas
[Lithuanian State Historical Archives, Vilnius] (henceforth LVIA), f. 420, ap. 2, b.
155, l. 38 and overleaf.
17. A police raid in March 1912 at an Odessa market produced even more
impressive results: ten victims identified their stolen linen and underwear being
offered for sale at nine secondhand booths. See Central State Historical Archive of
Ukraine (henceforth TsDIAU), f. 385. op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 34 overleaf.
18. We know this firsthand from the people who described the circumstances
of the theft of their valuables: for example, in a Nizhny Novgorod pub in Febru-
ary, pickpockets stole from the jacket of a recent migrant, peasant I. F. Katin,
3 rubles, passport, and records of his prior employment; or in July, in a hotel
room, someone took 890 rubles from the jacket of the Arkhangelsk peasant P.
F. Istomin, who came to the Nizhegorod fair for business; or in August, on the
street, Kostroma peasant, permanent resident, and even homeowner in Nizhny
Novgorod, A. A. Gromov, was robbed of 36 rubles; or in September, the owner
of a fruit shop, the Iranian national Risa Askerov, was attacked in his own room
in his sleep at night by his young Russian shop assistant, who managed to steal
the master’s jacket, which was kept under his pillow. Inside it was 400 rubles,
Askerov’s national passport, and other important documents. See Volgar, February
23, 1909, 2; State Archive of the Nizhegorod Region (GANO), f. 1665 Criminal
Unit of the Nizhegorod City Police Administration, op. 3, d. 63, l. 138ob.–140; f.
1665, op. 3, d. 8, l. 27–27 ob; f. 1665, op. 3, d. 10, l. 183.
19. Cf. Ju. M. Lotman, “Primary and Secondary Communication-Modeling
Systems,” in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, ed. Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977), 95–98.
20. Cf. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Moder-
nity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. ch.
6; Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual
and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), ch. 1.
21. The resulting groupness can literally be called a “community of practice,”
borrowing the highly elaborated sociological model of Etienne Wenger. See his
Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 2 and 5.
22. Wenger regards learning within the process of social interactions as the core
constituent element of communities of practice that “can be thought of as shared
histories of learning” (ibid., 86 and ch. 3 passim).
23. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 161.
24. Ibid., 172.
25. Volgar, March 14, 1909, 3.

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 202 Notes to p. 27

26. Cf. White, “The Life of the Silent Majority,” 85–100; Wolf, Europe and the
People without History.
27. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Generational Turns,” American Historical Review
117, no. 3 (2012): 808.
28. Ibid.
29. Most important, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of
a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
30. A recent review of the diverse field of “social practice studies” concluded
that “there is no such thing as a coherent, unified ‘practice theory,’ only a body of
highly diverse writings by thinkers who adopt a loosely defined ‘practice approach.’
Theodor Schatzki . . . distinguishes four main types of practice theorists: phi-
losophers (such as Wittgenstein, Dreyfus, or Taylor), social theorists (Bourdieu,
Giddens), cultural theorists (Foucault, Lyotard) and theorists of science and tech-
nology (Latour, Rouse, Pickering).” John Postill, “Introduction: Theorising Media
and Practice,” in Theorising Media and Practice, ed. Birgit Bräuchler and John Pos-
till (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 4. See also Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore
R. Schatzki, and Eike von Savigny, eds., The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory
(London: Routledge, 2001); and Andreas Reckwitz, “Towards a Theory of Social
Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social
Theory 5, no. 2 (2002): 243–63.
Thus, there is no single conventional “normative” theory of social practices;
each scholar arranges an intellectual genealogy and frame of reference of his
or her own. Still, I would like to point out the important contribution of cul-
tural anthropologist Sherry Ortner, who has studied social practices in historical
dynamics and concluded that the “theory of practice is a theory of history”; “a
practice approach offers . . . a model that implicitly unifies both historical and
anthropological studies.” Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology Since the
Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 1 (January 1984): 126–
66, here 159. In her interpretation, this approach offers “a general theory of the
production of social subjects through practice in the world, and of the production
of the world itself through practice.” Sherry B. Ortner, Culture, Power and the
Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 16. Besides its role
in restoring the human agency in history, showing how the social order is created
through everyday practices of ordinary people, and offering a common method-
ological platform for the synthesis of history and anthropology, the “social practice
approach” is also important for providing insights into the way the new mean-
ing is communicated beyond the sphere of discourse. For a popular introduction
into the theory of learning through participation in collective social practices, see

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 Notes to pp. 27–29 203

Wenger, Communities of Practice, and also Jean Lave, “The Practice of Learning,”
in Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, ed. Seth Chaiklin
and Jean Lave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–34.
31. For instance, presenting a case of petty swindle as a widespread social phe-
nomenon: “A Tatar [man] would come to any house at 5 p.m. and would say
that he has brought flowers [in gratitude] for the assistance the homeowner once
provided to him. The host is moved, the Tatar asks for spare clothes for the trip
home, the kind host gives him the first thing that catches his eye, while the Tatar
had spent 20 kopecks for flowers.” “Prodelki aferistov,” Kazanskii telegraf, April
12, 1909, 5. Or depicting a routine street scene in the language of civilizational
distance and racial inferiority: when a heavily loaded cart got stuck in the mud,
the Tatar cart driver “Khairullin grabbed the lever that caught his eye and began
beating the poor animal on the head and stomach. The hurried constable hardly
snatched the lever from the hands of the two-legged animal.” “Davno by tak,”
Kazanskii telegraf, April 17, 1911, 5. Or when reporting on deserters during the
Great War, somehow the newspaper mentioned exclusively Tatar names: Kazan-
skii telegraf, March 20, 1915, 3.
32. Thus, it would devote disproportionately large space to describing how a
Jewish boy was hit by a streetcar (blaming the boy for the accident), or making
the murdered Jewish venereologist himself guilty (for not efficiently treating his
frustrated Christian patient turned murderer). See Pessimist, “Malen’kii fel’eton,”
Russkaia rech’, July 4, 1912, 3; Pessimist, “Malen’kii fel’eton,” Russkaia rech’, July
16, 1912, 3–4.
33. For example, after reporting the arrest of two Jews, Isaak Flikshtein and
Ioseif Galperin, suspected of robbing the Christian owner of a wine cellar, Aleksei
Kuzmin, of 100 rubles, the newspaper mentioned three instances when Jews were
robbed by Gentiles. See “Zaderzhanie grabitelei,” Srochnaia vecherniaia pochta,
December 31, 1911, 3.
34. For instance, the scandalous “expropriation” of the Kazan forestry office
in December 1907 was covered very differently by the liberal Volga Leaflet (Vol-
zhskii listok) and the nationalist and monarchist Kazan Telegraph: see Kazanskii
telegraf, January 1, 1908, 3; Kazanskii telegraf, January 3, 1908, 3; Volzhskii Listok,
December 22, 1907, 3; and Kazanskii telegraf, April 17, 1908, 3.
35. Thus, reporting on the case of the murdered venereologist, Russian Speech
initially demonstrated clear compassion toward the Jewish victim, and only later
retold his story from a “proper” anti-Semitic point of view. See “Proisshestviia,”
Russkaia rech’, July 15, 1912, 3–4.
36. Recently, firsthand accounts by top officers of the Russian imperial secret
service (Okhranka) were collected under one cover in “Okhranka”: Vospominaniia

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 204 Notes to p. 29

rukovoditelei politicheskogo syska, 2 vols. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe oboz-

renie, 2004). There are exhaustive studies of the subject, such as Jonathan W.
Daly, Autocracy under Siege. Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998); and Jonathan W. Daly, The
Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906–1917 (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). Scholars studying revolutionary move-
ments also greatly contribute to our knowledge of the Russian political police, to
name just the most popular books: Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolution-
ary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993); L. G. Praisman, Terroristy i revolutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory (Mos-
cow: ROSSPEN, 2001).
37. The archive of the St. Petersburg criminal police and many of the doc-
uments of the Department of Police pertaining to the empire-wide network of
criminal police units were burned during the February Revolution of 1917; like-
wise, the documents of many regional criminal police units were destroyed (as
in Kazan or, to a lesser degree, in Nizhny Novgorod). Hence, historians usually
rely on the memoirs of two outstanding organizers of the Russian imperial crimi-
nal police: the founder and head of the St. Petersburg police unit, Ivan Putilin
(1830–93), and the head of the Moscow criminal police unit, Arkadii Koshko
(1867–1928): I. D. Putilin, Sredi ubiits i grabitelei: Zapiski nachal’nika Sankt-
Peterburgskoi sysknoi politsii (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1995); A. F. Koshko, Ocherki
ugolovnogo mira tsarskoi Rossii: Vospominaniia byvshego nachal’nika Moskovskoi sys-
knoi politsii, 3 vols. in one (Moscow: Stolitsa, 1992). Mostly describing individual
cases, both authors also communicate bits and pieces of information on the orga-
nization, everyday functioning, and mores of the police (see, especially, Koshko, 2:
pt. 3, the chapter titled “The Criminal Investigation Apparatus”). A useful over-
view of late imperial police in Russia was provided by Neil Weissman in “Regular
Police in Tsarist Russia, 1900–1914,” Russian Review 44, no. 1 (January 1985):
45–68. More recently, several dissertations by Russian scholars have focused on
the history of the criminal police. Although written by jurists studying toward law
degrees, these dissertations are more concerned with the institutional aspect and
only occasionally treat topics of interest to social historians. See T. L. Matienko,
Sysknaia politsiia Rossiiskoi imperii (1866–1917) (Moscow: Moscow University
of the Interior Ministry of Russia, 2007); D. S. Ryzhov, Bor’ba politsii Rossii s
professional’noi prestupnost’iu (1866–1917) (Samara: Samara Institute of Law of
the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, 2001) (based on his Candi-
date of Law dissertation defended in Moscow in 2000). There is also a range of
surveys of varying quality and little originality used as textbooks by law students,
such as E. P. Sichinskii, Ugolovnyi sysk Rossii v X–nachale XX vv.: Uchebnoe posobie

Gerasimov.indd 204 11/16/2017 5:29:27 PM

 Notes to pp. 29–30 205

(Cheliabinsk: Cheliabinsk Juridical Institute of the Interior Ministry of the Rus-

sian Federation, 2002).
38. The first criminal police unit in Russia was created in St. Petersburg on
December 31, 1866. However, its formal statute and budget (only for three years)
were confirmed by the emperor more than half a year later. Its further develop-
ment continued on the same ad hoc basis. In 1874, the criminal police unit was
established in Warsaw, and in 1881 Moscow followed suit. At the turn of the cen-
tury, Kiev, Riga, Odessa, Nizhny Novgorod, Baku, Rostov on Don, and Tiflis got
their own criminal police taskforces. Only in 1908, more than forty years after the
first criminal police unit was established in the capital, the law “On the Organiza-
tion of Criminal Investigation” was promulgated. This laconic law (just twelve small
articles) established criminal police in eighty-nine imperial urban centers, but did
not answer many questions regarding the practical side of criminal police activity. It
left the work of newly established police units uncoordinated and without any guid-
ance. Only two years later, the “Instruction to the Officials of Investigative Units”
issued by the minister of the interior for the first time provided some general rules
and common structure to the loose network of local criminal police divisions. Even
this instruction left many urgent questions unanswered, including the issue of rela-
tionships between the criminal police and the office of the prosecutor. Some articles
of the instruction were simply counterproductive, such as the request that detectives
always wear a uniform while on duty. It was not until November 1913 that the
criminal police received the first comprehensive and meaningful guidance for their
activity (including, inter alia, permission to operate undercover, in civil attire). See
Ryzhov, Bor’ba politsii, and Sichinskii, Ugolovnyi sysk.
39. See TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 1733.
40. See LVIA, f. 668, ap. 1, b. 103.
41. “Krazha pri uchastii agenta sysknogo otdeleniia,” Kazanskii telegraf, March
19, 1911, 3.
42. M. I. Balykina, “Sysknoe otdelenie nizhegorodskoi politsii i ego bor’ba s
ugolovnymi prestupleniiami (1896–1917 gody),” in Zapiski kraevedov, ed. O. V.
Riabov (Nizhny Novgorod: Knigi, 2008), 123–24.
43. When police officers received the Instruction of 1910, they noticed that “it
was formulated so vaguely that it allowed the chiefs of city police to interpret the
status of investigative units at will.” Sichinskii, Ugolovnyi sysk, 86. The organiza-
tion of everyday paperwork remained unspecified, and extending investigation to
other regions was bound by impossible red tape: in order to take measures in a
neighboring province, the head of a criminal police unit had to report the need
to the chief of police, who would present the case to the governor, who would ask
assistance from the Department of Police in St. Petersburg.

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 206 Notes to pp. 30–34

44. GANO, f. 1665, op. 1, d. 40, l. 80.

45. Ibid., l. 81.
46. Ibid., l. 82–82 rev.
47. Three months before his request cited above, the head of the Baku criminal
police sent to Nizhny Novgorod an extensive (thirteen-point) questionnaire ask-
ing about the following: What rooms do you have in your headquarters? Who is
in charge of fingerprinting, photographing; do you have a typewriter? What fur-
niture do you have, how many desks and filing cabinets? (The Nizhegorod officer
marked in the margins: “4 cabinets for the register”). How many photographs
were taken last year, how many fingerprint cards submitted to the Department
of Police? (A pencil mark in the margin: “300”). How much did you spend on
photographs, and from which budget line; is your photo laboratory profitable?
How do you submit cases to court investigators or Justice of the Peace: directly or
via police precincts? (In the margin: “Directly. Sometimes via precincts.”) [Thus,
even this fundamental procedure remained unregulated.] Do you have police dogs
and how many, how many dog trainers and where do you keep them? (In the
margin: “No—but then we got the offspring of Moscow’s Tref—Jack”). [“Tref ”
(meaning the playing card suit clubs) was the famous police dog in the service
of the Moscow criminal police.] In addition to the permanent staff, how many
regular policemen are attached to your unit? (In the margin: “3”). How many
precincts are there in your town and what is the town population? (In the margin:
“4/100,000”). How much does the town pay for the housing of the investigation
unit? Are the members of your unit provided with additional housing allowance,
heating and lighting, and in what amount? (In the margin: “no”). Do you have
an instruction for the investigative unit issued by the chief of local police? (In the
margins: “no”). GANO, f. 1665, op. 1, d. 40, ll. 170–170 ob.
48. TsDIAU, f. 386, op. 1, ed. khr. 1050, ll. 1–1 ob.
49. Ibid., ed. khr. 1049, l. 1.
50. Ibid., l. 2.
51. The only exception I found was in the report of the head of the Odessa
criminal police unit on July 4, 1912: “It came to my attention that . . . a large
quantity of trousers . . . were stolen from the very poor peddler, Chaim-Gersh Frid-
man” [emphasis added]. Technically, the highlighted part of the text was com-
pletely redundant and could be read as a sign of compassion. This was the most
explicit expression of a value judgment in the many hundreds of reports analyzed
for this study. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 104 ob.
52. In the linguistic model of Roland Barthes, “style” functions as a rhetorical
edifice uncontrolled by the author, but still well above the “natural” level of writ-
ing “degree zero.”

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 Notes to pp. 35–39 207

53. Boris Briker, “The Underworld of Benia Krik and I. Babel’s Odessa Sto-
ries,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, no. 1–2 (March–June 1994): 119.
54. Cf. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa is based almost exclusively on the mate-
rials of just two Odessa newspapers (out of a few dozen). For a special study of
the Odessa myth and a contribution toward its further proliferation, see Jarrod
Mitchell Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old
Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
55. Valerij P. Malachov and Boris A. Stepanenko, Odessa: 1900–1920: liudi,
sobytiia, fakty (Odessa: Optimum, 2004), 142.
56. See O. Averbakh, ed., Zakonodatel’nye akty, vyzvannye voinoi 1914 goda s
Germaniei, Avstro-Vengriei i Turtsiei, 2nd ed. (Petrograd: Trud, 1916), 15–16.
57. On Underground Russia as an alternative public sphere that was perceived
as normative by the intelligentsia and that was responsible for coordinating life sce-
narios and political tactics, including utterly practical acts such as terrorist attacks,
see Marina Mogilner, Mifologiia podpol’nogo cheloveka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 1999); and Marina Mogilner, “The Russian Radical Mythology (1881–
1914): From Myth to History” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1999).
58. TsDIAU, f. 419, op. 1, ed. khr. 4196, ll. 1–1 ob., 5.
59. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 1, t. 2, ed. khr. 2110, ll. 144–1144 ob.
60. The second letter was delivered by a senior apprentice at the Stotland
shoemaker workshop, which employed eight cobblers; police found a bomb after
searching the workshop.
61. “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Novaia odesskaia gazeta, July 7, 1908, 3.
62. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 1, t. 2, ed. khr. 2249, ll. 13–13 ob.
63. Ibid., l. 13 ob.
64. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 1, t. 2, ed. khr. 2415, l. 111.
65. Beznachaltsy (in Russian, literally “anarchists”) was a particularly extremist
current in the diverse anarchist movement.
66. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 1, t. 2, ed. khr. 2415, l. 195–195 ob.
67. Ibid., ll. 269, 281.
68. “Iunye aferisty,” Golos Odessy, January 30, 1910, 3.
69. “Iunyi anarchist,” Golos Odessy, February 25, 1910, 3.
70. “Anarchisty ‘na gorizonte,’” Golos Odessy, March 13, 1910, 4.
71. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 173, l. 2.
72. Ibid., l. 3.
73. Ibid., l. 4.
74. See Moshe Gammer, The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen
Defiance of Russian Rule (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 115.
75. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 173, l. 5.

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 208 Notes to pp. 40–48

76. Ibid., ll. 6–6 ob.

77. Ibid., l. 7.
78. In the United States, this “master detective” had been popularized in the
pages of the Nick Carter Weekly, but in Russia he was introduced in 1908 in the
French film Nick Carter, le roi des detectives (series 1–6). This was followed by
print editions (singles and collections) issued by several publishers, including Nik
Karter, amerikanskii Sherlok Kholms (St. Petersburg: N. A. Alexandrov, 1908) and
Nik Karter, velichaiishii syshchik Ameriki: Novaia seriia (St. Petersburg: Pechat’,
1908). See Abram Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi
sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2014), 303.
79. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 173, l. 10.
80. Ibid., l. 20e.
81. Ibid., l. 20b.
82. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 173, l. 22g.
83. Ibid., ll. 24, 25.
84. Ibid., l. 33.
85. See TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 231, ll. 5, 6, 11, 71, 103, 106.
86. Ibid., l. 6.
87. Ibid., l. 71.
88. See National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART), F. 41, op. 4, d.
1078, ll. 9–10.
89. “Otraviteli!” Kazanskii telegraf, January 29, 1908, 3.
90. “Ugroza,” Kazanskii telegraf, February 16, 1910, 3.
91. “Detskie zatei,” Volgar, March 16, 1912, 2.
92. Ibid.
93. “Vymogatel’stvo,” Volgar, March 29, 1912, 2.
94. GANO, f. 1665, op. 3, d. 10, ll. 10–11 ob.
95. Ibid., l. 135.
96. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 957, l. 15.
97. Ibid., ll. 22–22 ob.
98. Ibid., l. 23–23 ob.
99. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 958, ll. 9–9 ob.
100. Ibid., ll. 11–11 ob.
101. Cf. letters from October 18 and December 10, 1907. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2,
b. 957, ll. 51–51 ob., 64–65.
102. In 1912 alone, the Vilna police discovered six groups involved in this
business. See LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 142, ll. 1–22 ob.
103. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 3224, ll. 8–8 ob.
104. Ibid., ll. 10–11 ob.

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 Notes to pp. 48–55 209

105. Ibid., ll. 1–2 ob.

106. In nearby Grodno, these services cost from 30 to 145 rubles, the equiva-
lent of a low-end sales assistant salary for one to five months. Tatiana Voronich,
“Kriminal’nyi mir gubernskogo Grodno vo vtoroi polovine XIX–nachale XX v.,”
in Garadzenskі palіmpsest 2012. Liudzі daўniai Garodnі: XV–XX stst., ed. A. F.
Smalenchuk and N. U. Slіzh (Grodna: Garadzenskaia bіblіiateka, 2013), 256.
107. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 3142, l. 5.
108. Ibid., ll. 7–38.
109. Ibid., l. 42.
110. The term is borrowed from James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Every-
day Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985),
although it is used beyond the explanatory model of Scott, who limits the applica-
tion of the term to various forms of more or less passive resistance. “The weak” as
aggressors, the socially deconstructive and even suicidal effect of their pursuit of
selfish goals in some cases, are not discussed by Scott.
111. See E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of
Social History 7, no. 4 (1974): 382–405.
112. Cf. Mark D. Steinberg and Stephen Frank, eds., Cultures in Flux: Lower
Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1994); Ilya Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late
Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
113. Hans Medick, “Plebeian Culture in the Transition to Capitalism,” in Cul-
ture, Ideology, and Politics, Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 85–86.
114. The theme of strategic duplicity and social masquerade was extensively
elaborated in Roshanna Sylvester, “Crime, Masquerade, and Anxiety: The Pub-
lic Creation of Middle-Class Identity in Pre-Revolutionary Odessa, 1912–1916”
(PhD diss., Yale University, 1998).
115. Cf. Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung, or Hausmann, “Stadt und
lokale Gesellschaft im ausgehenden Zarenreich,” 3–166.

Chapter Two

1. M. D. Dolbilov and A. I. Miller, eds., Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi impe-

rii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006); L. M. Dameshek and A. V.
Remnev, eds., Sibir v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe oboz-
renie, 2007); V. O. Bobrovnikov and I. L. Babich, eds., Severnyi Kavkaz v sostave
Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007); S. N. Abashin

Gerasimov.indd 209 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 210 Notes to pp. 55–56

et al., eds., Tsentral’naia Aziia v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe liter-
aturnoe obozrenie, 2008); A. Kushko and V. Taki, eds., Bessarabiia v sostave Ros-
siiskoi imperii, 1812–1917 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012).
2. For a discussion of the series and its goals, see the thematic forum “Uni-
verse of Imperial Edges: Discussing the Perspective from ‘Borderlands of the Rus-
sian Empire’ (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2006–2008),” Ab Imperio 9, no. 4
(2008): 358–519.
3. On diversity as a fundamental characteristic of an imperial situation (in the
form of a “strategic relativism”), see Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Jan Kusber,
Marina Mogilner, and Alexander Semyonov, “New Imperial History and the
Challenges of Empire,” in Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov,
eds., Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the
Russian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 3–32.
4. Probably because of the restrictions barring foreigners from visiting these cit-
ies before 1991, Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod missed the wave of histories being
written of Russian imperial urban centers in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. The
studies that are now appearing usually ignore the immediate pre-1917 decade
or focus on specific aspects of urban history (e.g., the history of landscape, of
religious groups, etc.). The noticeable exception is presented in the monograph
by Küntzel, Von Niznij Novgorod zu Gor’kij. Still, even this book is structured
as a collection of sketches dedicated to various strata and loci of the Nizhegorod
society and presented in isolation from each other, including a chapter on the
monasteries, another on the Nizhegorod Fair, the next dealing with the Sormovo
industries, and so on. To this day, the most comprehensive narrative of the his-
tory of Nizhny Novgorod at the turn of the twentieth century, written in Russian,
belongs to Dmitrii Smirnov, Nizhegorodskaia starina (Nizhny Novgorod: Knigi,
2007). For a useful survey in English, see Heather DeHaan, “Nizhnii Novgorod:
History in the Landscape,” http://www.opentextnn.ru/space/nn/?id=542. Despite
its primary focus on an earlier (pre-1905) period, the comprehensive survey of the
“Nizhegorod civilization” by Catherine Evtuhov offers useful background infor-
mation on the city of Nizhny Novgorod as well. See Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of
a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizh-
nii Novgorod (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). An earlier history
of the Nizhegorod Fair can be found in Anne Lincoln Fitzpatrick, The Great Rus-
sian Fair: Nizhnii Novgorod, 1840–90 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
Kazan was luckier in getting scholars’ attention, but comprehensive urban
studies of Kazan are also rare. A detailed structuralist social history of Kazan dur-
ing the late imperial period can be found in Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Verans-
taltung. For a pioneering attempt to study the history of everyday life in Kazan

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 Notes to pp. 56–58 211

in the longue durée, see Elena Vishlenkova, Svetlana Malysheva, and Alla Sal-
nikova, Kul’tura povsednevnosti provintsial’nogo goroda: Kazan i kazantsy v XIX–
XX vv. (Kazan: Kazan State University, 2008). For a more conventional narrative
of urban history, see Elena Vishlenkova, Svetlana Malysheva and Alla Salnikova,
“Kazanskoe zhit’e,” in Kazan i ee zhiteli: Kazanskoe zhit’e (Kazan: Globus, 2007),
787–1183. For an important interpretive framework placing Kazan in a broader
regional context, see Geraci, Window on the East.
5. See N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi
imperii 1897 goda, vol. 25, Nizhegorodskaia guberniia, pt. 2 (St. Petersburg: Tsen-
tralnyi statisticheskii komitet, 1904), table 13.
6. See ibid., tables 13 and 14; A. P. Mel’nikov, ed., Nizhnii-Novgorod i
Nizhegorodskaia guberniia: Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1896 god i putevoditel’ po
gorodu (Nizhny Novgorod: Tipografiia gubernskogo pravleniia, 1896), 150.
7. Mel’nikov, Nizhnii-Novgorod i Nizhegorodskaia guberniia, 85.
8. P. Mel’nikov, “Vospominnania o Vladimire Ivanoviche Dale,” Russkii vestnik
104 (March 1873): 290–91.
9. See Troinitskii, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897
goda, vol. 14, table 13.
10. Zorin, Goroda i posady dorevoliutsionnogo Povolzh’ia, 106. In 1897, tem-
porary migrants and visitors to the town added an extra 8 percent percent to the
regular population of Kazan, and we have every reason to believe that in the early
1910s this figure was not lower but higher. See ibid., 107. This made the town
society particularly fluid and underdisciplined.
11. Adres-kalendar’i spravochnaia knizhka Kazanskoi gubernii na 1915 god
(Kazan: Izdanie Kazanskogo gubernskogo statisticheskogo komiteta, 1914),
712–13.
12. The 1916 statistics of city police already used the category of “ethnographic
composition,” indicating less than 78 percent as Russians, almost 19 percent as
Tatars (both Muslims and baptized), and 1.2 percent as Jews, about the same
number as Germans or Poles. See NART, f. 482, op. 1, d. 182 Otchetnye vedomosti
o rode prestuplenii, ll. 176–81.
13. See N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi
imperii 1897 goda, vol. 24, Gorod Moskva, pt. 2 (St. Petersburg: Tsentralnyi statis-
ticheskii komitet, 1904), table 13.
14. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Repubics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
15. Ibid., x.
16. Philip J. Deloria, “What Is Middle Ground, Anyway?” William and Mary
Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 15–22.

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 212 Notes to pp. 58–62

17. See Sergey Glebov, “Siberian Middle Ground: Languages of Rule and
Accommodation on the Siberian Frontier,” in Gerasimov et al., eds., Empire
Speaks Out, 121–51. Strictly speaking, the concept was first introduced into Rus-
sian studies by Thomas M. Barrett in “Lines of Uncertainty: The Frontiers of the
Northern Caucasus,” in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane
Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998),
148–73. However, Barrett referred to White’s concept as one of three new “trends
in American frontier historiography” (151), and his goal was to advocate the
applicability of the frontier model to studies of the Caucasus. In this context, the
concept of the middle ground did not provoke the interest of Russianists.
18. Richard White, “Creative Misunderstanding and New Understandings,”
William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 9.
19. The argument about the underdeveloped nature of the Russian national
project in Imperial Russia has been most forcibly (and famously) advanced by
Geoffrey Hosking in Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
20. R. White, The Middle Ground, 52–53.
21. R. White, “Creative Misunderstanding and New Understandings,” 9.
22. Calculated in Ia. I. Gilinskii, Deviantologiia: sotsiologiia prestupnosti, nar-
komanii, prostitutsii, samoubiistv i drugikh otklonenii (St. Petersburg: Iuridicheskii
tsentr press, 2004), 217.
23. See Svod statisticheskikh svedenii o podsudimykh, opravdannykh i osuzhden-
nykh po prigovoram obshchikh sudebnykh mest, sudebno-mirovykh ustanovlenii i
uchrezhdenii, obrazovannykh po zakonopolozheniiam 12 iiulia 1889 g. za 1911 god,
pt. 1 (St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1914), 1; Svod statisticheskikh svede-
nii o podsudimykh, opravdannykh i osuzhdennykh po prigovoram obschikh sudebnykh
mest, sudebno-mirovykh ustanovlenii i uchrezhdenii, obrazovannykh po zakonop-
olozheniiam 12 iiulia 1889 g. za 1913 god, pt. 1 (Petrograd: Senatskaia tipografiia,
1916), 1.
24. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . za 1913 god, pt. 1, 50.
25. GANO, f. 1665 Criminal Unit of the Nizhegorod City Police Administra-
tion, op. 1, d. 42, l. 1–1 ob.
26. Ibid., ll. 5, 8, 14, 21, 32, 40, 43, 46, 51, 56, 61.
27. Cf. GANO, f. 1665, op. 2, d. 8 “Doneseniia o grabezhakh.”
28. Cf. NART, f. 41 Kazan Circuit Court, op. 4, d. 619, 1184, 1534, etc.
29. Kazanskii Telegraf, March 3, 1910, 3.
30. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 24, 1912, 3.
31. GANO, f. 1665, op. 1, d. 63, l. 108–9. A few years earlier, in similar cir-
cumstances the “victim” even provided detailed descriptions of “unknown males”

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 Notes to pp. 62–64 213

allegedly attacking him. As it turned out, in April 1909, a village shoe repair shop
owner, a Russian Konoplev, came to Nizhny Novgorod. He began drinking with
prostitutes (one was Nadezhda Chesnokova), and eventually found himself minus
69 rubles and his coat. Volgar, April 17, 1909, 2.
32. On August 10, 1911, a Nizhny Novgorod homeowner, Gromov, was
returning from the fair extremely drunk. He met a Tatar fellow, followed him
to a deserted bank of the Oka River, where he was attacked by six other Tatars,
who robbed him of 36 rubles. Gromov claimed that he was able to recognize his
attackers, and he seemingly did not have a reason to make a false excuse about los-
ing the money. See GANO, f. 1665, op. 2, d. 8, l. 27–27 ob.
33. Analyzing Russian classical literature, the famous psychiatrist Pavel Kova-
levskii concluded: “Tatars commit the most grave crimes: murders, robberies, etc.,
while Jews predominantly sin against propriety.” P. I. Kovalevskii, Psikhologiia
prestupnika po russkoi literature o katorge (St. Petersburg: Russkii meditsinskii vest-
nik, 1900), 110.
34. In August 1912, for the ceremony laying the foundation of the first mosque
in Nizhny Novgorod, a crowd of about one thousand Muslims (about 1 percent
of the town’s population) gathered, including not only the majority of local Tatars
but also “many visiting traders.” See Volgar, August 16, 1912, 2.
35. Volgar, November 27, 1912, 4.
36. GANO, f. 1665, op. 3, d. 10, l. 135.
37. Kazanskii Telegraf, January 1, 1908, 3.
38. Kazanskii Telegraf, January 3, 1908, 3.
39. Volzhskii Listok, December 22, 1907, 3.
40. Volzhskii Listok, April 17, 1908, 3.
41. For an overview of the main approaches to conceptualizing “the politiciza-
tion of ethnicity,” see Fearon, “Ethnic Mobilization and Ethnic Violence.”
42. Volgar, September 11, 1909, 2.
43. Volzhskii Listok, August 3, 1907, 3.
44. Volzhskii Listok, June 13, 1906, 3.
45. “Mestnaia pressa,” Nizhegorodskii illustrirovanyi kalendar’ na 1911 god
(Nizhny Novgorod: Izd. F. I. Makarevskago, 1911), n. p.
46. See, for example, Volgar, April 12, 1909, 2; July 12, 1909, 2; April 8, 1912,
3; October 19, 1912, 2; and November 14, 1915, 3. At one point, the court heard
three cases against the editor of Minin in one session. In all three cases, the editor
was found guilty and sentenced first to a fine of 50 rubles (or one week in jail),
then to three months in jail, and then to 50 rubles or one month in jail (Volgar,
October 19, 1912).
47. Volgar, September 11, 1909, 2.

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 214 Notes to pp. 64–66

48. Volgar, July 12, 1909, 2.

49. Volgar, November 14, 1915, 3.
50. Nuriia Appakova-Shogina, “Etnopoliticheskie problemy razvittia rossiisk-
ogo obshchestva v provintsial’noi publitsistike nachala XX veka” (Candidate of
Sciences in History diss., Kazan State University, 2003), 17.
51. See, for example, Volzhskii Listok, May 6, 1908, 3; Kazanskii Telegraf, Janu-
ary 25, 1911, 5; May 6, 1911, 4; and November 17, 1911, 3.
52. Volzhskii Listok, August 22, 1908, 3.
53. Volgar, September 13, 1912, 3.
54. The publisher of the Volga Messenger, A. A. Znamenskaia, was eventually
prosecuted for leftist political activism and exiled abroad for three years. See Vol-
zhskii Listok, July 27, 1907, 3
55. Ilya Gerasimov, “Evreiskaia prestupnost’ v Odesse nachala XX v.: Ot ubi-
istva k krazhe? Kriminal’naia evolutsiia, politicheskaia revolutsiia i sotsial’naia
modernizatsiia,” in Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva, ed. Ilya
Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Marina Mogilner et al. (Kazan: NNU TsINI, 2004),
501–44.
56. For instance, there was a confrontation of several Union members with
Jewish merchants on May 22, 1909. Apparently, reacting to the quarrel, the peas-
ant Veselov shouted to the Union member, Khudiakov: “A black hundred, Dubin-
nik [i.e., follower of the ultra-right politician], ruffian, hooligan!” Volgar, August
19, 1909, 2.
57. On the campaign against a progressive deacon in nationalist press, see Vol-
gar, December 21, 1909, 2.
58. Volgar, March 14, 1909, 3.
59. The closest analogy to Zalesskii in Kazan among the leaders of Nizhegorod
nationalists (educators, members of the intelligentsia) was S. P. Smotrakov, a dep-
uty teacher in a local Realschule. See F. A. Seleznev, Vybory i vybor v provintsii: par-
tiia kadetov v Nizhegorodskom krae, 1905–1917 (Nizhny Novgorod: Izdatel’stvo
Nizhegorodskogo universiteta, 2001), 51.
60. Kazanskii telegraf, January 4, 1911, 4.
61. On June 8, 1909, at a Nizhny Novgorod circus, Russian clerk Pal’tsev com-
mented unfavorably on the tactics of one of the wrestlers, who happened to be
Russian nobleman Znamenskii (stage name Moor). Znamenskii/Moor overheard
Pal’tsev and confronted him, referring to the famous Roman general, Fabius Max-
imus Cunctator. The entire exchange developed as a sequence of demonstrations
of superior social status, based on misunderstandings. As a spectator who paid for
his ticket, Pal’tsev thought that he was in a position to comment on Moor; Moor
responded with a demonstration of high cultural background. Pal’tsev said that he

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 Notes to pp. 66–72 215

knew more about Fabius than Moor did. Moor disagreed: he had graduated from
military school as a junior officer, and where had Pal’tsev studied? Pal’tsev, a petty
clerk, apparently could not raise the stakes any further, as Moor turned out to be
of a higher social background; instead, he mocked Moor’s schooling. At this point,
Znamenskii/Moor called Pal’tsev “a lousy Yid,” and left. Whether Znamenskii/Moor
was anti-Semitic is unclear and irrelevant in this case. See Volgar, June 23, 1909, 2.
62. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in
Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robert
Weinberg, Blood on the Steps: The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993).
63. In this, political mobilization in Kazan resembled the dynamics in Ufa,
with outbursts of violence structuring the rising spontaneous mass politics passing
through the stages of mobilization, through polarization, to demobilization. See
Charles Steinwedel, “The 1905 Revolution in Ufa: Mass Politics, Elections, and
Nationality,” Russian Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 555–76.
64. Many witnesses, including the Tatar janitor (dvornik) Saifutdinov, testi-
fied that individuals in the crowd were announcing the names and addresses of
Jews living in the vicinity, of which the crowd had no idea. Cf. Volzhskii Listok,
November 4, 1906, 3.
65. Volzhskii Listok, November 3, 1906, 3.
66. Ibid.
67. Volzhskii Listok, November 4, 1906, 3.
68. Volzhskii Vestnik, June 11, 1906, 4.
69. Volzhskii Vestnik, June 13, 1906, 3.
70. Volzhskii Vestnik, June 11, 1906, 4.
71. Volzhskii Listok, April 17, 1908, 3.
72. Geraci, Window on the East, 308.
73. On the approach to social practices as a specific language of self-descrip-
tion, see Ilya Gerasimov, “Redefining Empire: Social Engineering in Late Imperial
Russia, in Projects and in Practice,” in Gerasimov et al., eds., Empire Speaks Out,
229–72.
74. Volzhskii Listok, January 11, 1908, 4; January 26, 1908, 4; and so on, every
two weeks.
75. Another advertisement for a room for rent specified: “Intelligent German
family will rent out a room to a single gentleman” (Kazanskii Telegraf, October
22, [1911], 4). In Nizhny Novgorod, locals never specified their ethnicity, but
newcomers to the town might volunteer the information: “A Kurlandian seeks
position as an estate manager”; “A young Liflandian girl seeks a place”; or just “A
newly arrived maid . . .” See Volgar, March 14, 1909, 4.

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 216 Notes to pp. 72–78

76. Volzhskii Listok, January 26, 1908, 4.

77. Volzhskii Listok, April 26, 1908, 4; May 29, 1908, 4; and so on.
78. R. White, The Middle Ground, x.
79. Volgar, February 26, 1909, 2.
80. Volgar, March 18, 1909, 2.
81. Volgar, April 17, 1909, 2.
82. At least, there were other burglaries committed by same recidivists:
ibid., 2.
83. GANO, f. 1665, op. 1, d. 1, l. 431–32.
84. Volgar, September 20, 1909, 2.
85. Cf. Kazanskii Telegraf, January 27, 1912, 3.
86. GANO, f. 1665, op. 1, d. 1, l. 101.
87. Volzhskii Listok, July 5, 1907, 3.
88. NART, f. 41, op. 4, d. 1184, l. 3–7, 35–36.
89. Kazanskii Telegraf, February 23, 1912, 3.
90. Kazanskii Telegraf, February 26, 1912, 4.
91. Kazanskii Telegraf, March 6, 1912, 3.
92. NART, f. 79, op. 1, vol. 2. D. 805.
93. Ibid., ll. 1–2.
94. Ibid., ll. 14–16 ob.
95. Ibid., ll. 34–37, 39.
96. Ibid., l. 39 ob.
97. Ibid., l. 2.
98. Madina V. Goldberg, “Russian Empire—Tatar Theater: The Politics of
Culture in Late Imperial Kazan” (PhD dissertation, The University of Michigan,
2009), 46.
99. For two cases of Old Believer priests who thought that they had resolved all
the formalities before marrying young people in 1910 and 1911, but were found
guilty of breaking the law, see Volgar, October 18, 1912, 2.
100. See, for example, Volgar, May 25, 1909, 4.
101. Volzhskii Listok, May 24, 1908, 1.
102. For petitions for the official prohibition of any commercial activity on
Sundays, see Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), f. 1287 Khoziaistvennyi
departament MVD, op. 44 Otdelenie 7, stol 1, d. 383; NART, f. 98 Kazanskaia
Gorodskaia Uprava, op. 4, d. 2220. I would like to thank Alexander Kaplunovskii
for sharing these materials with me. For an account of the angry protest of Tatar
young men (perhaps students of confessional schools) against Tatar merchants
opening their shops on the main Bolshaia Prolomnaia street during the important
Muslim holiday, see Volzhskii Listok, August 3, 1907, 3.

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 Notes to pp. 78–82 217

103. This section was published regularly and could feature up to five small
articles at a time, in addition to stories related to Tatar affairs that were published
in other sections. See Volzhskii Listok, August 3, 1907, 3; September 1, 1907, 3;
September 18, 1907, 3; December 4, 1907, 3; January 25, 1908, 3; April 17,
1908, 3; and June 13, 1908, 3.
104. Volzhskii Listok, September 1, 1907, 3; September 18, 1907, 3.
105. Russkoe Slovo, August 27, 1908, n.p.
106. Volzhskii Listok, June 13, 1908, 3.
107. Cf. Geraci, Window on the East; Norihiro Naganawa, “Islam and Empire
Observed: Muslims in the Volga-Ural Region After the 1905 Revolution,” in
Imperiology: From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire, ed. Kimi-
taka Matsuzato (Sapporo: SRC, 2007), 68–84.
108. Medick, “Plebeian Culture,” 91.
109. Ibid., 92.
110. Ibid., 90.
111. Ibid., 92.

Chapter Three

1. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 1, b. 699, “Sutochnyi prikaz po Vilenskoi gorodskoi polit-

sii. 8 iulia 1913 goda. # 189,” n.p.
2. Consider, for instance, a mundane episode, when in March 1912 the
Nizhegorod chief of police requested that a cabdriver he noticed on the street be
fined. This request could be implemented only through the ruling of a justice of
the peace, so a constable brought the cabdriver to the court chamber on the order
of the Polizeimeister. The constable did not know the exact nature of the driver’s
misdeed, and the judge summoned the chief of police himself to the court to tes-
tify. Eventually, the highest police officer in town had to come to a local justice of
the peace to prove his case, and the cabdriver was duly fined 3 rubles for double-
parking (Volgar, March 3, 1912, 4, and March 10, 1912, 4). So much trouble
would make one think twice before going after fifteen minor violations at a time,
in addition to the regular direct responsibilities of regulation and control in all
spheres of social and economic life in town.
3. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 1, b. 699, “Sutochnyi prikaz po Vilenskoi gorodskoi polit-
sii. 20 sentiabria 1913 goda. # 263,” n.p.
4. A special look into the instances of censorship of movie theaters in Kazan did
not reveal any attempts by the police to restrict the repertoire of cinemas, except
in response to orders from St. Petersburg that specifically banned films containing
scenes of famine in the countryside and the depiction of main protagonists of the

Gerasimov.indd 217 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 218 Notes to pp. 82–84

Christian religion. See Elena Alekseeva, “Stanovlenie i razvitie kinematografa v

Kazani i Kazanskoi gubernii (1897–1917),” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 83 (2007):
259–63.
5. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 1, b. 699, “Sutochnyi prikaz po Vilenskoi gorodskoi polit-
sii. 30 maia 1913 goda. # 150,” n.p.; ibid., “31 maia 1913 goda. # 151,” n.p.;
ibid., “24 iulia 1913 goda. # 205,” n.p.
6. A classic “pigeon drop” is demonstrated in the opening scene of the 1973
film The Sting (featuring Robert Redford and Robert Earl Jones): a “stranger” per-
suades a mark (“pigeon”) to take his money for safekeeping and suggests storing
his and the mark’s cash in one place. As a precaution, the “stranger” stows all their
cash in one envelope, and returns it to the mark. In the process, the real money is
switched for a stack of cut paper. The scheme requires good teamwork and excep-
tional artistic skills.
7. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 3143 “Spisok prestupnikov g. Vilno, zaregistrirovan-
nykh v Vilenskom sysknom otdelenii,” ll. 2–4.
8. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 3127 “Statisticheskie svedeniia o chisle prestuplenii za
1 ianvaria 1907–1 ianvaria 1908,” l. 5.
9. Calculated on the basis of data found in LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 142, “Vedo-
mosti o deiatel’nosti Vilenskogo sysknogo otdeleniia za 1912 g.,” ll. 1–22.
10. GANO, f. 1665 Criminal Unit of the Nizhegorod City Police Administra-
tion, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 1–1 ob.
11. Ibid., ll. 5, 8, 14, 21, 32, 40, 43, 46, 51, 56, 61.
12. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 352, “Statisticheskie svedeniia za 1911 g. o nar-
odonaselenii, fabrikakh, zavodakh i pr.,” l. 23.
13. Ibid., l. 23 ob.
14. Eventually, the 1912 yearbook cautiously announced the number of Vil-
nians as “approximately 200,000.” See Vsia Vil’na: Adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga.
1912 god (Vilna: T. Tasselkraut, 1912), pt. 8, p. 6.
15. Cf. Eugene M. Avrutin, “Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Dif-
ference in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian His-
tory 8, no. 1 (2007): 13–40.
16. The most numerous of all the mass organizations in town, the Jewish
Bund, which was actually founded in Vilna in 1897, numbered fourteen hun-
dred members in 1900 and a maximum of three thousand members in 1905 (1.8
percent of the town’s population). For quantitative appraisals, see Henri Minc-
zeles, Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius: La Jérusalem de Lituanie (Paris: Edition la découverte,
2000), 93; E. Vidmantas, “Sotsial-demokraticheskaia pechat i rabochee dvizhe-
nie v Litve v 1895–1907 gg” (Candidate of Sciences diss., Vilnius University,
1976), 61. After the Revolution of 1905, Bund membership rapidly declined. See

Gerasimov.indd 218 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 Notes to pp. 84–88 219

Vladimir Levin, “The Jewish Socialist Parties in Russia in the Period of Reaction,”
in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Medel-
son (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 111–27, esp. 112–15.
For a classical study of Jewish socialist politics in the Russian Empire, see Jona-
than Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews,
1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
17. Cf. Theodore R. Weeks, From “Russian” to “Polish:” Vilna-Wilno 1900–
1925 (Washington, DC: National Council for Eurasian and East European
Research, 2006), 5, 14.
18. On the conspicuously low level of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuanian lands
during the Late Imperial period, see Darius Staliunas, Enemies for a Day: Anti-
semitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2015).
19. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 352, ll. 38, 55, 88, 98, 108, 132, 149.
20. Ibid., ll. 6, 7, 9. A Jewish almshouse was located on the same street as
the town police headquarters, just several buildings away; the communal Admin-
istration of Jewish Prayer Houses (Evreiskoe molitvennoe pravlenie) occupied the
building less than three hundred yards from the governor-general’s palace, on
Dvortsovyi (Palace) Lane. Similar examples are abundant.
21. Cf. “Vilna Jews internalized this sense of multiethnic urban space,” Samuel
Kassow, “The Uniqueness of Jewish Vilna,” in Vilniaus Zydu intelektualinis gyveni-
mas, ed. Larisa Lempertiene (Vilnius: Mokslo aidai, 2004), 154. For one of the
first attempts to study the daily interethnic contacts of the Jewish and Gentile
population of the Vilna region in the late imperial period, see Eugene M. Avru-
tin, “Jewish Neighborly Relations and Imperial Russian Legal Culture,” Journal of
Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 1–16.
22. Theodore R. Weeks, “Jews and Others in Vilna-Wilno-Vilnius: Invisible
Neighbors, 1831–1948,” in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of
Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman
Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 81–99.
23. On the usage of archaism as a powerful trope and popular method in Rus-
sian modernism of the turn of the century, see Irina Shevelenko, Modernizm kak
arkhaizm: natsionalism i poiski modernistskoi estetiki v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe liter-
aturnoe obozrenie, 2017).
24. Darius Staliunas, “An Awkward City: Vilnius as a Regional Centre in Rus-
sian Nationality Policy (ca. 1860–1914),” in Russia and Eastern Europe: Applied
“Imperiology,” ed. Andrzej Nowak (Krakow: Arcana, 2006), 243.
25. E. Kondratenko, ed. Kavkazskii kalendar na 1887 god (Tiflis: Caucasian
Statistical Committee, 1886), pt. II, p. 39.

Gerasimov.indd 219 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 220 Notes to p. 88

26. Cf. Deminskii, “K voprosu ob ustroistve kochevnikov,” Kaspii, nos. 257,

258 (1890); F. D., “O svadebnykh obriadakh molokan,” Kaspii, nos. 188, 189
(1897); F. A. Deminskii, “Nekotorye svedeniia o Kabristanskom politseiskom
uchastke Shemakhinskogo uezda Bakinskoi gubernii,” Zapiski Kavkazskogo otdela
Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 22, no. 2 (Tiflis, 1901).
27. Cf. E. Kondratenko, ed., Kavkazskii kalendar na 1900 god (Tiflis: Cauca-
sian Statistical Committee, 1899), 179; E. Kondratenko, ed., Kavkazskii kalendar
na 1903 god (Tiflis: Caucasian Statistical Committee, 1902), 180.
28. E. Kondratenko, ed., Kavkazskii kalendar na 1905 god (Tiflis: Caucasian
Statistical Committee, 1904), 187.
29. It is possible that Fedor and Ivan Deminskii were older brothers of the
famous Russian epidemiologist, Ippolit Alexandrovich Deminskii (1864–1912),
who died of plague but documented the illness and analyzed microbes from his
own fluids until the very end. If so, Polizeimeister Deminskii was born to a family
of a low-ranked military veterinarian in Crimea, who later moved to Astrakhan on
the shores of the Caspian Sea. Both parents passed away in the mid-1870s, and
given the family’s modest income even when they were alive, military education
was the most accessible for the children (Ippolit would have great difficulty pay-
ing for his medical studies at Kazan University). For graduates of nonprestigious
military schools, a police career offered more opportunities than did a career in
the unprivileged infantry regiments, so low social status and police service in a
remote precinct were highly correlated, regardless of the actual family background
of Fedor Deminskii. On the choice of police service over a military career, and
the benefits of service with an older brother, see A. P. Martynov, “Moia sluzhba
v otdel’nom korpuse zhandarmov,” in “Okhranka”: Vospominaniia rukovoditelei
politicheskogo syska 1 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2004), 37–55.
30. Ronald Suny characterized it as an episode in the 1905 “Armenian-Tatar
war,” in The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 22, 167–68.
31. His daughter claimed that he had warned the Baku governor about the
brewing pogrom three days in advance, but the governor ignored the warning.
Later, he asked for 150 Cossacks to disperse the crowd of pogromists, but the
governor responded, “Go away! It is not your business.” On the other hand, the
French national engineer Michel Timoni testified to the commission of Baku
attorneys in late February that he saw Deminskii with one hundred Cossacks
passing by the mob of pogromists without making any attempt to stop them. See
G. E. Startsev, Krovavye dni na Kavkaze (St. Petersburg: G. M. Popov, 1907), ch.
3. Timoni himself was ruthlessly murdered on September 5, 1905 (new style),
during an attack on the oil fields he serviced; see James D. Henry, Baku: An

Gerasimov.indd 220 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 Notes to pp. 88–91 221

Eventful History (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 205. His murder during the “sec-
ond round” of the Armenian-Tatar war (Suny) was interpreted as vengeance for
his indictment of the Russian authorities and Azeri mobs in the pogroms.
32. The emperor’s manifesto of October 17, 1905, announced basic civil rights
and the convocation of parliament in the Russian Empire.
33. Quoted in I. S. Bagirova, Politicheskie partii i organizatsii Azerbaidzhana v
nachale XX veka (1900–1917) (Baku: Elm, 1997), 243.
34. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 934, “Imennye spiski, vedomosti chinov politsii,
sostavlennye po veroispovedaniiam za 1907 god,” ll. 2 (data for 1906), 2ob. (1907
statistics).
35. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 1, b. 699, “Sutochnyi prikaz po Vilenskoi gorodskoi
politsii. 14 ianvaria 1913 goda. #14,” n.p.
36. Karsten Brüggemann, “Representing Empire, Performing Nation? Russian
Officials in the Baltic Provinces (Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Centuries),” Ab
Imperio 14, no. 3 (2013): 264.
37. Of course, a formal police report or interrogation would include informa-
tion on a confession, but this was needed for statistics. Also, some crimes were
so associated in the local knowledge with a specific ethnic group that references
to them included an ethnic marker almost for formulary purposes. This was the
case with “Jewish evasion of [military] service throughout Vilna province”: in the
region with Jews constituting the biggest faction of town inhabitants, this typi-
cally urban problem had a distinctive “Jewish face.” Cf. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 1, b.
699, “Sutochnyi prikaz po Vilenskoi gorodskoi politsii. 21 oktiabria 1913 goda.
#294,” n.p. Vilna court records from the early twentieth century contain many
dozens of files on “criminal gangs” that arranged for Jewish evasion of military
service. See LVIA, f. 668, ap.1, b. 173–85, and so on.
38. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 1, b. 699, “Sutochnyi prikaz po Vilenskoi gorodskoi
politsii. 27 sentiabria 1913 goda. #270,” n.p.
39. For example, one Frants Gan, born in 1884, a peasant of the neighboring
Vitebsk province, identified himself as Belarusian. See the database of the Memo-
rial Society: Zhertvy politicheskogo terrora v SSSR, http://lists.memo.ru/d8/f84.
htm.
40. Cf. Alexander Maxwell, “National Endogamy and Double Standards: Sex-
uality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe during the 19th Century,” Journal
of Social History 41, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 413–33.
41. Ibid., 426.
42. Ibid., 425.
43. In the formula of Ann Stoler, “sexual submission substantiates colonial rac-
ism.” See Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate

Gerasimov.indd 221 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 222 Notes to pp. 91–93

in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 46. For the equa-
tion of prostitution with racial inferiority, see also Philippa Levine, Prostitution,
Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2003), ch. 7, “Prostitution, Race, and Empire.”
44. For an elaborated juxtaposition of Vilna as a traditionalist “center of learn-
ing” and Odessa as “the boom town of the frontier,” see Alexander Orbach, New
Voices of Russian Jewry: A Study of the Russian-Jewish Press of Odessa (Leiden: Brill,
1980), 14, and passim. See also Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers, 18–19.
45. Characteristically, in his pathbreaking study of Jewish interaction with late
imperial Russian society, Benjamin Nathans never even mentioned “prostitution.”
Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Rus-
sia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
46. For an example of a historical study of such gender dualism, see Julie Hard-
wick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in
Early Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
47. For a standard study of prostitution in Russia, see Bernstein, Sonia’s
Daughters.
48. “Ustav blagochiniia ili politseiskii,” in Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi
Imperii. Sobranie Pervoe, 21 (St. Petersburg: II Otdelenie Sobstvennoi Ego Imper-
atorskogo Velichestva Kantseliarii, 1830), 480.
49. Ustav o preduprezhdenii i presechenii prestuplenii: Izdanie 1876 goda (St.
Petersburg: N.p., 1876), 36–37.
50. “Ustav blagochiniia ili politseiskii,” 479. The same article (185) in the
1876 Statute: Ustav o preduprezhdenii, 37.
51. Tatiana Voronich, “Gorod i prostitutsiia: iz istorii povsednevnosti Grodno
(vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX vv.,” in Garadzenski palimpsest 2011, ed. A. F.
Smalenchuk and N. U. Slizh (Minsk: Zmitser Kolas, 2012), 260–64.
52. Tatiana Voronich, “Tsarskie vlasti v bor’be za moral’nost’ minchan: vtoraia
polovina XIX–nachalo XX v.,” in Minsk i minchane: dzesiats’ stagoddziayi gistoryi,
ed. A. I. Grusha (Minsk: Belaruskaia navuka, 2012), 316–19.
53. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
(New York: Basic Books, 1983).
54. Cf. M. I. Pokrovskaia, “O zakonodatel’nykh merakh protiv torga zhen-
shchinami v tseliakh razvrata,” in Trudy pervogo Vserossiiskogo s”ezda po bor’be s
torgom zhenshchinami i ego prichinami, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskaia odi-
nochnaia tiurma, 1912), 418–19. The main document setting the rules for prosti-
tution was “Regulations on the Organization of Control over Urban Prostitution
in the Empire,” appended to Circular no. 1611 of the Ministry of the Interior of
October 8, 1903.

Gerasimov.indd 222 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 Notes to pp. 93–94 223

55. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 957, “Raporty pristavov o domakh terpimosti, pro-
sheniia raznykh lits o peremene mestozhitel’stva publichnykh zhenshchin,” l. 15.
56. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 957, ll. 17–17 ob., 22 ob.
57. Cf. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 957, ll. 3–4, 10–11, 15–22, 22–23, 48, 51.
58. The classical study by Boris Unbegaun identifies Dudar as a typical Belaru-
sian family name (Boris Ottokar Unbegaun, Russian Surnames [Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1972], 320), but it is possible that Sofia’s family had been russified long
ago.
59. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 957, ll. 17–17 ob., 22 ob.
60. For example, in the second half of 1908, two prostitutes rented rooms
from the madam, Beilia Lupat: the eighteen-year-old Antonina Grendo, registered
as a peasant of Trakai district (a Belarusian or Lithuanian girl), and Mariana Daits
(a Jew). LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 958, “Prosheniia raznykh lits o vkliuchenii I iskli-
uchenii iz chisla publichnykh zhenshchin,” ll. 6, 6 ob.
61. A report by the head of the Medical-Police Committee (entrusted with
control over the town prostitutes) mentioned eight apartment-based “dens of
vice” and four “single apartments” of prostitutes (including the one already men-
tioned, belonging to Beilia Lupat), all run by Jewish owners. See LVIA, f. 420, ap.
2, b. 957, l. 6.
62. In 1897, 210 respondents in Vilna admitted to census-takers to being
professionally involved in prostitution: 43 percent of them were Jews, 28 per-
cent Poles, and 24 percent indicated Russian as their native tongue, which almost
exactly concurred with the general proportion of these linguistic groups among
Vilna’s population (Yiddish speakers 40 percent, Polish speakers 31 percent,
and Russian speakers 20 percent). See N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobsh-
chaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897 goda, vol. 4, Vilenskaia guberniia
(St. Petersburg: Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet, 1903), tables 14 and 22. In
1873, 47 percent of Vilna’s prostitutes were Jewish (in 1872 Warsaw, 70 percent),
whereas Jews composed 46 percent of Vilna’s inhabitants. See Itzkhak Oren and
Mikhael Zand, eds., Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia (Jerusalem: Jewish Univer-
sity in Jerusalem, 1992), 6: col. 835; Vilna i okrestnosti: putevoditel’ i spravochnaia
knizhka (Vilna: Tip. A. G. Syrkina, 1883), 305.
63. For instance, on November 28, 1914, the police interrogated the Jewish
owners of two bordellos located on Kopanitsa Street (Aukštaiðių gatvė). One,
forty-year-old Beilia Dushanskaia, a brothel-keeper for the past fifteen years,
signed the protocol without hesitation, while Sosia Ass, sixty-five years old, who
had kept the bordello for ten years, refused to sign her name “on the occasion of
Sabbath.” LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 1031, “Raporty pristavov, prosheniia raznykh
lits o zakrytii domov terpimosti, o zachislenii i iskluchenii iz spiskov publichnykh

Gerasimov.indd 223 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 224 Notes to p. 94

zhenshchin,” ll. 57–57 ob. On the other hand, one complaint demanding the
closing down of a “den of vice” was written on behalf of a Judaic prayer house
located on Stefanovskaia Street (Šv. Stepono g.). The author alleged that a man
named Iankel, the dyer, secretly kept a den with two prostitutes. Police investi-
gation completely dismissed all of the accusations, but it is interesting that Ian-
kel was falsely accused by his neighbors of all possible crimes with the important
exception of blasphemy or any other offense against his religion, rather than “the
respectability of our prayer house.” LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 958, ll. 9–11 ob.
64. In the intercepted Yiddish correspondence, a certain mechanic or engine
driver, Sokolinskii, wrote in a postcard to an addressee in Polotsk (Vitebsk prov-
ince): “Now I can write to you about my well-being—[I] live real life, the way
I like to live: I live as ‘God in Odessa.’ Reb Faives! Write me what is new, have
you received permission to open a brothel? I ask you to write about everything
in detail, how is life[?]” LVIA, f. 668, ap. 1, b. 265, “Po delu o Altere Dubnike
obviniaemom po 527 st. Ulozh. o nakaz. v verbovke zhenshchin dlia publichnykh
domov,” l. 59.
65. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 957, ll. 67–67 ob.
66. A seemingly different historical case of mid-nineteenth-century prostitu-
tion in New York is striking for its multiple structural parallels with the Russian
case. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that the motivations of Russian mad-
ams were similar to those of their American peers: “Most often, a woman became
a madam or prostitution boardinghouse keeper after working as a prostitute, but
there were some who entered the profession by discovering that renting a room
to a woman or couple for sex might be more profitable than other rental arrange-
ments. Whether a woman operated discreetly as an assignation-house keeper, or
notoriously as a brothel madam, her primary goal was to run a profitable business
and earn a good living.” Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution
in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
92–93.
67. According to a comprehensive survey of 1889, the most numerous group of
madams in the empire were thirty-five to forty years old (27.6 percent), Jewish (27.6
percent empire-wide, 92 percent in Vilna), and 57.5 percent were married. See A.
Dubrovskii, ed., Prostitutsiia v Rossiiskoi imperii po obsledovaniiu 1-go avgusta 1889
goda (St. Petersburg: Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet, 1890), xiii, xiv, 12.
68. In dozens of profiles of prostitutes in police files, not a single one was born
in Vilna. According to the statistics of 1889, 62.5 percent of prostitutes in bordel-
los and 30.4 percent of “individuals” had come to Vilna from other provinces; the
rest were born in unspecified locations within the Vilna province. Dubrovskii,

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 Notes to pp. 94–97 225

Prostitutsiia v Rossiiskoi imperii po obsledovaniiu 1-go avgusta 1889 goda, Appendix

1, 2–3.
69. On prostitution as a regular resort of women facing the tight job market,
see Voronich, “Gorod i prostitutsiia,” 275; and Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s
Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2015), 94–95.
70. See Troinitskii, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii
1897 goda, vol. 4, table 1.
71. See Voronich, “Tsarskie vlasti v bor’be za moral’nost’ minchan: vtoraia
polovina XIX—nachalo XX v.,” 313, 319.
72. Statuer-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain, ch. 2.
73. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 958, “Prosheniia raznykh lits o vkliuchenii i iskli-
uchenii iz chisla publichnykh zhenshchin,” ll. 1 ob.
74. Ronald Weitzer, “Prostitution,” in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed.
Fedwa Malti-Douglas (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 3:1202.
75. See the groundbreaking study by Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, or a
pioneering history of homosexuality in Russia, Healey, Homosexual Desire.
76. Foucault spoke of the “transformation of sex into discourse” in the Western
bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, or rather of some wholesale under-
reflected upon complex of practices—into a variety of differentiating discourses,
defining the “norm” and “perversion,” and ascribing meaning to individual ele-
ments of the once single phenomenon. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexu-
ality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), passim (quote
p. 61).
77. The 1897 census documented 377 prostitutes in Odessa, or 0.093 percent
of the total population; 210 Vilna prostitutes composed 0.136 percent of all the
inhabitants (more by a factor of 1.46). According to the census, 32.4 percent of
prostitutes in Odessa were Jewish (defined by native tongue), whereas the share
of linguistically defined Jews in the city population was 31 percent (in Vilna, the
corresponding figures were 43 percent and 40 percent). See N. A. Troinitskii,
ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897 goda, vol. 47,
Khersonskaia guberniya (St. Petersburg: Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet, 1904),
tables 14 and 22.
78. For an extensive treatment of discourses of sexuality and vice in Odessa, see
Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa.
79. LVIA, f. 668, ap. 1, b. 265, “Po delu o Altere Dubnike obviniaemom po
527 st. Ulozh. o nakaz. v verbovke zhenshchin dlia publichnykh domov,” l. 7.
80. Cf. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 142, l. 1.

Gerasimov.indd 225 11/16/2017 5:29:28 PM

 226 Notes to pp. 97–101

81. Cf. Mara L. Keire, “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slav-
ery Scare in The United States, 1907–1917,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 1
(2001): 5–41.
82. Already in December 1909, a law countering the trafficking of women
was added to the legal code of the Russian Empire. “On Measures Preventing the
Trade of Women with Lechery Purposes,” in Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi
Imperii, 3rd collection, 29, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia,
1912), 991–93. At a 1910 representative First All-Russian Congress against Traf-
ficking in Women that took place in St. Petersburg, Russian activists were visible
in international organizations and forums combating “white slavery.” See Bern-
stein, Sonia’s Daughters, 146–47, and passim.
83. Voronich, “Gorod i prostitutsiia,” 275.
84. Statuer-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain, 172.
85. Seeibid., esp. ch. 5 and 6.
86. LVIA, f. 668, ap. 1, b. 265, ll. 7, 8, 11, 40.
87. Ibid., ll. 20–21 ob.
88. Ibid., ll. 21 ob.–22 ob.
89. Ibid., ll. 22 ob.–23 ob.
90. Ibid., ll. 23–24.
91. Ibid., ll. 40–41.
92. Ibid., l. 40.
93. Ibid., ll. 44–44 ob.
94. Ibid., l. 45.
95. Ibid., ll. 45–45 ob.
96. Ibid., ll, 46–46 ob.
97. Ibid., l. 66.
98. Generally, the majority of prostitutes in bordellos were migrants from other
regions, while the majority of individual streetwalkers and those working from
“dens of vice” were natives of the same province, which made the task of staffing
bordellos a special business. In 1889 in Kazan 48.5 percent of bordello prosti-
tutes were natives of Kazan province, in Vilna 37.5 percent were natives of Vilna
province, but in Białystok bordellos only 12.5 percent of prostitutes were locals.
See Dubrovskii, Prostitutsiia v Rossiiskoi imperii po obsledovaniiu 1-go avgusta 1889
goda, 2–3, 4–5.
99. A 1909 newspaper article written in a typical sensationalist “white slav-
ery” genre exposed two Odessa-based flesh-peddlers working together: a Jew and
a Russian. See “Zaderzhanie torgovtsev zhivym tovarom,” Volgar, July 4, 1909, 4
(reprinted from the Odessa News).
100. According to the hotel’s owner (ibid., l. 41).

Gerasimov.indd 226 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 102–105 227

101. This was a typical strategy of British working-class women, at least before
the tightening of control over prostitution in the 1860s. See Judith R. Walkowitz,
Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1980), 14 and passim.
102. Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 709–17.
103. The latter aspect, in regard to the problem of Russian Jewish identity and
modern identity in general, is subtly discussed by Gabriella Safran in Rewriting the
Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 196–97.
104. Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 716.
105. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” 384.
106. Cf. Alexander Kaplunovski, “Opisyvaia imperiiu sotsial’no: ‘prikazchits-
koe’ mnogogolosie v sotsial’nom register iazykov samoopisaniia Rossiiskoi impe-
rii,” Ab Imperio 6, no. 3 (2005): 175–226.
107. One fruit trader from Saratov, Dzhavakhov, had two male sales assistants,
who lived with and had to engage in sexual relations with him. Reportedly, one
of them, Beliaev, suffered psychologically from these physical relations. At some
point, Beliaev confronted Dzhavakhov informing him about his decision to resign
and requesting his salary in full. Dzhavakhov refused to pay; Beliaev did not feel
that sexual harassment was sufficient reason to quit without getting a paycheck;
they fought, and eventually Beliaev murdered Dzhavakhov. In this case, sexual
coercion and economic exploitation became so entangled that it is hard to tell
which one became the primary motivation for the murder. See Kazanskii telegraf,
October 19, 1911, 3. Newspaper criminal chronicles and police reports routinely
mentioned instances of male employers’ sexual harassment of female employees
when providing sexual favors often became the condition for keeping one’s job.
108. On March 8, 1907, in an all-Tatar bordello in Kazan, peasant Mustafin
was seriously wounded after a brawl with a waiter, Safin. As it turned out, Mus-
tafin lived in the same village from which Safin and Safin’s sister, a prostitute in
the same bordello, came to Kazan. In the village, Mustafin blurted out the real
occupations of the Safins in Kazan, thus discrediting the woman. Kazanskii tele-
graf, January 11, 1909, 4. Apparently, Safin saw himself as the custodian of his
sister’s honor, working in the same brothel and protecting her. An honorable trade
in Kazan, her occupation dishonored her in the context of village society, and
Mustafin almost lost his life for spreading accurate information about her in their
native village.
109. Thus, in Kazan Tatar prostitutes had been registered as early as in the
1850s, but they had to work in bordellos outside the Tatar Quarter, as the Tatar
community did not allow the institutionalization of prostitution within its official

Gerasimov.indd 227 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 228 Notes to pp. 105–108

and moral jurisdiction. The situation had changed by 1905, when Tatar bordellos
established themselves throughout traditionally Tatar-dominated parts of Kazan.
See S.Iu. Malysheva, “Publichnye doma i prostitutki v dosugovoi i povsednevnoi
zhizni Kazani vtoroi poloviny XIX–nachala XX vv.,” Dialog so vremenem 31 (Mos-
cow: Editorial URSS, 2010): 98, 99.
110. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 920, “Perepiska s Vilenskim gubernatorom i guber-
nskim ob obshchestvakh prisutstviem,” ll. 13–13 ob., 21.
111. Ibid., l. 83.
112. Ibid., l. 84.
113. The general governor of Vilna, Kovno, and Grodno provinces issued
decree no. 13 on September 20, 1905, saying that it was allowed to print Rus-
sian signs in “one of the local languages,” provided that the Russian text was more
prominent and noticeable (LVIA, f. 420, ap. 1, b. 693, “Sutochnyi prikaz po
Vilenskoi gorodskoi politsii za 1907 god,” l. 229). The subsequent practice of pro-
ducing signs in three languages was an actual legal violation that police preferred
to ignore.
114. See LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 947, “Prosheniia raznykh lits o razreshenii
vyvesok na torgovykh uchrezhdeniiakh, 1907” ll. 1–262; LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b.
973, “Prosheniia raznykh lits o razreshenii vyvesok na torgovykh zavedeniiakh,
1908” ll. 1–793.
115. For example, LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 947, ll. 18, 131, 245.
116. Ibid., l. 194.
117. Ibid., l. 191.
118. Ibid., l. 180.
119. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 973, l. 118.
120. Ibid., l. 51.
121. Ibid., l. 330.
122. Theodore R. Weeks, “The 1905 Revolution in Vilnius,” in Rewolucja
1905–1907 w królewstwie Polskim i w Rosji, ed. Marek Przeniosło and Stanisław
Wiech (Kielce: Wydaw. Akad. Świętokrzyskiej, 2005), 215.
123. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 947, l. 162.
124. Ibid., l. 249.
125. Ibid., f. 420, ap. 2, b. 973, l. 150.

Chapter Four

1. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.

2. Michael Y. Dartnell, Action Directe: Ultra Left Terrorism in France 1979–
1987 (London: Frank Cass, 1995).

Gerasimov.indd 228 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 109–113 229

3. These figures are presented in Leonid I. Strakhovsky, “The Statesmanship

of Stolypin: A Reappraisal,” Slavonic and Eastern European Review 37 (1958–59):
357.
4. Cf. Mogilner, Mifologiia podpol’nogo cheloveka; and Mogilner, “The Russian
Radical Mythology (1881–1914).”
5. Thus, ideology-driven Socialist Revolutionaries committed a total of 216
assassinations: six before 1905, fifty-four in 1905, seventy-eight in 1906, and sixty-
eight in 1907. See M. I. Leonov, Partiia sotsialistov-revolutsionerov v 1905–1907
gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), 409. Over the same period, the unorganized
and indiscriminative anarchist groups only within the Pale of Jewish settlement
staged 350–400 attacks, claiming at least 500 casualties. Cf. Viktor Savchenko,
Anarkhisty-terroristy v Odesse (1903–1913) (Odessa: Optimum, 2006), 75.
6. See TsDIAU, f. 385, “Odessa Gendarme Administration,” op. 1, t. 2, ed.
khr. 3085–3089, “Svedeniia Okhrannogo otdeleniia i Zhandarmskogo Upravle-
niia ob ‘anarkhistakh-kommunistakh’,” A-V to R-T.
7. For a detailed discussion of this politicized “internationalist” racket, see
Ilya Gerasimov, “‘We Only Kill Each Other’: Prestupnost’ kak marker mezhet-
nicheskikh granits v Odesse nachala XX veka (1907–1917),” Ab Imperio 4, no. 1
(2003): 209–60.
8. See TsDIAU, f. 385, “Odessa Gendarme Administration,” op. 1, t. 2, ed.
khr. (file) 1936, ll. 65–66.
9. TsDIAU, f. 386, “Odessa Secret Service,” op. 1, ed. khr. 1050, l. 25 ob.
10. Ibid., l. 4.
11. Cf. “Should not all of us Jews close our ranks to express publicly and popu-
larly our contempt for those ‘bombers’ from the Jews, who pose as representatives
of one or another political party but who, in fact, have a sole interest in rob-
bery? . . . Christian-bombers call themselves anarchists, while Jews—Bundists. So
‘Bund’ in the perception of the entire society becomes some gang of cutthroats.”
B. S-n, “Bund,” Russkii evrei, April 1, 1906. This magazine, The Russian Jew, tra-
ditionally sympathized with Jewish leftist parties.
12. TsDIAU, f. 386, “Odessa Secret Service,” op. 1, ed. khr. 1050, l. 3.
13. Iosif Pokornyi was a prosperous photographer and printer. He had print-
ing shops in Libava (today, Liepāja in Latvia) and Odessa, and two photography
shops in Odessa. See Anatolii Drozdovskii and Eva Krasnova, “Starinnye evreiskie
fotografii Odessy,” Moriia 6 (2006): 220.
14. TsDIAU, f. 386, “Odessa Secret Service,” op. 1, ed. khr. 1050, l. 24.
15. Ibid.
16. This connection is mentioned in a standard study on Russian revolution-
ary violence, specifically in the context of Odessa: Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 135.

Gerasimov.indd 229 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 230 Notes to pp. 114–118

17. “Khronika: Buinyi rybotorgovets,” Odesskaia gazeta, December 15, 1908,

3.
18. Cf. the directory Vsia Odessa 1902–3 gody: adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga
(Odessa: A. Shultse, 1902), 85.
19. “Khronika: Plody konkurentsii,” Odesskaia gazeta, December 29, 1908, 3.
20. “Vooruzhennyi girei,” Srochnaia vecherniia pochta, March 21, 1912, 3.
21. “Rasprava s konkurentom,” Odesskii kur‘er, January 18, 1913, 4.
22. See TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 195.
23. Ibid., l. 144.
24. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 1, t. 2, ed. khr. 2110, ll. 159–60.
25. Novosti Odessy, 1, 2, 6 (1907).
26. TsDIAU, f. 419 “Prosecutor of the Odessa Court Chamber,” op. 2, t. 1
“Criminal cases, 1871–1911,” ed. khr. 527, l. 1. The murder was committed
by Gentiles, Roman Shikhovtsov and Vladimir Nemirovskii, while the Rus-
sian bystander, Sokolov, was wounded by the twenty-two-year-old Jew, Abram
Goldstein.
27. TsDIAU, f. 419, op. 1, t. 4, ed. khr. 5054, l. 1.
28. “Napadenie na M. Veksel’shteina,” Novosti Odessy, 6 (1907).
29. The main source for quantitative generalizations are official reports of the
Head of the Criminal Unit of Odessa Police. Composed every week or even more
often, these reports mention on average six to ten incidents that came to the atten-
tion of police. We are speaking about at least five hundred cases a year, a total of
several thousand over the course of the period. See TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 1. t. 1, ed.
khr. 2415 (for 1909); f. 385, op. 1. t. 2, ed. khr. 2110 (for 1907–11); f. 385, op.
2, ed. khr. 106 (for 1912–14); ed. khr. 173 (for 1915); ed. khr. 231 (for 1916).
30. On the latter topic, see Gerasimov, “Evreiskaia prestupnost’ v Odesse
nachala XX v.: Ot ubiistva k krazhe?”
31. TsDIAU, f. 419, op. 2, t. 2, ed. khr. 1905, l. 1.
32. Ibid., l. 20.
33. Blok, Honor and Violence, 104.
34. Jay Robert Nash, ed., World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1993), 366. See also Dean Jennings, We Only Kill Each Other: The
Life and Bad Times of Bugsy Siegel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
35. In fact, as the majority of scholars agree, Jewish crime in the United States
had never evolved into an ethnically homogeneous Mafia on the model of Ital-
ian clans or Chinese criminal societies. On the contrary, with the growing scale
of operations (beyond dominating the immediate neighborhood), initially com-
pact Jewish gangs allied with Italian or Irish mobs, incorporated other minorities,
and did not discriminate on an ethnic basis in their treatment of victims. Siegel

Gerasimov.indd 230 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 118–126 231

himself was murdered on the order of his friend, a big-time Jewish gangster, Meyer
Lansky, when he breached the trust of their Sicilian partners. See Jenna Weissman
Joselit, Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Robert A. Rockaway, But He Was
Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters (Jerusalem: Grefen,
1993); Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1998). For a comprehensive analytical bibliographic survey,
see Robert Rockaway, “American Jews and Crime: An Annotated Bibliography,”
American Studies International 38, no. 1 (February 2000): 26–41.
36. Kh. I. Muratov, “Avtobiografiia G. I. Kotovskogo,” Istoricheskii arkhiv 4
(1955): 221.
37. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 231, ll. 73–75.
38. Kovalevskii, Psikhologiia prestupnika po russkoi literature o katorge, 110.
39. “Ograblenie priezzhego chinovnika,” Kazanskii telegraf, October 13, 1905,
2.
40. “Obokradennyi mulla,” Kazanskii telegraf, September 18, 1905, 3.
41. In 1912, a Russian petty commoner (meshchanin) Savel’ev was arrested
with Tatar Saydkov (apparently, a carter) with a load of wood stolen from the
warehouse of the timber merchant Kudriavtsev. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazan-
skii telegraf, January 6, 1912, 4.
42. NART, f. 89, op. 1, d. 1534.
43. NART, f. 41, op. 4, d. 619, ll. 5–5 ob.
44. “Sudebnaia khronika,” Kazanskii telegraf, February 27, 1909, 3.
45. NART, f. 41, op. 4, d. 1184, ll. 2, 35–36.
46. “Sudebnaia khronika,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 28, 1912, 3.
47. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 11, 1911, 4.
48. “Iz revnosti,” Volgar, April 28, 1909, 2.
49. “V drake,”Volgar, May 12, 1909, 2.
50. Volzhskii Listok, February 27, 1908, 2.
51. “Zverskoe ubiistvo,” Kazanskii telegraf, October 22, 1911, 4.
52. S. Iu. Malysheva, “Professionalki,” “arfistki,” “liubitel’nitsy”: publichnye doma
i prostitutki v Kazani vo vtoroi polovine XIX–nachale XX veka (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo
Kazanskogo universiteta, 2014).
53. “Khronika,” Volgar, April 17, 1909, 2.
54. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 13, 1911, 3.
55. Volzhskii Listok, July 27, 1907, 3.
56. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 25 ob.
57. Ibid., l. 21 ob.
58. Ibid., l. 37.

Gerasimov.indd 231 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 232 Notes to pp. 126–134

59. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 141, l. 169 ob.–170.

60. “Gnusnoe zverstvo,” Volzhskii vestnik, August 12, 1906, 3.
61. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, October 18, 1911, 3.
62. “Sudebnaia khronika,” Volzhskii Listok, no. 494, September 27 (1907): 3.
63. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 19, 1908, 3.
64. In September 1895, a married woman, Shagi-Akhmetova, was walking
along in the Tatar district, when a Tatar, Valeev, solicited her with the words,
“Honey, why don’t you go with me.” She scolded him, and locked herself inside
her apartment. Valeev followed her, broke into the apartment, and began beating
the woman with a poker. Only neighbors saved her from what was prosecuted as
battery, but could have ended in rape, as Valeev’s initial behavior suggested. See
“Buinyi Lovelas,” Volzhskii vestnik, October 1, 1895, 3.
65. See Garthine Walker, “Sexual Violence and Rape in Europe, 1500–1750,”
in The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present, ed. Sarah Toula-
lan and Kate Fisher (London: Routledge, 2013), 429–43; Shani D’Cruze, “Sex-
ual Violence since 1750,” in Toulalan and Fisher, Routledge History of Sex and the
Body, 444–60.
66. TsDIAU, f. 419, op. 2, t. 2, ed. khr. 1628, ll. 1–1 ob.
67. Ibid., ll. 1 ob.–2.
68. Ibid., l. 2 ob.
69. Ibid., ll. 6–6 ob.
70. Ibid., l. 14.
71. Ternian is a very rare surname. My searches produced only one reference
to Ternian: Ester Ternian, a resident of Odessa born sometime around 1890. See
http://207.232.26.141/YADVASHEM/new_app/200406211242_350_7858/80.
jpg.
72. TsDIAU, f. 419, op. 2, t. 2, ed. khr. 1628, l. 4 ob.
73. Ibid.
74. Cf. “Niddah,” in Geoffrey Wigoder, ed., Encyclopedia of Judaism (New
York: Macmillan, 1989), 524–25.
75. “Zverskoe izbienie,” Novaia Odesskaia gazeta, September 21, 1908, 2–3.

Chapter Five

1. See Jane Burbank, “An Imperial Rights Regime. Law and Citizenship in the
Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3,
(Summer 2006): 397–431.
2. “Raskrytie krazhi,” Volgar, June 13, 1909, 2.
3. “Moshennichestvo,” Volgar, June 21, 1909, 2.

Gerasimov.indd 232 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 135–138 233

4. “Moshennichestvo,” Volgar, March 29, 1912, 2.

5. “Magicheskii baraban,” Volgar, January 11, 1912, 4.
6. GANO, f. 1665, op. 1, d. 42, l. 1.
7. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 142, l. 1, 12.
8. “Arest falshivomonetchika,” Kazanskii telegraf, April 17, 1911, 5.
9. “Proisshestviia: fabrikatsiia falshivykh deneg v Odesse,” Odesskaia gazeta,
March 19, 1909, 3.
10. “Telegrammy nashikhi korrespondentov,” Novoe vremia, December 21,
1907, quoted in http://starosti.ru/article.php?id=6556.
11. Kenneth Newton, “Trust, Social Capital, Civil Society, and Democracy,”
International Political Science Review 22, no. 2 (April 2001): 207.
12. James Farr, “Social Capital: A Conceptual History,” Political Theory 32, no.
1 (February 2004): 8.
13. The recent contributions by Geoffrey Hosking to the study of trust, relying
on the Russian (or, rather, Soviet) case among others, presents an approach to trust
that is poorly compatible with the research agenda of this study. By announcing
his rejection of the models of both Geertz and Foucault (Geoffrey Hosking, Trust:
A History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 5–6), Hosking inadvertently
essentializes “trust” as a phenomenon. Outside the framework of an analytical
model, “trust” turns into an elusively self-evident metanarrative (against the inten-
tions of the author), undifferentiated into epistemologically distinctive categories
of analysis and practice. See also Geoffrey Hosking, ed., Slavonic & East European
Review 91, no. 1 “Trust and Distrust in the USSR” (January 2013).
14. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 31.
15. Ibid., l. 37.
16. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 25.
17. “Rastrata v magazine Ia. Itskovicha na 1300 rub,” Srochnaia vecherniia
pochta, February 2, 1912, 3.
18. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 78.
19. “Begstvo sluzhashchego vora,” Srochnaia vecherniia pochta, December 17,
1911, 3.
20. Srochnaia vecherniia pochta, June 5, 1912, 3.
21. “Skryvshiisia zingerovskii agent,” Volgar, March 25, 1909, 2. In a similar
case in Odessa in May 1912, the Singer agent, Volf Kharnos, ran away after he
pawned ten stolen sewing machines, worth 600 rubles. See TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2,
ed. khr. 106, l. 77.
22. “Skryvshiisia rabochii,” Volgar, April 17, 1909, 2.
23. GANO, f. 1665, op. 1, d. 63, l. 37 ob.–39.
24. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 10, 1912, 4.

Gerasimov.indd 233 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 234 Notes to pp. 138–144

25. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 12, 1912, 3.

26. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 17, 1912, 4.
27. “Kazanskaia khronika,” Kazanskii telegraf, January 20, 1912, 3.
28. “Sudebnaia khronika,” Kazanskii telegraf, March 21, 1912, 3.
29. The famous protagonist of the 1928 novel Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov,
the trickster Ostap Bender, at some point signed a contract to draw posters even
though he had no experience, in exchange for desperately needed boat tickets.
30. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106. l. 78.
31. “Proisshestviia: Arest aferista,” Odesskaia gazeta, March 2, 1908, 3.
32. State Archive of the Odessa Region (DAOO), f. 41 Odessa Customs, op.
1, d. 1067.
33. See Vsia Odessa: Adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga vsei Odessy s otdelom Odesskii
uezd na 1914 god (Odessa: “Odesskie novosti,” n.d.), 46.
34. DAOO, f. 41, op. 1, d. 1137.
35. See N. P. Arzhanov, “Fal’sifikatsiia lekarstvennykh sredstv—istinnaia i mni-
maia. Podpol’nye fabriki i dilerskie seti,” Provisor 15 (2000): 17–21; 16 (2000):
11–14; and 17 (2000): 15–18.
36. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106. l. 54.
37. At the time, a typical capacity for a tank car in Russia was fifteen thou-
sand to twenty thousand liters. The sum of 1,800 rubles was sufficient to fill a
tank at the price of 12 kopecks per liter, while the average wholesale price was
16 kopecks, and the retail price even higher. See Narodnoe khoziaistvo v 1913 g.
(Petrograd: Ministerstvo finansov, 1914), 106.
38. “Krupnaia afera,” Odesskii kur’er, February 15, 1913, 4.
39. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106. l. 72.
40. Just one month earlier, another grocery trader in Odessa, Lerner, purchased
four barrels of sunflower oil stolen from a fellow trader, Shteinberg, by a man
named Ivan Rudenko. Eventually, Lerner had to compensate for the damage, at a
rate of about 100 rubles a barrel. See TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106. l. 48.
41. “Zaderzhanie shaiki vorov,” Golos Odessy, January 31, 1910, 3.
42. The price of a pud of tea varied from 50 rubles to 58 rubles, depending
on the kind of tea. It cost more when priced per pound, amounting to 270–360
rubles for the load found at Rozenkrants. See Statisticheskii ezhegodnik za 1913–
1917 gg., vol. 2 (Moscow: TsSU, 1922), 73.
43. Cf. Kovalevskii, Psikhologiia prestupnika po russkoi literature o katorge.
44. Calculated on the basis of data in Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . za 1913
god, pt. 1, 42.
45. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . za 1911 god, pt. 1, 162.
46. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . za 1913 god, pt. 1, 162.

Gerasimov.indd 234 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 144–148 235

47. Ibid., pt. 2, 86.

48. Troinitskii, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897
goda, vol. 47, table 14.
49. See Troinitskii, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii
1897 goda, vol. 14, table 14.
50. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . Za 1913 god, pt. 1, 163.
51. Ibid., pt. 2, 80.
52. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . Za 1911 god, pt. 1, 163.
53. See Troinitskii, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii
1897 goda, vol. 4, table 14.
54. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . Za 1913 god, pt. 1, 164; Svod statis-
ticheskikh svedenii . . . Za 1913 god, pt. 2, 78.
55. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . Za 1911 god, pt. 1, 1, 2; Svod statis-
ticheskikh svedenii . . . Za 1913 god, pt.1, 1, 2.
56. A famous catchphrase from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
(New York: Lulu Press, 2006), 97.
57. “Iz zaly suda,” Volgar, April 4, 1912, 3.
58. “Iz zaly suda,” Volgar, January 11, 1912, 4.
59. Most likely, the son of the late Nizhegorod state rabbi, fresh graduate of
Novorossiisk University in Odessa, future activist of cooperative movement, a
Menshevik, and member of the Central Executive Committee elected by the First
Congress of Soviets in June 1917. See Ia. I. Rabinovich, V poiskakh sud’by: Evre-
iskii narod v krugovorote istorii (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2002),
1:295; Spravochnaia knizhka i adres-kalendar’ Nizhegorodskoi gubernii na 1914 god
(Nizhny Novgorod: Gubernskii statisticheskii komitet, 1914), 127; The Memo-
rial Society database of victims of political repressions, http://lists.memo.ru/d13/
f233.htm; DAOO, f. 42 Novorossiskii University, op. 36; Ziva Galili, Leopold H.
Haimson, and Albert Nenarokov, eds., Men’sheviki v 1917 godu (Moscow: Prog-
ress-Akademiia, 1994), 1:715.
60. “Iz zaly suda,” Volgar, January 14, 1909, 2.
61. Volzhskii listok, August 3, 1907, 3.
62. In 1901, in Grodno, some nine hundred miles westward of Nizhny
Novgorod, a window left open on a hot June afternoon was acknowledged as a
legitimate reason for transferring the case of apprehended thieves who had broken
into the house through that window from the criminal court to a local justice of
the peace. See Voronich, “Kriminal’nyi mir gubersnkogo Grodno,” 253.
63. Philippe Besnard, “The True Nature of Anomie,” Sociological Theory 6
(Spring 1988): 93.

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 236 Notes to pp. 148–150

64. This usage is related to the literal meaning of the term as “normlessness”
and the initial interpretation of the concept by Émile Durkheim (cf. Peter A.
Munch, “Anarchy and Anomie in an Atomistic Community,” Man, n.s., 9, no.
2 [1974]: 243–61), but does not necessarily bear the connotation of a patho-
logical condition that was characteristic of Durkheim’s understanding of anomie
(see Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society [Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1984]). I also would like to distance the use of anomie here from its interpreta-
tion informed by Robert Merton as a reaction of frustration caused by the lack
of means and opportunities to reach a certain clear goal. Cf. Robert K. Merton,
“Social Structure and Anomie,” American Sociological Review 3 (1938): 672–82;
and “Anomie, Anomia and Social Interaction: Contexts of Deviant Behavior,” in
Anomie and Deviant Behavior: A Discussion and Critique, ed. M. B. Clinard (New
York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 213–43.
65. Bedovyi, “Dnevnik,” Malen’kii odesskii listok, August 24, 1915, 3.
66. Bedovyi, “Dnevnik,” Malen’kii odesskii listok, August 26, 1915, 3.
67. Ibid.
68. Indeed, the notion seemed too sociological and abstract to find a proper
historical contextualization: “The objectification of the criminal as outside the
law, as natural man, is still only a potentiality. . . . One will have to wait a long
time before homo criminalis becomes a definite object in the field of knowledge.”
See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 102. (In the spirit of his anarchic understand-
ing of criminality as a social construct, Foucault saw the criminal as a “natural
man” by definition because he could not be a “criminal” before society branded
him as such, hence he was someone else, perhaps the asocial homo criminalis.)
69. According to Foucault, the absence of a universal and systematically
enforced legal order under the old regime resulted in a situation when “each of
the different social strata had its margin of tolerated illegality: the non-application
of the rule, the non-observance of the innumerable edicts or ordinances were a
condition of the political and economic functioning of society.” Modernization
did not eradicate the legacy of illegality, but rather transformed it: “the illegality
of propriety was separated from the illegality of rights.” By the former, Foucault
meant “fraud, tax evasion, irregular commercial operations,” characteristic of the
new elite; by the latter he basically meant obvious criminality, reserved for the
lower classes. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 82, 87.
70. NART, f. 41, op. 4, d. 471, l. 28.
71. See Genrikh Klepatskii, ed., 100 let kazanskomu tramvaiu (Kazan: Poli-
gran, 1999), http://kazantransport.by.ru/kn100.htm.
72. “Iz zhizni tramvaev,” Volzhskii Listok, April 17, 1908, 3.
73. Klepatskii, 100 let kazanskomu tramvaiu.

Gerasimov.indd 236 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 150–156 237

74. “Spor o iazyke,” Malen’kie odesskie novosti, September 9, 1913, 7.

75. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, October 5, 1916, 3.
76. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 27.
77. Ibid., l. 58 ob.
78. Ibid., l. 75.
79. Ibid., l. 80 ob.
80. Judging by the streetcar route Grechukhin took, he was commuting
between his apartment on Gogol Street and Rishel’evskaia Street, where in the
corner building of Novikov “a splendid hairdressing salon was kept by a most
popular hairdresser of the early twentieth century, Nikolai Grechukhin, who
worked in tandem with his spouse, Evdokiia.” See Oleg Gubar, “Rishel’evskaia,
No. 4 (Deribasovskaia, No. 12): dom Podzhio–Kiriko–Novikova,” Deribasovs-
kaia–Rishel’evskaia: Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi, istoriko-kraevedcheskii illius-
trirovannyi almanakh 43 (2010): 100.
81. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 93 ob.
82. Ibid., l. 100.
83. It included a dark-green woolen coat or a double-breasted frock coat, each
with two rows of six buttons, and embroidery on the collar and cuffs. The uni-
form trousers matched the coat in color. There was also a black woolen (or a white
piqué) vest with six small buttons, and a narrow black necktie, knotted with a
small bow. On their heads, government agronomists wore a dark-green cap with
visor and a cap-badge. In cold weather, they wore a double-breasted overcoat with
twelve buttons or a greatcoat with hood, also dark green. Gloves of kid or suede
completed the uniform of the government agronomists. See “Prilozhenia k Ustavu
o sluzhbe po opredeleniiu ot Pravitel’stva,” in Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol.
3, col. 150–65.
84. “Riad moshennichestv,” Kazanskii telegraf, March 15, 1909, 5.
85. TsDIAU, f. 386, op. 2, ed. khr. 12, l. 140, 141; GANO, f. 1665, op. 3, d.
10, ll. 150, 173, 191–191 ob. etc.; LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 934, “Imennye spiski,
vedomosti chinov politsii, sostavlennye po veroispovedaniiam za 1907 god.”
86. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 46.
87. TsDIAU, f. 386, op. 2, ed. khr. 12, l. 183. When in October 1907 in
Kazan two constables caught red-handed a moonshiner, a man named Semenov,
they demanded just 10 rubles for not opening an investigation against him and
were eventually satisfied with 7 rubles. “Sudebnaia khronika,” Kazanskii telegraf,
January 25, 1911, 5.
88. “Zaderzhanie mnimykh agentov sysknoi politsii,” Odesskii kur’er, January
31, 1913, 4.
89. “Voinstvennaia semeika,” Malen’kie odesskie novosti, September 8, 1912, 6.

Gerasimov.indd 237 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 238 Notes to pp. 157–159

90. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 89 ob.

91. “Khronika,” Kazanskii telegraf, August 31, 1905, 3.
92. Kazanskii telegraf, January 29, 1908, 2.
93. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106. l. 32 ob.
94. Ibid., l. 48 ob.
95. “Otravlenie,” Volgar, February 26, 1909, 2.
96. “Izbienie devochki,” Volgar, January 14, 1912, 4.
97. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 3143, l. 151 ob.–152.
98. “Krazhi,” Volgar, September 20, 1909, 2.
99. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . za 1911 god, pt. 1, 46.
100. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . za 1913 god, pt. 1, 42.
101. It was suggested that the archaic category of social estate was an even
more powerful mechanism of social identification during the last decade of the
Russian old regime than it had been before. Roberta Thompson Manning, The
Crisis of the Old Order in Russia. Gentry and Government (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982); Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and
Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 11–36.
102. Peasants were the largest social group even in the capital of empire:
between 1869 and 1897 their proportion in the population of St. Petersburg had
grown from 31 percent to 59 percent. (Iukhneva, Etnicheskii sostav i etnosotsial’naia
struktura naseleniia Peterburga, 36–37). In Kazan, by 1913 peasants made up 54.4
percent of the population (Zorin, Goroda i posady dorevoliutsionnogo Povolzh’ia,
117). In Odessa, meshchane traditionally dominated the spectrum of social estates,
but during the last decades of the old regime their share gradually decreased, while
the share of peasants dramatically grew, reaching 30 percent by 1914. (Freder-
ick W. Skinner, “Odessa and the Problem of Urban Modernization,” in The City
in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm [Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986], 212). On Moscow see Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite.
103. For the politics of identification papers and registration in Late Imperial
Russia, see Jeffrey Burds, “The Social Control of Peasant Labor in Russia: The
Response of Village Communities to Labor Migration in the Central Industrial
Region, 1861–1905,” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Rus-
sia, 1800–1921, ed. E. Kingston-Mann and T. Mixter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 52–100; Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society: Con-
trolling Movement in Russia and the USSR (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993);
Moon, “Peasant Migration,” 324–57. The most recent and most important con-
tribution to the study of population control in the heterogeneous imperial society
is Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist
Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

Gerasimov.indd 238 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 159–161 239

104. NART, f. 76 “Justice of Peace of the 2nd Precinct of the City of Kazan,”
op. 1, t. 1, d. 104; TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 31 ob.; “K arestu fabri-
kanta pasportov,” Srochnaya vechernyaya pochta, March 16, 1912, 3.
105. See TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, ll. 31, 33, 34 ob., 50.
106. Russian customers would use the passport letterheads of some obscure vil-
lage commune, while Jews were furnished with documents of one of the numer-
ous town commoners’ boards from within the Pale of Settlement. In 1906, in
their pursuit of passport counterfeiters, the criminal police unit of Vilna even
went after the thieves who stole passport forms and official seals from the Grodno
town commoners’ board (meshchanskaia uprava) in a neighboring province. LVIA,
f. 420, ap. 2, b. 3127, l. 5. At about the same time, in summer 1906, several
hundred passport forms were stolen by anarchists from the Białystok town com-
moners’ board. See “Aron Izrailivich Ostrovskii,” in Almanach Anarchiste: Sbornik
po istorii anarkhicheskogo dvizheniia v Rossii, [ed. N. Rogdaev] (Paris: N.p., 1909),
43.
107. This is what Bruha Uvnitskaia paid for her “new” internal passport in
March 1913. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 31 ob.
108. LVIA, f. 420, ap. 2, b. 148, “Kniga soderzhashchikhsia pod arestom v
gorodskoi arestantskoi, 1913 god.”
109. “Oblava,” Volgar, July 31, 1909, 2.
110. In a random sampling: eleven people were arrested on January 3, five
people on January 10, two people on January 12, and nine people on April 4. See
Kazanskii telegraf, January 4, 1911, 4; January 11, 1911, 4; January 13, 1911, 3;
April 5, 1911, 4.
111. “Kur’eznaia pros’ba,” Volgar, January 12, 1912, 4.
112. Eugene Avrutin has shown that there existed a broadening gulf between
the instructions of Judaic communal leaders in Vilna and the actual practices.
Avrutin, “Jewish Neighborly Relations”; see also chapter 3 of this book.
113. The Edict of Toleration issued in April 1905 and the October 1906 edict
concerning the Old Believers decriminalized most actions that had been classified
as religious crimes before 1905. Still, in 1907, 543 people stood trial for religious
crimes, such as blasphemy, disruption of church service, or sectarianism. In 1909,
their number more than doubled to 1233. In 1910, the number of people tried
for religious crimes was 1,417; in 1911—already 1910, in 1912 the number was
2,276, which meant more than a fourfold increase over the period of five years.
See Svod statisticheskikh svedenii o podsudimykh, opravdannykh i osuzhdennykh . . .
za 1907 god (St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1910), pt. 1, 2; Svod statis-
ticheskikh svedenii o podsudimykh, opravdannykh i osuzhdennykh . . . za 1909 god
(St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1912), pt. 1, 2; Statisticheskii ezhegodnik

Gerasimov.indd 239 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 240 Notes to pp. 161–165

Rossii. 1913 (St. Petersburg: Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1914), pt. 4, 2; Statis-
ticheskii ezhegodnik Rossii. 1914 (Petrograd: Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1915),
pt. 4, 8; Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Rossii. 1915 (Petrograd: Ministry of Internal
Affairs, 1916), pt. 4, 6.
114. “Prazdniki,” Volzhskii vestnik, April 6, 1906, 3.
115. Kazanskii telegraf, April 17, 1911, 5.
116. See “Krazha,” Kazanskii telegraf, September 16, 1905, 3; NART, f. 41, dd.
627, 629, 817, 957.
117. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii . . . za 1913 god, pt. 1, 35, 36.
118. Thus, also in 1913, the Voronezh Circuit Court convicted ten people for
sacrilege; the Vladimir and Riazan courts, eleven each; Saratov Court, twelve; the
Novgorod Circuit Court, nineteen; and so on, while the borderland multiethnic
and multiconfessional regions produced the lowest numbers. Ibid., 34–37.
119. “Krazha,” Kazanskii telegraf, September 16, 1905, 3.
120. Sudebnyi protsess po delu o pokhishchenii v Kazani iavlennoi chudotvornoi
ikony Kazanskoi Bozhiei Materi. Polnyi stenograficheskii otchet s prilozheniem vsekh
sudebnykh rechei (Kazan: Izdanie redaktsii zhurnala “Pravoslavnyi sobesednik,”
1904), 8.
121. A. M. Eldashev, Monastyri Kazanskogo kraia: ocherki istorii (Kazan: Insti-
tut istorii AN RT, 2004), 59, 60.
122. “Dnevnik proisshestvii,” Kazanskii telegraf, March 17, 1912, 3.
123. “Kazanskaia khronika,” Kazanskii telegraf, March 31, 1912, 3.
124. Kazanskii telegraf, March 31, 1912, 5.
125. It was legally all but impossible for a Russian to convert to a non-Chris-
tian faith, while politically, few Tatars would dare to be baptized after 1905 in
the context of the rising Tatar national movement and the mass divergence of
baptized Tatars from Christian Orthodoxy. See Paul Werth, “Arbiters of the Free
Conscience: Confessional Categorization and Religious Transfer in Russia, 1905–
1917,” in Re-Bounding Identities in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Blair Ruble, Domi-
nique Arel, and Nancy Popson (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Institution
Press, 2006), 181–207.
126. Even ten years later, after the Revolution of 1917, which removed all for-
mall obstacles to official mixed marriages, the ratio of Jews marrying Gentiles in
Odessa (in 1922–25) did not exceed 2.6 percent of all Jewish marriages. G. D.
Filkenstein, “Braki evreev v Odesse,” Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev 3, no. 1
(1930): 106.
127. See B. F. Sultanbekov and S. Iu. Malysheva, Tragicheskie sud’by (Kazan:
TGZhI, 1996), 50.
128. Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 146.

Gerasimov.indd 240 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 166–173 241

129. TsDIAU, f. 385, op. 2, ed. khr. 106, l. 69.

130. A. I. Akopov, “Stanovlenie spetsializirivannoi kurortnoi pressy v Rossii,”
Filologicheskii vestnik Rostovskogo universiteta 1 (1997): 61–62.
131. Odesskaia i iuga Rossii brachnaia gazeta, January 11, 1910, 4.
132. Odesskaia i iuga Rossii brachnaia gazeta, February 7, 1910, 4.
133. Odesskaia i iuga Rossii brachnaia gazeta, March 7, 1910, 1.
134. Ibid.
135. Odesskaia i iuga Rossii brachnaia gazeta, March 21, 1910, 1.
136. Odesskaia i iuga Rossii brachnaia gazeta, April 4, 1910, 1.
137. Brachnaia gazeta, August 17, 1917, 2. The extreme specificity of self-
description in this ad published by the leading Moscow Marriage Newspaper
can probably be explained by the fact that it was published in a different epoch:
three years into the world war and a half year into the Russian Revolution of
1917, which contributed to the dramatic mobilization of a nationalizing world
view.
138. Speaking of instances of social cooperation in early modern Europe,
Charles Tilly has reminded historians that “We should avoid thinking of such
trust networks as leftovers from primeval Gemeinschaft. People create and recre-
ate them all the time.” “Instead of deriving relations of trust from general culture
or contract-enforcing institutions as is currently fashionable,” Tilly suggests an
opposite logic deriving “new attitudes and contracting-enforcing institutions from
alterations in social relations.” Charles Tilly, “Trust and Rule,” Theory and Society
33, no. 1 (2004): 5, 6.
139. “In the use of the phrase social capital . . . I . . . refer . . . to that in life
which tends to make these tangible substances count for most in the daily lives of
a people, namely, goodwill, fellowship, mutual sympathy and social intercourse
among a group of individuals and families who make up a social unit.” Quoted in
Farr, “Social Capital,” 16.

Epilogue
1. By 1917, average worker’s wages had increased by almost 300 percent, while
the salaries of schoolteachers and university lecturers had grown by no more than
50 percent. While the living standards of workers somewhat improved despite the
skyrocketing inflation, the middle classe was impoverished and had to adapt to
lifestyles more resembling those of plebeians. See K. A. Pazhitnov, Minimal’naia
zarabotnaia plata (Petrograd: N.p., 1917); B.A. Gukhman, Proizvoditel’nost’ truda
i zarabotnaia plata v promyshlennosti SSSR (Moscow: Ekonomicheskaia zhizn,
1925); Mikhail Gribovskii, “Materialnyi dostatok professorov i prepodavatelei

Gerasimov.indd 241 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 242 Notes to pp. 173–176

universitetov Rossii v kontse XIX—nachcle XX v.,” Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstven-

nogo universiteta no. 349 (2011): 76–80.
2. For a critical assessment of this historiographic tradition, see Stephen Kot-
kin, “‘One Hand Clapping’: Russian Workers and 1917,” Labor History 32, no. 4
(1991): 604–20.
3. Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical
Review 113, no. 2 (2008): 320, 338.
4. Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
5. Ibid., 52.
6. Less convincingly, Riga attempts to gentrify the protagonists of her study,
presenting them as lower middle class even when they came from the families of
illiterate peasants or vagabonds. The “plebeian society” would be a more accu-
rate and productive category for the majority of these people. See Ilya Gerasimov,
review of The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire, by Liliana Riga, Ab Imperio 16,
no. 3 (2015): 336–51.
7. For an outline of the problem of Russian “imperial revolution,” see Ilya Ger-
asimov, “The Great Imperial Revolution,” in 1917: Une révolution aux marges de
l’empire russe 1917, ed. Matthieu Renault and Olga Bronnikova (Paris: Éditions
Amsterdam, 2018).
8. Maxim Gorky, “March 17 (4), 1918,” in Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts:
Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918, transl. Herman
Ermolaev, introd. Mark D. Steinberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1968), 148.
9. Vladimir Lenin, “Report on Work in the Countryside, March 23,” in V. I.
Lenin, Collected Works, 4th ed. (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 29:209.
10. See Sergei Iarov, “Ritorika vozhdei: V. I. Lenin i I. V. Stalin kak oratory,”
Zvezda, no. 11 (2007): 168–79; Mikhail Vaiskopf, Pisatel’ Stalin (Moscow: Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001).
11. Howard G. Williams, “Founders of Deaf Education in Russia,” in Deaf
History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship, ed. John Vickrey Van
Cleve (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 224–36.
12. A. A. Khitrov, “Blagotvoritel’naia pomoshch’ glukhonemym v Rossii pod
pokrovitel’stvom imperatorskoi familii (konets XIX–nachalo XX veka,” Izvestiia
RGPU im. A. I. Gertsena, no. 103 (2009): 29–36.
13. G. Rafikova, “‘Kazan nikogda ne byla bedna ludmi initsiativy, gotovymi
sluzhit blizhnemu . . .’ (Prizrenie detei-invalidov v Kazani XIX–nachala XX vv.),”
Gasyrlar-avazy–Ekho vekov no. 3–4 (2012): 50–55.

Gerasimov.indd 242 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 176–180 243

14. Claire Louise Shaw, “Deaf in the USSR: ‘Defect’ and the New Soviet Per-
son, 1917–1991” (PhD diss., School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Uni-
versity College London, 2010), 47–48.
15. Ibid., 48–50.
16. Ibid., 40, 81.
17. The popular concept was coined by Stephen Kotkin in Magnetic Mountain:
Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), ch. 5.
18. Shaw, “Deaf in the USSR,” 73, 79.
19. Ibid., 73.
20. V. I. Lenin, “Replies to Written Questions,” in Lenin, Collective Works,
29:32.
21. V. I. Lenin, “First Paragraph of Section of the Programme on the Courts,”
in Lenin, Collective Works, 29: 131.
22. V. I. Lenin, “Report on the Party Program. March 19,” in Lenin, Collective
Works 29:182.
23. “Anketa o lichnom sostave VIII s”ezda RKP(b),” in Vo’imoi s”ezd RKP(b).
Mart 1919 goda: Protokoly (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi
literatury, 1959), 451.
24. “Pervonachal’nyi proekt pervogo dekreta o sude,” Materialy Narodnogo
komissariata iustitsii (Moscow: Narkomiust, 1918), 2:103.
25. See Piers Beirne, Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of
Soviet Legal Theory, 1917–1938 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 33.
26. M. N. Pokrovskii, “Obshchestvennye nauki v SSSR za 10 let,” Vestnik
Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, no. 26 (1928): 19.
27. A. V. Lunacharsky, “Revoliutsiia i sud,” in Materialy Narodnogo komissari-
ata iustitsii 2 (Moscow: Narkomiust, 1918), 15.
28. P. I. Stuchka, 13 let borby za revolutsionno-proletarskuiu teoriiu prava (Mos-
cow: Gosudarstvennoe iuridicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1931), 10.
29. Leon Petrażycki, Law and Morality (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
2011), 81.
30. M. Reisner, “Sovremennaia iurisprudentsiia i uchenie L. I. Petrazhitskogo,”
Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 1 (1908): 27–55.
31. Leon Petrażycki, Law and Morality, 72.
32. Ibid., 229.
33. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 201, 221.
34. Since the publication of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in
1975.

Gerasimov.indd 243 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 244 Notes to pp. 180–183

35. The original “Decree on the Red Terror,” 232 words long, insisted that
it was “necessary to publish the names of all those executed and the reasons for
applying this measure to them.” See Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Politizdat,
1964), 3:292. The two volumes of The Cheka Red Book published in 1920 and
1922, at the height of the Red Terror, demonstrated the regime’s openness about
the politics of terror. The book provided the shocked society with intimate details
of punishments, now hidden from the public for technical reasons (mass execu-
tions were held in basements and secluded areas rather than in town squares),
as well as information about official interrogations, which themselves became an
integral part of Kafkaesque terror. See A. S. Velidov, ed., Krasnaia kniga VChK,
vols. 1–2 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989).
36. A. A. Kuchumova, “Na bereg vypolzla Muma,” Zhivaia starina no. 4
(2005): 17–20; A. A. Kuchumova, “Mumu i Gerasim glazami sovremennogo che-
loveka,” http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/kuchumova1.htm.
37. Turgenev, The Novels, 401.
38. Every month, the Russian search engine Yandex receives on average 3,317
requests concerning “Gerasim drowning Mumu” (http://bit.ly/1U4v4JN), as
compared to 613 requests for “Stalin’s terror” (http://bit.ly/1Nc3Kqx).
39. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Russian Terror/ism and Revisionist Historiography,”
Australian Journal of Politics and History 53, no. 1 (2007): 5–19, esp. 18; Alter L.
Litvin and John L. H. Keep, Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the
Millennium (London: Routledge, 2005).
40. See Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confes-
sions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Igal Halfin, Red Autobiographies: Initiating
the Bolshevik Self (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). Rare exceptions
only prove the general rule: thus, immediately after graduating from the Mining
Institute in 1939, geologist Leonid Potemkin left the spotlight of the urban public
sphere to embark on geological expeditions in the wilderness (Hellbeck, Revolu-
tion on My Mind, 228–29). He did not return to a major city until 1955, when he
moved to Moscow from the Murmansk Region, having spent the most dangerous
years of Stalinism in the safest place: the underpopulated backwaters in the vicin-
ity of major GULAG enterprises.
41. Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobio-
graphical Texts,” Russian Review 60 (July 2001): 342.
42. “Raspredelenie naseleniia SSSR po vozrastu . . . (Svodnaia po SSSR, oba
pola),” in Vsesoiuznaia perepis naseleniia 1937 g.: Obshchie itogi, ed. V. B. Zhirom-
skaia and Iu. A. Poliakov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 81–84.

Gerasimov.indd 244 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 Notes to pp. 183–185 245

43. “Gramotnost’ i obrazovanie naseleniia SSSR . . . (oba pola),” in ibid.,

112–13. Specifically, only in the group age eight to fifteen, more than 50 per-
cent had been receiving any education (more than 80 percent among those nine
to fourteen). This means that among the socially active population (age sixteen
and older), no more than 30 percent had any experience of sovietization through
schooling.
44. Iu. A. Poliakov, ed., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000),
1:390.
45. According to the 1959 census, people forty-nine years old and younger
(born after 1910) made up over 81 percent of Soviet citizens. Only 35 percent of
the eligible age groups had no formal schooling: still a very significant segment of
the population, now it was already a minority. See “Raspredelenie naseleniia SSSR
i soiuznykh respublik po vozrastu i urovniu obrazovaniia,” in Vsesoiuznaia perepis
naseleniia 1959 g., http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/sng_edu_59.php.
46. The number of Komsomol members had grown eightfold over the course
of a quarter century—from 2.3 million in 1929 to 8.2 million in 1939 to 18.6
million in 1955—but still embraced only one-third (33 percent) of the young
people eligible for membership. “Vsesoiuznyi leninskii kommunisticheskii soiiuz
molodezhi (VLKSM),” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed. (Moscow:
Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1977), 24: pt. 2, 178. The number of communists
in the country was always on average two to two and a half times smaller than
the number of Komsomol members, accounting for about 5 percent of adults in
1955. See “Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza (KPSS),” in ibid., 176.
47. V. I. Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” in Lenin, Collective
Works, 26:113.
48. This is the central argument of Liliana Riga’s study, The Bolsheviks and the
Russian Empire.
49. Oleg Kapchinskii, “Sotsialnyi i partiinyi sostav tsentralnogo apparata
OGPU v 1920-e gody,” Rossiiskaia istoriia no. 1 (2007): 93–101; Oleg Kapchin-
skii, Gosbezopasnost’ iznutri: Natsionalnyi i sotsialnyi sostav (Moscow: EKSMO,
2005).
50. D. S. Khmeknitskii, “Mif industrializatsii. Plany piatiletok i zhil’e dlia
stroitelei sotsializma,” in Pravda Viktora Suvorova: Okonchatelnoe reshenie, ed. D.
S. Khmeknitskii (Moscow: Iauza, 2009), 351–84.
51. T. A. Kiriushkona, “Zhilishchnaia politika v SSSR v 30-e gody XX veka
(po materialam Penzenskogo kraiia),” Izvestiia PGPU im. V. G. Belinskogo, no. 23
(2011): 458.

Gerasimov.indd 245 11/16/2017 5:29:29 PM

 246 Notes to pp. 185–188

52. Even in Moscow, in 1912 the density of inhabitants per housing unit aver-
aged 8.7 people—more than twice that in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, or London. See
Mazanik, “The City as a Transient Home,” 62–63.
53. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary
Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Elena Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in
Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941, ed. Kate Transchel (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).
54. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 355, 365, 367.
55. Ibid., 360.
56. Dietmar Neutatz, Die Moskauer Metro: Von den ersten Plänen bis zur Gross-
baustelle des Stalinismus (1897–1935) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), ch. 1.
57. M. P. Viatkin, Gornozavodskoi Ural v 1900–1917 gg. (Moscow: Nauka,
1965), 326–27.
58. See Ilya Gerasimov, “Becoming a Soviet Plebeian Subject: The Story of
Mark Miller Narrated by Himself,” Ab Imperio 18, no. 1 (2017): 183–210.
59. For a powerful presentation of this argument, see Timothy Snyder, Blood-
lands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
60. See Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith, eds., Soviet State and Society under
Nikita Khrushchev (New York: Routledge, 2009).
61. This historiographic turn was generated by the application of Foucauldian
theoretical schemes in a very specific interpretation, which was dominant in the
United States in the early 1990s, to the field of Russian studies. Laura Engelstein
played a crucial role here with her seminal The Keys to Happiness. A direct geneal-
ogy of the early Soviet ideological project from the radical intelligentsia tradition
of the 1860s is explicitly elaborated in Irina Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the
Soviet Experience,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4
(Fall 2002): 577–610; and Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Rus-
sia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002).
62. Most prominently articulated by Sheila Fitzpatrick, for instance, in her
Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1932 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1979) and her edited collection Cultural Revolution in
Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
63. On the conservative nature of the early Soviet regime as a counterrevolu-
tionary reaction to the late imperial epistemological revolution, see Ilya Gerasimov,
Marina Mogilner, and Sergey Glebov, “Hybridity: Marrism and the Problems of
Language of the Imperial Situation,” Ab Imperio 17, no. 1 (2016): 27–68.
64. This hypothesis also explains the failure of the Soviet “propaganda state”
as diagnosed by David Brandenberger: the predominantly plebeian Soviet society

Gerasimov.indd 246 11/16/2017 5:29:30 PM

 Notes to pp. 188–191 247

could not be effectively mobilized by any discources (“propaganda”) alone, with-

out the “practical” instrument of mass terror. See David Brandenberger, Pro-
paganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin,
1927–1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
65. The phenomenon that has been dubbed “Stalin’s pact with the intelligen-
tsia” after Sheila Fitzpatrick’s work. See in particular her The Cultural Front: Power
and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992),
ch. 7, “Stalin and the Making of a New Elite.”
66. See Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
67. See Donald J. Raleigh, trans. and ed., Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet
Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006); Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and
Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Denis
Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds., The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during
the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
68. Turgenev, The Novels, 355–56.
69. Cf., “Donald Trump attracted a large share of the vote from whites without
a college degree, receiving 72 percent of the white non-college male vote and 62
percent of the white non-college female vote, according to CNN exit polls. Simi-
larly, in the United Kingdom’s June referendum on its European Union member-
ship, 75 percent of voters with a post-secondary degree voted to remain in the
EU while 73 percent of voters without one voted to leave the EU.” Clara Hen-
drickson and William A. Galston, “The Educational Rift in the 2016 Election,”
The Brookings Institution, November 18, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/
fixgov/2016/11/18/educational-rift-in-2016-election/. By itself, education level
correlates very loosely with specific political views, but it is linked more closely to
the mode of processing information and the ability to actively (and thus critically)
engage public discourses.

Gerasimov.indd 247 11/16/2017 5:29:30 PM

Gerasimov.indd 248 11/16/2017 5:29:30 PM
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National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART), Kazan, Russia

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Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), St. Petersburg, Russia

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State Archive of the Nizhegorod Region (GANO), Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

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 Index

action directe (direct action), 70, 108–12, Bolsheviks, 172, 174, 176–79, 183–86,
117–19 188, 190, 195n21
Adelman, Jeremy, 173 Bourdieu, Pierre, 27
Aksakov, Constantin, 2 brothel, 47, 77, 92–94, 97–102,
Aksakov, Ivan, 2 112–13, 223n63, 224n64, 224n65,
Amirhan, Fatih, 77 227n108, 227n109
anarchists, 35–38, 45, 109–10, 113,
119, 137, 207n65, 229n5 cart drivers, 105, 120, 122–23, 126,
anomie, 16, 75, 118, 148–50, 236n64 128, 134, 135, 203n31
anonymous letters, 13, 33–52, 62, 67, Catholics, 23, 88, 93, 98, 102, 105, 130
93, 109 Carter, Nick (fictional detective), 40,
aphasia, 3, 171, 175, 180, 181 208n78
archaism, 14, 59, 82, 85–87, 89, 91, city, imperial, 4, 10, 14, 19, 131, 147,
98, 102, 104, 107, 109, 176, 181, 196n37
219n23. See also tradition civil society, 52–54, 197n37
Armenians, 13, 61, 69, 88, 116, 118, class: lower, 2, 4, 5, 14, 16, 20, 25, 34,
126, 169, 220n30 50, 59, 102, 111, 122, 150, 154,
Arsène Lupin (fictional detective), 40 174, 195; middle, 19, 80, 94, 96,
artisans, 13, 103, 106, 118 107, 166, 171, 189; social, 4, 15, 19,
51–54, 173, 178; upper, 3, 6, 66, 188
Babel, Isaac, vii, 19, 34–36, 38, 44, 103, colonization (colonial rule, domination),
137, 165–66 2, 3, 10, 91, 193
Baku (city and province), 30, 88, 89, counterfeiting, 60, 83, 134–36, 141,
127, 205n38, 206n47, 220n31 159
Barthes, Roland, 18, 25, 206n52 court statistics, 60, 72, 143–45, 158,
Belarusians, 83–84, 88, 91, 93, 98, 105, 161, 240n118. See also crime rate
126, 143 craftsmen, 80, 138
Białystok, 98–102, 110–11, 127, crime rate, 72, 82. See also court statistics
226n98 criminality: 12, 16, 33, 59, 143, 149,
Blok, Anton, 117 152, 159; ethnoconfessional, 11, 28,
body language: 15, 127, 131, 132 29, 135; professional, 51, 60, 82,
body politics (as language), 15, 79, 108, 113; social practice, 28
117, 180, 181 crowd, 150–53, 161, 185, 187

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 270 Index

deafness (physical and symbolical), 1, 2, 7–8, 16–17, 171, 179–81, 185; as

13, 15, 25, 61, 171, 175–83, 190 metaphor, 5–6, 9–13, 25, 34, 175–
Deminskii, Fedor, 81, 82, 86–90, 107, 77, 182, 190–91
220n31 Glebov, Sergey, viii, 58
Dewey, John, 169 Gorky, Maxim, 54, 174, 175
direct action, 114, 173, 174. See also Groznyi, 76
action directe
discourses: borrowed by plebeians, 15, Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 4
42, 45, 46, 50–54, 94, 112, 113, Hartley, L. P., 1, 18
132; divorce with social practice, hegemony, 3, 104
71–72, 74, 76, 80, 84, 91–93, 107, Hobsbawm, Eric, 53
108, 173, 188; economic, 98; of homosexuality, 24
ethnicity, 11, 28, 71, 91, 121; forging honorary citizens, 13, 74, 157–60, 164
social cohesion, 14, 23; influenced by housemaids, 13, 21, 93, 100, 130
practice, 77; isolation from, 26, 31,
32, 87, 128, 155; Soviet ideology as Iliashenko, Nikolai, 45, 64, 66, 71
hegemonic discourse, 181, 182, 184, illegality: concept, 16, 17, 149–52, 164–
187, 188, 190 65, 169, 183, 236n69; persistence
post-1917, 172, 177–79, 181, 187;
Eley, Geoff, 4 in plebeian society, 136, 156, 158–62
elite: educated, 52–53, 67, 78, 129, 171; “infamous men”: concept, 6, 7, 9, 14,
imperial (colonial), 190; middle-class, 55, 190; and discursive sphere, 34,
96, 113, 175, 185, 188; social, 2–3, 51, 94; and historical sources, 9, 11,
6, 104, 118; Soviet, 174, 184, 189 25–26, 28, 92; and violence, 127
estrangement (ostranenie), 1, 18 information: communicating, 9, 23,
ethnicity, 11, 16, 20, 27, 75–76, 90, 108; handling by mass media, 28, 29,
110, 120, 139, 153, 155, 166–68; 64; processing, 6, 7, 79, 128
and criminality, 143, 145; and intellectuals (intelligentsia), 3, 52, 54,
discrimination, 78, 149, 152; 63, 86, 188, 189
politicization of, 63–71, 85, 110–11,
132; and violence, 15, 162, 187, Jews (Jewishness): in 1905 riots,
198n42 68–71; breaking customs, 78,
95; and commercial ads, 26, 66;
Foucault, Michel, 5–7, 9, 11, 14, 25, crime statistics, 143–44; crime
29, 94; and coercion, 179–81; and victims, 156–58; criminals, 124,
illegality, 16, 149, 236n69; and 126, 143–44, 152–55; impossible
sexuality, 96, 225n76 to operationalize, 156; inter-
ethnoconfessional relationships,
Geertz, Clifford, 8, 92 73–75, 91, 102, 105, 106, 148, 151;
gender, 87, 91, 95, 103, 129, 158 intergroup liaisons, 93, 129–31,
Geraci, Robert, 71 164–66; as militants, 110–13;
Gerasim (main protagonist of Ivan military service evasion, 159; national
Turgenev’s novella Mumu), 1–3, movements, 10, 84–85; the Pale of

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 Index 271

Settlement, 10; and prostitution, 151–53, 173, 187; text compatible,

91, 93, 94, 96, 98–101; in public 52, 110, 176
discourse, 16, 26, 28, 31, 32, 66, 72, Leblanc, Maurice, 40
77, 91, 94, 97, 155; share in urban Lenin, Vladimir, 175, 177–78, 184
population, 10, 57, 83–85; social Lithuania (Lithuanian lands), 10
networks, 137–40; and violence, Lithuanians, 83–85, 87, 89, 91, 105,
114–19, 124, 126, 129–31 106, 143
local knowledge, 3, 31–33, 52–54, 79,
Kaganovich, Lazar, 190 92, 97; integrating, 103, 124, 171,
Kaunas, 98, 101 172
Kazan (city and province): 1905 riot, Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 178
68–69; anonymous letters, 45;
crime patterns, 136, 138, 147, 149, Magnitogorsk, 185
152, 154, 162–64; crime statistics, Mari (Mari language), 56
60, 144; documents, 159–60; marriage, 77, 127, 129, 164, 165,
ethnoconfessional relationships, 240n126; advertisements, 166–68
61–67, 70–76, 78–79, 164–65, Medick, Hans, 53, 80
169; periodicals, 64; police, 29–30; merchants: as crime victims, 37, 40, 45,
population, 4, 19–20, 28, 57, 150, 73–76, 115–16, 120–2, 137–38; and
151; social transformation, 157; intergroup conflicts, 69; social status,
violent crimes, 119–28, 161 157; trade practices, 66, 106, 141,
Kharkiv, 10 216n102
Kherson (city and province), 38, meshchane, 4, 58, 105, 112, 157, 164.
144 See also town commoners
Khmelnitskii (Chmelnizki), Dmitrii, middle ground: as common space,
185 60, 79, 105; concept of Richard
Khrushchev, Nikita, 187, 190 White, 58–59; and creative
Kotkin, Stephen, 185, 186 misunderstanding, 13, 63, 72, 75,
Kotovskii, Grigorii, 119 108, 152; social practice, 14, 15, 70,
Kovno. See Kaunas 73, 80, 86, 92, 118, 132–33, 172,
187
language: of historical documents, migrants: city and society, 129, 148,
38, 39, 44, 45, 48; of law and 161, 165, 197n37; marginal legal
scholarship, 72, 91, 118, 179; status, 37, 38, 113, 159–60, 226n98;
nonverbal, of self-expression, 2, 8, 9, mobility, 4, 13, 19, 54, 83, 138;
15, 23, 24, 27, 51, 163, 175, 180; morale, 50, 124, 127, 137; share in
of public discourses and tropes, 3–4, urban population, 20, 57, 58, 94,
6, 25, 61, 66, 71, 79, 86, 157, 190; 211n10; socialization practices, 24,
of social practices, 11, 13, 24, 28, 59, 79, 111, 119, 188
96, 101, 103, 108, 109, 113, 117, military draft and draft dodging, 5,
124, 125, 172–74, 183; spoken by 47–49, 221n37
different groups, 13, 20, 23, 52, Minin, Kuz’ma, 56; newspaper, 64, 65,
56, 62, 78, 94, 102, 105–6, 125, 213n46

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 272 Index

Minsk, 95, 97, 100 77, 158; violent crimes, 121, 125,
modernity (modernization): of city, 145–46
84, 87, 149; as epistemological noblemen, 66, 105, 157–58, 160,
regime, 3, 107; global, 19, 78–79, 97, 214n61
133, 181, 188–90; politics of, 81, 89,
177, 188 Odessa, 10; anonymous letters, 34–45,
Mogilner, Marina, viii, 195 51; crime patterns, 96, 109–13, 136–
moral economy, 8, 12, 128, 134, 178, 37, 139–42, 156–59; crime statistics,
179 60, 144, 162; ethnoconfessional
Mordvins (Mordvin language), 56, 57 relationships, 148–52, 166–68,
Mumu, the dog, 2, 8, 11, 15, 34, 176, 240n126; police, 29, 31–32, 154;
179–81 periodicals, 28, 167; population, 19,
murder, 68, 69, 115–17, 120–123, 225n77, 238n102; reputation, 91,
146, 227n107; as body politics, 15, 95; violent crimes, 114–17, 119,
117–18, 123, 124; in crime statistics, 125–26, 129–31
60, 82–83, 109; threat of, 39–40, 42, OGPU (Soviet secret service), 184
114; in Turgenev’s Mumu, 7, 176, Old Believers, 56, 77, 98, 105, 162,
181 164, 169
Muslims: marriage, 128, 150, 164; Ottoman Empire, 116, 194
problem of interaction with, 23, 58; Ozouf, Mona, 53
in public discourse, 70–71, 76–79,
150; share in urban population, 10, patriarchality (social practice), 14, 82,
13, 121–22, 211n12 85–92, 95–97, 101–8, 118, 132–33,
172, 186–89, 198n40
nation, 84, 91, 111, 132; as discourse, peasants (legal estate): eroding legal
79, 85, 86, 91, 98, 118, 155, status, 135–36, 157–158, 160, 164;
166; ethnoconfessional, 2, 193n8; in multiethnic environment, 73–74,
operationalizing, 90, 148, 167 95, 122–23, 128, 153; share in urban
nationalism, 14, 85, 86, 89 population, 4, 159, 238n102; social
nationalist elite, 2, 26, 66; ideas, 54, 66, mobilization, 66, 105, 112, 184;
70, 91, 143, 155, 165, 168; mob, 68, turning into urbanites, 13, 58, 145,
69; mobilization, 71, 78, 85–89, 91, 188
143, 174; organizations, 70, 71, 78, peddlers, 5, 206n51
112; press, 28, 29, 63, 64, 65, 152 Petrazhitskii (Petrażycki), Leon, 178–79,
Nizhny Novgorod (city and province), 183
10; anonymous letters, 46–47; pickpockets, 74, 82, 96, 152–53, 158
cost of living, 20; crime patterns, plebeian society, 171–72, 189–91;
61–62, 73–74, 80, 134–36, 138–39, and 1917 Revolution, 173–75; as
160; crime statistics, 60, 82–83; backbone of the early Soviet regime,
ethnoconfessional relationships, 26, 184–91; as commonality of social
62–66, 68, 71, 78–79, 215n75; practices, 12–14, 16–17, 79–80, 87,
periodicals, 66, 72; police, 30, 154, 90–92, 113, 133, 157; diversity of,
206n47; population, 19, 56–57, 11, 66, 67, 105, 119, 153, 166; and

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 Index 273

discursive sphere, 24, 33–34, 52–56, sources, 26, 33; Soviet, 183–84, 186–
71, 107–9, 111, 128, 155, 160, 180; 87; violence, 117–19, 132, 180–81
as foundation of mass society, 133, Prakash, Gyan, 3, 9, 190
150, 165, 175–77; and illegality, prostitution: cases, 98–101; as
136–37, 144, 147, 159, 169, 178– employment, 95, 102, 224n66;
79; as lower classes, 4–6, 20, 46, legal status, 91–93; multiethnic
59, 156; and sexuality, 96, 103, 164, context, 90, 125, 165–66, 227n109;
168; and violence, 15, 109, 117, 129, in public discourse, 94, 97, 145; as
132 social practice, 103–5; statistics, 96,
pogrom, intercommunal (as form of 223n62, 224n67, 225n77, 226n98;
urban riot), 127, 161; 1905 in Baku, stigmatization and prosecution,
8, 220–21; 1905 in Kazan, 69–71; 47–48, 90, 157
1905 in Odessa, 31, 68; 1906 in Proust, Marcel, 18
Białystok, 110; and self-organization, public sphere: adapting to practices and
14; as threat, 112–13, 117, 156 local realities, 71, 73, 77–78, 87,
Poles (Polishness): and commercial signs, 92; coordinated through hegemonic
105–6; in crime statistics, 143; and discourses, 86, 181, 191; as elite
nationalism, 85, 86; in police force, phenomenon, 3, 4, 59, 67, 107, 171,
88–89; in reports, 66, 89–90, 95, 98, 173; limited to textual sphere, 25–26;
126; in urban population, 13, 83, 84, and local knowledge, 52; nation-
211n12, 223n62 centered, 165; partially accessible to
police, criminal: attitude toward, 49, plebeians, 51, 54, 61, 113; Soviet,
51; corruption, 29–30, 155; fake, 182–83, 186–87, 190; vehicle of
135, 153–57; indifference to societal cohesion, 118; Underground
discourses, 31–33, 153; organization, Russia, 207n57
29–30, 88, 92, 205n38, 206n47; purity, national, 11, 14, 65, 85, 91, 98
performance, 37, 60, 62, 63, 73–75, Pushkin, Alexander, 42
81–83, 93, 96, 112, 160, 217n2;
sources, 12–13, 25, 29, 35, 38, 61, race, 5, 67, 194n8
95, 110 raid (by bandits), 34–35, 37–39, 44,
population, urban, 4, 19–20, 56–57, 109, 115, 137
83–85, 94, 106, 144 rape, 15, 116, 125–29, 131–32
postcolonial scholarship, 2, 6, 7 rationality: economic, 80, 139–41, 157;
practice, social: of anonymous letters, of plebeian society, 53, 73, 133, 136;
50–51; approaches to study, 27, 202; of police, 33; of subalterns, 3, 9; of
and criminality, 59; and discourses, violence, 117
29, 35, 53, 59, 76, 86, 91, 97, 173; Reisner, Mikhail, 178, 179
as language, 8, 11–13, 15, 24, 54, 71, religion (confession), 14–16, 20, 23, 77,
113, 171–72, 175; middle ground, 90, 160–64, 182
60, 79–80, 92, 117; patriarchality, revolution: of 1905, 21, 68–69, 109,
85–87, 90, 92, 96, 102–3, 107–8; 162; of 1917, 18, 174, 175; imperial,
plebeian, 16–17; producing social 173–75; of legal system, 177–79;
cohesion, 105, 133, 149, 183; social, 165

Gerasimov.indd 273 11/16/2017 5:29:31 PM

 274 Index

revolutionary: groups, 32, 35, 63, 111– Siegel, Benjamin “Bugsy,” 117–18,
13; movement, 51, 118; rhetoric, 36, 230n35
37, 38, 45, 109–11, 119, 173, 176 signs, commercial, 26, 48, 66, 69, 105–
Riga, Liliana, 174 6, 114, 138, 228n113
ruble (buying power and income Slavophiles, 2, 10, 193n7
indicator), 20–21, 36, 39, 64, 75, social capital, 71, 127, 136–37, 158,
139, 141, 155, 200n11 163, 169, 241n139
Russian Empire, 10, 19, 55–58, 133 social mobility: and anomie, 148;
Russian Orthodox Christianity: downward, 157; horizontal, 172; and
interconfessional problems, 77, 164, population control, 159; and social
240n125; as marker of Russianness, transformation, 56–57, 102–5; and
57, 84, 193n8; in marriage ads, subalternity, 5; upward, 54, 176, 184,
167–68; sacrilege, 162; in taxonomy 186
of diversity, 13, 23, 78 Soviet Union (Soviet regime), 177, 179,
Russians (Russianness): in crime 181–84, 188–90
statistics, 143; criminality, 29; as Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2, 5, 7, 11,
ethnoconfessional nation, 2, 11, 190
23; intellectuals, 2–3, 52; inter- St. Petersburg, 4, 20, 31–32, 166
ethnoconfessional relationships, 69, Stalin, Joseph (Stalinism), 175, 180–88,
73–79, 93, 102–6, 119–21, 151, 190
169; intergroup liaisons, 165–68; Staliunas, Darius, 86
language, 23, 42, 48, 89, 153; Stauter-Halsted, Keely, 95, 98
nationalists, 26, 63–66, 70; among Stoler, Ann, 108
police, 88, 154; problematized as Stuchka, Petr, 178
category, 27, 55, 57–59, 77, 155–56, subalterns (subalternity): after 1917
170; and prostitution, 91, 98; in revolution, 172, 174, 176, 189–91;
public discourse, 62, 71–72, 77, 148; as plebeians, 4, 6, 128, 129; problem
share in urban population, 56, 57, of grouping, 11, 12; problem of self-
83; social dynamics, 157, 159, 164; expression, 8, 9, 10, 34, 51, 61, 94;
and violence, 110, 112, 114–16, and social practices, 13, 14; theory, 3,
121–26, 162–63 5, 7; in Turgenev’s Mumu, 2
subjectivity: plebeian, 5, 8, 22, 25,
secondary modeling system, 23–24, 26, 37, 191; Soviet, 176, 182; Soviet
67, 131 plebeian, 187; of state institutions,
self-organization: concept, 14–17, 133, 33
149, 197n37; of Jewish militants; Sylvester, Roshanna, 53
of police, 31; of Russianness, 59; in
Soviet society, 177, 179, 188; of trade Tatars (Tatarness): as a category, 155–56,
unions, 105 166; in crime statistics, 144; inter-
Semyonov, Alexander, viii ethnoconfessional relationships, 26,
sexuality, 91, 96, 103, 108 27, 40, 70–72, 74–78, 119–28, 164–
Shklovsky, Viktor, 1, 18 65, 169–70; intragroup relationships,
shop assistants, 20–21, 36, 45, 47, 104 138; in public discourse, 28, 61,

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 Index 275

62, 63, 67, 78–79; share in urban crime patterns, 136, 159, 162;
population, 10, 56, 57 crime statistics, 82–83, 144;
Tbilisi, 103, 205 ethnoconfessional relationships,
terror: anarchist, 35, 37, 45; as body 84, 86–90, 93, 105, 125; police,
politics, 180; epistolary, 35, 44, 49; 29, 81–82, 88–89, 92, 96, 154;
Red, 178–80, 244n35; revolutionary, population, 83–85, 94, 106, 144;
109; Stalinist, 181, 182, 184, 189, prostitution, 91–101; reputation, 86,
190 91, 96; social dynamics, 87, 91, 92,
textuality, 4, 51, 52, 57, 166, 187 95, 103, 105, 106; violent crimes,
thieves, 73, 74, 120, 142, 147, 162, 179 126, 158
Thompson, E. P., 34, 52, 104 violence: during 1905 riots, 68–70;
Tiflis. See Tbilisi communication function, 24, 59,
town commoners, 13, 21, 104, 105, 108, 117–19, 124, 184; daily, 114,
158. See also meshchane 115, 161, 162, 164; discursive
tradition: in ethnoconfessional ethnicization of, 28, 119; ethnically
settlement patterns, 78, 121, 123, marked, 62, 115–18, 121, 124,
169, 228n109; moral order, 96, 128, 198n42; low threshold, 23, 120;
129, 150, 169; of perception, 3, meanings, 15, 75, 114, 129, 131,
14, 53, 70, 153; as religious norms, 132, 172, 180, 189; sexual, 125–131;
23, 70, 77, 91, 94, 131, 161; of social practice, 6, 132, 172, 180,
revolutionary poetics, 35, 38; of 183–84, 187; of state terror, 181;
scholarship, 1, 6, 27, 33, 178; as symbolic, 35–38, 46, 51, 163;
social order, 11, 84–87, 148, 160; as revolutionary, 109, 111, 112, 179
socioeconomic niches, 93, 94, 97. See
also archaism waiters, 21
trust, 14, 50, 136–40, 143, 150, 169, white slavery, 97–99, 101, 102,
182 226n82
Turgenev, Ivan, 1–3, 6–8, 11, 16, 171, White, Richard, 58, 78
180–81, 190 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 27
workers, 13, 32, 63, 74, 105, 121, 136;
Ukraine (Ukrainian lands), 10, 30, 98, in Soviet plebeian society, 173, 175,
162 178, 184, 185
Ukrainians: among anarchists, 110;
lumped with Russians in statistics, Yiddish: in anonymous letters: 42, 49;
83, 143; in social interactions, 66, on commercial signs, 105, 106; in
114–16, 126, 130, 131, 152, 155 social interactions, 97, 99, 101,
Union of the Russian People, 63–65, 70 102, 119, 151; speakers in urban
population, 223n62
Vilna. See Vilnius
Vilnius (city and province), 10; Zalesskii, Vladislav, 66
anonymous letters, 47–51, 93; Znamenskii-Moor, 156, 214n61

Gerasimov.indd 275 11/16/2017 5:29:31 PM

Covering the interrevolutionary decade of 1906–16 in imperial Russia, this book

PLEBEIAN MODERNIT Y
tells the story of the “silent majority” of urban inhabitants in four major cities:
Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania), Odessa (in today’s Ukraine), Kazan, and Nizhny
Novgorod. Representatives of underprivileged social groups made up some ninety
percent of city populations during this period, yet produced hardly one percent of the ILYA GERASIMOV
surviving written sources. These people, many of them migrants from the countryside,
usually did not read newspapers, rarely authored written documents, and had little
exposure to public discourse. They often did not even speak a common language.
Our understanding of this population has until recently been based largely on
interpretations by educated observers (journalists, legal experts, scholars). whose
testimonies reflected the cultural stereotypes of the time. This book bypasses such
mediation, arguing that we can come to know the authentic voices of urban
commoners by reading their social practices as a nonverbal language. Toward that
end, author Ilya Gerasimov closely examines newspaper criminal chronicles,
police reports, and anonymous extortion letters, reconstructing typical social practices
among this segment of Russian society. The resulting picture represents the distinctive
phenomenon of a “plebeian modernity,” one that helped shape the outlook of early
Soviet society.

“Plebeian Modernity attempts to answer a key historical question: how can we make the
lower classes in previous centuries ‘talk’ before these lower classes had the ability or
the wish to express themselves in writing and before the invention of oral history
projects? Highly readable, the book is a major contribution to the scholarship on the
history of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the old
order was challenged by different aspects of modernization.”
—Christoph Mick, University of Warwick 

“This book is the most innovative and theoretically engaged work on modern Russia
I have read in recent years. It will become a classic work in the field. Imaginative,
erudite, and written in highly readable prose, Plebeian Modernity is an outstanding work
that will make a major impact on the field of Russian history.”
—Serhy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria

ILYA GERASIMOV is a founding editor of Ab Imperio. He holds a PhD in Russian

history from Rutgers University. GERASIMOV PLEBEIAN
MODERNIT Y
Cover image: Three generations posed outdoors at the Zlatoust arms plant, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, 1910.
Photograph by Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,
LC-DIG-prokc-20542.

Cover design by Rosemary Shojaie.

Social Practices, Illegality,

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916
www.urpress.com