regulation was in place even before Russia’s serfs had been emancipated and before Russia’s cities grew in response to policies promoting industrialization in the late nineteenth century.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s burgeoning civil society considered both prostitu1237
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tion and its regulation major social and political problems. Physicians, jurists, feminists, socialists, temperance advocates, philanthropists, and elected local authorities seized on this issue to advance their political agendas and to aid working-class women. Nonetheless, despite charges that regulation fostered police corruption, oppressed women from the lower classes, and made little sense in light the lack of an effective cure for venereal diseases and the lack of controls over prostitutes’ clients, medical-police surveillance remained official policy until the Provisional Government that emerged in February 1917 declared its abolition. The Bolsheviks also rejected regulation, heeding its critics and, like other socialist theorists, considering prostitution a transient symptom of industrial capitalism.
Prostitution, however, did not disappear during the Soviet era; it remained a viable source of income and favors. During the Civil War of 1917-1922, authorities were known to treat prostitutes as “labor deserters,” but a more laissez-faire attitude emerged during the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-1928), with its toleration of private trade. Under the presumption that prostitutes could be rehabilitated through manual labor, the Soviet government dispatched former prostitutes to sanitariums and made a distinction between prostitutes, who were regarded as victims, and other individuals who profited from the sex trade. Yet authorities still associated prostitutes with disease and disorder; repression became the practice once NEP ended. Soviet officials claimed that prostitution disappeared, but it simply went underground, prosecuted under categories pertaining to labor desertion and illegal income.
Not until the 1980s, during the relative openness of Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure, was prostitution again acknowledged as a social problem. Economic instability, persistent gender inequality, and prostitution’s attraction as a source of income all combined to increase the numbers of prostitutes in late- and post-Soviet Russia. Correspondingly, some municipal authorities resurrected regulation, presuming that it would prevent the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. See also: FEMINISM; GLASNOST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernstein, Laurie. (1995). Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1989). “St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Personal and Social Profile.” Russian Review 48:21-44. Engelstein, Laura. (1988). “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes.” Journal of Modern History 60:458-495. Healey, Dan. (2001). “Masculine Purity and ‘Gentlemen’s Mischief: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution between Russian Men, 1861-1941.” Slavic Review 60:233-265. Stites, Richard. (1983). “Prostitute and Society in Pre-Revolutionary Russia.” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Os-teuropas 31:348-364.
(1881-1945), film director.
A highly successful moviemaker both before and after the revolutions of 1917, Yakov Alexan-drovich Protazanov began his career in 1907 as an actor and scriptwriter, becoming a director in 1911. In 1913 he and Vladimir Gardin co-directed the biggest box-office sensation of early Russian cinema, The Keys to Happiness, based on Anastasia Ver-bitskaya’s best-selling novel.
Protazanov was the master of the cinematic melodrama. While he preferred to adapt his screenplays from popular literature, he also scored major hits with classics like War and Peace (1915), The Queen of Spades (1916), and Father Sergius (1918). His last Russian “sensation” before he emigrated to France in 1920 was Satan Triumphant (1917), which Soviet critics considered the epitome of bourgeois decadence.
Protazanov quickly established himself in the West and made six pictures before he returned to Soviet Russia in 1923. He worked for Mezhrabpom-Rus, a quasi-independent company that focused on profits as well as politics. Protazanov’s skillfully made, highly entertaining, and superficially politicized blockbusters gave the studio the profits it needed to support the more revolutionary (but less profitable) work of young Soviet filmmakers like Vsevolod Pudovkin.
Protazanov’s most important Soviet movies were Aelita (1924), His Call (1925), The Tailor from Torzhok (1925), The Case of the Three Million (1926), The Forty-First (1927), and Don Diego and Pelageia
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(1928). Throughout the 1920s, Protazanov displayed a finely tuned talent for social satire. He also introduced talented actors such as Nikolai Batalov, Igor Ilinsky, Anatoly Ktorov, and Yulia Solntseva to the Soviet screen.
Satire was definitely out of favor in the political climate of the 1930s. In the final decade of his long career in the movies, Protazanov marshalled his skills as an actor’s director to make “realist” movies, returning to the classics for his most notable success, Without a Dowry (1937). Protazanov’s history is one of the more remarkable survival tales in Soviet cinema. See also: MOTION PICTURES; VERBITSKAYA, ANASTASIA ALEXEYEVNA
Youngblood, Denise J. (1992). Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Youngblood, Denise J. (1999). The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Protestantism originally derived from the sixteenth-century Reformation movement begun in western Europe by Martin Luther and John Calvin.
The Reformation, the movement that gave rise to Protestantism, was particular to western Christendom. Russia, as a part of eastern Orthodox Christendom, never experienced an analogous development. Consequently Protestantism in Russia was an imported phenomenon rather than an indigenous product.
Two forms of Protestantism in Russia can be identified. The older form was introduced to Russia by European non-Russian ethnic groups. A later form emerged in the nineteenth century when ethnically Slavic people embraced teachings of European Protestants. Converts to the older form comprised people who moved at various times from Europe to Russia or who were conquered by Russian western expansion. Converts to the later form derived from missionary activity among Russians in the aftermath of the Alexandrine reforms of the mid-nineteenth century that produced groups who were variously called Shtundists, Baptists, Evangelical Christians, Adventists, and, in the twentieth century, Pentecostals.
Protestantism entered Muscovy during the reign of Ivan IV. Initially viewing Protestants favorably, the tsar permitted building two Protestant churches, one Lutheran and one Calvinist, in Moscow. But he came to view Protestantism as heretical and in 1579 ordered both churches destroyed. Protestantism was relegated to an enclave outside the city that came to be known as the “German suburb.”
Russia’s Protestant population grew in the eighteenth century when Russia conquered Estonia and Latvia, where many Lutherans lived, and when German colonists of Lutheran and Mennonite persuasions settled in south Russia at the invitation of Catherine II. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Protestant notions received some high-level support from Emperor Alexander I, who was fascinated with German pietism.
Only in the aftermath of the abolition of serfdom did Protestantism win substantial adherents within the Slavic population of Russia. This was the result of preaching activity-in St. Petersburg by the English Lord Radstock and in the Caucasus by Baltic Baptists-and of the influence of German colonists in the Ukraine. Russian Protestantism was institutionalized in the Russian Baptist Union in 1884. The official response to this development was expressed in harsh persecution predicated on Chief Procurator Konstantin Pobedonostev’s declaration, “there are not, and there cannot be, any Russian Baptists.”
Protestants benefited from the tsarist declaration of religious tolerance of 1905 and even more from the Bolshevik declaration of separation of church and state of 1917. By 1929 there were up to one million Protestants in the Soviet Union, less than 1 percent of the population.
Communist antireligious policy limited legal protestant activity between 1929 and 1989 to one formally
