by James Millar
NATALIE O. KONONENKO
PROSTITUTION
Until the mid-eighteenth century, Russian authorities treated prostitution as a crime against morality and public decorum, and enacted laws and decrees to keep prostitutes invisible and isolated. Nevertheless, contemporary observers often remarked the presence of prostitutes in Moscow and, by the early eighteenth century, in the new capital of St. Petersburg. In the late 1700s prostitutes became regarded more as sources of venereal disease, and policies changed accordingly. The first attempts to reduce the medical danger associated with prostitutes took place during the reign of Catherine the Great, with the designation of a hospital in St. Petersburg for their confinement.
The nineteenth century brought the rise of a system of medical and police regulation to control prostitutes in terms of both their public behavior and the threat they represented to public health. In 1843 Tsar Nicholas I’s minister of internal affairs subjected prostitution to surveillance based on a European model of inscription, inspection, and incarceration. Ministry guidelines called for licensing brothels, registering streetwalkers, regular medical examinations for women identified as prostitutes, and compulsory hospitalization for those apparently suffering from venereal disease. Prostitution remained officially illegal, but the ministry’s regulations superseded the law so long as prostitutes registered their trade and brothels were under police supervision. Thus, medical-police 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.
LAURIE BERNSTEIN
PROTAZANOV, YAKOV ALEXANDROVIC
(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
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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.
DENISE J. YOUNGBLOOD
PROTESTANTISM
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 Shtundi
sts, 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 recognized structure, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), and scattered autonomous congregations of such denominations as Lutherans and Methodists, primarily in the Baltic republics, and German Baptists in Siberia. AUCECB claimed to comprise five thousand protestant congregations.
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After 1991, Protestants expanded their activity within Russian society. At the end of 2000 the Russian Ministry of Justice reported that there were about 3,800 officially registered Protestant congregations in Russia, out of more than 20,000 religious organizations in the Russian Federation. These included 1,500 congregations of Baptists, 1,300 Pentecostals, 560 Adventists, and 200 Lutherans. Sociological surveys estimated that Protestants, at approximately one million, constituted about two-thirds of one percent of the total population of the Russian Federation. See also: CATHOLICISM; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH the chief protectress of all connected with Rasputin. And so, in the words of one historian, “a man verging on insanity remained at the head of the Ministry of Interior until the Revolution. This case gives the measure of the decadence of the bureaucratic system.” See also: NICHOLAS II; RASPUTIN, GRIGORY YEFIMOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ferro, Marc. (1993). Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars. New York: Oxford University Press. Florinsky, Michael T. (1931). The End of the Russian Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
NICHOLAS V. RIASANOVSKY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Billington, James. (1966). Icon and the Axe. New York: Random House. Heard, Albert F. (1887). Russian Church and Russian Dissent. New York: Harper Brothers. Heier, Edmund. (1970). Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, 1860-1900: Radstockism and Pashkovism. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff. Sawatsky, Walter. (1981). Soviet Evangelicals since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.
PAUL D. STEEVES
PROTOPOPOV, ALEXANDER DMITRIEVICH
(1866-1918), minister of the interior, 1916-1918.
A member of an upper-class family, mentioned in Russian historical records from mid-sixteenth century, Alexander Dmitrievich Protopopov had an honorable, if not distinguished, career in the zem-stvo (local self-government), and he also served in the third and fourth Duma, indeed as vice president from 1914. A left-wing Octobrist by party affiliation, Protopopov was active in the formation of the Progressive Bloc of deputies. His appointment as minister of the interior in September 1916 was not inappropriate, and it could even be considered as an effort by Nicholas II to go beyond narrow court circle and extreme rightist ideologies. Yet it proved to be a total disaster for two reasons: It foregrounded Protopopov’s connection with the notorious Rasputin, and it coincided with the onset of mental illness. The emperor wanted to dismiss his new minister, but he was blocked by the empress,
PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
The Provisional Government is most often remembered for its weakness and its inability to prevent the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 or to manage the mass movements that ensured the victory of Vladmir Lenin. The experience and meaning of the Provisional Government are not well understood, however, and indeed the same might be said for the February Revolution as a whole. Certain basic facts about the Provisional Government should be stated at the outset. It was the product of a long and intricate process of prerevolutionary party and parliamentary politics that came to a head during World War I just prior to the outbreak of the revolution. It was a government that went through several transformations, from a largely liberal cabinet to a coalition of liberals, socialists, and populists, and finally to a crisis-driven statist cabinet led by Alexander Kerensky that barely could express its moderately socialist ideological underpinnings.
The Provisional Government was formed during the February days as a result of negotiations between the Temporary Duma Committee and the Petrograd Soviet. The Provisional Government was in fact an executive authority, or cabinet, headed by a minister president, that governed through the inherited ministerial apparatus of the old regime. It had legislative authority as well. Although the Provisional Government claimed power and the mantle of legitimacy, it was never clear during its brief eight-month existence whether this legitimacy
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derived from the Revolution or from inherited continuities of power or a mixture of the two. The first Provisional Government was clearly a product of the old regime Duma and its factional politics. But the new government chose not to base its authority on a Duma elected under prerevolutionary laws (its leadership, in any case, did not want to share power with certain Duma eminences and parties), and in official terms, at least, the Duma was pushed to the sidelines with no official status in the new governing structures (though it did continue to operate during 1917).
The First Provisional Government cabinet consisted largely of Cadets (Andrei Shingarev, Paul Miliukov), but it included Progressists (Mikhail Tereshchenko), Octobrists (Alexander Guchkov), and one nominal Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky. The minister president was Prince Georgy Lvov, a romantic activist who had made his mark during the war as head of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and Towns and the Red Cross. As minister of foreign affairs, Miliukov stood firmly on the side of the Allies in their demand for Russia’s continued participation in the war. Mil-iukov believed in the war aims of the tsar’s government because he championed the state above all (albeit a rule-of-law state) and detested German authoritarianism and imperialism, so it was no leap to continue fighting alongside the democratic Western powers. Guchkov, as minister of war, shared this view and attempted to stave off what turned out to be a mass army mutiny during the course of 1917.
The first Provisional Government enunciated its revolutionary program in a declaration on March 8. The primary goal was to establish the rule of law and representative government based upon universal suffrage, self-government, and breaking the traditional power of the bureaucracy and police. The declaration also called for freedom of conscience and religion, reform of the judiciary and education, and lifting of the onerous restrictions upon the empire’s nationalities. The final form of Russia’s statehood was to be determined at a Constituent Assembly. The Provision
al Government, in its various cabinets, tried to attain these goals. However, the revolution was unforgiving and the range of problems was so great that the government found itself adopting statist positions as it tried to maintain authority, prepare for the late spring offensive promised to the Allies, and adjudicate the multitude of social and political demands unleashed by the revolution. Continuation of the war brought on the first government power crisis in April, and this led to the formation of the first of a series of coalition cabinets that included socialist ministers from the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties. Effective Bolshevik propaganda and use of symbolic fields of discourse for revolutionary ends made these more moderate socialists, now co-opted within the boundaries of power, look responsible for the deepening crisis in every sphere of public life. The Provisional Government implemented reforms in self-government, labor relations, and the judiciary. It established a grain monopoly and set the stage for many subsequent Bolshevik administrative and economic policies. Thus it was hardly a “bourgeois” government, but it was made to look so. Perhaps its greatest domestic failures were its inability to solve the land question on short notice and in the midst of revolution and, of course, its weak and perhaps idealistic approach to modern nationalism and the explosive new desires of the empire’s non-Russians for self-determination. Its efforts in these and other areas were inadequate to stem the revolutionary tide.
The government finally collapsed under the strange leadership of Alexander Kerensky. A Socialist Revolutionary, he came to power in July in the midst of what turned out to be a failed military offensive. His leadership was marked by ill-conceived adventurism (the Kornilov Affair) and a clear desire to act as and represent himself as an executive strong man. See also: FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; KERENSKY, ALEXANDER FYODOROVICH; KORNILOV AFFAIR; OCTOBER REVOLUTION
