Victims of the Social Temperament: Prostitution, Migration and the Traffic in Women from Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, 1885-1935

ABSTRACT

The early twentieth century was the apogee of what historians have come to call a ‘white slavery’ panic, a period in which long term anxieties about the social dangers and moral ambiguities of sex work metamorphosed into an intense philanthropic, public and state focus on forced migration for the purposes of prostitution. This dissertation investigates the origins of ‘the traffic in women’ as a social problem in imperial Russian and Soviet law and society, connecting it to emergent regimes of transnational biopolitics at the fin-de-siècle and through the interwar years.  This period was one in which state and social understandings of the subject’s freedom, to move across borders or to consent to sex, were being reconceptualized.  I argue that the traffic in women, as a legal category and cultural discourse, was key to this process of reconceptualization, as it became a heuristic for making sense of the entanglement of legality, clandestinity, consent and coercion operational in cross border migration, particularly that which involved sex work, in an age of rapid globalization. Consequently, this dissertation helps us to understand how certain conceptions of gendered and sexualized bodies have become central to questions of state security and sovereignty.

Officials, activists and philanthropists in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union developed modes of dealing with this perceived crisis that combined rehabilitatory and carceral approaches to women who sold sex, as well as single female migrants. Through these modes of rule, governments and social activists could claim to be rescuing women by submitting them to increasingly interventionist and even violent state power.   I argue that this mode of (authoritarian) governmentality was not a Russian ‘special path’ but stemmed from the interventionist logics of the international anti-trafficking movement itself, supposedly a paradigmatic liberal humanitarian cause.  By making this point I do not argue that Russia was a liberal state but that liberalism was itself an incomplete project in the West, an observation borne out when we examine the emphasis the interwar League of Nations ‘Traffic in Women Committee’ placed on the securitization of borders and deportation of foreign prostitutes.  Ultimately, Russia’s shared heritage of ‘modern’ state practices makes binary oppositions and claims of special paths of limited utility.