Introduction
This chapter maps prostitution onto the shifting social, political, and economic landscape of modernizing Russia. It outlines the system for the regulation of prostitution in the Russian Empire and pays attention to the significant expansion of the system during late nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization. The chronological setting of the study is analysed as a period of flux, in which social identities, cultural practices, and traditional gender roles were destabilized. Amid this fluctuation, the imperial authorities attempted to tighten their grip over the Empire’s vast lower class population, using emerging technologies (such as photography, fingerprinting, and statistical analysis) to ‘know’ and monitor those at the social margins. Women who sold sex were certainly one key focus of this attention, as local police forces attempted to compile accurate records of their names, ages, addresses, social classes, and ethnicities. Thereafter, the chapter explores how the Russian imperial state attempted to enforce a paternalistic relationship between those in authority and their subjects. Official approaches to the Empire’s lower classes combined strict discipline with custodial care and supervision. This paternalism was at the heart of the state regulation of prostitution, under which officialdom monitored the bodies and behaviour of registered prostitutes, and to a certain extent, their clients and managers.