Center for Gender Studies

This article examines how high command in the Soviet Red
Navy responded to reportedly high levels of venereal diseases
in the Black Sea fleet in the mid-1920s. Illness in the fleet posed
a threat to national security, especially during the first unstable
decade of the Soviet Union’s existence. Naval command
and the municipal authorities of the Crimean Autonomous
Soviet Socialist Republic (Crimean ASSR) targeted three main
points for reform: the source of infection, those who became
infected, and the urban space of Sevastopol. The majority of
studies of venereal diseases in military populations have been
situated within wartime, whereas this article explores the
construction of disease during peacetime to interrogate how
the naval and municipal authorities in the Black Sea justified
intervention into the private, and intimate, lives of sailors and
the wider population.

Prostitution flourished during Russia’s First World War. Mass mobilisation and the displacement of millions of the empire’s population challenged the tsarist state’s ability to control both the movement and bodies of those buying and selling sex. In light of this, military and medical authorities shifted their attention more directly onto regulating men's bodies. Wartime social turmoil also increased the visibility of prostitution, which saw many enlisted men lament the apparent ‘moral decline’ that they witnessed on the front. This article examines how the tsarist authorities grappled to control the bodies of its populace on Russia's western front, and how the conflict had an impact upon ideas of morality and sexuality.

ABSTRACT The existence of prostitution was embarrassing for the Soviet government. This was especially true after the end of the Second World War and the death of Josef Stalin, when the Cold War and global processes of decolonization were in full swing and the USSR competed for the supremacy of its version of state socialism on the world stage. Soviet officials claimed that social ills that plagued capitalist countries, like prostitution, did not exist in the USSR. Despite these confident declarations, Party officials at the central and regional level, law enforcement and medical workers, as well as ordinary Soviet citizens, were well aware that these statements were false, as prostitution was a permanent feature in Soviet cities in the long post-war period. This article examines Soviet state policies towards women engaged in sex work from the mid-1950s until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The article also explores how policing actually functioned in practice in major cities, paying particular attention to the Baltic capitals of Riga and Tallinn. This ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approach reveals how prostitution was entangled with the spatial politics of the long post-war era, and examines how Soviet citizens aided and resisted policing, motivated by ideological commitment, indifference or concern for their own financial gain.

Evgeniia Trifonova made her way into the soldiers' barracks at Kreslavka disguised as a military nurse. The chief of the Russian army's counterintelligence division identified her as an 'undocumented prostitute' from the city of Dvinsk, located around forty kilometres east of Kreslavka. 1 Trifonova had not only moved into a restricted military zone, but in wearing a nurse's uniform, she displaced herself from the binaries of 'loose' and 'honest' woman. As an 'undocumented prostitute', she was also working outside the Russian empire's system of tolerated prostitution. This article will examine the wider implications of Trifonova's case, namely the challenges faced by the tsarist government in its attempts to regulate the bodies of its populace during the First World War. During the conflict, the authorities grappled with the mass movement of troops and refugees, increasing levels of venereal diseases among military and civilian populations, and the heightened visibility of clandestine prostitution. These challenges destabilised the official gendering of responsibility for venereal disease transmission, and forced state officials to shift their attention away from the control of prostitutes' bodies onto the sexual lives of military personnel. This article uses responses to female heterosexual prostitution to examine how the tsarist authorities grappled to control the bodies of its populace on the Russian western front. The tsarist authorities introduced the regulation of female prostitution in 1843 with the official aim of preventing the spread of venereal diseases. The system never succeeded in meeting this objective, and instead, provided local authorities with a mechanism for monitoring the behaviour and movement of lower-class women. Under the system, women identified as prostitutes by the authorities had to register their

This article examines Soviet approaches to sexual health in the Brezhnev era (1964-1982), specifically venereal diseases (VD). After the death of Stalin, the Soviet leadership adopted new methods for regulating the behaviour of Soviet citizens based on collective adherence to specific moral codes. State ministries took tentative steps towards mass sex education. In the 1960s, the Soviet leadership relaunched the 'struggle with VD', a state-led campaign to drastically reduce rates of infection. This article explores the enactment of this campaign in the Latvian SSR, where VD cases exceeded all-union averages and where Party leadership adopted a stringent approach to perceived sexual misconduct.

Despite the proliferation of diverse historical research on commercial sex in recent years and the recognition of the continued political salience of the topic, prostitution has remained on the margins of the historiography of Europe. This special issue seeks to shift prostitution into the very centre of European history. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this issue encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and readjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. Historiography on prostitution in Europe has predominantly focused on state-regulated prostitution,which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The articles in this issue shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War. In this introduction, the editors sketch out key trends in state approaches to commercial sex in twentieth century Europe, focusing specifically on the law, policing practices and the gendered politics of labour.

This article looks to the societal and imperial margins to examine attitudes towards social welfare provision in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Drawing on archival material from the Empire's Estliand province (now northern Estonia), the article focuses on the self-representation of single mothers and official discussions of abandoned children. Society was in flux in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration served to undermine traditional social structures, mentalities and identities. These changes were accompanied by the disruption of the traditional patriarchal gender order, as well shifting ideas about who ought to be responsible for taking care of vulnerable groups. In rural Estliand, Estonian-speaking unmarried women sought engagement with Russian imperial judicial structures to secure child maintenance. In the early 1900s, anxieties about the social impacts of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation and the development of new currents in philanthropy, meant that care for foundlings and abandoned children became a burning issue in the minds of Estliand's provincial officials. Examining single mothers and child abandonment in Estliand illuminates tensions between empire-wide and local mechanisms for dealing with social issues, as well as shifting attitudes to gender, the family and charity in light of urbanisation and modernisation. In December 1910, a ticket inspector discovered an unaccompanied newborn baby in one of the third-class cars on the Pskov-Riga railway, a railroad line that cut through the region of the Russian Empire that comprises present-day Estonia. 1 The local police searched for the baby's mother and found Liza Laiden, who hailed from the Estonian countryside. Laiden admitted that she had given birth that day in a nearby town, but since the child was 'illegitimate' (nezakonnyi, literally translated as 'illegal') and the father refused to provide financial support, she made the snap decision to leave the child on the train in the hope that somebody else would take him to a foundling home. Laiden's child would have been classed as illegitimate under Russian imperial law because he had been conceived through the crime of fornication, defined in the criminal code as consensual sexual intercourse between heterosexual unmarried partners. 2 This article focuses on the two groups in the above case, single mothers and abandoned infants, to examine shifting perceptions about whose responsibility it was to take care of vulnerable groups in the final decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. Taking the case study of Estliand province (Estliandskaia guberniia,

The February revolution of 1917 brought about the complete collapse of the tsarist autocracy and offered multiple possibilities for the reorganisation of society based on new principles of democracy, equality and citizenship. Amid societal reconfiguration, the tsarist system for the regulation of prostitution was repealed in July 1917. After this, the Provisional Government and later the Bolshevik Party looked for new methods to prevent the spread of venereal diseases (VD), which had reached epidemic proportions. The regulation of prostitution had been the tsarist government’s main form of VD control and it was frequently attacked by commentators across the political spectrum on both medical and moral grounds in the decades preceding February 1917. Therefore, its abolition was a political project that was interconnected with broader discourses of liberation and efforts to rid society of the unwanted remnants of the old regime. Physicians rallied around the issue of prostitution, and...

Concern about the issue of forced prostitution reached its height in the Russian empire (as elsewhere in Europe and the Americas) at the turn of the twentieth century, as part of the wider international “white slave” panic. In 1909, new antiprocurement statutes were incorporated into the Russian empire’s Criminal Code to ensure that those who forced, coerced, or encouraged young women to enter the commercial sex industry felt the full force of the law. This article uses a case study of the Russian empire’s Estonian provinces (Estliand and Lifliand) to highlight the regional nature of Russian imperial experience. Prosecuting procurement was aligned with the priorities of local government, and the authorities in Revel’ (Tallinn) and Iu’rev (Tartu) used the issue of procurement to bolster their revenue. Here, the statutes gave the authorities additional tools for targeting individuals, such as managers of unlicensed brothels, who deprived the government of the income it generated from ...

In the years after 1905, catastrophic war, widespread political and social unrest, and rising demands from across all segments of the empire's population forced the Russian imperial state to develop a rudimentary social contract with military personnel and implement a series of reforms to prevent the reoccurrence of military disaster and mass social unrest. These reforms entitled disabled veterans to some forms of state support that were denied to their civilian counterparts, including assistance finding work, pensions, and free prosthetic devices. These entitlements were part of a broader shift away from paternalistic approaches to social welfare provision toward the early germinations of a gendered and selective welfare state. Disability support was dependent on proximity to the military, which cemented the idea that civic inclusion-and by extension, Russian manhood-was something achieved only through military service. This article examines interactions between veterans with disabilities and representatives of the Russian imperial state to explore shifting conceptions of masculinity and the development of new political subjectivities in the aftermath of war. The Russian imperial military can be regarded as a test site within which masculine identities were negotiated and reconfigured amid the social, economic, and political transformations of the late imperial period. In 1907, Alexei Voskoboinikov, a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) wrote to the Chief of Staff for the Imperial Navy with a request. Voskoboinikov explained that while defending Port Arthur in 1904, he had survived an explosion that killed his entire detachment, but as a result, developed severe rheumatism, which significantly reduced his mobility. Voskoboinikov had recently been rejected for a position as a salesman in a state-run wine shop due to his inability to remain standing for the entirety of the shift, but he insisted that he was "capable of hard work" and asked for assistance in finding a job. 1 Voskoboinikov was just one of many veterans who wrote to request support 1 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv voenno-morskogo flota (RGAVMF), f. 417, op. 2, d. 968, l. 20. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This cluster of articles explores the gendered history of the military in the Russian imperial and Soviet contexts during periods of imperial conquest, war, and their complex aftermaths. The cluster began at the 2021 ASEEES virtual convention, when the contributors joined the Zoom panel while their respective countries were in various stages of lockdown. Chronologically, the cluster stretches from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, with two articles on the Russian Empire and two covering the Soviet period. From the imperial borderlands of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century to the Nazi-occupied western frontiers of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, ideas about appropriate feminine and masculine behavior shaped the enactment of and reactions to violence. Veterans of the Russo-Japanese and Second World Wars drew on vocabularies of military masculinity to claim authority within their respective postwar societies. In this short introduction, we reflect on the relationship between gender history and military history and underline the importance of integrating the Russian/Soviet case into international historiographies of gender and war.

In the mid-1980s, HIV and AIDS were initially dismissed in the Soviet press as infections that could only be contracted by individuals engaged in ‘deviant’ or ‘promiscuous’ sexual behaviour. However, in late 1988 a different narrative took hold when the mass nosocomial infection of children occurred in hospitals in Elista, Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don. These tragedies — and the Soviet government’s lack of action in their aftermath — crystallized the public perception that the spread of HIV and AIDS was primarily due to government negligence and the deficiencies of the Soviet system. In this context, civil society organizations sprang up across the USSR to critique the government’s AIDS response, address the country’s inadequate healthcare infrastructure, and formulate their own solutions. This article explores how this played out in Moscow and Riga in 1989–90, where grassroots AIDS action was inflected by the local political context and indicative of the broader disillusionment with the Soviet government. Because of the specific conditions of Soviet society, AIDS action was more centred on the collapse of the social contract between citizens and the government in a socialist welfare state, and less about the de-stigmatization and liberation of marginalized groups.

This article examines how sexual health became an important component of ideal military masculinity in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Rising rates of venereal diseases (VD) in the military in the final years of the nineteenth century forced the Russian imperial state to increasingly turn their attention to the sexual health and hygienic habits of military personnel. State officials enlisted the help of military physicians, who prepared sex education brochures and lectures with the aim of reducing venereal infection. Sex education materials encouraged conscripts to abandon the habits and practices of rural life and embrace "modern" hygienic manhood. Physicians saw military personnel as an important link to the Empire's vast lower-class population and regarded the inculcation of new norms of health and hygiene within military populations as a key method for improving public health more generally, especially in the countryside. Within this context, expert knowledge became intertwined with visions of ideal military masculinity, and good sexual health and hygiene were presented as important markers of manhood.

Mākslīgā intelekta parādība aizvien vairāk kļūst par mūsdienu filozofiskā dialoga
līdzveidotāju. Par galvenajiem jēdzieniskiem pretpoliem kļūst tādi jēdzieni kā
individuālās/datora uztveres (domāšanas) mehānismi, ķermeņa "reālā" un "mākslīgā” tēla
(body image) (Berlucci, 1997)) pretstats, šī pretstata ķermeniskā uztvere. Lai gan šis binārisms
aktualizējās jau 20. gadsimta astoņdesmitajos gados – līdz ar datoru uzvaras gājienu un
programmēšanas valodas attīstību, tā jēdzieniskais "tvērums" turpināja būt aizsegts aiz tehniski
sarežģītiem un bieži vien neskaidriem kodiem. Situācija ievērojami mainījās līdz ar teksta-uzrunāšanu (text-to-speech) tehnoloģijas ienākšanu 21. gadsimta pirmajā desmitgadē, kad šie
kodi sāka iegūt "cilvēciskus vaibstus" – tehniski pielāgoties cilvēka domāšanai un reakciju
spējām. Rakstītais un runātais teksts tika vizualizēts, tādējādi padarot mākslīgo intelektu par
šķietami viscauresošu un ikvienu indivīda rīcību un jautājumu "risinošu". Mana pētījuma
centrā ir jautājums par atslēgas frāzes "ķermenis" un "ķermeniskais" ("body", "corporeality")
MI ģenerēto vizuālo tēlu fenomenoloģisko analīzi. Par centrāliem jautājumiem izvirzu: 1. Vai
digitālā "ķermeņa tēls" ir tas pats (= var tikt uztverts līdzvērtīgi) kā "ķermeņa tēls" tradicionālās
fenomenoloģijas izpratnē? 2. Vai digitālie attēli atšķiras dažādu programmatūru apstrādē? (Ja
atšķiras – tad kādas iespējamas īpašības tiek ņemtas vērā, konstruējot šo "ķermeņa attēlu") u.
c. Par tehniskiem izejas punktiem izmantošu Ru-DALL-e un Al-Art virtuālo modeļu
ģenerētāju.


Šo projektu finansē Latvijas Zinātnes padome, projekts "Nogaidošie ķermeņi: vilcināšanās vakcinēties ķermeniskās pieredzes fenomenoloģiska analīze", projekta Nr. lzp2021/1-0360.

Referāta centrā ir jautājums par lingvistisko un “patiesi izteikto” valodas vienību dažādības
noteikšanu. Par teorētisku sākumu ir izvēlēti divu 20. gadsimta pirmās puses filozofu – M. Heidegera
un L. Vitgenšteina – idejas par “patiesās” (t. i., izteiksmi, jēgu paudošās) un “mākslīgās” (t. i.,
rakstītas un sabiedrībā plaši pieņemtās) valodas mijattiecībām. Referāta uzdevums ir ar konkrētiem
piemēriem parādīt leksiskās (taču ne semantiski-jēdzieniskās) izteikšanas robežas un šādu
ierobežojumu uztveres un lietošanas sekas. Piedāvātā analīze var rast turpinājumu mūsdienu
tehnoloģijas pasaules apzināšanā – piemēram, domājot par mašīnmācīšanās (machine learning),
teksta atpazīšanas u. c. līdzīgajām digitālajām tehnoloģijām.
Šo projektu finansē Latvijas Zinātnes padome, projekts “Nogaidošie ķermeņi: vilcināšanās
vakcinēties ķermeniskās pieredzes fenomenoloģiska analīze”, projekta nr. lzp-2021/1-0360