Letter from the Inspector of Printing Houses and the Book Trade in Kyiv to the governor generals of the imperial provinces of Kyiv, Podolsk and Volyn, 27 December 1906.
I have the honour to report that I have conducted an investigation regarding the statement that I recently received from Your Highness about the significant increase in the trade of pornographic postcards and images in Kyiv.
Based on my information and information that was provided to me by the Kyiv Police Chief on 16 December (a copy of which is attached), I have reached the following conclusions:
- The trade in pornographic images is carried out in Kyiv, but it is no more developed than in other large cities.
- In Kyiv, neither I nor the police officers found any instances of the open trade of such images, nor their exhibition in shop windows. Usually, people selling pornography keep their goods in their pockets and only show them to customers who are interested. Meanwhile, in June of this year in St Petersburg, I noticed a man openly selling the most outrageous pornography on Nevskii Prospekt. When I wanted to detain him with the help of a policeman, he immediately disappeared.
- In Kyiv, pornographic publications are obtained mainly from Odessa and Warsaw. Traders of this commodity usually come to the Kyiv Contract Fair. At this time, the policemen and I conduct surveillance on postcard dealers and every year it is necessary to confiscate pornography and prosecute the perpetrators. These people are then usually forbidden from trading at the Contract Fair. This year, according to my report, the Kyiv Governor forbade the Odessa merchant Chaim Halperin from trading postcards there. Halperin was brought to my attention for selling pornography in 1905 and was fined 25 rubles by the Justice of the Peace for the Third district of Kyiv on 29 April 1905.
- In my opinion, the spread of pornography in Kyiv, as well as other cities, is due to a number of common reasons. First, the public’s love for various immoral spectacles and pictures in cinema, living photographs, operettas, and farces. It is also due to the law’s relatively lax attitude towards people engaged in the pornography trade.
From the above, Your Highness, please see that on my part there is constant monitoring of the spread of the trade in pornographic images in Kyiv and the perpetrators are brought to criminal responsibility.
From reporting on this, I have to honour to add that from the public side of things, I am convinced that some people look at the pornography trade too leniently, whereas others look too harshly, considering famous paintings, artists in tights etc. as pornographic, which is not in accordance with the law.
A copy of the letter of the Kyiv Police Chief to the Inspector of Printing Houses and the Book Trade in Kyiv, 16 December 1906.
In relation to correspondence from 27 November 1905, I inform Your Highness that there is a secret trade in pornography in Kyiv, as in other major cities. In our city, it happens mainly on Khreshchatyk. It is extremely difficult to find this evil because of traders’ method of selling from under the counter or from inside their pockets, and especially because the police have absolutely no means or opportunity to appoint people solely to monitor this trade and detain people found to be in this dirty business.
In any case, I can say that the pornography trade in Kyiv is not particularly widespread because there is always police surveillance, both as a result of your repeated instructions and the police orders that I have issued on the subject. For example, this year we have detected many people with pornographic and illegal postcards, after which I have drawn up protocols and submitted them to you or to the Governor.
It was also possible to trace other people involved in the pornography trade. Police agents are currently collecting more subversive information about them, which will be reported to you.
Further reading: Siobhán Hearne, ‘An Erotic Revolution: An Erotic Revolution? Pornography in the Russian Empire, 1905–1914’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 30:2 (2021): 195–224.
This source comprises correspondence between branches of the tsarist bureaucracy on the issue of the pornography trade in Kyiv at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sale of visual and textual materials deemed to be ‘obscene’ (nepristoinyi) and ‘immoral’ (beznravstvennyi) deeply concerned the tsarist authorities and was broadly regarded as a negative consequence of modernisation. The tsarist authorities were not alone in their concern about the increasing availability of ‘obscene’ materials in this period. Across the European continent, innovations in photographic technology, falling costs of printing and distribution, and the development of postal systems generated an explosion in pornography in old and new media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rapid development of transportation networks across rail and sea further drove the pornography trade, as people and products could more easily move between major urban centres and cross national/imperial borders. In the Russian Empire, the western cities of Kyiv, Warsaw, and Odessa were well established sites of the production and dissemination of pornography.
The pornography boom of the early twentieth century greatly concerned commentators from across the political spectrum. Pedagogues and journalists worried about the corrosive impact that pornography had upon young people’s morality and physical health. State officials regarded the open sale of pornography as a threat to public order, as it provided evidence of the state’s inability to censor and prevent the circulation of contentious material.
In the Russian Empire, the production of ‘obscene’ literary or artistic works ‘with the goal of corrupting morals, or which are obviously opposed to morality and decency’ was an offence under the criminal code. The vague definition of ‘obscene’ materials meant that the law was open to broad interpretation and applied unevenly, so an individual’s ability to avoid prosecution hinged upon their social class, religious affiliation, ethnicity, or connections with those in positions of power. After the 1905 revolution and the introduction of emergency law (Jonathan W. Daly, 1995), local authorities were granted additional powers to suppress threats to the social and political order through fines and detention. Many local authorities used these additional powers to crack down on the sale of pornography.
The following correspondence shows the difficulties that the tsarist authorities faced when attempting to define pornography and suppress the sale of pornographic materials.