Prostitutes were recruited primarily among peasant girls who came to Petersburg; many were the wives and daughters of soldiers; others belonged to the bourgeoisie. But the ranks of prostitutes were also filled with women from bankrupt noble families and impoverished clerks—in the words of a newspaper writer of those days, “women who have nothing to eat, who have been desiccated by need, jabbed by the needle that gives pathetic pennies for painstaking labor.”
Often in the families of retired clerks, the Petersburg journalist wrote, “even mothers sell their daughters into depravity, out of oppressive poverty.” The lot of most was poverty, drunkenness, death from disease, usually venereal, primarily from syphilis, which spread quickly in Petersburg despite police-medical actions.
Wandering through the city, Dostoyevsky would come out from “drunken” Stolyarny Alley, onto nearby infamous Hay market Square, where quite recently executioners had publicly whipped serfs from the provinces. I always shudder when I read Nekrasov’s poem that draws a parallel between the fate of oppressed serfs and of literature in Nicholas’s Russia:
Haymarket was the “belly” of Petersburg. Crowds bustled there from morning till night, buying up food piled high on counters under light awnings. Noise, mud, and a strong rotten smell ruled there. Lusty pie men bustled around the counters with their hot wares. Like their “patron,” Menshikov, who was Peter’s friend and the first governor of Petersburg, they were a thieving, brazen lot—if a buyer complained that the filling contained a piece of rag, they replied haughtily, “What did you expect for three kopecks, velvet?”
The city became a melting pot for the many ethnic groups of the Russian Empire. Depending upon the year, 10 to 20 percent of the capital’s residents were non-Russian, a motley mix of sixty groups. The biggest were Germans, Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians, Finns and Swedes, Jews, Baits, and Tatars. Some, particularly the Germans, occupied a prominent place in the capital’s bureaucratic machine. Others became tradesmen and craftsmen.30 Thousands huddled on the outskirts in rude huts and barracks.
For them the city was not Petersburg but “Piter”—a nickname that indicated familiarity, a certain irony, cynicism, affection—a complicated mixture that characterized the newcomers’ attitude to the capital that took them in. This attitude was reflected in the rhymed proverb
Even as Petersburg exploited, humiliated, and unified its new residents, it challenged, urged on, and refined them. Vistas for all kinds of activities opened up for the hardest-working and cleverest. You could buy or sell anything in Petersburg.
For instance, Stock Exchange Square was the place to buy exotic shells, huge tortoises, monkeys, and talking parrots. A parrot that could chatter in Italian went for one hundred rubles—a huge sum in those days. A vendor immediately offered a big rooster, also for a hundred rubles. “But for that price I could buy a parrot that talks,” a potential purchaser argued. “Mine doesn’t talk but he’s a terrific thinker,” was the immediate rejoinder.
Naturally, the capital’s seething commercial activity, coupled with the sharp increase in population, fed a growing crime rate. According to official statistics, close to ten thousand crimes took place each year in Petersburg. But there were few serious cases, thanks to the extraordinary police controls: around one hundred murders and attempted murders, around fifty rapes, about forty passed counterfeit bills, and about a dozen cases of arson.
Petersburg had two mortal enemies—water and fire—which emptied the city many times. The two most memorable floods were in 1777 and 1824. (The flood of 1924 later joined their number.) The fire of 1862 was remembered longest, for most of the commercial section—Gostiny Dvor, Apraksin Dvor, Shchukin Dvor, and Tolkuchy Market—burned to the ground during several weeks of May and June of that year. Even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and numerous private homes were destroyed; losses were in the millions of rubles. A stunned eyewitness described an apocalyptic scene: black clouds of smoke, a fiery sky, and columns of flame showering huge sparks. A strong wind tossed burning embers to the roofs of distant houses, even across the Fontanka River, which burst into flames like torches.31
