An Erotic Revolution? Pornography in the Russian Empire, 1905–1914

In May 1911 Fridrich Liblik, a fifty-one-year-old bookshop owner living in Iur'ev (now Tartu, Estonia), stood trial for selling pornographic postcards.¹ Two students alleged that Liblik kept postcards with "seductive images" in a special box in his bookshop. On the basis of their testimony and the discovery of eleven of the offending postcards, Liblik was fined fifteen rubles and required to serve a week's prison sentence. The production of "obscene" literary or artistic works "with the goal of corrupting morals, or which are obviously opposed to morality and decency" had been an offense under the Russian Empire's criminal code since 1845.² Under Article 1001, individuals who produced and disseminated material with the potential to "corrupt morals" faced a maximum fine of 500 rubles and up to three months' imprisonment. Censorship committees were responsible for deciding what exactly constituted an illegal image, guided by this vague definition of obscenity as material intent on bringing about moral decline. Overburdened officials working within the tsarist bureaucracy were tasked with confiscating illegal images and bringing the producers and distributors to justice.

This article examines the history of pornography in the Russian Empire between 1905 and 1914 with a particular focus on distributors, publishers, and the imperial police. The article has two principal arguments. First, I will demonstrate that reactions to pornography signaled unease with the empire's accelerated path toward "modernity," broadly defined as a period of industrialization, urbanization, consumerism, and the development of mass communication. This argument situates the Russian case within wider scholarship on European trends in the dissemination and policing of pornography, and it helps to expand our historiographical lens on pornography beyond the Anglophone, Francophone, and Germanophone contexts, which have so far dominated the discussion.³ The development of mass-circulation media in the early 1900s transformed state attempts to suppress pornography in Europe. In the era of mass print culture, the legality of pornography came to be determined at least partially by issues of distribution and access, as well as content. In other words, obscenity became a "performative category" that hinged on questions of production and dissemination.⁴ Sexual imagery and naked bodies were deemed acceptable within high culture, but these images became "obscene" when they were mass-produced and printed on postcards or in the popular press, where they could be accessed by women, youth, and lower-class people.⁵ The expanding definition of pornography brought new mass-produced media such as postcards, commercial advertisements, and cheap periodicals under state control.

In the Russian Empire, as elsewhere, pornography traders responded to the expansion of consumer culture and took advantage of new networks of transport and communication, which allowed for the advertisement of cheap pamphlets, postcards, and photographs in mass-circulation newspapers, customer postal orders, and the movement of goods across imperial and national borders.⁶ Concern about the impact of these new forms of communication sparked international efforts to prevent the distribution of pornography. On 4 May 1910 the Russian Empire signed the Agreement for the Suppression of the Circulation of Obscene Publications, along with Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, the German Empire, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Signatories to this treaty forbade the distribution of pornography in their respective countries and agreed to share information regarding obscenity offenses with one another.⁷ In this context, efforts to suppress "obscenity" became a state or imperial project underwritten by official and popular anxieties about gender, class, race, and ethnicity.⁸

A second focus of this article will be to tease out the distinctiveness of the Russian case, paying particular attention to the impact of the 1905 revolution and the decentralized and disjointed nature of Russian imperial governance. The year 1905 marked a distinct turning point in the relationship between law, state, and subject. Beginning with the violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in January 1905 (known as Bloody Sunday), multiple waves of violence, strikes, mutinies, pogroms, assassinations, and protests broke out across urban and rural spaces of...