I wish to thank Laurie Bernstein, Stephen Frank, Christina Gilmartin, Bob Weinberg, and Charters Wynn for their helpful criticism and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

1. The hooligan phenomenon was not unique to urban Russia. In approximately the same period London, Paris, Berlin, and New York City experienced similar waves of crime. While there are many similarities among these far-flung cases (and their near simultaneous appearance is itself an intriguing issue), the specific historical context in which they appeared endowed each crime wave with its own meaning. For London, see Humphries, Stephen, Hooligans or Rebels?: An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981 Google Scholar); Pearson, Geoffrey, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for New York City, see Stone, Christopher, “Vandalism: Property, Gentility and the Rhetoric of Crime in New York City, 1890–1920,” Radical History Review 26 (1982)Google Scholar; for Berlin, see Rosenhaft, Eve, “Organising the ‘Lumpenproletariat’: Cliques and Communists in Berlin during the Weimar Republic” in The German Working Class, 1888–1933. ed., Evans, Richard J. (London: Croom Helm, 1982)Google Scholar; for Paris, see Nye, Robert A., Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. On the transformation of the social structure, see Freeze, Gregory, “The Estate (Soslovie) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (February 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On urban structural changes, see Bater, James H.. “Between Old and New: St. Petersburg in the Late Imperial Era” in Hamm, Michael F., The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. On confusion about social status and social roles see Brooks, Jeffrey, When Russia Learned In Read: Literacy and Papular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 355 Google Scholar; Richer, Alfred J., Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 415–417 Google Scholar; Emmons, Terence, The Formation of Political Parlies and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1–4, 173–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. For examples see workers’ memoirs in Zelnik, Reginald E., ed. and trans., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Bonnell, Victoria. ed. and trans.. The Russian Worker: Life and Labor under the Tsarist Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

4. Brooks, Jeffrey, “Popular Philistinism and the Course of Russian Modernism” in History and Literature: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed., Morson, Gary Saul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 90–91ffGoogle Scholar. On the culture of upward social mobility within this group, see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 269–294. On fears of falling and the “fallen,” see Joan Neuberger, “Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1985), 113–140.

5. Exceptions to this are Engelstein, Laura, Moscow, 1905: Working Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and Bradley, Joseph, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Bradley also discusses attempts to reform the unruly lower classes by imposing notions of “respectability” on them.

6. In 1913 the Ministry of Justice published a proposal for a new law prohibiting hooliganism but the law was never enacted because of the widespread opposition of jurists who objected that it defined hooliganism, not as a crime sui generis, but as a type of behavior that could characterize or be associated with any crime. This kind of extralegal judgment would be difficult to apply in practice. Informally it was also argued that the framcrs of the proposal and their supporters only wanted the law as a pretext for intensifying repression of the lower classes. See Neuberger, “Crime and Culture.” 166–173. The proposal was published as “K voprosu o merakh bor'by s khuliganstvom,” Zhurnal ugolovnogo prava i prolsessa, no. 4 (1913), 103–114. After the revolution, an article prohibiting hooliganism was included in the first Soviet criminal code of 1922. See Isaev, M., “Khuliganstvo: luridichcskii ocherk” in Khuliganstvo i khuliganv: Sbornik (Moscow, 1929). 11 Google Scholar.

7. The designation of these newspapers as “middle class” is problematical and worthy of a separate article. Brooks argues that Moscow boulevard newspapers were read by “the lower classes and their employers,” that is, by members of one commercial milieu rather than only one class or social group. But other sources indicate Peterburgskii listok was perceived to be identified with middle-class readers; see, for example. Zelnik, ed.. Radical Worker, 323. In addition, while it seems to be true that the boulevard press attracted some readers from the lower and upper classes, a content and language analysis of articles, announcements, and advertisements in Peterburgskii listok show that the newspaper conveys a set of cultural values and prescribes a code of behavior commonly associated with middle-class “respectability” (see below, 181–182). It was these values and middle-class attempts to impose them that hooligans challenged. While some or all of these values may have been shared by members of the lower classes or the elite, the culture they represented may still be defined by association with the middle-class experience in which they were rooted. On readership see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 128–129.

8. See Louise McReynolds, “News and Society: Russkoe slovo and the Development of a Mass-Circulation Press in Late Imperial Russia” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Chicago, 1984), 221, 223, for circulation figures. The editorial quotation can be found in Skrobotov, N. A.. Peterburgskii listok za tridtsat'-piat’ let, 1864–1899 (St. Petersburg, 1914), 3 Google Scholar.

9. Esin, B. I., Russkaia dorevoliutsionnaia gazeta, 1702–1917. Kratkii ocherk (Moscow, 1971) 47 Google Scholar.

10. Even Esin believed that the reporting in Peterburgskii listok was accurate (see ibid., 50–52).

11. Although other newspapers surpassed it in circulation, Peterburgskii listok held its own and continued to increase circulation until World War I. This increase suggests that Peterburgskii listok had established a loyal readership that continued to find that the newspaper satisfied their interests, reflected their attitudes, and responded to their tastes in news, despite the popularity of Gazeta-kopeika, Russkoe Slovo, and others. On Gazeta-kopeika, see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 131; and McReynolds, “News and Society,” 219–224; on Peterburgskii listok, see V. K. Frolov, Peterburgskii listok za 50 let, 1864–1914 (St. Petersburg, 1915), 49–50.

12. Brooks, “Popular Philistinism,” 90–91.

13. Stephen Graham, “One of the Higher Intelligentsia,” The Russian Review [London], 1, no. 4 (1912): 120. It should be noted that the old intelligentsia had also become fragmented. Beginning in the 1890s the intelligentsia of social and political commitment was isolated on cultural grounds by the artistic avant-garde, which rejected its attachment to realistic and didactic roles for art. Political affiliation, of course, divided radicals from liberals and moderates but these all shared a commitment to political change and cultural enlightenment.

14. Since the beginning of the twentieth century an anthropological definition of culture has been sifted out of the multiple meanings of the word. At the beginning of the century, however, the concept of culture as sets of values and conventions, and modes of behavior and expression was not understood as distinct from the aesthetic concept of culture. For an introduction to the history of definitions of culture see Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87–93 Google Scholar. See also, “Kul'tura,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauz-Efrona (St. Petersburg, 1895) 17:6, where kul'tura is treated as a translation of civilization.

15. Stories about the rough edges of the nouveau riche (especially if they are rock stars or live in Hollywood) are standards in the comic repertory of our contemporary popular culture. In 1901, as the press coverage of such scandals shows, the readers of Peterburgskii listok were not laughing; they were facing a genuine dilemma of self-definition and self-confidence. See Peterburgskii listok (hereafter PL), “V kamerakh mirovykh sudei,” 9 January 1901, and Avgur [pseudonym], “Klubnye nravy,” 14 January 1901. The saga continued through February with weekly exposes of the mores of club society. In March the case was appealed: “V s″ezde mirovykh sudei,” 8 March 1901, and Aborigen [pseudonym], “Stolychnyi den',” 9 March 1901. In May the appeal was taken to the Senate: “V senate,” 13 May 1901. In his 13 May 1901 column, “Stolychnyi den',” Aborigen noted that the case and all its publicity would probably not improve the deplorable klubnye nravy.

16. For a discussion of language in crime reporting, see Neuberger, “Crime and Culture,” 109–110.

17. A. V. “Grustnyi fakt,” PL, 25 February 1901.

18. S-i, “Pogibaiushchiedeti,” PL, 19 April 1901.

19. Ibid. In this period the police rarely investigated crimes involving the city's poor population. This public perception was admitted by the police department itself. See Mulukaev, R. S., Obshcheuf-olovnaia politsiia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 1979), 25 Google Scholar. Robert J. Abbott makes the same case for the 1860s and 1870s, “Crime, Police, and Society in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1866–1878,” The Historian, 1977 (November): 70–84; Daniel Brower makes the same case for the 1890s, “Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Review, 41, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 426.

20. S-i, “Pogibaiushchie deti.”

21. Ibid. Quotation marks are in the original.

22. Ibid.

23. “Iz zaly suda: Opasnyi khuligan,” PL, 8 October 1903.

24. T., “Bezobraziia khuliganov na konke,” PL, 15 October 1903.

25. Zelnik, Reginald E., Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg: 1855–1870 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971), chap. 7Google Scholar; Bater, James H., St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (Montreal, 1976), chap. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Public drunkenness was prohibited by article 42 of the Ustav o nakazaniiakh, nalagaemykh mirovymi sud'iami. For figures on arrests and detentions for article 42 see, S-Peterburgskie stolichnye sudebnye mirovye ustanovleniia i arestnyi dom v 1897 g. Otchet. (hereafter SPbSSMU), 124; and SPbSSMU v 1902 g. Otchet., 133. These figures represent only a fraction of those arrested under article 42 (many were fined and released) and do not include those who were picked up by the police, spent the night in a precinct drunk tank, and were released without being tried. In 1901 in St. Petersburg, 54,940 persons spent the night in a drunk tank; in 1902, 52,490. Of a total population of approximately 1.4 million, this was an average ratio of 1:14. N. 1. Grigor'ev, “Ustroistvo priiutov dlia vytrezvleniia p'ianykh,” Gorodskoe delo, no. 18 (1910), 1247. For examples of drunken sprees on paydays, holidays, and weekends see Om, “Khuliganskii vopros,” PL, 8 April 1903.

27. Lists of people rounded up and fined for disturbing the peace occasionally included women. See “Nakazannye khuligany,” PL, 4 September 1903. The only detailed case of a female hooligan that I found in PL between 1900 and 1914 was “ ‘Intelligentnye’ khuligany,” PL, 1 October 1906. The woman involved, “one Nikolaeva,” roughed up a seamstress to whom she owed payment for some linen.

28. For example, Andron Sladkii, “Peterburgskie negativy: Khuligany,” PL, 13 October 1903, and, from a slightly later period, Nash [pseudonym], “Khodiachiia ‘kazenki,’ ” PL, 23 July 1906.

29. PL, 24 April 1903; 31 December 1903.

30. Peasant here presumably refers to the legal soslovie designation and is not a clue to social identity.

31. During the 1905–1907 Revolution incidents of hooliganism rapidly multiplied and, although hooliganism retained its original characteristics, several new incidents would come to be associated with hooliganism, including attacks on policemen and a form of street violence that was new to the center of St. Petersburg—massive street brawls sometimes involving hundreds of people. See Neuberger, “Crime and Culture,” 77–92 and 99–106.

32. “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Napadenie khuligana,” PL, 22 September 1905.

33. Pchela [pseudonym], “Odichanie,” PL, 16 May 1905.

34. These contradictory images of Nevskii Prospekt were possible in part because different sections of the avenue had different reputations. The blocks around the Nikolaevskii train station and Ligovskaia Street were the first “to fall.” Those who clung to the traditionally grand image of Nevskii did so in the face of accumulating evidence of change. Although to a certain extent the stratification Gogol so brilliantly parodied in 1835 in “Nevskii Prospekt” was still observed and still restricted class interaction on the avenue, Nevskii was increasingly used by members of all classes at all times of day.

35. “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Vozmutitel'nyi fakt,” PL, 28 May 1905.

36. Members of the middle classes were certainly not confronted with peasants and workers for the first time at the beginning of the twentieth century. As James Bater has demonstrated, the older central districts of the city had always had a socially and economically heterogeneous population (Bater, St. Petersburg, chap. 7). This fact makes all the more striking the horror with which Peterburgskii listok described the antics of the lower-class hooligans: They were not necessarily strangers to the scene but they were exhibiting new and strange behavior.

37. While PL did carefully distinguish between acts of political protest and acts of hooliganism, these were not viewed as rigidly separate categories but, rather, as adjacent points on a spectrum. Although they exhibited different levels of political consciousness, they often had in common the social origin of the participants, the willingness to confront established authorities directly, and the novel visibiity and power manifested by the lower classes during the revolutionary years, 1905–1907.

38. A. S-ov, “Khuliganskii klub,” PL, 7 July 1906. For the other extreme, see also 22 October 1906 where hooligans are differentiated from other outcasts, the homeless and the chronic alcoholics; and 17 October 1906 where they arc distinguished from workers. On distinctions in more violent incidents, such as massive street brawls, see, for example, “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Bezobraziia khuliganov,” PL, I March 1905; “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Grandioznoe poboishche na Anichkovom moste,” I July 1906; “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Razgon khuliganov,” 8 August 1906.

39. Most of the following portraits of hooligans come from the pages of Pelcrburgskii listok. The point is to identify the PL view of hooliganism and demonstrate the plausibility of the portrait. The portrait given here, however, is corroborated in the available published police sources, in the published records of the St. Petersburg mirovoi sud, and in the vast literature that appeared on hooliganism beginning around 1910. For a bibliography of this literature, see Ncuberger, “Crime and Culture,” 345–353.

40. When hooligans were arrested their name, age, and, sometimes, soslovie were given in the PL crime chronicle entry.

41. S-i, “Pogibaiushchie deti.” See also Om, “Khuliganskii vopros.”

42. K. G., “Pitomki khuliganov,” PL, 28 August 1903; “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Zhertva khuliganov,” 14 October 1903. In the 1910s, fears that teenaged apprentices made up most of the young adult hooligans produced great concern among judicial and prison authorities and criminologists and led to the establishment of a special court for juvenile cases attached to the Petersburg mirovoi sud (See la. L. Berman, “Retsidiv v detskoi prestupnosti” in Deli-preslupniki: Sbornik statei, ed. M. N. Gernet [Moscow, 1912]; N. A. Okunev, “Osobyi sud o maloletnikh” in SPbSSMU za 1910g. Otchel; D. A. Dril', “O merakh bor'by s prestupnost'iu nesovershennoletnikh” in Trudy sed″mogo s″ezda predstavitelei russkikh ispravitel'nykh zavedenii dlia maloletnikh [Moscow, 1909]). Occasionally in the interrevolutionary period, members of the Left tried to show that hooliganism was not an exclusively lower-class phenomenon. They believed that the outcry against hooliganism was a pretext for police repression against all peasants and workers. They may well have been correct, but they still had a hard time linding examples of upper-class hooligans. I found only a handful of cases reported in PL between 1900 and 1914 of a hooligan identified as other than a worker, a peasant, or a meshchanin. The Menshcvik, D. Zaslavskii, argued that the lower-class origin of hooliganism was exaggerated and he lobbied against harsher penalties for hooligans, “Bor'ba s khuliganstvom,” Sovremennyimir, no. I (1913): 124. Debates in the State Duma and among Russian criminologists over enacting a law against hooliganism also revolved around this issue; see Neuberger, “Crime and Culture,” 177–185. See also, Weissman, Neil, “Rural Crime in Tsarist Russia: The Question of Hooliganism, 1905–1914,” Slavic Review 37, no. 2 (1978): 231 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. S. Narskii, “Khuligan: Roman-khronika iz sovremennoi zhizni Peterburga,” PL, 30 June 1903.

44. Among many examples of unemployed and unskilled workers as hooligans: “young boys and adolescents who work in the factories of the Petersburg Quarter,” PL, 25 February 1901; “a former worker at a bullet factory,” “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Napadenie na ulitse,” 16 March 1905; “chernorabochie,” “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Nozhovaia rasprava,” 26 July 1906. One infamous hooligan, who went by the name Ivan Ivanov, was known to have worked as an unskilled transportation worker (as a nosil'shchik and a gruzovshchik), PL, 24 October 1906. Another, lengthy, description of hooligan types identified the hooligans as “members of the so-called free professions: typesetters, shop assistants, and hairdressers,” Sladkii, “Peterburgskie negativy,” 13 October 1903. When a group of hooligans, that had been terrorizing pedestrians along Bol'shaia Grecheskaia street, was caught they turned out to be workers at a rolling mill, “Prodelka shaiki khuliganov,” 6 October 1906.

45. For example, “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Opiat’ khuligany na Ligovke,” PL, 22 August 1905, in which the hooligans turned out to be two “well-known recidivist thieves”; and “Dnevnik prikliuchenii: Tri zaitsa,” 20 April 1905, in which the attackers escaped but were recognized by their victim as three famous hooligans known as the “three hares.” That the core of hooligans comes from the lower end of the casual labor market is supported by research on a group with similar characteristics in the same period in Odessa. See Weinberg, Robert, “Workers, Pogroms and the 1905 Revolution in Odessa,” Russian Review, 46, no. 1 (1987): 53–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. On dress see, for example, Sladkii, “Peterburgskie negativy.” Cartoons and reports throughout this period depict the same distinctive features: Hat “blini-likc” caps, greasy jackets and trousers, jerseys instead of shirts, and patent leather boots.

47. The classic discussion of social crime is Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Norton, 1965)Google Scholar. Much has been written about social crime since Hobsbawm's work. A good critique of Hobsbawm is Anton Blok, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (September 1972): 494–505; and several excellent studies of social crime can be found in Hay, Douglas et al., eds., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975)Google Scholar, and in John Brewer and Styles, John, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.