Introduction: Crime and Culture

At the beginning of the twentieth century St. Petersburg was gripped by fears of crime. This book is about those fears, the crimes that provoked them, and their role in shaping urban Russian culture in the last years before World War I. Crime of all kinds was on the increase, but it was a peculiar concoction known as hooliganism that made headlines in St. Petersburg and within a few years grew to acquire symbolic stature. Around 1900 the Petersburg boulevard press began reporting an increasing number of cases of annoying public disturbances, rowdiness, drunkenness, rock throwing, shouting of obscenities, and