Lebina N.B., Shkarovsky M.V. Prostitution in St. Petersburg. M.: Progress Academy, 1994

This book is about prostitution. About a peculiar relationship: the suit is a fallen woman. About simply free love in Tsarist Russia and about “free communist love” in socialist Russia. Finally, this book is about urban culture, about some of its less than pleasant sides. Historian Natalya Lebina and archivist Mikhail Shkarovsky, abandoning the puritanical view of the problem of the relationship between elements of culture and anticulture in the life of the city, tried to paint a social portrait of a corrupt woman in the “golden age” of Russian prostitution against the backdrop of phenomena accompanying prostitution - venereal diseases, alcoholism, crime. Prostitution, in their opinion, as a litmus test, made it possible to identify many patterns and deformations in the development of society both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Soviet era.