What should the first thing any pious Moscow or St. Petersburg Christian do in 1900, if he came to a Sunday service at church? Cross yourself? Bow to icons? Or the abbot?
If it seems to you that any of these answers are correct, you certainly did not live 110 years ago (yes, I am still a detective).
First of all, anyone who came to church for a Sunday or holiday service had to break through to the door through the crowd of beggars on the porch - at the entrance to the temple. Cripples and ragamuffins of all stripes stretch out their hands and begging mugs, heart-rendingly shouting about great troubles and begging everyone who passes, be it a merchant, student or artisan, to give a copper or two to feed the unfortunate. All of them are crowded right at the entrance, forming a whole street of pleading hands and mouths.
Petersburg journalist Anatoly Bakhtiarov, author of the book "Reckless People: Essays from the Life of Perished People", vividly describes how beggars work. Only at first glance they crowd the porch just like that, in fact they have a clear system and each is in its place:
The aforementioned beggar Anton, in fact, is the husband of a woman who shouts about her deceased husband and seven children. Further in the text of the essay, it is described how a team of beggars, at the request of the church watchmen, helps to meet the bishop with bell ringing. “I looked through all my eyes so as not to miss Vladyka!” The “blind” beggar boasts.
Pictures like this are a well-rehearsed performance. Hundreds of such performances were performed daily on the city streets by tens of thousands of beggars. Always outlawed, but always provided with work and earnings, beggars flourished in pre-revolutionary Russia. Why?
Begging in Russian
As sociologist Igor Golossenko notes, begging came to Russia in the 10th century, with the adoption of Orthodoxy. Before that, it had never occurred to the brutal Slavic pagans that the crippled and the poor should be helped. Terrible drought and nothing to eat? Did the Pechenegs burn down the village and cut off your leg? You have a rich choice: to become a slave to those who are more successful (if they suddenly need a one-legged slave), or to die.
Christianity brought the idea of mercy into the harsh world: every suffering beggar is a son of God, and it is sinful to refuse him alms. Even then, beggars - both real invalids and victims of circumstances and cunning rascals - wandered through the streets of Russian cities with drawn-out groans: "Give, for Christ's sake …". Hence the verb to be Christ-like - to beg for alms; the beggars themselves were called Christarads.
For several centuries beggars flourished in Russia. Orthodox princes often sinned: they killed everyone in a row, including the closest relatives, robbed neighboring estates, cheated on their wives with courtyard girls - but did not want to go to hell. Which exit? Pray more often, of course, and also give generous alms to the poor. But as Moscow gathered land around it, the authorities began to feel burdened by crowds of begging.
The first step in the fight against begging was made by Peter I - as usual with the first emperor, he walked widely and sharply. Peter legally prohibited giving alms on the streets. A monetary fine was imposed on the applicants, and the Christians were expected to be whipped and exiled: some at their place of residence, some to Siberia. As an alternative, institutions of state charity were introduced: hospitals, almshouses at monasteries. Peter's policy had only one drawback: it completely failed. Like all the following attempts.
The Romanovs, one after another, issued decrees prohibiting begging, and sought to develop state charity systems. So, under Nicholas I in 1834, a Committee was established for the analysis and charity of the beggars in St. Petersburg, where the detained Christians were divided into several categories, helped those who were beggars out of want and sent “professionals” to hell. All this did not help, the number of beggars only grew. This was facilitated by crop failures, natural disasters, land shortages - and the liberation of the peasants in 1861.
They were freed without land, which had to be ransomed from the landlords, and the ransom payments stretched out for decades.
As a result, tens of thousands of peasants, free and without land, flocked to the cities. But not everyone could get rich or gain a foothold in the nascent proletariat. Those who were unlucky joined the armies of city beggars: in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the number of beggars only grew. For obvious reasons, there are no general statistics on them. But experts cite estimates ranging from a few hundred thousand to two million.
The exact figures only concern the beggars who were detained and registered. In 1905-1910. at the disposal of the Presence for the analysis and charity of beggars received from 14 to 19 thousand every year (data on the work "Wandering among us. Beggars in Russia and Europe" by ML Butovskoy, IO Dyakonov and MA Vanchatova). From this we can conclude that in the capital and the second largest city, Moscow, the bill went to tens of thousands.
All these beggars, sincere or deceitful, every day found a way to feed themselves, despite the royal prohibitions. “Orthodox peasants and merchants, as a rule, tried to help everyone, without finding out whether he really needed,” notes Denis Zinchenko in his work on the state's fight against begging. The compassionate Russian mentality assumed that once they asked, they had to give. Therefore, the beggars never ended, crowded on the porches, fought with each other for bread places and filled the pages of books and articles of intellectuals, who were worried about the fate of the people. Unsurprisingly, there were enough delicious stories, cruel and funny, to show the wildest sides of human nature. The beggarly universe existed in parallel with the worlds of the nobles, intelligentsia, merchants and was somewhat perverted,but a fascinating sight.
Career prospects
So, imagine that you are begging in St. Petersburg or Moscow. Statistics of the late 19th - early 20th centuries shows that you are most likely a man (70%) and, with a probability of about 50% (39,117 beggars out of 78,134 registered in the 15 years of the Charity Committee), quite able-bodied. But you have decided that you have lost your mind to sweat, plowing the fields, work for a miser-merchant or go to the service of the sovereign, and you will live off the mercy of the kind Russian people. Where to go? The choice is wide: professional beggars have many specialties.
1) Praying mantises. Those same beggars at the porch who do not allow anyone to enter the church. This is, of course, a beggar's paradise: where are people more compassionate than churches? It is important to rush both to those who come inside and to those who come out, demonstrating mutilations (real or " painted ") and tearfully praying in the name of the Mother of God and our Lord Jesus Christ.
True, not everyone will be allowed into the praying mantises: the beggars' artels rigidly distribute the porch among themselves, and if some left sir sticks himself with his mug for alms on someone else's porch, they hang him with the same mug, as well as crutches and feet, so that they pretend to be injured will no longer be needed. Everything is strictly organized here: if one cripple asks for alms before matins, by the evening service he must make way for another.
2) Gravediggers. Almost the same as that of the praying mantises, only in cemeteries - waiting for the next "crucian carp" (deceased) to be brought. You, of course, are worried about sorrowful loved ones: you rush to them, cry, and cry out to sacrifice for the peace of the soul of the newly departed and, again, in the name of all saints. Another gold mine: confused and unhappy people, as a rule, have no time to count pennies. Here, however, everything is distributed as severely as among the praying mantises.
These two categories, even if they look pathetic, and are engaged in a rather vile business (especially gravediggers) - the white bone of the beggarly world. They are often richer than those who beg for money.
3) Jerusalem wanderers. Here it is necessary to pretend that you, a pious traveler, have just returned from the Holy Land, where you prayed to God and saw many miracles. This is not such a stupid divorce as with ordinary beggars: you need to dress in black, like monks, behave modestly and politely, beg unobtrusively and humbly. Psychologism will not hurt: you need to understand what spiritual strings to pull in order to breed potential benefactors for money. And, of course, you need to be able to compose exciting stories about distant lands, otherwise you will simply not be believed.
4) Fire victims. The alternative, on the contrary, is simpler: ask for alms to restore burnt houses. The version is always plausible - peasant Russia outside big cities at the beginning of the 20th century is still wooden, fires come almost every summer, and someone is constantly on fire. It is more effective to find colleagues: a wife and a couple of crying kids, or even a whole crowd, and tearfully ask everyone you meet, someone will give.
5) Migrants. It is similar to the previous version, but more general beggars of this category asked for money in connection with the resettlement from poor provinces and simply admitted that they were just walking around the world, looking for a better life. The number of immigrants became especially numerous after the reform of 1861: there is freedom, there is no land, you live where you live, so you wander in search of a better life. Not the most profitable career option: they usually ask in whole crowds, in the end you will get little.
6) Crippled. There is a huge scope for creativity, and you don't even have to cut something off. The perfect proof is this story:
There were also plenty of real disabled people among crippled beggars: often peasants and urban poor people, if a crippled child was born, so as not to feed him, they gave them to professional beggars, and they raised them into skillful beggars. Other "cripples", on the contrary, were quite healthy, with the exception of diseases like mats (inflammation of the sebaceous glands), due to which the hair sticks together into dense lumps, which looks as disgusting as possible. Koltun was easily treated, but why is it for the poor, who earn on how bad they look? Cripples are served to quickly fall behind and hide out of sight, hiding disgust behind mercy. In the 21st century, by the way, things have not changed at all.
7) Writers. Such a path is already aerobatics; literate and educated, degraded aristocrats or cunning adventurers follow this path. Anatoly Bakhtiarov in his essay "The Intelligent Beggar" draws a portrait of such a writer: a middle-aged gentleman, decently dressed, in a frock coat, but the same beggar.
Such a beggar behaves exaltedly, as if doing a favor to those from whom he asks: in the shop he will not talk about money with the seller, but only with the owner or a noble lady-buyer, and will not whine about Christ, but in detail, in good Russian, expound what calamities caused him, a noble man, to sink to such a deplorable position. Medyakov will not accept, he will require silver. Such a cunning beggar, the author concludes, “can do much more harm than a simple, uneducated beggar” - due to the fact that he is more credible.
Geography of beggars
If you suddenly got tired of begging in the city and wanted to take a breath of fresh air, there is always the opportunity to go with a bag across endless Russia. However, begging was not uniform everywhere. In Siberia, for example, only exiles, immigrants and other stray guests were begging. The Siberians themselves considered such an occupation shameful.
The main center of begging is Central Russia and part of its south, including the now Ukrainian territories. “This activity was most widespread in Kazan, Moscow, Orel, Odessa, St. Petersburg, Saratov and Kherson, where there were up to 5% of the beggarly population,” the book “Wandering Among Us” reports.
They begged on a grand scale: in some places there were "beggarly nests", that is, whole villages where all the inhabitants lived in begging. Someone combined this with traditional peasant agriculture, someone, like the inhabitants of the village of Piavochnoye Lake in the Arzamas province in the 1870s, abandoned arable farming and were exclusively engaged in “collecting donations”. They acted dexterously: they found a poor church in the vicinity, negotiated with its ministers, who checked all the necessary documents and a book to collect donations, and then rushed on wanderings - to collect money from all the peasants in the province for repairs, restoration, and construction of a new church. It was a godly thing, fact-checking among the peasants worked, you understand how, so they believed everyone - and the earnings came out notable. A small part of it went to the churches that were in the share,and on the rest of the village Piavochnoye Lake (ie "leech") booze so that the neighbors called it Pianishny (ie "the lake of drunks").
It was a shame not to give alms, among other things, because many really needed it to survive. Some villages, especially those located in the zone of risky agriculture, where crop failures and hunger are frequent, had very real reasons for asking for alms, but they hunted this in quite prosperous areas. So, in the Moscow province, the village of Shuvalovo was beggarly: at first, back in 1812, its inhabitants were forced to go around the world with a bag when Napoleon burned their village down, but gradually they and their descendants got so used to freebies that they were begging for nothing.
Children, "kings" and soldiers
Let's go back to the capital, where the beggars continued to thrive. The attempts of the authorities to fight them resembled scooping up the sea with a basin, and if the water from the basin was thrown back into the sea. If the detainee fit the definition of a "professional", begging not because of lack of work or for health reasons, then he was sent away from the cities to his native villages and villages (at the place of registration). In the absence of documents, the place of residence was found out mainly by questions like "where are you from, slave?" and teeth. As a rule, as soon as they were brought to their "home" at the expense of the treasury, they, having politely thanked the officials, set off on a new beggarly journey. Most often - back to the same city. The cycle of beggars was eternal.
Many died, freezing on the streets or drinking too much (of course, most of the beggars stuck alcohol as if not into themselves), but the army of beggars did not lack recruits, including children. Professional beggars used their own children, but more often they bought strangers from the poor, or even simply stole. The legal scholar August Levenstim, who studied the problem of begging, wrote:
Bakhtiarov, in his essay "Kings of the Beggars", tells how older children - children of twelve or fifteen years old - work for experienced "kings", older beggars. They themselves do not ask for alms, but they are at the head of children's "artels" - they collect all the proceeds from teenagers, giving a small part. Plus food, lodging, vodka and cigarettes.
Children who grew up begging on the streets, as a rule, remained in the same social status: boys were waiting for a career of beggars or thieves (which was often combined), girls - prostitution. The use of children for collecting alms caused great outrage in society, but no one was going to stop: there is no easier way to pity even the most callous than to show a tear-stained child's face.
There was no need to talk about morality: the poor worked with any means of earning money. When the Russian-Japanese war broke out, and after nine years the First World War, this, of course, also benefited the poor. An annoyed journalist wrote:
It cannot be said that the government was inactive: realizing that police methods did not work, cities created welfare for the poor, industrious houses, shelters, shelters, cheap canteens. But the help of all these institutions was used by those who themselves wanted to find a new place in life and stop being a beggar, while the “professionals” were not touched by the state's concern.
In the 1910s, officials and public figures talked about a large-scale social reform that would totally change society and save it from the vice of begging - but it never came to fruition. Old Russia was overthrown by the whirlwind of world war and revolutions, and until the mid-1920s there was simply no one to solve the problem of begging. And after the fog of war cleared away, a completely different country took up social issues.
Egor Vorobyov
