Tallinn Prostitutes

Tallinn Prostitutes
by Siobhán Hearne , TALLINN
In the early 1900s, Tallinn had a reputation amongst medical experts as a city with a venereal disease problem. Second only to the capital of St Petersburg in incidence of syphilis and gonorrhoea, Tallinn outranked much larger cities in the Russian Empire in terms of infection, including Moscow, Warsaw and Riga. [1] In 1914, one physician claimed that one in ten Tallinn residents were infected with a venereal disease, and most apparently caught their infections following encounters with prostitutes in the city’s brothels. [2] Why were venereal diseases allegedly so widespread in Tallinn? In this piece, I trace explanations given by various contemporary observers and place Tallinn within the wider context of disease control across the Russian Empire.
In the final decades of the Russian Empire, prostitution and venereal diseases were interconnected in official and popular imagination. In 1843, the Ministry of Internal Affairs introduced the Empire-wide regulation of prostitution with the stated aim of preventing the circulation of venereal infection. This system of “supervision” ( nadzor ) was installed in cities and towns across the vast Russian Empire, from Liepāja to Vladivostok. Within the territory of present-day Estonia, dedicated medical-police committees were established to oversee the regulation of prostitution in Tallinn, Tartu, Narva, Rakvere, Võru, Pärnu, Viljandi and even Kuressaare.

Under the regulation system, women who sold sex were required to register their details with their local police and swap their internal passports (documents required for travel and employment) for a new form of identification known as a medical ticket. Registered prostitutes were legally obliged to attend medical examinations twice a week, the results of which were recorded on their identification. If a woman was found to be infected with a venereal disease, she was supposed to go immediately to hospital for treatment.
The official aims of regulation were medical, but the additional rules that accompanied the medical ticket suggest that the tsarist authorities used regulation to limit the autonomy and visibility of women who sold sex. Registered prostitutes were forbidden from “obscenely” appearing in the windows of their apartments, disturbing and ‘enticing’ passers-by on the streets, walking together in public places, and even sitting in the stalls at the theatre. [3] They were also permitted to live only within specific city districts. Local police forces and the wider public were encouraged to root out women believed to be working illegally, known as “clandestine prostitutes” ( tainye prostitutki ). The authorities used regulation to police female behaviour, often conflating “promiscuity” with commercial sex and forcing women to register onto the police lists. As well as enforcing these rules, local police forces were required to issue licenses to brothel keepers and close down any rowdy or unsanitary brothels.
In 1909, Tallinn had a modest 7 state-licensed brothels and 181 registered prostitutes [4] . The city was hardly a centre of prostitution in the Empire, as it ranked 27th in terms of its population of registered prostitutes, which numbered just 2.7 per 1000 residents [5] . Five of Tallinn’s seven brothels were located on Martenskaia Street (now Mardi tänav), and these establishments bore the names Victoria, the Golden Star, Manchuria, Venice and the Manezh [6] . All but one of the original wooden brothel buildings were destroyed during the aerial bombardment of the city by the Soviet Air Force in 1944. The exception is number 3, which now ironically houses an AIDs information and support centre. [7]

The Russian imperial authorities endeavoured to monitor all women thought to be selling sex. This aim has left behind a rich historical record about the ethnicities, ages, and migration patterns of registered women, which makes them a unique group amongst the Russian Empire’s urban poor. We know that the vast majority of Tallinn’s registered women were classified as peasants and that over 95% had worked as domestic servants before they ended up on the police lists [8] . Most had worked as prostitutes for under five years, and had migrated to Tallinn from other towns or villages. The social composition of Tallinn’s registered women corresponded to the general picture across the Russian Empire. Registered prostitutes were predominantly lower-class migrants who sold sex for a short period during their twenties and thirties.
The ethnic composition of Tallinn’s police lists transformed as the city became better connected to other regions of the Empire. The Baltic Railway was established in the 1870s, connecting northern Baltic cities such as Tallinn and Tartu with the capital of St Petersburg [9] . The line was bought by the imperial Russian government in the 1880s and improvements were made to the route throughout the following two decades until it was finally absorbed into the North-Western Railway in 1906 [10] . Before the amalgamation of the railways in 1901, the majority of registered prostitutes identified as Estonian (60%), followed by ethnic Russians (14%) and Latvians (13%) [11] . By 1906, just 38% of Tallinn’s registered prostitutes were Estonian, 27% were Latvian and 17% Russian [12] . Polish, German, Lithuanian, Finnish and Jewish women made up the remainder of the lists.
The geographical position of the Baltic provinces was also used as an explanation for high rates of venereal infection in Tallinn and the surrounding province. The Baltic region had good railway connections to central and eastern Russia, as well as Western Europe. By the early 1900s, the Baltic provinces were a key exit point for emigrants leaving the Russian Empire in search of a better life overseas. Estliand province’s coastline was also home to several major resorts, and as the area was well connected to the capital by rail and steamship, tourists flocked there during the summer months. While temporarily away from home or in transit, people allegedly behaved differently, engaging in promiscuous and commercial sex, and facilitating the spread of venereal infection.
Reportedly high rates of infection in Tallinn could have actually been a result of the poorer available medical facilities and limited police presence outside major urban centres, or the region’s reputation as a magnet for tourists and holidaymakers. Despite this, some contemporary educated observers ignored these factors and used such figures to reinforce stereotypes about the supposed cultural backwardness and ‘deviance’ of the empire’s non-Russian, non-Orthodox populations.
[1] Rasprostranenie i Bor’ba s Polovymi Bolezniami, Glavnym Obrazom v Revele’, Russkii Zhurnal Kozhnikh i Venericheskikh Boleznei (RZhKVB) 9-10 (September 1913), pp. 273-274.
[2] I. I. Truzhemeskii, ‘Nekotorye Dannye o Rasprostranenii Venericheskikh Boleznei v Revele’, RZhKVB , 4 (April 1914), pp. 395-396.
[3] Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Akhiv Sankt-Peterburga (TsGIASPb), f. 569, op. 18, d. 4, l. 33. In the capital, prostitutes were forbidden from living in various central locations, such as Nevskii, Liteinyi, Vladimirskii, Voznesenskii and Izmailovskii prospekti , and the entire first and second parts of the Admiralteiskii district. TsGIASPb, f. 593, op. 1, d. 601, l. 11.
[4] Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Mestnogo Khoziaistva, Vrachebnoi-Politseiskii Nadzor za Gorodskoi Prostitutsiei (St Petersburg, 1910), p. 26.
[5] Vrachebnoi-Politseiskii Nadzor , p. 61.
[6] EAA.31.2.6909, lk. 2.
[7] Jaan Tamm (ed). Entsüklopeedia Tallinn 1. A-M (Tallinn, 2004), pp. 195-196. With thanks to Teele Saar of the Estonian Maritime Museum for sharing her Tallinn expertise and providing me with the reference.
[8] EAA.31.2.4509
[9] Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians , 2nd edn. (Stanford, 2001), p. 71.
[10] John Westwood, A History of the Russian Railways (London, 1964), p. 76.
[11] EAA, 31.2.3722.
[12] EAA, 31.2.4681.
[13] EAA, 30.6.3628 lk. 2-4.
[14] Vrachebno-Politseiskii Nadzor , pp. 10-11, 26-27.
[15] Neil Weissman, ‘Police in Tsarist Russia, 1900-1914’, Russian Review , 44, 1 (1985), p. 47.
[16] EAA, 330.1.1651, lk. 130.
[17] EAA, 31.2.3274, lk. 50.
Dr. Siobhán Hearne is a postdoctoral researcher currently based at the University of Latvia in Riga. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2017 for a thesis on the regulation of female prostitution in the Russian Empire, 1900-1917. She has published several articles on gender and sexuality in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union.
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If you don't mind watching the... - Original Sokos Hotel Viru
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All reviews kgb museum old town shopping mall direct access business class room big hotel family room junior suite excellent location the upper floors higher floor bigger room standard room central location nice room nice stay harbour
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I had heard some stories about Viru hotel and it's profile as a place to go when your holiday's sole intention is to get drunk and prostitutes' services. However, I assumed that this was something that happened in 70s or 80s. Had no idea how bad it would be even these days.

I was travelling with a friend and her newborn baby and the reason we chose Viru was to join my friend's husband on business there. Well, it turned out that his business guest were there just for one thing - paid women. Of course, we did enjoy the good location - ithe hotel is located attached to a shopping mall and it was easy to go back to the hotel to feed the baby. The rooms were ok, but more a 3 star experience than a four star luxury. In fact, everything was fine until the evening. We entered the lobby at 10 pm and immediately noticed the prostitutes on call. My friend's husband was waiting for us in the lobby for a minute or two, and during that time was offered sex twice. Drunk men were going upstairs with women clearly not their wives or girlfriends. Outside the night club we saw this girl barely 16-17 years old completely stoned and being approached by older men. I was very conservatively dressed but got grabbed in an elevator. It felt like every woman was assumed to be a... I had heard some stories about Viru hotel and it's profile as a place to go when your holiday's sole intention is to get drunk and prostitutes' services. However, I assumed that this was something that happened in 70s or 80s. Had no idea how bad it would be even these days. I was travelling with a friend and her newborn baby and the reason we chose Viru was to join my friend's husband on business there. Well, it turned out that his business guest were there just for one thing - paid women. Of course, we did enjoy the good location - ithe hotel is located attached to a shopping mall and it was easy to go back to the hotel to feed the baby. The rooms were ok, but more a 3 star experience than a four star luxury. In fact, everything was fine until the evening. We entered the lobby at 10 pm and immediately noticed the prostitutes on call. My friend's husband was waiting for us in the lobby for a minute or two, and during that time was offered sex twice. Drunk men were going upstairs with women clearly not their wives or girlfriends. Outside the night club we saw this girl barely 16-17 years old completely stoned and being approached by older men. I was very conservatively dressed but got grabbed in an elevator. It felt like every woman was assumed to be a prostitute. There was even a man who went totally nuts after I told him to keep his hands to himself. Quite frankly, I was afraid that he would go violent. The whole scene was very sad and disturbing to me. And believe me, I'm young, relatively free-minded and well-travelled, but this was just depressing. Would never, ever bring children to this hotel. I was surprised that I family hotel chain like Sokos knowingly supports prostitution. I would suspect that such a big chain would have somekind of social responsibility, but was sad to find out that this was not the case. There are far more lovely hotels in lovely Tallinn for this price range. I can't imagine why to stay in Hotel Viru. More
Stayed for a couple of days in Tallinn: the Viru's location is good as not too far from the airport, not too far from the city center. The hotel is pretty large. At arrival the desk staff suggested an upgrade to a better room for 20EUR which was a fair price. The room was then a business class one, high floor with a good view (avoid low floors and a side of the hotel as it's facing a buy street). The room itself and bathroom were OK, nothing fancy but clean and not too outdated. The breakfast was disappointing (only went once and then went to a coffee 2 minutes away from the hotel). The bar seems to serve lots of different beer types (haven't tried) and there's a club in the basement (which turned to be quite busy the night we went but lots of seriously drunk people). And, wifi Internet access is free (like in lots of places in Tallinn).
We just had a long weekend in Tallinn (Thursday to Sunday ) to attend a freinds wedding and this hotel was the one chosen for us by the wedding party. Overall an Ok hotel - it was quite busy all the time we were there but check in and ameneties were well served. There are 2 main bars and 2 restaurants and the hotel is located very close to the old town - just a 5 minute easy walk . The hotel adjoins a large very well appointed shopping mall so if the weather is not good you can walk into the mall without needing a coat. Rooms were OK , not great but OK. The choice of decor was a bit bizar with tired red wooden coloured furniture and a mixture of soft furnishings blended with Picasso style prints on the walls. The rooms were clean and comfortable but we and other wedding guests learned that that none of the rooms have double beds. It seems a double is just 2 singles pushed together so you have to contend with a gap down the middle if you fancy a snuggle with your loved one ! We ate in the hotel's own Tex-Mex style restaurant on the first night. Food was fine and service was adeqaute but they won't win prizes in either department . There is a night club in the subterranium level - we took one look in there and left - not our thing at all . One level up is a Karaoke bar which was also not really our thing but both were popular with the locals. the hotel bars were Ok - one is trying to be an English pub but not quite making the mark , the other is a standard hotel bar opposite the reception. Drinks were cheap and service OK, Overall , if you are looking for a reasonable priced hotel with quite rooms close to Tallin old town without being in it - you could do worse. We spotted an SAS Raddisson hotel from our 18th floor window which we would probably have chosen if it hadn't have been for the wedding party but as a base to explore Tallinn at a fair price - you could do a lot worse. We booked a standard room for € 82 but upgraded to 'business Class' for an additional € 20 p/night . The extra space in the room for our 3 night stay was welcome. Standard rooms must be really small , business class wasn't exactly spacious and by no means luxurious but clean , comfortable and safe. Room facilities included minibar, hairdryer, safe and TV. There were towlling robes and slippers but they don't seem to have heard of fabric softner because the robes were as rough as sandpaper !!
Visited for one night as part of a tour. The location is great, just across from the entrance to the old town. The hotel was the first modern hotel built during the communist era, and it has been refurnished recently. My room was very modern and clean, with comfortable furnishings, including a fridge and safe. The hotel is connected to a big mall with a supermarket in the basement, and various places to eat, including a cafeteria. The staff was pleasant and breakfast was adequate.
We were only in Tallinn for one night, and chose this Hotel for its location to the Old Town. It is a quick taxi ride from the airport, a five-minute stroll (albeit across a rather hectic main road) to the enchanting Old Town, and even less to the shops of the New Town (check out the shopping centre accessible via a passageway at the rear of the hotel). The staff were perfe
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