Red Lights on the Black Sea: Labor Migration and the Traffic in Women from Fin-de-Siecle Odessa, 1880-1910

The second half of the nineteenth century saw both an exponential increase in the number of people emigrating from the Russian empire, and an ‘emigration panic’ on behalf of state officials who feared that Russia was haemorrhaging human capital. The resultant efforts to prevent emigration, which was de jure illegal if de facto engaged in by millions, undergirded the construction of increasingly militarized borders.  Claims of the ubiquity of migrant smuggling, and particularly the new crime of ‘trafficking in women’ for prostitution, were used to justify an interventionist stance on the part of the state towards its internationally mobile subjects.

This paper will examine the ways in which concern about trafficking in women for prostitution contributed to the expansion and contraction of Russia’s southern border around the port city of Odessa.  In particular, I will interrogate the role of non-state actors in policing Odessa’s ‘borders’ at urban train stations and port city docks through their involvement in efforts to protect migrant women from traffickers.  As I argue, volunteers for traveller’s aid societies who, with the permission of local authorities, guarded local train stations and boarded ships looking for single female migrants to ‘rescue’, ended up trusted lieutenants in the state’s campaigns to prevent labor migration. In this way, a sexualized discourse that linked women’s labor migration to sex work, and that in turn assumed that sex work was always coerced, shored up the police and border officials’ attempts to intercept international crossings on the nineteenth century Black Sea.