Begging and lower-class giving in late Imperial Russia

This article uses perceptions of begging and charitable giving to explore tensions related to modernization in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. By exploring and challenging the stereotype that poor people encouraged fraud and indolence by giving alms in naive or unsophisticated ways, we uncover how lower-class Russian subjects in villages and cities related to their poorest neighbours through hierarchies of perceived need and expectations of moral behaviour. We analyze rural and urban spaces as intertwined, porous, and overlapping, with practices of begging and giving moving fluidly between the countryside and the empire's growing cities. By exploring the treatment of and discourse surrounding one of the empire's most marginalized categories of people, we illuminate the sophistication and skepticism of lower-class givers and demonstrate that urbanization required Russian subjects to adapt how they gave alms and charity but not the norms and values that determined who was worthy of charity in the first place.