Conclusion

This concluding chapter considers attitudes toward sex work in modern-day Russia. While sex workers and their allies in today's Russia have argued for the legalization of the venal economy on various judicial grounds, politicians remain deeply wedded to the belief that prostitution is a social vice and should be policed as such. Informing these retrograde discussions of sexual labor is a firm belief, made recalcitrant in the post-Soviet era, that prostitution represented the nation's social and political decline. The reconstitution of erotic life in contemporary Russia mirrors imperial era panics about social degeneracy that connected prostitution with infection and disease. Yet the topic of prostitution likewise offered Russia's cultural elite a means to discuss women's sexual and economic emancipation. Whether romanticized or demonized, commercial sex appeared as a contested means for women's emancipation, as these women found commodification a means not only for survival but for social and economic advancement.