Abstract Begging was everywhere in the late Russian Empire, and presents a distinctive case study for lower-class charitable giving. Unlike many Western European states at the turn of the twentieth century, Russia had no institutionalized social safety net. For most lower-class Russians, direct alms from other lower-class people were the only form of poor relief. This article shows that poverty in urban and rural spaces was entangled. As lower-class Russians moved between the countryside and the city, they engaged with poverty and begging in comparable ways, revealing how rural peasants, urban workers, and people in between understood their society through a shared moral landscape. Studying everyday interactions between beggars and individual almsgivers indicates that lower-class people were largely cautious and discriminating in their decisions about who to give alms to, why, and in what forms. Although perceived hierarchies of need along lines of gender, age, and physical ability were similar in urban and rural spaces, mechanisms of discrimination were very different. In villages, lower-class people used personal networks and face-to-face interaction to assess need. In cities, crowds of anonymous strangers made that approach impossible, so they relied on information provided by modern forms of communication such as the daily newspaper to identify people and causes worthy of charitable giving, demonstrating processes of lower-class adaptation to Russia’s modernizing society.
Cowan et al. (Mon,) studied this question.