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  • The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State
  • Sharon A. Kowalsky
The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State. By Tricia Starks (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) 313 pp. $26.95

The Body Soviet places Soviet efforts to promote hygiene and public health at the center of the Bolshevik revolutionary transformations of the 1920s. Exploring written and visual propaganda aimed at improving, rationalizing, and modernizing the health and fitness of the Russian [End Page 613] population, Starks argues that the Bolshevik leadership used "the language of hygiene as a symbolic system to create and define the revolutionary state and citizen" (22). As she moves her focus from broad (the state) to narrow (the individual), Starks examines the importance that Soviet public-health officials placed on hygiene, setting their efforts within a broader pan-European context of the modernizing and interventionist post-World War I state. She also highlights the unique nature of the Soviet experiment in its attempt to create a "politically conscious population capable of leading the world revolution and creating the socialist utopia" (39).

Starks begins her analysis with a discussion of dirt and cleanliness, emphasizing the ways in which hygiene entered politics in the Soviet context. For the Bolsheviks, dirt represented a defiance of communist order whereas cleanliness reflected purity. In this symbolic universe, the pollutants of the old way of life needed to be removed to create the new socialist order. Particularly when it came to the home, Bolshevik propaganda emphasized the importance of cleanliness as a foundation for Soviet citizenship and political consciousness. In their efforts, health professionals often focused on women as guardians of the home; they were thus responsible for its transformation. Nevertheless, Soviet health professionals did not trust women to implement Soviet hygienic principles properly. They stressed instead the importance of such Soviet institutions as Houses of Leisure, Workers' Clubs, sanatoriums, nurseries, kindergartens, and maternity homes, among others, to instill a proper understanding of cleanliness, hygiene, and order among the population, and to assert the authority of the state over daily activities.

Soviet institutions and health professionals also sought to rationalize behavior as part of their hygiene regimen. They attempted to regulate rest and leisure to make the most productive use of every hour and thus speed up the transformation of Russian society. Discouraging such polluting behaviors as drinking, smoking, and sexual pleasure, Soviet hygiene propaganda advocated attendance at meetings, reading, and physical exercise as appropriate uses of leisure time. As Starks concludes, "By cleansing one's body, maintaining a strict schedule, abstaining from polluting activities, and engaging in physical culture, citizens could triumph over biology and resist the temptations and pitfalls of modern, urban life as well as the enticements of the flesh. They could transcend the untidy political and social environment of the 1920s and advance directly to utopia" (201). These efforts, however, often failed to achieve their intended results.

Starks has produced a meticulous examination of written and visual propaganda, published sources, and archival holdings on public health and hygiene that assesses the goals and achievements of Soviet health policy as well as popular resistance to them. The volume provides a welcome contribution to the growing historical scholarship on everyday life in the early Soviet period,complementing recent works by, for instance, Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the So- [End Page 614] viet Masses (DeKalb, 2007), and Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939 (DeKalb, 2009). Well written and richly illustrated with reproductions of hygiene posters, it should find a wide audience among scholars interested in issues of public health, hygiene, sexuality, modernization, state intervention, and women's issues.

Sharon A. Kowalsky
Texas A&M University, Commerce
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