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  • The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953
  • Joonseo Song
The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953. By Donald Filtzer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 410 pp. $116.00).

Analyzing medical reports on public sanitation and public health, demographic data, and data on diet and nutrition, Filtzer, a historian of Soviet labor and industry, examines how the Soviet people, especially the urban working class, lived during the war and postwar Stalin years. The key issues Filtzer examines include sanitation, access to safe water supplies, personal hygiene and anti-epidemic controls, diet and nutrition, and infant mortality. Comparing five key industrial regions including the Moscow, Central, Volga, Ural, and Siberian regions, he reveals that there were dramatic improvements in mortality rates as a result of the application of rigorous public health controls, though living conditions lagged about fifty years behind Western European norms.

Filtzer’s main purpose in this study is to broaden the understanding of workers’ living standards in order to show the “totality” of living conditions, or what Filtzer identifies as the “quality of life” (3). For this reason a major part of this monograph includes very detailed information on what Soviet workers actually ate, wore, and purchased (5). Filtzer persuasively explains why it is important to understand workers’ quality of life: some quantitative indicators, such as real wages and prices (or “paper calculations,” as Filtzer terms it), do not always reflect the realities of daily life. In Soviet reality, for example, low prices and high wages did not necessarily guarantee access to goods like food due to supply problems. In this sense, the increase in real wages, according to Filtzer, has little meaning, especially during the period that he examines. He points out that one needs to examine the quality of daily life rather than absolute levels of wages or goods.

One of the merits of the monograph can be attributed to Filtzer’s keen effort to find “real” meanings beyond numbers. Filtzer warns his readers that the amount of food obtained from official rations may be misleading, especially in terms of nutrition. He points out that the calculation of calories and grams of protein that urban residents obtained through official rations does not indicate [End Page 579] real levels of nutrition because, on the one hand, people were unable to obtain all the food to which they were entitled, and, on the other hand, the quality of food they received was often substandard or lacked the designated nutrition. People luckily had outside sources of food that they purchased from food grown on private plots (170, 180, 187).

The second merit of this monograph comes out of the author’s regional, or geographically nuanced, approach. While most scholars thus far have examined mainly the conditions of the wartime occupied territories, Filtzer focuses on the “hinterland industrial regions within the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic] that did not experience major fighting or battle damages during World War II” (11). Additionally, Filtzer’s study exposes living conditions in small industrial towns of the home front region that scholars have so far overlooked, largely due to the lack of both sources and interest. Scholars wishing to gain a more comprehensive and balanced view of living conditions should indeed pay attention to regional small towns, because, as Filtzer points out the total population living in small and medium-size industrial towns was larger than that of the regional metropolises. His analysis of living conditions in small and medium cities enables him to compare conditions between regions, between major cities in the front regions and metropolises in the hinterland, and between regional metropolises and smaller towns in their geographic peripheries. Lastly, Filtzer’s analysis of the global context, that is, his comparisons of the epidemic, hygiene, and food supply conditions of the postwar Stalin years with those of other parts of the world, such as Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, the U.S., Great Britain, and even China, helps us to identify to what extent the postwar Soviet living conditions were deteriorating.

Some of Filtzer’s findings regarding living conditions were not unexpected. His...

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