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] ntroduction • ] the midst of the devastating Russian civil war, V. I. Lenin turned his attention from the bourgeois parasite to another bloodsucker-the louse. "Either the lice will defeat socialism;' he cautioned the 1919 All-Russia Congress of Soviets, "or socialism will defeat the lice:'! Concern for health is not often associated with the years of revolution, but even in the thick of war Lenin's attention to hygiene made sense.2 From 1919 through 1923 three quarters of the population suffered from starvation. As hunger weakened immune systems, waves of louse-born typhus, Spanish influenza, cholera, smallpox, and even plague coursed through Russia. Disease and famine killed as many as ten million Russians from 1914 to 1921 and left many times that number crippled or chronically ill,3 The Bolsheviks inherited a sick population as well as an industrially defunct and militarily weak state.To restore Russian might and create a model state, Lenin saw the need for a more virile population, insisting "the fight for socialism is at the same time the fight for health:'4 While historians are familiar with Lenin's battle cry against the louse, its relevance to political, cultural, and social issues has been lost.s Health was of immediate, vital importance to the new state for political stability, productive industry, and military manpower, but revolutionaries characterized health programs as necessary for more than mere survival. Caring for the population was a duty. Capitalism had stunted workers' lives and banished them to fetid basements. Revolutionaries pledged to provide the people with better living quarters, improved working conditions, and universal medical care. Reformers moved workers from overcrowded barracks into confiscated bourgeois housing. The government enacted protective legislation, and in 1918 the Narodnyi komissariat zdravookhraneniia (People's Commissariat of Public Health; hereafter NarkOInzdrav) began a quest to protect the health and welfare of all citizens.6 4 Introduction Revolutionaries agitated for health as a matter of survival, duty, and political change. Narkomzdrav advocates worked alongside cultural and revolutionary theorists, who considered clean living part of their own utopian projects? These professionals and supporters can collectively be termed "hygienists" for their unified support of habits for body, home, and life centered on order, rationality, and balance.8 Just as many agendas included hygienic measures, not all hygiene recommendations can be ascribed to concerns about disease. Hygiene carries with it connotations far beyond health. The word "hygiene;' rooted in the cult of the goddess Hygeia, retains much of the Greek emphasis upon balance and reason as the basis for personal and societal health.9 As such, hygiene implies more than a condition of the body or environment and entails the creation of order and political systems. As did most medical authorities around the globe, Soviet activists included these classical concepts in their programs to cultivate the people and bring function to the state. Hygienists' concerns, while seemingly cultural in form, were political in motivation. In their language, pamphlets, and programs, Soviet hygienists associated mental acuity, political orthodoxy, and modernity with lives lived according to the concepts of balance and reason. These presumed benefits from a regulated, hygienic lifestyle informed medical inquiry, education, and state programs. Soviet hygienists believed that ordered lives produced healthy bodies and politically enlightened, productive, and happy populations; strong bodies generated balanced minds that would, in turn, choose the most rational, equitable, and inevitable of political, social, and economic structures, namely, socialism. Furthermore, the cleansed body was not just a building block of the socialist utopia; it became the material manifestation of the revolutions success . Since the state, the nation, and the family would all "wither away;' it was the population whose transformation would signal the success of revolution. Thus, the rationalized Soviet body was more essential to the socialist utopia than even the state; the creation of the body Soviet was the creation of the socialist utopia. State-sponsored institutions and campaigns disseminated the message of hygiene in their quest to reform the population. Museums demonstrated the positive effects of fresh air, sunshine, and exercise. Actors staged show trials of people exhibiting "holdover" behaviors, such as the illiterate, the drunkard, the slob, the libertine, and the spitter.IO Tuberculosis treatment centers and workers ' vacation homes counseled hygienic behavior as the foundation of an entire "healthful" lifestyle, showing Russians how to eat, bathe, and decorate the house, as well as what kinds of activities could replace the usual boozing and romancing hygienists associated with worker leisure.Workers' clubs held lectures, [18.117.186.92] Project...

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