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Chapter 11— Destalinizationas Detoxification ?
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Chapter 11 DESTALINIZATION AS DETOXIFICATION? The Expert Debate on Industrial Toxins under Khrushchev C H R I S T O P H E R B U R T O N Although it had prerevolutionary roots, the Soviet science of communal hygiene developed as a means to reconcile health protection with very rapid industrial development under Stalin. Entering the Khrushchev years, most communal hygienists understood human-created, or anthropogenic, threats to human health cautiously, even conservatively. Their field therefore largely ignored the dangers indicated by broader environmental degradation, ironically heightening the risk to human health within the Soviet Union. Destalinization, however, challenged the assumptions of communal hygiene. As long ago as the 1970s, it was accepted wisdom in the West that Soviet public health and the environment were deeply troubled, and by the second half of the 1980s it was popular knowledge as well inside the former Soviet Union itself. The frankly catastrophic interpretation of Soviet health care attained broad currency in the West with the bulletin cowritten by Murray Feshbach and Christopher Davis on infant mortality.1 Davis and Feshbach hypothesized the very poor state of the Soviet medical system and also the worsening quality of life in the Soviet Union as causes of the disaster. Feshbach later expanded his interpretation to an even more ambitious environmental modeling of the crisis. The infant mortality deterioration was only an element of a pervasive systemic breakdown, which Feshbach C H R I S T O P H E R B U R T O N 2 3 8 labeled “ecocide.”2 The ecocidal model also strongly links health care to environmental issues.3 Because of the lack of resources devoted to Soviet health care and the depth of environmental problems, they were very closely intertwined. In this close relationship of health to environment, “ecocide” has a visceral immediacy largely lacking in discussions of environmental problems in North America and Western Europe. The ecocidal crisis can be thrown into relief by considering Soviet thought on the relationship between medicine and the environment long before the 1980s. Despite the implications of the “ecocidal” model, Russian and Soviet scholars have a distinguished history of thinking on health and environmental issues on the broadest possible scale, the best example being geochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky as the inventor of the concept of the biosphere.4 Thanks to existing historical scholarship we have a firm grasp of Russian and Soviet thinking in the field of biology on these problems. Soviet biologists and naturalists in related fields were most concerned with the protection of nature, a solution for which they found, at least in part, in the creation and maintenance of nature reserves, or zapovedniki. The trials and tribulations of these reserves, and the scientific movement which lay beyond them, are subjects addressed by the distinguished historian Douglas R. Weiner.5 However, as “ecocide” posits a very close relationship between Soviet health and environment, we can gain further insight into thinking and practice in the USSR by shifting focus to the Soviet understanding of environmental health. Environmental health is a field of medicine. It is distinct from environmentalism, a concern with the relation between humanity and the natural environment, and predates environmentalism in its modern form. As a field of medicine, environmental health has its origins in the public health of the nineteenth century, with its concern with finding the physical origins of the epidemics of the early industrial age. It is first identifiable as a field right at the end of the nineteenth century or at the beginning of the twentieth, with the shifting of concern amongst public health officers to housing conditions as sources of ill health, although it soon developed foci other than housing. By one definition, environmental health encompasses every factor in the human environment that affects health and every illness that has its origin in the environment, even including naturally occurring background radiation , as it may be dangerous to human health. However, some experts in the field find it useful and more manageable to limit the definition to diseasecausing agents that are introduced into the environment by humans, as well as the diseases caused in this manner.6 For my purposes I will define environmental health as the study of anthropogenic causes of disease, even [18.224.0.25] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:40 GMT) D E S T A L I N I Z A T I O N A S D E T O X I F I C A...