The Environment of Postwar Stalinism

The postwar Soviet Union was full of shit. Many cities had such a poor sanitation infrastructure that courtyards were awash in filth from leaky cesspits and covered in piles of fecal matter. Residents of small industrial cities sometimes faced a disgusting combination of an open-gutter sewerage system, location in a non-desiccated swampland, and lack of sidewalks. People in these places were forced to traverse excrement-filled muck just to go about their daily lives.

These conditions were an extreme manifestation of the impoverished circumstances of many European countries after the Second World War. But they also reflected the hardships of late Stalinism, especially since the cities in question had not been subject to devastation during military campaigns. Historians of the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union in the last decade of Stalin's reign have been busy painting a portrait of this era as a dynamic and transformative period instead of as simply the solidification of totalitarianism. Almost all assessments of social and economic circumstances between 1943 and 1948 highlight the pervasive misery of these years. With over twenty-five million dead from the war and a million more to perish during a famine in 1946-7, state attempts to culturally harness social support for reconstruction faltered. A different set of carrots and sticks characterized state policy toward society between 1948 and 1953 as material conditions gradually improved. Scholarly consensus, furthermore, points out that some form of liberalization and reduction of repressive measures had become almost necessary for the government to maintain political control after Stalin.¹

The squalid conditions in the country contrasted with the Soviet Union's ascent as a global political power. The late historian Tony Judt described the situation in 1945 in the following terms: 'After two decades of effective exclusion from the affairs of Europe, Russia had re-surfaced. The resilience of the Soviet population, the successes of the Red Army, and it must be said, the Nazis' capacity to turn even the most sympathetic anti-Soviet nations against them, had brought Stalin credibility and influence, in counsels of governments and on the streets.'² Instead of immediately redistributing the spoils of military victory to the Soviet citizenry, the government quickly used this newfound geopolitical strength to justify many of the same old policies of the 1930s. Namely, it pursued the rapid industrialization of heavy industry and mobilized different forms of forced labour, while it neglected to make accompanying investment in municipal infrastructure and limited most people's personal consumption.

Some of the most viscerally repugnant facets of this world constitute the subject of Donald Filtzer's new book. Upton Sinclair once famously described the response to his exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry in The Jungle, 'I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach'. I found that while Filtzer's The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia might have begun with a blow to the stomach, its thorough discussions of Soviet living conditions ultimately weighed heavily on the heart. A major goal, and accomplishment, of this book is to excavate Soviet social history by detailing the 'real conditions in which workers and their families carried out their daily lives'. As Filtzer - the author of four previous monographs on Soviet labour history - relates, 'Having had the privilege of living in the former Soviet Union during the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras I had direct knowledge of just how bad Soviet toilets were, but I had no idea that for the better part of the twentieth century most Soviet citizens did not have a toilet, or running water either' (p. xvii).

Besides being a meticulous researcher who probes deeply into all available sources, Filtzer has also elaborated a unique interpretation of Soviet history as a whole. Much of the trajectory of the Soviet experiment from the Stalinist revolution that began in the late 1920s to the 1991 collapse can be attributed to...