The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 by Donald Filtzer (review)

A question I have occasionally posed to students regarding Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is whether the novella’s Gulag camp should be taken as a microcosm of Soviet life under Iosif Stalin. Was Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of dehumanizing camp conditions—the filthy, overcrowded barracks, the hunger, the cold, the regimentation, the official disdain for individual personality and welfare, the class hierarchy, the outrageous operation of the medical dispensary, with its daily maximum allowable number of sick cases and its untrained “doctor”—intended to underscore the uniquely awful characteristics of the Gulag, or was it intended as a broader critique of Soviet life? Whereas my students have always opted for the broader interpretation, I have tended to emphasize particularity and to see Solzhenitsyn’s great contribution as bringing to light a hidden, nightmarish world outside normal Soviet life. Donald Filtzer’s powerful new book has made me rethink my position. Filtzer shows that many of the degrading conditions we associate with the Gulag were also common in Soviet urban areas, with the partial exception of Moscow, throughout the late Stalin era. The “Little” and “Big” zones were all too similar in key material respects.

Let’s start with excrement, the topic with which Filtzer, somewhat disconcertingly, opens his investigation. The slop bucket, which figures so prominently in Solzhenitsyn’s and others’ accounts of the Gulag, had its counterpart in residential buildings throughout the country. Soviet cities had woefully undeveloped sewage systems at the end of World War II, typically covering just the city center and dating to prerevolutionary years. Outside Moscow, the vast majority of urban residents entered the postwar period with no access to sewage. Outhouses and cesspools in the courtyards of urban dwellings, often poorly constructed and oozing, gave residential quarters a permanent stench. Particularly in winter, when outhouses froze, people relieved themselves almost as frequently outside the outhouse as within it. Garbage and excrement overwhelmed the meager collection efforts of municipalities, which had at their disposal a fraction of the number of horses and vehicles for waste removal as had British cities some seventy years earlier. This picture changed very little during the remainder of the Stalin era. Only through the forced mobilization of urban residents to participate in twice-yearly cleanup campaigns were cities able to cart away most of the garbage and sewage that had accumulated in streets and courtyards. Investment in sanitary infrastructure was not a priority.

Sewerage is closely connected to Filtzer’s second topic, urban water supplies. Here, too, his findings are bleak. Access was one aspect of the problem. Everywhere but Moscow, most urban residents lacked indoor running water and had to haul it by buckets from street pumps. Remarkably, a substantial percentage of new urban housing, including multistory units, in the postwar period lacked plumbing. The perilous passage across icy streets to the water pump that we see in documentary footage of the Leningrad blockade was not an anomaly; it was a routine feature of Soviet urban life. In this, no less than sewerage, Soviet cities were thirty to eighty years behind Western European cities, Filtzer tells us.

The quality of the available water was dreadful. “Ecocide,” a term coined by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly to describe the wholesale destruction of the environment in the later decades of the USSR, was further advanced by the late Stalin era than we may have realized. Most cities and even factories had no water treatment facilities at all. Raw sewage, including contaminated hospital waste, was released directly into waterways, along with toxic emissions from the Stalin-era industrial behemoths. Although Filtzer comes at this subject more from the perspective of public health and living standards than from an environmental history angle, the two are closely intertwined. To take just one of many horrific examples, the Nizhnii Tagil coke-oven factory spewed phenols, cyanide...