Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia by Tricia Starks (review)

The old adage suggests you should never judge a book by its cover; though an exception should be made for Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia, by Tricia Starks, associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas. The cover incorporates actual nineteenth-century cigarette advertisements, drawn from the forty-seven stunningly vivid, full-color pictures that help immerse the reader into both the image and reality of smoking during the late tsarist period. Fortunately, Starks has an equally vivid narrative to accompany such engrossing images.

As anyone who has visited the Soviet Union of old—and presumably the tsarist empire that preceded it—will tell you, tobacco smoking in Russia was fundamentally different from most any other country, at least before openness to international markets permitted the influx of mass-produced Western filtered cigarettes. Before then, smoking in Russia was synonymous not with cigarettes, cigars, or pipes, but with the ubiquitous papirosa (plural: papirosy): a filterless, hollow paperboard tube capped with a cartridge of rolled Turkish- or Russian-Ukrainian-grown tobacco at the end. The rise of papirosy in late-nineteenth century Russia accompanied the transformations of urbanization and industrialization. "The easy availability of cheap papirosy from street sellers and their portability made for a more mobile, modern, and convenient habit," Starks writes, "in keeping with the pace of the modern city" (p. 2).

The unfiltered, fast-acting nicotine proved highly addictive, leading to an explosion of papirosy sales, consumption, and government revenues, though much of the retail trade was off the books. Smoking under the Tsars casts a wide historical net: exploring not only the political-economic impacts of smoking, but the physiological, hygienic, psychological, social, and cultural experiences as well. While similar scholarly histories exist of smoking in other national contexts, this is the first to wed such diverse approaches together into a unified consideration of smoking within the Russian context and makes a convincing argument for understanding the uniqueness of Russian papirosa-smoking in its own right.

Starks argues in the "Cultivated" chapter that papirosy were not only symbols of Russian difference, but instruments of imperial statecraft used extensively by the armed forces that pushed the empire's boundaries ever outward, planting tobacco in newly conquered territories from Crimea to Central Asia. Manufacturers incorporated these themes of masculinity, patriotism, and orientalism through vibrant images of smoking Cossacks, which adorned many early advertisements.

In order to mass produce such cheap papirosy, manufacturers did not mechanize production as in the West, but rather simply added more women and children as laborers, who were paid at a lower level than men. In her chapter "Produced," Starks convincingly explains how such particularly exploitative labor practices—combined with the addictive nature of the product—made tobacco manufacturers in pre-revolutionary Russia high-profile targets of workers'-rights activists, feminists, and radical Marxists, especially from within the factory walls themselves. Gendered differences were evident not only on the production side, but on the consumption side as well. The chapter "Tasted" underscores how Russian women were welcome in the realm of "respectable smoking" connoisseurs, drawing greater parallels with smoking practices in China rather than in Western Europe in that significant regard.

The chapter "Condemned" looks at the rise of anti-tobacco temperance, as the increasing prevalence of smoking prompted concerns from the medical and public-health communities, and hand-wringing over national moral decline from both the Orthodox Church and the imperial state connected to it. As with anti-vodka temperance, Russian imperial officials could not be too energetic in their condemnations against tobacco, as the powerful trade generated substantial excise revenues to the tsarist state itself. Consequently, as explained in the chapter "Contested," even among public health and medical professionals, anti-tobacco activism focused more on moderation rather than total abstinence from consumption; the more strident the anti-smoking agitation, the more it was...