Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR by Tricia Starks (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR by Tricia Starks
• Alexei B. Kojevnikov

Tricia Starks. Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca, N.Y..: Cornell University Press, 2022. xx + 302 pp. Ill. $44.95 ( 978-1-5017-6548-3).

The Soviet Union was one of the word's main producers and consumers of tobacco products, competing in this widespread habit and unhealthy business, although not quite reaching the levels achieved by the United States. As a basic social phenomenon, smoking did not know political and ideological boundaries, but was not independent from them either. Tricia Starks accumulated a very rich, diverse, and culturally revealing body of sources explaining how the different patterns of manufacturing, selling, and opposing the use of tobacco developed over the seven decades of Soviet history.

Tobacco came to Russia via Western Europe in the seventeenth century, defying initial bans on religious grounds. It was fully legalized by Peter the Great, and by 1900 the country was fully affected by the global epidemic of smoking, which spread wider during World War I. Soldiers and workers whose mass action made the revolution of 1917 filled the halls and streets with the smell of cheap tobacco, but Lenin personally hated smoking and tried to ban it during Bolshevik meetings. In 1920, Commissar of Public Health Nikolai Semashko launched the public propaganda campaign against smoking as damaging to health, but this internationally pathbreaking effort by the first socialist state competed against economic interests of other governmental agencies that wanted to restore tobacco production decimated by the war, provide jobs, and satisfy the demand of revolutionary masses. While health officials and doctors were inventing pioneering methods to encourage and assist cessation, the semicapitalist New Economic Policy economy designed artistically innovative commercials for the booming tobacco factories.

Stalinist industrialization prioritized increased mass production to meet the growing demand. Cessation efforts and sales commercials became less visible, with emphasis more on cultured consumption and quality improvement or the shift from cottage-industry-style cheap tobacco (makhorka) toward industrially made papirosen and cigarettes. While consumers were overwhelmingly male, females constituted the bulk of the labor force in the tobacco economy, which achieved [End Page 518] great strides in approaching the "equal pay for equal work" goal and promoting women to responsible positions, such as director of the most prestigious Iava factory, Maria Ivanova. While the government message that nicotine was bad for health remained valid, especially for schoolkids, it was not very effective when the same government worshiped Stalin, who was publicly known to be an avid pipe smoker. The war crisis damaged production again, but at the same time elevated consumption as a typical attribute of the Red Army soldier, with tobacco as strategically important for military provisions as food rations and weapons. Smoking became an integral part of the image of Soviet militarized masculinity and, for boys, a passage to adulthood. By the 1950s, more than half of the male population smoked.

The sixties saw competition again, with the drive to catch up with the United States in quantity and to some degree in quality of tobacco products. The global appeal of commercials such as Marlboro created the culture of symbolic prestige associated with consuming smuggled or imported Western cigarettes or their local imitations. Reinvigorated efforts to limit smoking competed against more sophisticated marketing of filtered cigarettes, attractively packaged and wrongly assumed to be safer. With better scientific knowledge about the risks, now increasingly linked to lung cancer, health spokesmen voiced alarm about the stalling and then declining average lifespan, especially for Soviet men. Locally grown tobacco had a stronger, natural taste but lesser nicotine content. American tobacco was easier to flavor with additional ingredients, seemed lighter, but was manufactured to enhance addiction. By 1975 Soviet producers collaborated with Philip Morris to issue together the Soyuz-Apollo cigarette brand, named after the joint U.S.-Soviet space mission.

The last decade of Soviet history saw sharp turns between attempts to radically curb tobacco production and sales during Gorbachev's perestroika and the total capitulation before unregulated American imports and broadly televised commercials during Yeltsin's 1990s. "Lighter" cigarettes also contributed...