Abstract
Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010; 410 pp., 5 maps; 9780521113731, £68.00 (hbk)
For all the excesses of political suppression, crash industrialization, forced labour and the uprooting of populations, Stalin’s Russia is sometimes credited with technological achievements and basic care provision for its working population, if only to facilitate their intensive as well as extensive exploitation. Donald Filtzer catalogues Russia’s grim urban conditions during wartime dislocation, privations and industrial effort and the 1947 famine, using sample studies to contrast stated or perceived establishment policy objectives with their ground-level application.
Filtzer’s methodology is admirably thorough and clear, but does not make for light reading. Problems surrounding the removal of waste; water supplies and their quality; the maintenance of personal hygiene and finally diet and nutrition are outlined, before he considers infant mortality (though not general mortality) as an indicator of risks and improvement. He compares various RSFSR urban districts, roughly from Moscow eastwards, mostly hinterland areas spared major battle damage. He draws upon the USSR Central Statistical Administration and its RSFSR affiliate, though the annual reports of State Sanitary Inspectors (roughly the equivalent of British Medical Officers of Health) and the RSFSR Ministry of Health provide much of the detail. Medical reports, demographic and nutritional data are used to convey the totality of living conditions, rather than narrower estimates of real wages with their associated difficulties concerning unofficial prices or rations that periodically lacked even key items.
Drawing on writers such as Anthony Wohl and Jörg Voegele, Filtzer suggests striking parallels between the general lack of sewerage systems beyond Russia’s older metropolitan centres and experiences in western cities some 40–80 years earlier. Heavy industrialization or war damage aggravated their deficiencies, while hinterland centres such as Molotov/Perm or Chelyabinsk lacked such basics, and the dormitory-barracks accommodation standard in industry-specific or mining oblast towns relied wholly upon outhouses and cesspits. Periodic clearances of accumulating human waste foundered upon shortages of horses, vehicles and fuel so ‘urban residents were living almost permanently surrounded by filth’ (19) with only incremental improvements by 1953.
Sewage and chemical-industrial contamination of water supplies was common: smaller towns sometimes fared better, but, in many, fish-free rivers featured distinctive pollutants or toxic cocktails and raw sewage. Without clean or ample water supplies and with street pumps affected by leakages, damage, drought or frost, domestic chores and personal hygiene constituted major undertakings. Public bathhouses (and data on bathings per capita) did not focus upon personal aesthetics or comfort but were linked with disinfections, isolation, health education, and inspections of food handlers and traders to control lice and diseases such as typhus, typhoid and dysentery. With accumulating experience in dealing with population movements, increasingly aided by targeted immunization programmes and antibiotics, the application of new knowledge subject to ‘the economic logic of Stalinism’ (10) and impervious to bourgeois sensitivities concerning bad smells, market forces or profit motives, major disease outbreaks were restricted.
Thus post-war Russian towns did not emulate the West since ‘mortality declined without any appreciable improvements in urban sanitation, water supply, overcrowding, or facilities for maintaining personal cleanliness’ (3). Moreover, this was achieved despite poor nutrition. Russia’s legacy of food shortages, compounded by wartime privations and the devastating if short-run effects of the 1947 famine, affected urban workers most. Food producers were advantaged and, though some urban supplies were protected, people unable to augment dietary allowances with home-grown produce were especially vulnerable. Official regional averages reveal shortfalls from the recommended daily 3053 kilocalories for manual labourers and Filtzer suggests that most workers approached this target only by subsisting on bread and potatoes, though shortages and malnourishment became less life-threatening by the early 1950s.
Filtzer does not trace specifics within the many influences upon overall wartime and post-war mortality but focuses instead upon infant death rates, perhaps a more sensitive indicator of urban hazards, noting their reduction from 1948. Infants in Moscow, which had more by way of sanitary infrastructure, fared noticeably better but broader improvement reflected mainly public education and hygiene measures and medical care boosted by the availability of antibiotics. Interpreting data from this era remains problematic and this detailed reconstruction with its occasionally dense, report-like coverage, produces unrelentingly grim impressions. However, summary charts and conclusions for each chapter are particularly useful. Despite defective urban environments, health efforts based upon directives and medical technologies seemingly tipped the balance, though precisely how remains unclear. Such conclusions might resonate with late-nineteenth century devotees of ‘serum therapy’ or contemporary observers of ‘developing world’ mortality trends, but they may startle European urban or health historians.
Filtzer sees the Stalinist regime as relentlessly focused upon developing heavy industry, producing massive waste and social costs, and squandering its wealth-producing labour force. Though minimal cost efforts, as outlined here, preserved labour supplies, the regime’s characteristic was self-negating and contributed to its downfall. Why workers as people rather than labour endured – or persevered with – Stalinism is not really discussed in this book, though Filtzer’s account is fascinating and has more than passing relevance for contemporary critics of capitalism.