r s /b l A -t C -C ussiA - Alcohol and Drugs History Society · Starks: Anti-Tobacco Campaigns in Twentieth-Century Russia 1 vessels such as coronary artery and heart disease, arteriosclerosis,

Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 21, No 1 (Fall 2006)�0

red stAr/blACK lungs: Anti-tobACCo CAMpAigns in twentieth-Century russiA1

triCiA stArKs

Tricia Starks is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Fayette-ville, Arkansas, USA.

Abstract. This paper examines two major Soviet anti-smoking cam-paigns—one in the 1920s and the other in the late 1970s. Each occurs in a period of demographic crisis as part of larger public health efforts. Each ultimately fails. In 1920, the leader of the People’s Commissariat of Health, N. Semashko, began a campaign against tobacco with the support of V. I. Lenin. He proposed restrictions on access, use, and production of tobacco. Faced with the needs of the new state for economic stability, government officials abandoned the plan by 1921. In 1970, internal demo-graphic concerns and increasing international evidence led the Ministry of Health to again attempt to stamp out tobacco. While policy was made, implementation was weak and the economic dislocations of the 1980s saw the vast importation of foreign brands to stabilize the government and the collapse of this second campaign against tobacco.

In his May 10, 2006 address to the Federal Assembly, President Putin recog-nized the demographic crisis facing Russia.2 Noting that the Russian popu-lation fell by 700,000 people each year, he argued for drastic measures to address the fearful decline. Analysts argue that economic collapse, infectious diseases, and environmental toxins all lay claim to part of the demographic puzzle, but Putin avoided most of these topics. AIDS got no mention and only bootleg, but not regular, alcohol made it into the speech. Instead of extensive discussion of major problems for the health of the existing population, Putin focused most of his speech on pronatalist initiatives.3

The media latched onto Putin’s birth incentives. The cash bonuses and other perks for procreation echoed programs of earlier times and allowed easy comparisons to Stalin. Analysts eagerly gleaned from these lightly sketched ideas comments on the state of Russia and Putin’s ruling style. Lost in the me-dia coverage was Putin’s first point as he asked authorities to begin “focusing on the detection, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease.”4 It is not surprising that he chose to mention CVD; CVD is responsible, according to a 2003 World Health Organization, for �6% of mortality in Russia. CVD is a problem for Russia, but also a leading cause of death world wide. Not a specific syndrome, CVD describes a variety of diseases of the heart and blood

SHAD (Fall, 2006): 50-68.

Starks: Anti-Tobacco Campaigns in Twentieth-Century Russia �1

vessels such as coronary artery and heart disease, arteriosclerosis, aneurism, stroke, as well as other problems of the circulatory system. These can be congenital, but also can be a consequence of unhealthy lifestyles. Major risk factors for CVD include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and smoking. While Putin did not dwell on tobacco, it is a major factor in CVD deaths as well as general mortality in Russia. According to recent surveys, over half of Russian men and over a third of Russian women smoke.�

Smoking creates the conditions for CVD and other diseases. As nicotine courses through the blood, reaching every organ of the body, it creates the condition for cancer of the throat, esophagus, lungs, stomach, kidney, blad-der, and pancreas. In addition to cancers, smoking contributes to death by atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The dangers to the heart are exacerbated by the toughening of lung tissue forcing the heart to pump harder in order to push oxygen through the system. In addition to the contribution to CVD and can-cer, tobacco use directly affects the birth rate and infant health. Smoking by mothers can have a debilitating effect on fetal and infant health. Smoking during pregnancy and in the homes of nursing infants has been connected to increased risk of premature delivery, stillbirth, lower infant birth weights, and increased risk of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

From endangering the young to crippling the old, the effects of smoking on Russian health add up. Clearly, smoking is an important factor in the startling decline of Russian health in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but Russia’s demographic problems cannot be understood merely as a product of the collapse of 1991 or even of the events of the last half of the twentieth century. Russian health in the twentieth century is not a story of inexorable decline, but instead a saga of triumph as well as tragedy. In 1918, the Soviets claimed the first national health system in the world with the founding of Nar-komzdrav (Narodyni kommissariat zdravookhranenie—The People’s Com-missariat of Health), and they managed to double life expectancy for most Russians within just a few decades. Their stunning advances were followed by an equally startling decline.6 By the 1970s, the mortality figures emerging from Moscow were so dire that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced on the floor of the United States Senate that the communists held control of a sickening society that would collapse within a decade.7 He was met with derision but his remark proved remarkably prescient.

The fall from an example of health care provision to the first industrialized nation to post a decline in major health indicators has left many questions. While researchers have looked to social issues such as alcohol abuse and en-vironmental problems like pollution to understand the demographic slide, to-bacco has a mounting body count. Yet the history of its spread, production, and reception is little researched, leaving modern investigators at a loss to understand how tobacco gained such a hold and became such a danger to Russian health.8


A history of tobacco in Russia in its entirety is outside the scope of this paper; instead, it contextualizes, examines, and compares the two major anti-smoking campaigns of the government health officials in the twentieth cen-tury—one in the early 1920s and the other in the late 1970s. The Soviets government pursued its campaigns in the period when mechanized produc-tion of cigarettes and increasing standards of living allowed greater access to tobacco for the majority of the population and subsequently saw the greatest increase in the number of smokers in Russia. Each campaign occured in a similar period of demographic crisis. Each was part of larger efforts to better the health of the population. Each ultimately failed.

The Russians made their first attempts at tobacco control well before the twentieth century. While the Soviets would bring in tobacco-control legisla-tion as a matter of public health, the tsars had looked upon tobacco with anxi-ety and concern for its danger to morality and began regulating its trade and use in the seventeenth century. In 1634, Michael Romanov forbade the sale and use of tobacco, seeing it as an evil that defiled man, an incendiary danger in the fire-prone city, and a dangerous influence on the poor who spent their last penny for tobacco over bread. While the ban was briefly overturned in hopes of creating a trade monopoly, the legal and economic context hindered tobacco’s infiltration of Russia as law codes and mercantilist policy combined to close the market to foreign imports. The law was quickly re-promulgated along with harsher sanctions including slitting of nostrils, flogging with the knout, exile to Siberia, and even the death penalty for those who used or traded tobacco.9

The ban ended in 1696 when Peter the Great made a fateful choice for the Russian economy and the Russian population. Understanding that tobacco, properly taxed, could be a tremendous source of revenue, he overturned the ban. Peter’s change of policy was also a response to the growing black market for tobacco illegally imported by the Poles, Swedes, and others and part of his general cultural program for westernization. For Peter, economic issues and the pragmatic desire to control a commodity that was already entering Russia, took precedence over symbolic bans on tobacco use and trade. The turn to tobacco revenue over tobacco control would be echoed in the later failures of Soviet efforts to fight the weed’s appeal.10

Control of borders, the economy, and the population all translated into state interest in the tobacco trade, but the state’s prominent role did not result in complete acceptance of tobacco by society. It would take at least a century for Peter’s change to trickle down to the rest of the population. While tobacco consumption did rise, especially among the elite and military ranks, it was at-tacked by religious and health authorities throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its connections to licentious behavior and health risk. While the effects of tobacco were not entirely un-derstood, pamphlets such as the 184� work of Dr. Bussiron, On the Effects


of Smoking, Snuff and Cigar Tobacco on the Health, Morality and Mind of Man, outlined the dangers of tobacco for the Russian public listing addictive behavior, general wasting, and cancer of the nose as part of a general indict-ment of the weed.11

Cultural and religious authorities similarly attacked tobacco use for the danger it presented to the will and soul. Tolstoy, in his 1890 essay “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” argued that tobacco compromised man’s moral fiber and made him more easily prey to perverse passions. Although Tolstoy strayed from the official church in other ways, his feelings about tobacco were perfectly in keeping with the church’s stand against smoking, chewing, and snuff. Archpriest Evgenii Popov of the St. Stephen of Perm “Society for the Upholding of Popular Morals in the Spirit of the Russian Orthodox Church,” exemplified the religious argument against tobacco as both a spiritual and health risk in his Begin the Fight with Fervor against Tobacco (1887).12

While the pacifist and archpriest would join as unlikely allies, those who came together in approval, or at least acceptance, of tobacco lobbed pro-to-bacco rhetoric from the other side. Pamphlets such as Smoke as Much as You Like argued that contemporary attacks on tobacco were unfounded and that if smokers followed simple rules they could smoke without harm.13 This sup-port of tobacco was muted by the author’s preference for the use of his initials rather than full name and the lack of any medical degree on the title (a com-mon inclusion in the turn-of-the-century health pamphlets), but still served to muddle the case.

Although by 1917 there was no consensus on the dangers of smoking, the new regime would bring a loud voice to public health discussions. In 1918, Narkomzdrav began protecting the health and welfare of all citizens as the first such organization at the national level in Russia and the world.14 The hygienists of Narkomzdrav had many problems to address.1� As many as ten million Russians died of disease or famine during the years of war and revolu-tion, and many times that number survived, only to live on crippled or chroni-cally ill in the period of starvation that followed.16 Narkomzdrav took on the task of improving popular health in an environment of devastation while facing the problems of government ministries in the 1920s—no funding, a crippled infrastructure, and a lack of personnel.17 Faced with few alterna-tives, Narkomzdrav turned to education and prophylaxis as the cheapest, most effective, way to slacken the tide of epidemics and rebuild the health of the remaining population. Posters and pamphlets reminded workers that their health was their own duty and that proper lifestyles could thwart communi-cable diseases in particular, but political and cultural agendas were evident in these rules, too.

Hygienists urged workers to live balanced lives, regulated by the clock.18 In particular they recommended control of the body through exercise and moderation of physical urges as a way to produce healthy bodies and con-sequently healthy thoughts. Alcohol, sex, and tobacco did not fit into their


prescriptions. Sexual or alcoholic excess could damage, drain, and ultimately desiccate the body. Tobacco, considered a “weakening” substance, became a gateway drug to further vice as the addictive behaviors of smokers became evidence of the physical degradation brought on by use. This joining of sex, alcohol, and tobacco reflected world-wide temperance programs against vice, since campaigns against all three also raged in the United States and areas of Europe. It is little wonder that Soviet hygienists attacked tobacco, but it is surprising how quickly they did so.

On December 14, 1920, Nikolas Semashko, Commissar of Health, opened the front by requesting measures against tobacco from the Soviet of People’s Commissars. According to his memoirs, he did not do so on his own. Instead, he remembered it as a move urged upon him by Lenin, who approached him in the early years of the revolution asking when he would start a fight against the “poison” tobacco. Lenin was a strong opponent of tobacco use and even forced those who wished to smoke at meetings to convene by the fireplace and blow their smoke up the flue. Semashko knew of Lenin’s dislike for smoking and given his assurance in such high-level support, it is little wonder that Semashko felt he had an easy task. He set upon it readily and emerged from that December meeting as head of a two-week commission charged with investigating the “lessening, and in the future… the destruction of [tobacco] culture.”19

Over the next several weeks, the commission met and hashed out the details of a decree. The representatives of the economic institutions all seemed skit-tish.20 While Semashko proposed an all-out ban on foreign export of tobacco, these groups were against such a strong move.21 As 1921 dawned, the meet-ings continued. While Semashko leapt at the chance to stamp out internal tobacco production, the only common enemy this group could find was tobac-co speculators.22 Tobacco sales outside of state control worried the produc-tion interests and merited several mentions in the meeting protocol. Despite the divisions of his committee, Semashko brought a draft decree, “On the Fight with Smoking Tobacco,” to the February 3, 1921 meeting of the Malyi Sovnarkom, a small governing body that met more frequently, decided issues of daily governance, and set the agenda for meetings of the full Sovnarkom.23 While the commission had allowed for input from other agencies, the gran-deur of the proposal spoke to Semashko’s heavy influence. In an ambitious ten-point plan of a scale unknown at the national level anywhere else in the world, Semashko proposed attacks on tobacco on three fronts—production, access, and image of tobacco.

To cut tobacco use, Semashko proposed limiting the amount by banning imports, decreasing tillage, forbidding private tobacco factories, and control-ling sales.24 To regulate distribution of tobacco, he favored tobacco cards bar-ring those under the age of twenty from access to tobacco and allowing the remainder of the population tobacco according to standards determined by health officials according to the age and gender of the user.2� Men from age

Starks: Anti-Tobacco Campaigns in Twentieth-Century Russia ��

twenty to thirty-five (even those in the Red Army) and women of all ages would be allowed only a restricted amount of tobacco. Not all of the decree focused on the economics and supply of tobacco. Semashko included a ban on smoking in public places and buildings, as well as at all meetings, confer-ences, and in hospitals and places where children might be present (orphan-ages, kindergartens and schools) with fines for cases of infraction.26 Finally, the last point called for the “energetic agitation against tobacco” in all union, cultural-enlightenment and medical-sanitary organizations.27

The planks put forth by Semashko melded with the prophylactic mission of Narkomzdrav and the demographic fears that gripped most nations of the world in the 1920s.28 For example, the restriction of women’s access to to-bacco hid concerns—about birth rates, infant death rates, and the strength of Russia’s population in numbers as well as individually—that were funda-mental to Narkomzdrav’s mission. Tobacco products and their use had been connected to miscarriages, which provided scientific justification to the ban, but additionally, women’s smoking was a strain upon concepts of femininity. Women, always depicted as weaker physically, were more prone to all of the problems smoking visited upon men according to hygienists.

The ban on children’s access to tobacco echoed the same fears for con-tinued health of the population, and just as with women’s tobacco use, the concern about the issue had been a part of popular literature before 1917. Pre-Revolutionary pamphlets lingered upon the dangers of smoking youth, who like women, were seen as particularly susceptible to the dangers, which accompanied smoking because of their fragile health and minds at this “tran-sitional” stage of their lives.29 Smoking in youth, in particular, was considered a precursor to further problems and early death. Hygienists accused tobacco of being a “gateway” drug to cocaine or other harder addictive substances (hash-ish, heroin, etc.), and the source of many ills in connection to the development of health, sexual habits, and respect for authorities. Cigarettes seemed to be an even more dangerous form of tobacco than any other, bringing with them a challenge to tradition, and more intense nicotine absorption and perceived greater addiction. A veiled disquiet with gangs of toughs, homeless children, and societal disorder hung in the smoke of a youth’s cigarette.30

This fear for the delicacy of youth figured into Semashko’s reasoning as well. Accompanying Semashko’s draft decree in the archival file was a report on the dangers of youth and smoking and the measures taken by the Ger-man government to thwart this menace between 1917 and 1920. The German measures included similar moves to the Semashko plan such as restrictions on buying tobacco as well as smoking in public areas (assumedly a way to keep kids from having models of smoking behavior as well as in concerns for passive smoke and access to cigarettes).31 While not immediately apparent, the attack upon men aged twenty to thirty-five who smoked engaged the same issues of fertility and control, important in the planks addressing women’s and children’s tobacco use. In pamphlets both before and after the revolution,


smoking was blamed for a “weakening of the will” in men. Pamphlets and posters argued that cigarettes held power over the smoker, making them slaves to vice. The weakening of the will worked as the companion to women’s perceived infertility in the anxiety-ridden contemplation of national strength. Hygienists believed that modern life, which divorced men from productive labor and nature, drained essential forces. Bad habits, which enslaved the practitioner to vice—masturbation, drink, and tobacco—led to wasting away and sexual impotency (neurasthenia).32

These fears over tobacco use by women, youth, and men were not restricted to Russia nor were bans against tobacco a particularly Soviet response. To-bacco cessation campaigns grew up alongside prohibition campaigns around the world. Reformers often paired tobacco and drink as twin evils that wasted resources and leached away at health. In the United States, tobacco use was banned in public places in several states. While most of these bans were overturned within a few years, they showed an urge towards government in-tervention. 33 In this regard Semashko echoed the attitudes of public health advocates worldwide. A great difference was in the ban on all tobacco that Semashko proposed. While his restrictions for use focused primarily on smoking, the restrictions on production would attack all levels of tobacco consumption.

The body of the decree and its stridency echoed the concerns of the Com-missar of Health, and according to Semashko, the economic representatives on the Malyi Sovnarkom were so “scared” that they readily signed on to his proposition. The meeting minutes give a similarly smooth account of the reception of the decree. The committee concluded by asking Semashko to edit and submit the decree to the larger Sovnarkom, however, this suggestion revealed the fractious nature of the debate. Rather than simply adopting the decree, an option for the Malyi Sovnarkom, it was instead tendered to the full Soviet of People’s Commissars.34

While in their private meetings the “frightened” commissars had signed and agreed; when Semashko broached the subject at the full meeting the re-ception was far different. The economic organizations fell upon him “with bayonets” he later described. He tried to hold his ground, but finally looked to Lenin for help. Instead of a defender, Semashko saw a head bowed slightly and a sly smile. A July 1921 resolution pulled the decree “with discussion.”3� Semashko lost the legislative war and with no production controls or regula-tions he retained only the general sanitary enlightenment mission, which was already his under Narkomzdrav.36 Given the large mission of the Commis-sariat of Health and the horrid financial situation that it would soon enter as a result of the New Economic Policy, there would be no balance between anti-smoking propaganda and the massive influx of advertisements from a reanimated tobacco industry. With Narkomzdrav unable to fight the habit, ad-vertisers could easily claim supremacy—or as the early 1920s advertisement crowed, “Everybody Smokes Donskaia” (Figure 1) 37


Semashko’s closest moment to success occurred at a point when most Rus-sians were not smoking. The war and the civil war had severely disrupted pro-duction and distribution of tobacco products as the industry was plagued by lack of paper, fuel, workers and tobacco.38 By 1920, tobacco production was under half that of pre-war levels.39 Not only was tobacco in short supply, but that which remained was extremely expensive. Prices were well above pre-war levels for all sorts of tobacco—from cheapest to most expensive—and prices did not begin to come down until the general recovery period of 1926.40 Semashko had pushed at precisely that point when many Russians were giv-ing up smoking from pressures little related to health. If a ban had been im-posed at this time, when already many had quit out of necessity, perhaps it would have had some small success. While a few pamphlets, posters, and articles came out in the press on the dangers of smoking, they were but a small amount compared to the general publications on public health. Anti-smoking campaigns were but one front in the general campaign for healthy living.

As the 1920s came to a close, anti-smoking propaganda re-emerged, but this time in the unlikely venue of efficiency drives. Instead of the problems of smoking for individual health, the emphasis was on the economy. The late-1920s and early-1930s campaign against the perekur (smoking break) was taken up in the general quest for better labor productivity. Experts railed against the time lost to smoking when workers should have been taking only essential rests. Smoking, which took up time, space, and energy, was decried as a waste of the labor essential to industrial development.41 Posters outlined not just the lost work time but also the millions of rubles lost to the production of cigarettes and harvesting of tobacco.42

An investigation of posters, magazines, and pamphlet literature reveals that

Figure 1. Everybody Smokes Donskaia


there was relatively little activity in the 1930s and 1940s, presumably be-cause anti-smoking policy was of little importance to Stalin and his agenda. Indeed, health generally was relegated to the back burner. From 1927/28 per capita expenditure on health in the Russian federation decreased.43 In addi-tion to cutting health from the budget, the turn to industry relegated health care to lower importance as a career, increased the feminization of medicine, and contributed to lower standards of training and care.44 In the summer of 1929, a battle erupted over the hygienic campaign for universal care versus the center’s demands for worker-centered benefits. That winter, the Central Committee reprimanded Narkomzdrav for not carrying out party directives to restructure the commissariat along class lines, and purged personnel from the health departments.4� Semashko ceded his post to a professional party man with little medical knowledge, and many other medical figures of the 1920s were turned out of their positions.46

In addition to losing their positions in health administration, the hygienists witnessed the overturn of some of their most cherished campaigns, such as the attempt to limit alcohol consumption. In 1930, Stalin ordered Molotov to increase the production of alcohol in order to increase state revenue.47 The greatest fighters of public health as well as their dearest campaigns were aban-doned. It is little wonder that anti-smoking propaganda decreased in such an environment and with Stalin, a regular smoker, now at the helm, equations of smoking with moral laxity could not proceed.

With Stalin’s death there would be a new environment for tobacco. Not only was the inveterate smoker gone, but in the 1960s and 1970s two factors led to a greater interest in combating the dangers of tobacco. First, there was increasing evidence of the dangers of tobacco recognized by world authori-ties and second, there was increasing concern over demographic trends in the Soviet Union.

The 19�0s saw a reemergence of interest in tobacco on the global stage. In 19�0, three major studies appeared, which Richard Kluger argued, “marked the end of the age of innocence about the blithe charms of the cigarette.”48 Using evidence collected from hospital records and personal interviews, these studies from the United State and Britain brought major evidence to the argu-ment that smoking caused lung cancer. Previously only lip and tongue cancer had been proven to result from tobacco use, but these studies in 19�0 came to the startling conclusion that smokers were up to fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than non-smokers. In the years that followed, more studies appeared to link smoking to heart disease and more thoroughly to lung cancer.49

While the evidence mounted, the opinions of the medical community and the public did not easily turn against smoking. It was not until the 1960s that doctors in Britain and the United States began, as a group, to issue statements regarding the dangers of tobacco use. Faced with increasing evidence of the dangers of smoking, the British Royal College of Physicians was the first to


act on the information, issuing in 1962 a report that endorsed the idea that smoking caused lung cancer.�0 In the United States, a similar investigation by the Surgeon General’s office had resulted in the release in 1964 of a report on the health dangers of smoking and moves by the Federal Trade Commission to place warnings on cigarette packs.�1

Even as doctors in the United States and Britain began to marshal their forces against tobacco, the tobacco industry in these countries fought back with information and research from its own research group. The Tobacco In-dustry Research Committee devoted its energy to disproving the relationship between cancer and smoking. Using its own analysis, the tobacco industry muddied the waters, and continued to give the smoking public a set of expla-nations to keep them puffing. Touting filters, stressing environmental factors like pollution, and arguing for genetic predisposition to cancer, it managed to divide the opposition and continue a hold on its market.�2

The response from the Ministry of Health (formerly Narkomzdrav) to grow-ing information from the west on the dangers of smoking was muted. Few monographs came out on tobacco, although magazines like Health (Zdorov’e) did publish regular segments regarding the dangers of smoking, which be-came more strident as the 19�0s and then 1960s progressed.�3 Still, official attention and action was not forthcoming. Partially this was a governmental problem. Many officials did not believe in a connection between smoking and health and some Soviet doctors resisted the findings or openly disregarded the dangers. Lectures and posters on tobacco abuse appeared throughout the era (for example, Figure 2) but without a strong supporting example from doc-tors, many people found the warnings less than meaningful.�4 Some lamented a system where “these same doctors, who as a duty of service explained to patients the dangers of smoking, did not themselves stop smoking even in the presence of patients.”��

Mounting evidence of the general wasting of the population and the steady decline of the health system was becoming hard to ignore. Starting in 19��, expenditures on health fell still farther as a state priority. As health expen-ditures declined, so did the quality of health care.�6 Through the 1960s and 1970s, health problems became increasingly apparent as infant death rose and life expectancy decreased.�7 Worried by the drop, embarrassed by its implications, and fearful of what the west would do with such knowledge, the government attempted to simultaneously hide the extent of the problem and search for a solution. While undoubtedly environmental poisons and lack of basic preventative care were a major factor, alcohol and tobacco were seen as contributing.�8 A 1971 report from the Central Scientific Research Institute for Sanitary Enlightenment of the Ministry of Health described at length the dangers of smoking and snuff to health.�9 While the report was an internal document of the Ministry of Health, it testified to the growing concern.

Faced with frightening possibilities for the virility of their nation, govern-ment authorities decided to take action. In 1977, the Central Committee of the

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Communist Party (TsK KPSS) and the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR (SM SSSR) proposed new and extensive intrusions into smoking behavior as part of their general program “Measures for the Further Betterment of Health.” The proposal did not focus entirely upon smoking but was a larger program with emphasis upon attacking “bad habits,” among which they included smoking and called for “work to clarify to the wider population the dangerous effects of smoking for the purpose of the gradual elimination of the habit.”60

With the decree, the Central Committee proposed the organization of smoke-free workplaces with separate areas for smokers and more work in promoting a “popular opinion against smoking.” The Ministry of Health was charged with increasing propaganda against, and research into, smoking. The Ministry of Education needed to intensify the fight against smoking in schools and especially target youth for anti-smoking work as the Ministry of Trade was told to stop the placement of kiosks in schools and stop the sale of tobacco to children under sixteen. The Ministry of Culture was urged to increase work with movie and publication interests for the fight with smoking. Production attacks to be carried out by the Ministry of Food Industry included

Figure 2. Anti-tobacco Poster “Poison/Iad”

Starks: Anti-Tobacco Campaigns in Twentieth-Century Russia 61

curtailing the production of unfiltered cigarettes, concluding arrangements for warnings on cigarette packs, removing advertisements from packs, and engi-neering tobacco to include fewer harmful elements (a charge also given to the Ministry of Agriculture). As an alternative to smoking, the state economic planning agency (Gosplan) was to increase the assortment of chewing gums available.61

The 1977 decree included many provisions similar to the proposal of Semashko in 1920. Perhaps most striking were the common challenges to stop smoking by youth and an emphasis upon propaganda as an important ele-ment in the fight against smoking. Missing, however, was the emphasis upon tobacco use by those of child-bearing age. Whereas the 1920 decree proposed limiting access to tobacco by both men and women to age thirty-five, no such strictures came out in the 1977 decree. While not specifically spelled out in the decree as a target group, smoking mothers did get the message in propa-ganda posters that infant health was compromised by smoking. Posters such as the 1983 “A Smoking Mama for a Child Means Drama” with its image of cigarette smoking wafting into children’s prams underscored the dangerous ties between mother and child that a cigarette could form.62

The change of decade did lead to additions to the decree, which reflected the new context of smoking and the power of images and words in marketing tobacco. The resolution to omit all advertising elements from cigarette pack-aging targeted the ways in which cigarettes could be marketed. This attention to advertising reflected similar moves in the west to take away from cigarette manufacturers the ability to market their products as healthful, revitalizing, or healthier than other brands. In addition to realizing the power of positive mes-sages to sell cigarettes, government officials put faith in the ability of negative images to inhibit the use of the product. Again reflecting moves against to-bacco in the west, the government decided that the inclusion of warnings upon each pack of cigarettes could serve as a deterrent to smoking. The first warn-ings appeared on Iava cigarettes, one of the most popular cigarettes especially among youth, in 1978. The warnings were simple, but to the point, “Smoking is harmful to your health.”63

Another innovation of the 1977 decree was the charge to agricultural and production authorities to work towards engineering cigarettes to contain fewer harmful chemicals and to release fewer of these chemicals when smoked. The decree asked the Ministry of Agriculture to develop new high yield tobaccos with lower levels of nicotine and asked that the Ministry of Food Industry help in developing tobacco with lower inclusion of other dangerous substances.64 The Ministry of the Food Industry was further charged to help make sure that unfiltered cigarettes would be produced in lower quantities, reflecting a com-mon wisdom that filtered cigarettes were less dangerous.6� This change from the 1920 decree undoubtedly showed the new advances in technology but also was recognition that tobacco growth and production was an established indus-try rather than one nearing collapse. Wiping out tobacco was not an option.


Instead, it had to be controlled.Internal documents of the Ministry of Health from 1978 showed that con-

cern continued over the decree and that interest in greater attacks upon smok-ing was building within the ministry. The unsigned report “Information on the Standing of the Fight with Smoking in the USSR” outlined the problems of smoking and also the current number of smokers in Moscow (although not the entire Soviet Union). According to ministry figures, 60% of men and 10% of women in Moscow smoked in 1978 and the document noted that WHO figures placed a majority of smokers in the 16-18 age group. In addition, the number of cigarettes consumed per person had increased.66

Since the 1977 decree, the ministry had engaged in propaganda against smoking among medical workers as well as the general population. It had also organized lectures, seminars, advertisements, posters, brochures and even films regarding the dangers of cigarettes, but the ministry now requested more direct intervention from the government. Specifically it wanted the govern-ment to issue a “special directive document on the fight with smoking.”67 In 1980 the government issued regulations directly targeting tobacco under the heading “Measures for the Intensification of the Fight with Smoking.”68 The decree reiterated many of the same points of the general plan of 1977 includ-ing the need to increase anti-smoking propaganda, create smoke-free spaces in workplaces, and attack smoking by youth by limiting access to kiosks and forbidding the sale of tobacco to those under sixteen. The program carried concrete measures as opposed to a simple statement of the problem.69

While many of the limitations for sale of and access to tobacco were not implemented, there was a steady decrease in availability of cigarettes through-out the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Production of cigarettes and farming of tobacco in the Soviet Union declined from 1986 to 1991 by 38%. In the same years, the economic dislocation of Gorbachev’s programs entailed a de-crease in imported tobacco by 46%.70 By the summer of 1990, things were looking dire for cigarette smokers. Protests erupted over the lack of tobacco in major urban centers—Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. Philip Morris (mak-ers of Marlboro) and R. J. Reynolds (makers of Camel and Winston) met the needs of the Soviet Union’s smokers with a massive importation of thirty-four billion cigarettes.71 The influx of American cigarettes stabilized the situa-tion and marked the beginning of large-scale foreign infiltration of the Soviet Union’s tobacco market. Fascination with foreign, especially western, life-styles fueled an increase in interest in imported cigarettes while the quality of domestic tobacco products began to drop.72 By 2001, these two companies had capitalized upon their early intrusion in the Soviet Union. They now ac-counted for nearly 40% of market share.73

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought with it an accompanying collapse in the health system. Although health standards had been falling for some time, steadily decreasing funding and health crises after 1991 showed a new level of danger.74 Demographic trends visible before the fall of the Soviet


Union intensified through the 1990s as funding, accessibility, and quality of medical care steadily deteriorated. In 1993, an attempt was made to curtail at least advertising of tobacco products (along with alcohol). The tobacco industry responded quickly with the formation of “The Coalition for Objec-tive Information” and proposed a compromise by which advertisements for tobacco and alcohol products would be relegated to the evening hours. While Russian Health Ministry officials resisted, the power of money was strong and advertisements continued to be sold despite the ban.7� A second round in 199� did succeed in getting advertisements off of television, however, the ban did not carry the hoped-for stringency.76 When anti-tobacco forces attempted an advertising ban with a decree from the desk of the president, the Duma did not pass the law put forward by President Yeltsin for the full ban, but instead a variant agreed upon by the international tobacco companies—one that in-cluded television advertising.77

Grassroots efforts seem to have been more successful than these legislative attacks upon tobacco, or at least they have had more follow-through. Since 1992, Russia has participated in the annual “World No Tobacco Day.” Ra-dio, television and school participation assured a much greater visibility for anti-tobacco propaganda than in previous years.78 Further, Russia became involved in campaign by the WHO and in more conferences regarding anti-smoking work.

With the beginning of the twenty-first century, another wave of anti-tobac-co work is beginning in Russia, with advertisements on radio and television forbidden since 2001, and recent legislation promising the end of billboard advertising by the end of 2006. These measures decrease the pressure from the media, but examples of smokers are omnipresent and limitations on use are hardly apparent. Age screens are inconsistently applied and cigarettes are easily accessible and quite cheap. A pack can be obtained for as little as eight rubles (about thirty cents) a box.79

There has not, as yet, been any major change in the price of cigarettes or in taxation rates. If Putin’s call to action against CVD is serious this renewed attack on advertising will be only the beginning, but in contemplating further action it will be advisable to remember the two, largely forgotten, campaigns against tobacco in the 1920s and the 1980s. These campaigns share many similarities with the current situation and the demographic crisis that Putin faces. The events of 1990, the last time the population had difficulty obtaining tobacco, demonstrated the dangers to stability that can occur when addictions are not satiated. Action against cigarettes is essential for the health of the Russians, but some may be worried that action against tobacco could prove dangerous to the health of the Putin state. It remains to be seen whether he will, as previously, choose short-term economic gain over the long-term fiscal responsibility of caring for the public health.

University of Arkansas, [email protected]


endnotes

This article was originally given as a policy brief at the SSRC Eurasia Program Training Seminar for Policy. I am grateful to my fellow researchers for their suggestions. Research for this article was supported in part by the Summer Research Lab at the University of Illinois, the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endow-ment for the Humanities, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. I would also like to thank I. P. Bokarev, Chief of the Laboratory of the Mathematical Methods in History at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and A. K. Sokolov of the Institute of Rus-sian History of the Academy of Sciences, for their advice in researching tobacco in Russia.

President Putin recognized this decline even as demographers, such as Murray Feshbach, have been detailing it for some time. See C. J. Chivers, “Putin Urges Plan to Reverse Slide in the Birth Rate,” The New York Times, May 11, 2006. For a fuller treatment of these issues, see Mur-ray Feshbach, Russia’s Health and Demographic Crisis: Policy Implications and Consequences. (Washington, D.C.: The Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, 2003) and his landmark study with Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

See for example the essays in Mark G. Field and Judyth L. Twigg, eds. Russia’s Torn Safety Nets: Health and Social Welfare during the Transition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

Translation of Putin’s May 10, 2006 “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly” tak-en from the following site: http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/text/speeches/2006/0�/10/1823_ty-pe70029type82912_10��66.shtml, accessed October, 2006.

Comparatively, in 1949 more than half of all men and about one third of all women in the United States smoked. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (1966; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 132. The problem is the focus of A. K. Demin, ed. Kurenie ili zdorov’e v Rossii (Moscow: Zdorov’e i okruzhaiushchaia sreda, 1996).

For the origins and early work of Narkomzdrav, see Tricia Starks, The Body Soviet: Propa-ganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming); or currently in print, Gordon Hyde, The Soviet Health Service: A Historical and Comparative Study (London: Lawrence & Wisehart, 1974).

Michael Marmot, The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Lon-gevity (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 9.

William C. Cockerham, “The Social Determinants of the Decline of Life Expectancy in Russia and Eastern Europe: A Lifestyle Explanation,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 38 (June 1997): 117-30. Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 199�). The question of tobacco use is a new subject of attention of world historians and cultural anthropologists, for example see Sander L. Gilman and Xhou Zun, eds. Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (London: Reaktion Books, 2004) or Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Jacob M. Price produced the first work on the Russian trade in the 1960s by examining the trade from the English perspective (Price, “The Tobacco Adventure to Russia: Enterprise, Politics, and Diplomacy in the Quest for a Northern Market for English Colonial Tobacco, 1676-1722,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Volume 51 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961), 17-18). Recently, Matthew P. Romaniello has begun work on to-bacco in early modern Russia using new historiographical and theoretical approaches as well as new sources. Romaniello looks to the impediments in Russian policy and society to tobacco’s acceptance. (Romaniello, “Through the Filter of Tobacco: The Limits of Global Trade in the Early Modern World,” Unpublished article, 9.)

Price, “Tobacco Adventure,” 20-21; Romaniello, “Through the Filter,” 18-21. Romaniello, “Through the Filter,” 33-37; Bussiron, O vlianii tabaku kuritel’nogo,

niukhal’nogo i tsigar’ na zdorov’e, nravstevennost’ i um’ cheloveka (Sankpeterburg: K. Zherna-kov, 184�), 2�, 27-28, �3-�7.

1.

2.

3.

4.

�.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.11.

Starks: Anti-Tobacco Campaigns in Twentieth-Century Russia 6�

Leo Tolstoy, “Dlia chego liudi odurmanivaiutsia,” Foreword to, P.S. Alekseev, O P’ianstve (Moscow: Russkaia mysl’, 1891); Evgenii Popov, Nachnite bor’bu so strast’iu k’ tabaku 3 izd. (Perm: Tipo-litografiia gubernskogo pravleniia, 1887).

The rules included not inhaling deeply and not smoking until age 18-19 for men. See V. V. Kurite skol’ko khotite: Istoriia upotrebleniia tabaka, psikhologicheskiia osnovy etoi privychki, bezvrednost eia i vashneishiia gigienicheskiia pravila kureniia (S.-Peterburg: n.p., 1890).

The British health system was not created until 1948. Protection of health, formulated as the concept of social hygiene with prophylaxis as its cornerstone, was the guiding principle of Narkomzdrav (hereafter in notes as NKZ), see Susan Gross Solomon, “Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health, 1921-1930” in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, eds. Susan Gross Solo-mon and John F. Hutchinson, 17�-99 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

I have settled upon the term “hygienists” to describe the personnel and supporters of NKZ as not all were doctors or public health professionals. Many NKZ programs depended upon the use of volunteer inspectors and health cells for their spread and enforcement. The unifying fac-tor for all of these activists was a belief in the beneficial effects of balanced, “clean” living. As I argue elsewhere, this definition of cleanliness is defined by standards of social, political, and sci-entific contemporaries rather than simply the objective criteria of being free from dirt. For further contemplation of this concept, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; repr., London: Routledge, 2002).

W. Horsley Gantt cited the figure of 10 million dead for the period from 1916 to 1923 in Russian Medicine (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1937), 144; Using E. I. Potova, Borba s infektzion-nimi bolzenyami v SSSR, 1917-1967 (Moscow: Meditsina, 1967), 67-70, Gordon Hyde amassed statistics to point to cholera (368,390 dead from 1918-21), typhus (�,763,470 dead from 1918-21), typhoid (2,046,709 dead from 1914-21), and dysentery (1,66�,64� deaths from 1914-21) as leading problems in the early revolutionary years. Hyde, The Soviet Health Service: A Historical and Comparative Study (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), 48-49.

For more on the economic problems of the early Soviet years see Neil B. Weissman, “Ori-gins of Soviet Health Administration: Narkomzdrav, 1918-1928,” in Health and Society in Revo-lutionary Russia, 97; Christopher M. Davis, “Economics of Soviet Public Health, 1928-1932: Development Strategy, Resource Constraints, and Health Plans,” in Ibid.,148-49; Sally Ewing, “The Science and Politics of Soviet Insurance Medicine,” in Ibid., 69. For the continued prob-lems throughout the 1930s, see Feshbach, Ecocide, 34-9.

For example, see the posters, “Public Health in the USSR,” (1926-29) and “8 hours for rest - 8 hours for sleep - 8 hours for work,” (1927), in the Graphics Department, Russian State Library.

N. Semashko, Nezabyvaemyi obraz (Moscow: Gosizdat, 19�9), 11.Representatives from Narkomzem, Narkomvneshtorg, Narkomprod VSNKh. Glavsanu-

pra, and Ts. K. Profsoiuza tabachnikov all were part of the group; Gosudarstvennyi archive Ros-sisskii federatsii (hereafter GARF) f. a-482 op. 1 d. 1�� l. 444.

GARF f. a-482 op. 1 d. 288 l. 120.GARF f. a-482 op. 1 d. 288 l. 112-113.On Malyi Sovnarkom see T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917-1922 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 76-82.GARF f. a-482 op. 1 d. 1�� l. 447, points 1-3.A 1919 article, “Tabachnye kartochki” in Pravda (January 16 , 1919) mentioned tobacco

cards to be handed out to those over age seventeen suggesting that such cards were already in use for rationing.

GARF f. a-482 op. 1 d. 1�� l. 447, points 6-9.GARF f. a-482 op. 1 d. 1�� l. 447 (back) point 10.Narkomzdrav interested itself not just in current workers’ health but also in the future, see

R. M. Bravaia, Okhrana materinstva i mladenchestva na zapade i v SSSR: Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Gosmedizdat, 1929).

See for example Evgenii Popov, Children! Never Begin To Smoke Tobacco/Deti! Nikogda ne nachinaite kurit tabak (Perm: P. F. Kamenskii, 1884).

In Russia, see for example the fantastic B. Sigal, I.Trial of a Smoking Pioneer and II. Trial

12.

13.

14.

1�.

16.

17.

18.

19.20.

21.22.23.

24.2�.

26.27.28.

29.

30.


of a Slovenly Pioneer: Two Agitational Trials/ I. Sud nad pionerom kuril’shchikom i II. Sud nad neriashlivym pionerom: Dve instsenirovki (M: Zhizn’ i znanie, 1927). John C. Burnham explored the early “bad boy” problems of smoking in the United States in Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1993).

GARF f. a-482 op. 1 d. 1�� l. 446; for I. V. Sazhin, Pravda o kurenie (Leningrad: Lenin-gradskaia pravda, 1926);

See for example the cover for I. V. Sazhin, The Truth About Smoking/Pravda o kurenie, which features a cigarette holding a whip and flailing at a heart, which trudges along in front of it (Leningrad: Leningradskaia Pravda, n.d.). For all together, see the 1922 poster “Workers in the USSR,” (1922), which is most pointedly against drink but also condemns sexual license and smoking. Graphics Collection, Russian State Library.

Cassandra Tate, Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of the “Little White Slaver” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Semashko, Nezabyvaemyi obraz, 12; Rossisskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (hereafter RGASPI) f. 19 op. 2 d. 627 l. 3.

GARF f. a-482 op. 1 d. 1�� l. 711Semashko, Nezabyvaemyi obraz, 12.The New Economic Policy (1921-1928) was the Soviet response to the increasing disorder

after the Russian Civil War and the economic devastation brought on by almost continuous warfare from 1914 to 1921. With the NEP, Lenin advocated a retreat to capitalism in which small-scale capitalist business would be allowed to flourish. For government programs like Narkomzdrav, NEP manifested itself in calls for self-financing and austerity which meant much belt-tightening for the health programs and vast differences between urban and rural provision of care.

“Zakrytie tabachnykh fabriki,” Pravda November �, 1918. A. Kaplan warned in a 1918 ar-ticle that tobacco production would halt in four months without heroic measures, see “Kak spaset tabacnuiu promyshlennost,” Pravda July 18, 1918. See similar concerns in “Sostoianie tabachnoi promyshlennost,” Pravda August 14, 1918.

Figures courtesy of Iu. P. Bokarev, draft paper, “Tabak v Rossii.” 200�.Figures courtesy of Iu. P. Bokarev, draft paper, “Tabak v Rossii.” 200�.See for example the 1928 cover of Krokodil featuring a number of men enjoying a smoking

break in the guise of a bathroom break. “V zavodskom ‘klube’” Krokodil (March 1928).See for example “Smoking tobacco is an expensive and dangerous thing…/Kurenie tabaka

dorogoe i vrednoe delo…” (1930) or “Smoking greatly harms the normal working of the organ-ism/Kurenie tiazhelo otzyvaetsia na normal’noi rabote organizma,” (1930) both in the Graphics Department of the Russian State Library.

Davis, Economic problems, 8�.By 1934 7�.1% of doctors were female, Hyde, The Soviet Health Service, 98.N. A. Vinogradov, E. D. Ashurkov, and S. V. Kurashov, “Osnovnye tempy razvitiia sovetsk-

ogo zdravookkhraneniia,” in Okhrana narodnogo zdorov’e v SSSR, ed. M.D. Kovrigin (Moscow: Meditsinskaia literatura, 19�7), 60-61.

Davis, Economic problems, �8-64.Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, eds. Stalin’s letters to Molotov,

1925-1936. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 199�), 209-10.See Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 133. Although, as Robert N. Proctor has shown, the medical

community in Germany recognized the dangers of tobacco and its addictive nature in studies as early as the 1930s, these worries did not translate into action in the Soviet Union or elsewhere. Instead, it is the 19�0s statistical analyses of doctors from Britain and the United States that cata-pulted anti-tobacco work again into international attention. See Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 173-247.

Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 133-6, 167-8, 192-4Ibid, 224.Ibid, 224, 2�9.See for example the maneuvers reported in Ibid, 226-29.One of the few monographs was V. A. Bogoslovskii’s sanitary enlightenment primer on

31.

32.

33.

34.

3�.36.37.

38.

39.40.41.

42.

43.44.4�.

46.47.

48.

49.50.51.�2.�3.


tobacco for lecturers, O vrede kureniia (Konspekt lektsii) (Moscow: Institut sanitarnogo pros-veshcheniia, 196�). For articles see, for example, A. D. Ostrovskii, “Tabak i organizma,” which relied upon the same discussions of rabbits and smoke as late-nineteenth century attacks while giving only minor discussion of research in the west Zdorov’e March 19��, 3: 14-16. The letter from reader Galina Serikova (deputy of the Verkhovnyi Sovet) and Dr. Darikha Khodzhikova “Ne pora li organichit’ kuril’shchikov?” typified the angrier missives as the years progressed Zdorov’e 1972 9: 8.

See for example the posters “Kosmonauts Do Not Smoke/Kosmonavty ne kuriat,” (1964) or “Poison/Iad” (196�) both in the Graphics Department of the Russian State Library.

On exception to this general lack of interest (and consequent lack of success) in anti-to-bacco work that is consistently mentioned is in work in Sochi, for a general assessment of the failures, see G. B. Tkachenko, “Kurenie tabaka i, zdorov’e nasseleniia v Rossii,” in A. K. Demin, ed. Kurenie ili, zdorov’e v Rossii (Moscow: Assotsiatsiia obshestvennogo zdorov’ia, 1996), 38.

Judyth L. Twigg, “Unfulfilled hopes: The Struggle to Reform Russian Health Care and Its Financing,” in Russia’s Torn Safety Nets, eds. Mark G. Field and Judyth L. Twigg (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 43.

Mark G. Field quickly outlines the problem of health decline in the Soviet Union in “The Health and Demographic Crisis in post-Soviet Russia: A Two-Phase Development,” in Russia’s Torn Safety Nets, 21-23.

Feshbach, Ecocide, 183-�; for alcohol 187-9; cancer and circulatory disease, 189-90. For discussions of the demographic crisis of the 1970s, see Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s Series P-2�, no. 74 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, September 1980); Murray Feshbach, The Soviet Union: Population trends and Dilemmas. Population Bulletin 37, no. 3 (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, August 1982).

GARF f. 8009 op. �0 d. 2349 l. 18-61.The entirety of the plan is available as “O merakh po dalneishemu uluchsheniiu narodnogo

zdravookhraneniia,” in K. M. Boliubov, P. G. Mishunin, E. Z. Razumov, and Ia. V. Storozhev, eds. Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika (Moscow: Politicheskaia literature, 1978), 18: 316-19; excerpts used here of only the smoking-related portions come from Tkachenko, “Kurenie tabaka i zdorov’e,” 38-9.

Tkachenko, “Kurenie tabaka i zdorov’e,” 39.“Kuriashchaia mama—dlia malyshei drama” (1988) and the similarly themed “Nikotine

is poison! Where there are children, no smoking!/Nikotine iad! Tam gde malen’kie deti, kurit’ nel’zia” (1968) appear in the Graphics Collection of the Russian State Library.

“Preduprezhdenie kuril’shchikam,” Zdorov’e 1978 �: 28.Articles such as V. I. Kozlova’s “Poluchenie sortov tabaka s nizkim soderzheniem niko-

tina,” show that these concerns were already a part of the Soviet tobacco industry’s work. Tabak 196� 1: 30-1.

The “safety” of filtered cigarettes has been debated. Filtered cigarettes are usually engi-neered for taste so as to contain more nicotine and other substances. Additionally, the smaller particles of tar and other items that make it through the filter then are able to make it much farther into the lungs because of their size and the deeper inhalation occasioned by filter usage.

GARF f. 8009 op. �0 d. 6998 l. 1-2.GARF f. 8009 op. �0 d. 6998 l. 3-4.“O merakh po ucileniiu bor’by s kureniem,” in K. M. Boliubov, P. G. Mishunin, E. Z.

Razumov, and Ia. V. Storozhev, eds. Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika (Moscow: Politicheskaia literatura, 1978), 21: 316-319.

Tkachenko, “Kurenie tabaka i zdorov’e,” 42. Ibid, 49.Anthony Ramirez, “Two U.S. Companies Plan to Sell Soviets 34 Billion Cigarettes,” New

York Times September 14, 1990, A1. For a partial analysis see James Rupert and Glenn Frankel, “In Ex-Soviet Markets, U.S. Brands Took on Role of Capitalist Liberator,” Washington Post No-vember 19, 1996, A01. Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 717-8.

Tkachenko, “Kurenie tabaka i zdorov’e,” 63.

�4.

��.

�6.

�7.

�8.

�9.60.

61.62.

63.64.

6�.

66.67.68.

69.70.71.

72.


Figures taken from the WHO http://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/Russian_Federation.pdf (accessed November 2006).

Field, “Health and Demographic Crisis,” 23.Michael Janofsky, “The Media Business: Advertising; Moscow Draws Line on Cigarette

and Liquor Ads,” New York Times, July 20, 1993, D1. Rupert and Frankel, “In Ex-Soviet Mar-kets,” A01. For enforcement, see Tkachenko, “Kurenie tabaka I zdorov’e,” 63.

Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 219.Tkachenko, “Kurenie tabaka i zdorov’e,” 69. Ibid, 102-8. This was the price I paid in Fall 2006 for a pack of Belomorkanal, a particularly strong

cigarette around since the Soviet period that even Russians recognize as particularly virulent.

73.

74.7�.

76.77.78.79.

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r s /b l A -t C -C ussiA - Alcohol and Drugs History Society · Starks: Anti-Tobacco Campaigns in Twentieth-Century Russia 1 vessels such as coronary artery and heart disease, arteriosclerosis,