On April 24, 1935, the driver of a tobacco cart in Sochi, a health resort on the Black Sea coast of Russia, went drinking with his friends, leaving his horse alone to graze along Remeslennaia Street, where it destroyed a section of greenery.Footnote 1 The destruction of urban parkland was prohibited by the 1920 “Regulations for the mineral conservation of curative regions,” part of a broader suite of conservation laws and regulations that protected the ecology of Soviet health resorts.Footnote 2 The plenipotentiary of the USSR Central Executive Committee in Sochi had only recently organized police surveillance of the parklands of Sochi. In keeping with the new turn toward vigilance in this area, the cart driver, a certain Volovodev, was arrested and held for fifteen days.Footnote 3
In the early Soviet period, health resorts were protected by some of the most comprehensive conservation laws and regulations in Europe. These laws and regulations protected a variety of landscapes, including forest, steppe, mountain, and coastline, and natural healing resources such as mineral waters, muds, salt lakes, and bathing beaches. They withdrew health resort territory from industrial and agricultural development and restricted construction, fishing, boating, agriculture, tourism (turizm), and transportation activities there. This article places the protection of health resorts within the context of the historical development of conservation in the Soviet Union, positioning health resorts as sites of nature protection comparable to nature reserves (zapovedniki). It further foregrounds the role of medical ideas and physicians in the development of Soviet conservation policy and practice. Weaving together the history of health and medicine and the history of nature protection, this article highlights the importance of public health and medical science and the agency of physicians and medical officials in the development of conservation laws and regulations in the early Soviet and Stalinist period.
Understanding health resorts as sites of state nature protection offers an alternative framework for conceptualizing the relationship of the Soviet state to the environment from what is still the dominant framework for understanding that relationship, Soviet Prometheanism. This is the idea that, from the first Five-Year Plan forward, Soviet authorities generally viewed and treated nature as an “obstacle” or even an “enemy” to be transformed, beaten or conquered. “Conquest” was the defining feature of the Soviet relationship to the natural environment. The natural world was a “set of obstacles to be overcome” through the application of science and technology by conscious workers, led by engineers and the party.Footnote 4 Within the framework of Soviet Prometheanism, socialist construction had the unintended consequence of environmental degradation. Paul Josephson argued that the creation of “industrial deserts” was the logical outcome of massive Soviet projects such as dams, canals, railroads, electrical power systems, reactors, and rocket ships.Footnote 5 Scholars have also tied Soviet Prometheanism to Soviet exceptionalism. As Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly argued in their 1992 diatribe, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege: “No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its efforts to improve public health and protect nature so degraded both.”Footnote 6 Environmental degradation and medical crisis became an epithet of the late Soviet system. More recent work in Soviet environmental history, in tandem with the field of Soviet history overall, has called Soviet exceptionalism into question, in part by engaging in comparative and transnational study.Footnote 7 Moreover, in contrast to Soviet Prometheanism, a competing tendency in Soviet historiography highlights the importance of conservation and more positive approaches to nature in early Soviet and Stalinist modes of development.Footnote 8 And it is to this critique that this study seeks to contribute. This is the first study to highlight the centrality of medical ideas and the agency of physicians to Soviet nature protection.
State laws and regulations that protected health resorts took the form of conservation, closely tied to medical science. I argue that the laws and regulations that protected health resorts constituted a distinct form of conservation, “medicinal conservation.” Medicinal conservation could be defined as the expert-led management of natural resources and environments reserved for medical, therapeutic, and prophylactic use, to promote health. It is a term selected to parallel the “ecological conservation,” “pastoralist conservation,” and “utilitarian conservation” introduced by Douglas Weiner.Footnote 9 Such conservation, grounded in the health sciences and led by physicians, constituted an important part of the “scientific conservation” of the Stalinist era, free of ostensibly non-materialist aesthetic, ethical, and ethnic grounds for conservation.Footnote 10 Indeed, medicinal conservation overlapped in many ways with other types of conservation. It served as a platform for scientific experts, providing a set of ideas and practices by which they attempted to gain management control over natural resources, and even to shape policy related to those resources.Footnote 11 Conservationists valued mineral waters, muds, drinking water, estuaries, salt lakes, peat bogs, and bathing beaches as “natural resources” (proizvodite΄nye sily), comparable to iron ore and coal.Footnote 12 Medicinal conservation also shared with other utilitarian approaches anthropocentric ideas and an emphasis on “wise use.” Yet despite this overlap, the concept of medicinal conservation is proposed here as heuristically useful for making visible the distinctive features associated with physician-led conservation, embedded in socialist ideas of medicine and health.Footnote 13 This was a form of conservation that simultaneously aimed to protect and rationally exploit the curative qualities that physicians and the state attributed to nature.
At the core of what differentiated medicinal conservation from other forms of conservation was its connection to public health, the city, urban populations, and the category of urban leisure. In the interwar period, Soviet conservation laws regulated the exploitation of forests and scientific nature reserves (zapovedniki), areas far removed from urban everyday life and populations, for industry, agriculture, and science.Footnote 14 Unlike these other forms of protected territories, health resorts fit into the category of leisure landscapes, alongside other legal institutional categories such as urban parks, hunting grounds (zakazniki), natural monuments (pamiatniki prirody), and national and nature parks.Footnote 15 As leisure landscapes, health resorts were intended to be (and were in practice) accessible to the Soviet urban population. This article suggests that in the interwar period, public health formed the intellectual and cultural foundation of Soviet nature protection laws and regulations covering health resorts. Furthermore, evidence suggests that it underpinned the protection of leisure landscapes more broadly.Footnote 16 The state saw the function of developed leisure landscapes as supporting public health and raising labor productivity, and ideas of curative nature had a place in this formula.Footnote 17 Even in the context of the rising national mobilization that characterized late Stalinism, as artists, writers and historians reinvented the idea of the Russian landscape, and as conservation came under attack, public health remained the paradigm in which state protection of leisure landscapes unfolded. The state valued public health, and protected the leisure landscapes that would promote it.Footnote 18
Leisure space also had a prominent place in the Soviet acculturation project under Stalin.Footnote 19 Indeed, medicinal conservation fit into the broader Stalinist project of social transformation and engineering, to transform the customs, habits, and ways of thinking of the Soviet urban population. A study of medicinal conservation thus sheds light not only on our understanding of nature protection in the interwar Soviet Union, but also on the social and cultural characteristics of Stalinism. The health resort was not only a site of nature protection, but also a site where the state and physicians articulated and enforced a set of customs, habits, and ways of thinking in the natural environment, in relation to health. It was a site where physicians raised the environmental consciousness of society. The pivotal role of medicine and physicians in cultivating mass consciousness in this regard stood in stark contrast to the role of ecology and ecologists. While Douglas Weiner has argued that conservationists at the zapovedniki resisted state efforts to create a mass conservationist movement and were opposed to becoming mass educators, physicians took a different position. Physicians embraced the role of mass educators and were amenable to the project of cultivating environmental understandings and values in their patients and, through lectures, films, pamphlets, newspapers and other publications, in Soviet culture more broadly. Nature protectionism was not a marginal value held only by a small group of ecologists in free and peripheral corners of the Soviet Union, but rather became a Stalinist value, tied to hygiene, health, and culturedness (kul΄turnost΄).Footnote 20 These values were underpinned and reinforced by the arsenal of nature conservation laws and regulations that protected nature for health purposes. As will be explored below, these laws were increasingly enforced over the course of the 1930s.
The protection of the ecology of leisure landscapes in the Soviet Union is also significant for what it illuminates about the place of the environment and ecology in Soviet urbanism.Footnote 21 Socialist construction did not seek to destroy nature but, on the contrary, to carefully protect and conserve nature and natural resources in leisure landscapes, allowing it a broad presence in cities and health resorts and in the everyday lives of the Soviet people. Soviet health resort physicians saw being in a healthy, clean, and green environment as key to preventing the pathological development of disease, and to promoting health, longevity and productivity. The Soviet state was advised and guided by its physicians toward a deeply ecological understanding of what constituted a healthy living environment, aiming to integrate ecologically pure, curative nature into isolated urban settlements and health resorts while at the same time pursuing rapid industrialization in nearby territories. This medical vision of ecologically-clean environments for living was articulated in the early conservation laws and regulations for health resorts discussed in this article, where the link between ecology, curative nature, and health was carefully elaborated by physicians. As these laws were implemented into conservation practice, health resorts became models of healthy living environments.
This orthodoxy around health as a foundation for the nature protection of leisure landscapes began to give way in the Khrushchev period. As Douglas Weiner has argued, by the 1950s and 1960s, there were two major strands of thought and practice emerging in Soviet nature protection. First, there was the nature protection movement of the scientific intelligentsia (here medicinal conservation might fit). Secondly, there was a nature protection movement associated with literature, art, and film, tied to the village prose movement in literature and emerging Russian (and other) nationalism.Footnote 22 As Yitzhak Brudny has explained, this nationally-inflected nature protection movement developed in the Khrushchev period and gained state support in the Brezhnev era, when the projects of nature protection and nationalism converged and the centrality of health to the protection of leisure landscapes was challenged.Footnote 23 Nicholas Breyfogle has elaborated the role of scientists, naturalists and writers in initiating and mobilizing an environmentalist movement from the late 1950s, with broad social support, focused around ecosystem protection and ecological concerns as well as aesthetic considerations.Footnote 24 Yet even as nature protection gained a “national” aspect, public health remained an important foundation of Soviet environmental thinking, and the evidence suggests the close interconnection between medicinal conservation, the development of health resorts and the establishment of national parks. In a recent article, Katherine Metzo has noted the importance of nationalism in the formation of the first Buriat national park.Footnote 25 Yet, she also noted that regional activists valued the landscape for its healing qualities, and that the national park itself was built around the Arshan health resort, that is, based on the existing physical and institutional infrastructure of a health resort. All this suggests that a closer look at nature protection after Stalin may show the ongoing significance of health as a framework that was used to promote and justify nature protection.
The first section of this article analyzes the development of conservation laws and regulations that protected health resorts between 1917 and 1928. The second section focuses on the role of physicians as environmental activists in the Stalinist 1930s, when all forms of conservation in the Soviet Union came under attack. In this moment of crisis, the lengths to which physicians went to defend conservation at health resorts and their success in this endeavor provide a vivid example of the historic role of physicians and medical ideas in the promotion of conservation in the Soviet Union. Physicians successfully defended the medicinal conservation of health resorts, and even succeeded in winning state approval for an expansion in the coverage of conservation laws with new regulations in 1940. The third section of the article is dedicated to the links between acculturation and nature protection in the Stalinist period. Finally, the article turns to nature protection in practice, focusing on Sochi, which serves as a prism through which to trace state and expert intentions for health resorts, the translation of conservation laws and regulation into practice, and the limits of what the state and experts could achieve.
Maintaining the Natural Therapeutic Qualities of the Region
With the revolutionary decree of April 4, 1919, the Soviet state transferred the recently nationalized health resorts of Imperial Russia to the administration of the People's Commissariat of Public Health. Lenin himself signed the decree, “On the curative regions of state significance,” proposed by the Council of People's Commissars, which transferred health resort land and property from the administration of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture to the People's Commissariat of Public Health.Footnote 26 The decree explicitly called for the transfer of control over land, water, and parks in resorts of state significance to the Commissariat of Public Health.Footnote 27 The forests on health resort land remained under the management of the Commissariat of Agriculture.Footnote 28 The Department of Curative Regions, an administrative organ of the Commissariat of Public Health established in 1918, was given jurisdiction over the health resorts.Footnote 29
The 1919 decree, known commonly as “Lenin's decree,” was the first public declaration of Bolshevik support for health resort development. As the decree outlined, health resort land had already been nationalized and placed under the stewardship of the Commissariat of Agriculture at the time of the decree. But the pursuit of public health was not the initial justification for nationalizing health resort land. Indeed, the nationalization of all land was part of the revolution itself.Footnote 30 The decree constituted a development in ideas of land management introduced by the Soviet state. It introduced to Soviet law the idea that health resorts were distinct territories on the Soviet map, with distinctive regimens of use: just as zapovedniki belonged to the ecologists and other earth and natural scientists, the health resorts were to belong to the physicians.Footnote 31
The management of health resorts by the Commissariat of Public Health, as outlined in “On the curative regions of state significance,” was to have a number of defining characteristics. First, and most basically, management by the Commissariat of Public Health would guarantee that these lands would be used for what the decree explicitly called “medicinal purposes.” Footnote 32 In this way, health resorts were tied to the project of social transformation that Soviet medicine served.Footnote 33 Second, the decree divided all health resorts into two categories: health resorts of “state significance” and health resorts of “local significance.”Footnote 34 Thus, health resorts were divided into those that were nationalized and placed on central state budgets and those that were municipalized and locally financed. Finally, with the transfer of health resort land, the state delegated to the Commissariat of Public Health the responsibility to establish and enforce conservation laws and regulations in the health resorts of state significance.
“On the curative regions of state significance” outlined a plan to create territories within all health resorts of state significance, called “districts of mineral conservation,” which aimed to prevent the damage or depletion of medicinal waters and muds. It placed the task of implementing mineral conservation in the hands of the Commissariat of Public Health.Footnote 35 Through the establishment of districts of mineral conservation, Soviet physicians were empowered to transform health resorts into protected, curative territories, establishing physician-controlled, medicinal conservation in a large and diverse set of territories of the Soviet Union. In 1922, the Commissariat of Public Health reported that there were thirty-five health resorts of state significance in the RSFSR, covering forest and steppe, mountain, coastline, and desert. These were located in the Caucasian Mineral Waters (Piatigorsk, Essentuki, Kislovodsk, and Zheleznovodstk), the Black Sea Coast (Anapa, Gelendzhik, Sochi, Matsesta, Krasnaia Poliana, Eisk, Psekupsk, Teberda), Abkhaziia (Gagry, Sukhumi), Crimea (the southern coast of the Crimea, Feodosiia, Sevastopol΄ region, Evpatoria), Central Russia (El΄ton, Tinaki, Sergievskie mineral΄nye vody, Lipetsk, Staraia Russa, Sestroretsk), Siberia (Borovoe, Karachi lake, Shira lake), the Volga region (Shafronovskii region, Troitskii region, Orenburgskii region, Buzulukskii region, Novouzenskii region), and Ukraine (Odessa, Berdiansk, Slaviansk).Footnote 36 The land of health resorts of state significance remained under the management of the People's Commissariat of Public Health until 1956.
Medicinal conservation had not only powerful state patrons such as Lenin, but crucially also champions at the highest level within the Commissariat of Public Health. Prominent public health officials had an active hand in the formulation of conservation policy. The first Commissar of Public Health, Nikolai Semashko, together with the director of the Department of Curative Regions, Nikolai Ivanovich Teziakov, were the authors of the first conservation regulations for health resorts. Both physicians valued health resorts as crucial institutions for improving public health, particularly for treating the so-called “social diseases,” such as tuberculosis, venereal diseases, and malnutrition, as well as nervous ailments.Footnote 37 During the Civil War, Teziakov, an epidemiologist by training, had established revolutionary sanatoria in newly-nationalized estates to treat Red Army soldiers with tuberculosis.Footnote 38 Semashko famously entered Crimea in the wake of the White Army to set up sanatoria and draft a decree that designated Crimea as a health resort for workers.Footnote 39 The revolution gave Semashko and Teziakov the opportunity to draft some of the most ambitious and progressive public health legislation in Europe at the time, based in the last word in science. Indeed, in the wave of revolutions and social democratic state-building that swept Europe after World War I, the Soviet Union was the only state that nationalized health resorts and integrated them into a comprehensive state health care system. This opened up enormous opportunities for innovation.
Their decision to establish sanatoria within health resorts was not anomalous, however. Confronting the ongoing tuberculosis crisis, states and municipalities in industrialized and industrializing countries worldwide embraced the sanatorium in the interwar period, and the institution went through a kind of renaissance.Footnote 40 Despite the promise of the bacteriological revolution to deliver pharmaceutical cures for the disease, that cure was not quick to arrive. As the decades passed, the impact of the crisis increased. Tuberculosis became the leading cause of mortality and disability for adults of working age in most European cities around the turn of the century. In the context of a more general expansion of public health provision following World War I, states and municipalities revisited the therapeutic arsenal at their disposal, and despite their only marginal effectivity, embraced the mass worker sanatorium as at least delivering slower rates of disability from the disease for workers.Footnote 41 The sanatorium provided the most effective form of therapy in the absence of a cure. The Soviet investment in sanatoria at health resorts fit squarely within this development, building on an existing infrastructure of sanatoria established for elite and middle-class patients in the late Imperial period and new, mass sanatoria that had been established during World War I.
Semashko and Teziakov expanded dramatically on the initial provisions for conservation made in “On the curative regions of state significance.” While that decree had called for the protection of mineral waters, muds, and necessary sources of drinking water, in the “Regulations for the mineral conservation of curative regions,” passed by the Commissariat of Public Health on April 13, 1920, Semashko and Teziakov also included the protection of estuaries, salt lakes, peat bogs, and bathing beaches. The Regulations also outlined plans for the formation of a new, local-level administration for the enforcement of conservation at each resort: a Commission for Mineral Protection, to be led by the director of the health resort administration (a position held by a physician), with the assistance of a mining engineer, a sanitary physician, and an engineer.Footnote 42 The “Regulations” withdrew health resort territory from industrial and agricultural development, placing further restrictions on construction, fishing, boating, agriculture, tourism (turizm), and transportation.Footnote 43 Medicine alone was the justification given for conservation in laws and regulations protecting Soviet health resorts.
The physicians’ approach to health resort conservation was akin to the approach of scientific experts in other fields. The efficient use of health resort resources required a thorough scientific understanding of the resources intended for conservation.Footnote 44 Accordingly, in their approach to the natural environment, physicians drew on ecology and two branches of medical science (general hygiene and health resort medicine) to understand the natural medicinal resources at the health resorts.
The influence of an ecological understanding of the relationship between different systems in the natural environment was apparent in the conservation regulations. The regulations framed the entire complex of natural systems within the health resort territory as influencing the therapeutic qualities of the curative resources that they sought to protect. Indeed, although conservation laws and regulations, as we have seen, focused on the protection of curative resources rather than territories, they did take on, through their ecological conceptualization and sanitary regulations, a territorial aspect. Sanitary protection extended to the entire territory of the health resort as a means of protecting key medicinal resources.Footnote 45 The “Regulations for the mineral conservation of curative regions” introduced the idea that natural resources were to be used and protected in a way that maintained their “unaltered state” (neizmennoe sostoianie).Footnote 46 This ambiguous term, “unaltered state,” indicated that the resources could both be used and kept unaltered. The “unaltered state” was defined chemically, through laboratory testing. The regulations instructed the Commissions for Mineral Protection to conduct regular laboratory tests of curative resources and send the resulting reports of each analysis to the Commissariat of Public Health.Footnote 47
In its focus on making the natural environment suitable for healthy living by preventing the contamination of air, water, and climate with bacteria and filth, health resort conservation policies drew on the discipline of general hygiene.Footnote 48 Medicinal conservation was bolstered by a broader program of sanitary reform underway in the early Soviet period in the resorts, and, indeed, in the rest of the country. As Susan Gross Solomon has made clear, the Commissariat of Public Health issued an ambitious portfolio of sanitary legislation following the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919.Footnote 49 For the health resorts, Semashko and Teziakov issued additional sanitary regulations on April 13, 1920, the “Measures for the sanitary protection of curative regions,” which prohibited the removal of sand and gravel from beaches and the use of beaches by animals (particularly horses, evidently an ongoing threat to the integrity of health resort environments), and ordered the improvement of sewers so that waste water would not make its way into bodies of water.Footnote 50 These measures, however, remained distinct from other sanitary regulations. They were justified not only as preventing the spread of infectious diseases caused by changes in the natural environment (although they were also intended to do that), but also to maintain the positive, “therapeutic value” of health resort natural resources.
By emphasizing the therapeutic qualities of natural resources, the legislation drew on health resort medicine (kurortologiia). Health resort medicine was an established field of medical research and practice in the Soviet Union, in which the state invested heavily during the interwar period.Footnote 51 The Central Institute of Health Resort Medicine in Moscow, established in 1926, was the leading institution for accumulating and producing scientific knowledge about the natural healing resources of the Soviet Union.Footnote 52 It was placed in charge not only of knowing how to use natural healing resources in medical practice and establishing best medical practices, but also of exploring the Soviet territory to find new sources of natural healing.Footnote 53 Between 1929 and 1932, it led forty-five expeditions to 655 locations.Footnote 54
Kurortologiia, as an integrated field of medical research and practice, was a Soviet invention.Footnote 55 It integrated many established subfields of scientific medicine, however, including balneology, balneotherapy, climatology, climatotherapy, thalassotherapy, and physiotherapy.Footnote 56 Although these subfields had distinct historical trajectories in scientific medicine and in different national and regional contexts, seen together they had a marginal place in university medicine and medical research and were historically tied to therapeutic practice at health resorts. These fields experienced their peak of influence in university medicine in the 1860s, when such subfields as balneology, which focused on the study of medicinal waters and their uses, were integrated into some European university programs, most prominently in Vienna.Footnote 57 These sciences underwent a steady decline following the bacteriological revolution through to the interwar period. Yet, although interest in these areas of research declined from the turn of the century until World War I, there was a surge of new interest in researching this and other “natural” and “nature” cures in the 1930s with scientific methods, particularly in the early years of Nazi Germany.Footnote 58 Nowhere, however, was this drive to create scientific nature cures more comprehensive and long-lasting than in the Soviet Union. By 1940, there were eleven institutes dedicated to health resort medicine in the USSR.Footnote 59 Throughout the Soviet period, the state took health resort treatments seriously as a type of medical therapy and valued knowledge about how to exploit natural healing resources. As state support for kurortologiia as a branch of medical research and practice increased, medicinal conservation was further reinforced.
Physicians saw the state as a powerful guarantor of the efficient use of medicinal resources and of physician control over health resorts. They concurred that it was the role of the state to protect the natural resources of health resorts, in line with physicians’ recommendations. Crucially, the state remained committed to medicinal conservation during the more decentralized years of the New Economic Policy, launched in March 1921. The charter of the Main Administration of Health Resorts, into which the Department of Curative Regions was reorganized on March 13, 1923, confirmed its right to establish and change districts of mineral conservation.Footnote 60 A 1924 directive confirmed the regulatory role of the Mineral-Sanitary Commission in the context of an increasingly strong private medical sector at the health resorts.Footnote 61 This was a highly statist form of conservation. At the same time, it fit well into the highly progressive and experimental nature of legislation and institution-building of the early Soviet period, when intellectuals and experts were given great scope to develop policies and institutions based on their expertise, drafting and sketching the outlines of a new, socialist world. The strength of medicinal conservation in the Soviet Union indeed became a point of comparison between private and socialized medical practice and between pre- and post-revolutionary health resort administration. The socialist state declared itself more dedicated to conservation than the tsarist state had been, a better steward of the land and its riches.Footnote 62
Stalinism and the Industrial Principle of Conservation
Conservation policies came under attack from the state and party during the great break, as a new health resort politics centered on serving industrialization came down from above.Footnote 63 The period was characterized by overt class warfare and an attack on “bourgeois specialists.” As a result, the Commissariat of Public Health underwent significant upheaval. Semashko was removed as Commissar of Public Health in 1930, as part of a broader purge of the governmental bureaucracy, installing leaders closer to Stalin. His removal also signalled a shift in medical policy away from social hygiene and universal medical provision. With Semashko gone, medicinal conservation lost a powerful patron.Footnote 64 Indeed, the year 1930 saw great setbacks for Soviet conservation. In that year, health resort forests were transferred to the Forests Trust of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (VSNKh), and the Main Administration of Health Resorts of the Commissariat of Public Health was reorganized into the All-Russian United Health Resort Trust, with the charter declaring a new aim, the “socialist reconstruction of health resorts.”Footnote 65 Socialist reconstruction entailed a dramatic increase in the production of health resort treatments and an aggressive class-based selection of patients, as well as the expansion of resort capacity through the construction of new resorts, all developments that prioritized construction over conservation.
Yet, Commissariat of Public Health physicians were successful at maintaining state support for their control of the health resorts and for the conservation of natural healing resources during these years.Footnote 66 By demonstrating how they would support public health, key to industrial productivity, and in turn by highlighting the relationship between conservation and public health, they aligned the health resorts with the anthropocentric ideology of the state and its goal of industrialization.
G.M. Danishevskii, the director of the Institute of Health Resort Medicine in Moscow, became the leading voice of a new, Stalinist health resort policy. Danishevskii demonstratively opened up health resort medicine to the industrial workforce, abandoning the Commissariat of Public Health's NEP-era commitment to universal health care and the strictly medical selection of patients for health resort treatment. In a 1932 essay, “The Foundations of Health Resort Politics,” Danishevskii declared that Soviet health resorts served the industrial workforce of leading industries first, relinquishing physician control over patient selection according to medical principles: “The best treatment and first provisions go for the treatment of productive workers of leading branches of industry, collective farmers, Red Army soldiers (mostly shock workers) on the basis of state norms for the social selection of patients, supported by the insurances, professional and other organizations.”Footnote 67
Danishevskii emphasized the benefits of health resort treatment from an industrial management perspective, as an instrument that could be used as an incentive to raise labor productivity.Footnote 68 Health resorts would improve industrial production, he argued, by improving the health of workers and by providing an incentive for good work. As a final point of his new formulation of health resort politics, Danishevskii pointed to the commitment of the Commissariat of Public Health to an on-going “regionalization” of health resort development. The Commissariat of Public Health poured resources into the construction of local health resorts in new industrial regions, so that by 1933, after the end of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), the network of health resorts run by Commissariat of Public Health had reached 114 resorts (a dramatic expansion from the thirty-five resorts of 1922), distributed throughout the entire territory of the Soviet Union.Footnote 69 The regionalization of health resort development and the new social profile of health resort patients demonstrated the commitment of the All-Russian United Health Resort Trust to socialist construction and industrialization. By comparison, in 1933, there were sixty-nine zapovedniki, located often far away from population centers and mostly closed to outside visitors.Footnote 70 Soviet physicians actively developed health resorts as leisure landscapes, closely tied to industrial centers, serving and acculturating the new, urban elite.
In this context of Stalinist rapid industrialization, the articulation by Danishevskii of the on-going relevance of conservation was bold. Against the utilitarian tide, he argued that water sources, lakes, and other health resort resources should be preserved in an “unaltered” state. To justify this, Danishevskii rolled conservation into the definition of a functional health resort, serving public health: “In accordance with the slogan ‘health resorts for workers,’ a broad, conscious work is developing laying the legal, medical, and economic basis for the construction of Soviet health resorts, establishing the appropriate regimen for preserving, in an unaltered state, water sources, lakes, and other health resort resources.”Footnote 71 In this way, Danishevskii slipped conservation into the definition of the new, Stalinist health resort. Danishevskii forcefully demonstrated the continued relevance of health resorts in the new economic and political circumstances of the great break, overtly aligning it with the new political realities of the Soviet Union. It would remain squarely within the definition of the health resort for the remainder of the Stalinist period.
Yet, the development of new resorts of “local” significance constituted a relative loss in the influence of medicinal conservation during the first Five-Year Plan. As we have seen, no districts of mineral and sanitary protection were established in health resorts of “local significance,” in accordance with “On the curative regions of state significance” and the subsequent regulations and measures of 1919 and 1920, which were not updated in the early years of Stalinism. Rather, conservation was reserved for resorts of “state significance.” This shortcoming was, however, relatively quickly overcome.
The period from 1938 to 1941 was characterized by expanding state commitment to medicinal conservation, and indeed to conservation overall.Footnote 72 On April 19, 1940, the USSR Soviet of People's Commissars passed new health resort protection regulations, proposed by the Commissar of Public Health, Georgii Andreevich Miterev, reputed to have been an active environmentalist.Footnote 73 This legislation, the “Regulations on sanitary protection of health resorts and curative regions,” extended conservation to regional and local health resorts, a massive expansion in the reach of the regulations. Thus the Stalinist state upheld and expanded the scope of medicinal conservation in Soviet health resorts.
Public health remained the sole justification for nature protection in the new 1940 “Regulations on sanitary protection of health resorts and curative regions.” The regulations made no reference to aesthetic or moral considerations, patriotism, or nation.Footnote 74 The Commissariat of Public Health did not view health resorts through a national lens, and neither, therefore, did the state. In the pre-World War II Stalinist period there was no convergence between the state project of nature protection of leisure landscapes and the rise of national and aesthetic understandings of landscape.Footnote 75 Health remained the dominant paradigm through which the state framed nature protection in conservation laws and regulations protecting leisure landscapes.
The successful defense of medicinal conservation in the 1930s fits into what can now be seen as a developing consensus in Soviet environmental history, that the success of conservation policies after the first Five-Year Plan hinged largely on the ability of experts to align their conservation policies with the state priorities of economic growth and industrialization.Footnote 76 Indeed, recent work in the history of Soviet conservation policy and practice has challenged the declensionist narrative that dominated Cold War-era studies of Soviet environmental policy, which framed the Stalinist state as an unscrupulous exploiter of the land and natural resources of the Soviet Union, driving development without consideration for environmental costs or long-term productivity.Footnote 77 In contrast to this, Stephen Brain has argued that conservation took a new course after the Cultural Revolution, shifting into a highly statist form of environmentalism aimed at supporting industrial productivity. In his study of forest conservation, Brain argued that forestry “did not find a secure place in Stalin's system until supporters found a rationale that comported with rapid industrialization.”Footnote 78 By contrast, ecologists at the zapovedniki were less successful at defending the conservation policies needed to conduct their scientific research. In the 1930s the centers for ecological study at the zapovedniki were dismantled (although the reserves themselves survived the 1930s, mainly given over to agricultural research). As Douglas Weiner has shown, in contrast to physicians and foresters, ecologists struggled to formulate a justification for their science that appealed to the state in its ongoing focus on industrialization and modernization, particularly as the state embraced the acclimatization of exotic species: “Ecologists and conservationists were unable to demonstrate significant practical benefits arising from their research in zapovedniki to a regime and a political public that now derided ‘science for science's sake.’”Footnote 79 Borrowing a term of Christopher Burton, the conservation policy of Stalinism could be understood to have followed the “industrial principle” of conservation: conservation policies in this period needed a strong focus on serving economic growth and industrialization to attract state support.Footnote 80 But when this support was garnered, it could be remarkably vigorous. With its enormous power, the Soviet state had the potential to be a most effective tool for conservationists.
Medicinal conservation became more significant as sites of nature protection in the 1930s, when zapovedniki lost state investment and prestige. The state poured resources into leisure landscapes during the second Five-Year Plan, focusing on health resorts and Parks of Culture and Rest, as it shifted focus from crash industrialization and social revolution to the consolidation of industrial achievements and social integration. The defense of conservation tied to public health and productivity was so successful in this period that conservationists elsewhere took notice, attempting to use the public health and productivity argument to protect areas under their own jurisdiction. Indeed, this argument was even raised by the administrators of the zapovedniki. In 1935, two prominent conservationists, the agronomist V.N. Makarov (who had been placed in charge of the zapovedniki in 1930), and F.F. Shillinger, suggested opening zapovedniki to tourism, based on the model of American national parks. Public health, and, in particular, an emphasis on the utility of tourism as a form of prophylactic medicine (profilaktika), figured strongly in their arguments for the project, which, however, came to nothing at the time.Footnote 81 As Douglas Weiner has outlined, Makarov was in a difficult position, making genuine efforts to maintain the existence of zapovedniki. But he was not able to articulate a way that the inviolability of the zapovedniki served the industrial principle, and so they were turned over to agricultural research.Footnote 82
Kul΄turnost΄ and Nature Protection
Health resorts were not marginal or forgotten islands of the Soviet Union, nor little corners of freedom, but rather an integral part of the Soviet acculturation project. As we have seen, by 1933 there were 114 health resorts in the Soviet Union, of which twenty-one were of state significance.Footnote 83 The smaller network of health resorts of state significance operated on central state budgets and served, indeed helped to forge, the Soviet urban elite. Among these, Sochi was the showcase resort in the 1930s. Stalin had his dacha in Sochi alongside a small fleet of Politburo dachas, and the Central Committee, commissariats, and military and social organizations operated a network of sanatoria there. This was an experience limited mainly to party and state members, leading writers, artists and dancers, engineers and technical workers, academics and scientists, and Stakhanovites, drawn from all corners of the Soviet Union.Footnote 84 In 1940, 77,598 patients took a cure in the sanatoria of Sochi, including sanatoria of various commissariats, party, police, and social organizations.Footnote 85 The heavily-policed resorts were showcases of kul΄turnost΄.Footnote 86
A type of environmental consciousness, a code of behavior in nature, was part of the construct of the “cultured” person that emerged in 1930s health resorts. Conservation activists made the link between nature protection and kul΄turnost΄ explicit. As the conservationist Ivan Puzanov argued in a discussion of nature protection in Crimean health resorts: “The degree to which nature is protected is the best indicator of the level of culturedness (urovnia kul΄turnosti) of a country.”Footnote 87 Valuing the natural environment for health was a Stalinist value, tied to hygiene and medical science and practice.Footnote 88
The idea that nature was curative was cultivated by the entire medical apparatus of the health resort. The experience of a health resort visit directed the attention and awareness of the kurortnik to the healing power of nature. For health resort visitors with a place in a sanatorium, the daily schedule, the sanatorium regime, dictated that most of the day was spent in the sanatorium gardens. As the director of the State Sanitary Inspection in Sochi, Mizerov, argued: “According to the sanitary rules, in order to fulfil the sanitary hygienic minimum, sanatorium patients should be located during all their free time outside the wards in the open air or in rooms of rest; the wards are intended only for sleeping and rest hour.”Footnote 89 A model daily regime provided by the Sochi administration of sanatoria of the trade unions to sanatorium directors in 1952 focused on healing in nature and outdoor cultural activity. Rising at 7:30, the patient proceeded to “morning gymnastics” (7:40), breakfast (8:00), “clinical procedures” (8:00–9:30), “mass sports” (12:00–3:00 p.m.), lunch (3:00–4:00 p.m.), rest hour (3:30–5:00 p.m.), tea (5:00–5:30 p.m.), dinner (7:00–8:30 p.m.), “mass cultural work” (5:00–7:00 p.m.) and rest, with lights out at 11:30 p.m.Footnote 90 Of these, morning gymnastics, clinical procedures, mass sports, rest hour, as well as mass cultural work, that is, all the scheduled activities beyond meals, could be conducted outdoors. Moreover, in many sanatoria meals were similarly taken in the gardens in tents prepared for that purpose.
Health resort therapies, the “clinical procedures” of the sanatorium regime, drew mainly from a highly-developed arsenal of climate and balneological therapies. These were highly regimented, physician- or nurse-supervised dosages of natural healing. The most common forms of therapy in Sochi were sun and air therapy and the use of the Matsesta mineral waters. Sun therapy was prescribed in dosages, measured in calories of sun energy, and was taken on specially-constructed solaria.Footnote 91 Patients lay on long benches, with their heads covered by special shades, as exposure of the head to the sun was understood to cause fever. Beginning at the treatment level of twenty calories, medical personnel administered the treatment in dosages to the four surfaces of the body, instructing patients to turn to the front, sides, and back after five calories had been administered to each surface. After a sun bath of 60–80 calories, 10–15 minutes of rest in the shade was recommended, if possible in a nearby aeraria. This procedure emphasized the powerful, curative qualities of the sun and fresh air.
Taking the Matsesta waters was a focal point of treatment at the health resort in Sochi. Guidebooks linked treatment with Matsesta waters to a rich set of ideas about the healing power of nature. As a 1939 guidebook outlined, the mineral content of the waters was drawn from the Caucasus mountain range, accumulating in the waters as they descended from the pure peaks during the spring thaws.Footnote 92 Besides reinforcing the idea of the curative value of nature, natural therapies like the Matsesta cure underscored the importance of a cultured and nuanced approach to natural therapies. As a locally produced popular brochure outlined, the therapy using the Matsesta waters structured the entire day for kurortniki around the procedure. The day started with a light breakfast, followed by two hours of avoiding strong physical exertion or long walks before the Matsesta bath, as the guidebook recommended.Footnote 93 Leaving on a bus from the sanatorium to the bath house, patients then waited in line for a bath, taken in individual bath tubs. Sanatorium physicians determined the concentration of water, temperature, length of the bath, and the number of Matsesta baths in a course of treatment for each patient. When admitted to a cubicle, a nurse instructed the patient to lie quietly in the bathtub, without movement. After the bath, the patient went to a room for rest, lying quietly on the sofa for fifteen minutes, without reading. After returning to the sanatorium, two hours of bed rest was prescribed.Footnote 94 Matsesta baths were central to the therapeutic regimen of Sochi, and the bath house operated above capacity. In 1937, a local physician reported that the Matsesta bath house was working from six o'clock in the morning until eleven o'clock at night.Footnote 95
Patients came to appreciate the curative value of nature not only through the therapeutic procedures. Physicians and nurses actively educated patients about its value. In 1940, in the thirty-six sanatoria of the Sochi health resort, sanatorium staff gave 509 lectures on medical topics, mainly on the Matsesta waters, sun and air baths, and general hygiene.Footnote 96 Patients could also read about the complex science behind the procedures of natural healing in popular brochures and guidebooks published at the resort, in the region, and by the Commissariat of Public Health. These included detailed instructions on how to behave during a procedure, and emphasized the importance of carefully following the instruction of physicians in order to get the full health benefits of the procedures.Footnote 97
Conservation policy was enforced through the entire experience of health resort kul΄turnost΄. At the health resort, patients learned about a “cultured” way of rest that featured cultured forms of natural therapies and moving closer to nature, all for health reasons. This included going through medical therapies in an orderly fashion, but it also extended beyond strictly medical criteria and therapy to aesthetics and a cultured relationship to nature overall. An inventory of the cultured forms of behavior in nature included smelling flowers, walking on paths through parks (not off the paths) at a leisurely pace, looking around and appreciating the aesthetics of nature, viewing the sea from viewing towers, breathing the fresh air, exposing the body to the sun, wearing light, air-permeable clothing, and getting photographed in nature. These activities reinforced the idea, most potently suggested in climate therapies, that nature had a positive influence on health and well-being, as well as the importance of proper, cultured behavior in nature. “Uncultured” environmental destruction was not only prohibited, but enforced through policing. A cultured person recognized the “unculturedness” of individual forms of environmental destruction, such as chopping down trees, picking flowers from flowerbeds, trampling on gardens, or throwing trash out of windows. It was also uncultured to ignore the recommendations of a physician. On the other hand, meticulous observation of all physician prescriptions was highly cultured behavior. The acculturation project was deemed largely successful by local officials. Indeed, from their perspective, it was not the kurortniki who posed the greatest threat to the environment, nor even the many “wild” tourists who descended on the resorts from all over the Soviet Union during the busy season, but rather rival state institutions attempting to exploit the region's natural resources.Footnote 98
In the Stalinist period, the health resort shaped Soviet cultural understandings of nature. While the experience of a health resort cure raised environmental consciousness, it was tied to the creation of a more orderly and cultured population rather than to the creation of a social movement. This was the Stalinist foundation of an expert-led environmental consciousness, not a nascent environmentalist movement.
Conservation in Practice: Policing the Health Resort “Garden”
The health resort in Sochi was a protected landscape. Like most health resorts, Sochi expanded into surrounding areas over time, integrating massive green spaces into the resort as its borders expanded.Footnote 99 By 1933, the health resort had spread to cover 3,750 hectares of forest park in the mountainous zone of the resort.Footnote 100 Its use for recreation was limited, not only because of conservation regulations, but also by urban planning and the way in which health resort life was organized.Footnote 101 Descending in altitude from the forest parks toward the sea was a zone reserved for the construction of new sanatoria and houses of relaxation. The sanatorium zone was filled in with extensive parks. Individual sanatorium parks and gardens were some of the most extensive of the resorts, marked by paths, benches, and gazebos, together with viewing pavilions overlooking the sea. In 1936, the sanatoria of Sochi together maintained 203.55 hectares of parks, employed 157 gardeners, and absorbed a total budget of 818,600 rubles.Footnote 102 The coastal zone, between the sea and the central highway of the resort (Stalin Prospect), was a park zone filled with public amenities and cultural institutions. New bath houses, physical culture squares, and a central stadium and policlinic were concentrated in this zone, as were the cultural establishments of Sochi: the theaters, cinemas, and restaurants.Footnote 103 It was the cultural and medical center of the health resort, and a continuous green zone. Coastal beaches were developed only gradually in the late 1920s and 1930s. In 1928, plans for the development of four curative beaches were underway in Sochi, and by 1951, Sochi had thirty beaches.Footnote 104 In all, the health resort contained 2,200 hectares of cultivated parks and gardens, in addition to the forest parks, meaning the health resort was as a territory closer to a park than to the wilderness. In fact, the term most frequently used was “garden” (sad).Footnote 105
Until the mid-1930s, the enforced conservation of this landscape, as outlined in the 1919 and 1920 conservation laws and regulations, remained in the hands of specialists rather than the militia. In the early 1920s, local officials of the Sochi health resort administration went to great lengths to translate the requirements of the 1919 and 1920 conservation laws and regulations into practice. The Sochi Health Resort Administration established a unified district of mineral-sanitary protection for the entire Tuapse and Sochi regions, approved by the Commissariat of Public Health Main Health Resort Administration on October 25, 1924.Footnote 106 Yet, the health resort administration had difficulties staffing the Commission for Mineral-Sanitary Protection, so the task of supervising the conservation of the resort fell into the hands of a sanitary physician.Footnote 107
That sole sanitary physician, a certain Bessekerskii, recognized his own inability to properly enforce conservation regulations. In his assessment, since 1930 the mineral-sanitary commission had lost virtually all influence in the face of rapid construction of sanatoria in the resort.Footnote 108 As he wrote:
There is no one to interrupt the cutting down of forests and trees on the territories of individual constructions and inside health-resort institutions or the excavation of sand and gravel from beaches and from along the shoreline, not only on the territory of the city, but beyond it in the zone of protection, unless the commission receives information at random from private individuals.Footnote 109
Despite these ongoing concerns about enforcement, it is nevertheless significant that central conservation directives were received by a dedicated physician far from Moscow, who supported the state project of conservation. Conservation regulations existed not only on paper, but were translated into practice by engaged medical officials in the regions.
In the 1930s, the state changed its approach to enforcement of conservation laws and regulations, as part of a dramatic expansion of urban policing. In 1933, the Central Executive Committee began to impose order on the expansion of Sochi, and sent a plenipotentiary, Denis Metelev, to the resort to oversee its reconstruction. Metelev quickly removed the enforcement of environmental regulations from the local organs of the State Sanitary Inspection and placed it in the hands of the Worker-Peasant Militia, which since the early 1930s had been integrated into the OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate).Footnote 110 The Soviet state thus made nature protection into everyday police work, and subsequently, transgressions of conservation policies were treated not as hygienic transgressions but as crimes. At the same time, formal oversight over translating conservation policy into local conditions remained in the hands of the Mineral-Sanitary commission. Meanwhile, the OGPU in Sochi made efforts to bring criminality under control and cleared out apartments through passportization, in part to house its own elite.Footnote 111
By placing the everyday enforcement of conservation in the hands of the militia, Metelev improved the ability of the state to protect natural medicinal resources. He was surprisingly attentive to questions of conservation, issuing a series of local conservation directives. Metelev focused on the environmental problems of deforestation and coastal erosion in particular, which he deemed to be urgent threats to the resort.
The first environmental directive of Metelev, Directive no. 4, “On the protection of the forests,” of January 28, 1936, forbade “the unplanned cutting of forests in the health resort zone, whether for heating, agricultural needs, or for industrial aims,” without the permission of the mineral-sanitary commission, made in consultation with Metelev.Footnote 112 According to this directive, every case of illegal clearing of forests and vegetation in parks was to be summarized in an act and referred to a procurator. In particularly egregious cases, referral for administrative action was made to Metelev himself. Directive no. 11, of April 10, 1936, “On the protection of curative beaches,” forbade any kind of excavation of gravel, sand, or stone from the beaches of the entire health resort coastline. As Metelev wrote: “The unorganized and unplanned extraction of gravel in the health resort zone threatens to destroy the beaches and damage the coastal infrastructure.”Footnote 113 He instructed the municipal government of Sochi to put up signs along the coastline and organize police surveillance of the beaches.Footnote 114
It was only with this institutional change that the conservation regulations of 1919 and 1920 came to be actively enforced. In the following months and years, local residents and officials of Sochi frequently ran up against the militia for infringements of these directives. Enforcement focused on city greenery, forests, and the curative beaches. For example, on September 21, 1935, the director of the police in Sochi arrested the driver of a car belonging to the construction site of the Sanatorium of the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. The driver was caught loading his car with pebbles from a beach near the central health resort park. The militia director sent his citation on to the director of the municipal government, asking that it not be overlooked.Footnote 115 On November 16, 1936, Metelev himself ordered the arrest of the director of the health resort forest district for a month, for failing to protect the forests.Footnote 116 Kurortniki were noticeably absent from the roster of those arrested.
The year in which these arrests took place suggests that the arrests were also tied to the purges, to which Metelev himself would fall victim one year later. Indeed, the failure of health resort administrations to enforce conservation policies became a topic of denunciatory literature on health resort management during the purges.Footnote 117 This does not undermine but rather highlights the extent to which the state placed enormous and increasing emphasis on medicinal conservation in the 1930s.
This article serves as an introduction to the historic role of health resorts as sites of nature protection in the Soviet Union, comparable to national parks and nature reserves (zapovedniki). In 1922, there were thirty-five state health resorts in the Soviet Union. By 1933, the number of Commissariat of Public Health resorts had reached 114, distributed throughout the entire territory of the Soviet Union.Footnote 118 By comparison, in 1933, there were sixty-nine zapovedniki.Footnote 119 In the Stalinist period, the idea that natural resources at health resorts should be protected to promote public health, or medicinal conservation, gained influence with state patrons because physicians explicitly aligned the conservation of health resort resources with the anthropocentric ideology of the state and its goal of industrialization, demonstratively opening up health resort medicine to the project of improving the health of and acculturating the new, Stalinist urbanites. Borrowing a term from Christopher Burton, and rooted in recent work in Soviet environmental history, I propose that the conservation policy of Stalinism could be understood to have followed the “industrial principle” of conservation: conservation policies in this period needed a strong focus on serving economic growth and industrialization to attract state support. If this support was garnered, it could be remarkably vigorous. State patronage of health resort conservation increased in the Stalinist period, culminating in 1940, when the reach of conservation was extended beyond the leading state resorts to local health resorts. The article therefore suggests that health resorts are an important object of study for scholars interested in nature protection in the Soviet Union.
The example of Soviet health resorts serves as a reminder that nature protection looked different at various times and places. It develops our understanding of the diverse range of agents of nature protection that were active in the early Soviet and Stalinist periods, highlighting in particular the active role that physicians and medical officials had in formulating environmental policies for the state, and for that intermediary institution between the Politburo and the patient, the Commissariat of Public Health. Health resorts remained until 1956 under the control of that Commissariat, which should therefore be understood to have had a powerful place as a land administrator and administrator of cities previously managed by private investors, aristocrats, and merchant grandees, and in placing these on new, socialist foundations. The Commissariat of Public Health had a great deal of power, based not only in their influence on social policy, but also on their control of land, valuable infrastructure, and natural resources. This position of power reveals a great deal about the place of expertise in the management of Soviet natural resources and in the processes of building socialism more broadly. Health resorts were integrated into an arm of the state and state planning, and the Public Health Commissariat shaped their use, based on their expertise and aims. Far from advocating for “the conquest of nature,” physicians developed the idea of the curative value of nature, and with the health resort, developed a space for turning to nature for health. Physicians thus expanded and replaced pre-existing frameworks for understanding and valuing nature in Soviet culture. The idea of curative nature was not marginal, but in the 1930s was adopted into the Stalinist concept of culturedness (kul΄turnost΄). Indeed, health resorts themselves were not marginal or forgotten islands of the Soviet Union, not little corners of freedom, but rather an integral part of the Soviet project, intended eventually for the masses. At the health resort, turning to nature for health and valuing and protecting the natural environment as a source of health became a part of being cultured.
