Taken together, these two books by Anna L. Bailey and Tricia Starks present vodka and tobacco as iconic, hazardous consumables that provided significant revenues to the Russian and Soviet states and imparted to their societies a distinctive culture and set of social norms. Tricia Starks argues that Russia became “a society of modern smokers earlier and more fully than any other market in the world” (3) and, by the 1920s, papirosy smoking had become “a habit embedded in Russian bodies, psyches, and society” (24). Even as the Soviet state prescribed a tobacco-free lifestyle, the weed's economic importance outweighed concerns for the population's health, and leaders did not adopt a coherent national policy on smoking's hazards until 1978. Anna Bailey demonstrates vodka's similarly out-sized impact on Russia. Surveying the state's historic dependence on alcohol revenues, which contributed a vastly greater sum to the treasury than tobacco taxes, she recounts increasing levels of alcohol production and consumption, unsuccessful campaigns to curb excessive drinking in the late tsarist and Soviet eras, the Soviet state's contradictory alcohol policies, and Putin-era attempts to recapture alcohol revenues from organized crime groups. Furthermore, both scholars attribute relatively high levels of smoking and alcohol consumption in contemporary Russia to previous political decisions and socio-cultural developments. Starks concludes that the images and discourses attached to tobacco in the nineteenth century influenced public health policy for decades, and Bailey that Soviet alcohol policy held sway over decision-making in the post-Soviet period.
Despite tracing parallel trajectories and arriving at complementary conclusions, their objectives, methods, and source materials differ significantly. Bailey's book focuses on the process of policy-making in the 1990s and early 2000s by scrutinizing the roles of stakeholders, including the vodka lobby, beer industry, and Russian Orthodox Church, as well as political officials and the sistema, a network of individuals closely tied to Putin and other elites, to show their influence on alcohol policy. Two points motivate her analysis: 1) the discovery by researchers in the 1990s that Russia's population decline had accelerated, in part, because of excessive consumption of alcohol, particularly vodka; and 2) the delay between that revelation and the state's new anti-alcohol initiative in 2009, which resulted in a 2011 regulatory law. Pursuit of the reasons for the delay leads Bailey to conclude that decision-making in contemporary Russia is not simply a top-down process, but a series of policy battles full of “conflict, intrigue, and vilification” (183) that lack transparency and are subject to the “distorting” (185) effects of the sistema. A range of secondary sources further the investigation, including several English- and Russian-language monographs, published media reports, government documents, laws, decrees, and interviews with anonymous stakeholders, whose positions, but not names, are identified. Representatives from the vodka lobby and Rosalkogolregulirovaniye (RAR), the federal alcohol regulator, are noticeably absent, however, which tends to tilt her analysis in favor of those interviewed. Bailey also employs models and theoretical concepts, including “advocacy coalition framework” (ACF) (2), to represent alliances among stakeholders with apparently similar objectives. Most work well enough, even if, at times, they seem forced, although ACF does not offer the flexibility to explain why bureaucrats with seemingly opposed motives supported establishment of the RAR in 2008. Bailey nevertheless skillfully disentangles and lays bare the moves and counter-moves of the various players. Chapters documenting the clash between the well-connected Russian vodka lobby and the primarily non-Russian, strategically disadvantaged beer industry illuminate the political advantages of the former, due to cronyism. The chapter on popular attitudes and consumption habits, based largely on opinion polls, reveals that many Russians perceive excessive alcohol consumption as a national problem, but fail to see their own drinking habits as part of the problem. As a result, there is little support for vigorous measures such as price increases. Given the significance of this insight to another of Bailey's conclusions—that Putin and his circle pursued only those regulatory measures that did not provoke discontent—a chapter on the reception of the 2011 law would provide confirmation or complexity.
A stronger editorial hand or referee intervention might have remedied a few infelicities. Use of the term “hunger strike” to denote the state's forfeiture of income following the prohibition of alcohol sales in 1914–25, 1985–88, and during the Yeltsin era, for example, seems insensitive to the countless Russians who suffered material privation and starved to death in famines at the hands of the state. There are also missing citations (105 and 108, for instance), as well as two chapters, each numbering no more than six pages, which give the narrative a choppy, disjointed effect. Despite such shortcomings, Bailey's clear elaboration of the motives and maneuvers of Russia's elites and their relationship to policy-making is a worthy contribution to the study of Putin-era power dynamics.
More wide-ranging and ambitious, Starks’ book endeavors to link the Russian papirosa (a cardboard tube, stuffed with low-grade, nicotine-heavy tobacco) “to nearly everything” (56). To explore the “biopsychosocial web” (7) of Russia's distinctive smoking culture, ca. 1830s–1917, she draws on a range of sources, including scientific research, industry publications, literature, art, cartoons, and advertisements. Eschewing scorn and scolding, Starks historicizes smoking, grounding the meanings of things such as smoke, odor, and addiction in the past. The book is also vividly written. From the first page, Starks evokes the multi-sensory experience of the smoker, and each chapter takes up a different aspect of tobacco culture. The first considers tobacco's role as “tool” of imperial conquest and “symbol of difference” (13), while the second details the growth of Russia's tobacco industry and development of an increasingly feminized, radicalized workforce. Chapter 3 considers the role of smoking in constructions of identity and connoisseurship. The next two detail concerns raised by a group of professionalizing antismoking crusaders, alongside counter-arguments published in scientific journals and ridicule in popular formats. The most engaging sections of the book explore the multiple ways that the papirosa became “invested with cultural meaning” (123). Tobacco manufacturers fashioned the Cossack smoker into an icon of “militarism, manliness, and empire” (27) and capitalized on the public's interest in the celebrity of cultural heroes such as Lev Tolstoi and Aleksandr Pushkin. At the same time, Ivan Turgenev and Il΄ia Repin, among others, utilized tobacco to symbolize character traits, social norms, and fractures between classes and generations. Ads in the sensuous Style moderne rendered smoking an art in itself. Through these and other vividly drawn examples, Starks demonstrates the mutually-reinforcing integration of tobacco and smoking into the cultural mainstream and popular imagination. I can only quibble with the interpretation of the Bogdanov Company's ad depicting a post-Civil War African-American producer, which Starks states “aligns” tobacco with “liberation” and “American democracy” (119). It seems doubtful that the embedded racist stereotypes can ever be divested or Russified. This one ad aside, the analysis is skillful and the inclusion of dozens of color reproductions of ads and paintings make the book a treasure trove of commercial iconography.
Starks goes beyond a surface reading of the evidence to ponder the significance of images and texts. She considers, for instance, the meaning of the relatively large number of depictions of respectable, well-dressed, non-sexualized, independent, female smokers, shown simply enjoying some quiet time with a cigarette for company. Although she could make more clear that a few of the texts she cites alongside the ads expressed disapproval of women taking up the habit, her conclusion that in Russia there was “relative acceptance” (147) nonetheless is warranted. Moreover, Starks places the real-life experiences of women alongside the imagined female smoker. She highlights Dr. M.K. Valitskaia, whose research contributed to published discussions of tobacco's effects, and “tobacco queen” (55) Ekaterina Shaposhnikova, who, after her husband's death, turned Shaposhnikov and Company into the largest tobacco enterprise in St. Petersburg. The section on activist female tobacco workers Elizaveta Torsueva and Vera Keralina is especially noteworthy. Crediting them with bringing unity and organization to the fight for workers’ rights and tracing the effects of strikes they led, she concludes that such women contributed to the “general turmoil that overturned the tsarist system” (100). This research on the symbolic female smoker and activist female tobacco workers furthers a recent historiographical trend that attributes women's unique position within the Russian Empire—for example, the relatively early extension of suffrage and the visibility of radical, activist women—to civil society's general alienation from the tsarist state. As Starks remarks, female smokers and militant women may have seemed less of a menace than an oppressive state. Other observations complement this interpretation. Starks finds that, although Russia's scientific community, like that in other countries, failed to find a consensus on tobacco's dangers, Russian anti-smoking advocates, unlike their British and American counterparts, so distrusted the tsarist state that they did not seek cooperation with state officials on anti-smoking measures.
In conclusion, Bailey and Starks offer compelling interpretations of Russian politics, society, and culture through the prism of ubiquitous consumer goods and across traditional historical divides, demonstrating that each governing regime confronted and struggled with the legacies of the past. Their books make contributions to multiple disciplines and should find audiences among scholars and students alike.
