Soviet Campaign Research Articles

Reflections on the Historiography of Post-War Justice and the Holocaust in Lithuania

Abstract The article gives a brief overview of the historiography of post-war justice in Lithuania. It begins with an introduction to post-Holocaust justice, outlining the functioning of the post-war war crimes trials in Soviet Lithuania, including the institutional framework, the retribution law, the nature of legal proceedings, and the procedural changes that took place over time. The article then presents the historiographical approaches historians have used to investigate these trials and depicts the current developments in this field of study. It shows that following the fall of the Soviet Union, the first works on post-war justice lacked an in-depth analysis and instead concentrated on how the Soviet regime had utilized these legal proceedings for political purposes. The article presents not only the micro-historical studies that historians have conducted on selected court cases in recent years, but also explores the ways in which the relationship between the Holocaust and the Soviet war crimes trials, as well as the visual representation and mediation of these trials, have been investigated. It then briefly discusses the missing categories of analysis that need to be integrated into the study of post-war justice in the case of Lithuania. The article finishes by presenting the debates and controversies surrounding this historical topic. It shows that the Soviet campaign of post-war retribution is embedded in the “narratives of doubt.” The credibility and reliability of the legal records compiled by KGB officials are constantly questioned not only by the legal and political authorities, but also by historians.

Solidarity and the Aesthetics of Pain: Soviet Documentary Film and the Vietnam War

AbstractThe Soviet campaign in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the Vietnam War saturated Soviet public culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the longest solidarity action in Soviet history and the first to reach mass television audiences. This article examines the production and reception of a televised documentary film about the Vietnam War made by Konstantin Simonov – a celebrity writer who played a crucial role in Soviet culture during World War II, and then, in the post-war period, in the struggle to come to terms with terrible truths about Stalinism and the chaos and trauma that war had rendered. Simonov's film presented the Vietnam War in lyrical rather than analytical terms, calling upon viewers to draw connections between the suffering of the Vietnamese and the Soviet wartime experience and to enact their solidarity with the Vietnamese in terms of feeling. The film proposes a solidarity of pain and an understanding of war and wartime suffering as elemental and overwhelming. In dozens of letters to Simonov, we find an understanding and appreciation of this vision, which decentres Vietnam and instead sends viewers on a journey back to Soviet history and trauma.

Шугнанский перевод сказки Вильгельма Гауфа «Маленький Мук»

This article presents the Shughnani translation of “Little Muck”, a fairy tale by the 19th century German writer Wilhelm Hauff. This is the story of a tiny man whose appearance causes others to make fun of him. When he comes into possession of a pair of magic shoes, Muck’s hopes of attaining happiness are close, but then envious people take the shoes away. With the help of some magic fruit, Muck gets his shoes back and punishes the offenders. In the 1930s, as part of the Soviet campaign to create alphabets for non-written languages of the Mountainous Badakhshan Autonomous Region, work began on an alphabet and writing system for the Shughnani language based on the Roman script. Based on this alphabet, primers, educational books, and translated literature were published in the Shughnani language. “Little Muсk” was translated into Shughnani and published in 1938. Here it is presented according to the 1938 edition of the Shughnani text. The text is accompanied by morphemic glossing, using the currently accepted system of Iranian transcription in Roman script with addi‑ tional characters, and a translation into Russian. The presentation of the text in this format makes it suitable for use in comparative language research, as well as in research related to intertextuality.

Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Elimination of illiteracy in the 20-30s of the 20th century as a social and political project of the Soviet Government: philosophical aspect

Elimination of illiteracy in the 20-30s of the 20th century as a social and political project of the Soviet Government: philosophical aspect

Down with Bridewealth, Down with the Veil! Soviet Campaign for the Emancipation of Women in Central Asia in Graphics and Textiles between the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract Varied visuals (paper-based, textiles, ceramics, etc.) targeted men and women to join the struggle for a new happy life in Soviet Central Asia. I designate these visuals as “Soviet material ideology” and I consider them as a powerful tool in spreading new ideas and practices. In this paper I explore posters and carpets created in the 1920s and 1930s that call for the emancipation of women of Central Asia. Studying of graphic and textile iconography helps to understand how the image of a woman of the “Soviet East” was reproduced and which ideas about women’s emancipation were promoted. The analysis of Soviet visuals, which were a part of everyday life, explores a multidimensional picture of Soviet history and reveals the links between tradition and modernity, national and supranational, top-down and bottom-up narratives. Finally, textiles and graphics reflect Soviet trends pertaining to gender roles in the 1920–1930s. The paper is based on posters from the collection of the department of the Russian State Library and the Mardjani Foundation. It also relies on the examination of carpets from the Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan, the State Museum of Oriental Art, the Russian Museum of Ethnography, the All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Art and private collections.

Theodor Oberländer and the Nachtigall Battalion in 1959/60—an Entangled History of Propaganda, Politics, and Memory in East and West

This article analyzes the East German and Soviet campaign against the West German federal minister Theodor Oberländer in 1959–60 as an exemplary case of how the Cold War and east-west entanglements influenced the memory of the Holocaust and Stalinist crimes. These entanglements were complex and went beyond the relations between the two German states. The article examines also the interrelations with the Soviet Union's propagandistic struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. It addresses the diverse impact that the campaign had in the two German states, the Ukrainian diaspora, and the Soviet Union. It argues that in the German context the campaign contributed to critical reckonings and remembrance of the Holocaust, which it did not do in the Soviet Union and among the Ukrainian diaspora. Moreover, in the Soviet Union it amplified an enemy image of Ukrainian nationalism that still exists today and serves Russia to justify its current war against Ukraine with the accusation that Ukraine is ruled by a “Nazi” regime.

Memories from the Future: The Historical Experience of the First World War and the Civil War in Soviet Propaganda of the 1920s and 1930s

The article deals with the historical experience of the First World War and the Russian Civil War as it was brought up in Soviet propaganda of the 1920s and 1930s; topic is thus the employment of a useful past in the production of ideas about future wars. The present research is based on a corpus of normative texts related to the assessment of the First World War and the Civil War in the late 1920s and 1930s (including periodicals, political writings, materials of the Communist Party) as well as archival documents about campaigns dedicated to the anniversaries of the First World War and the Civil War. Despite their proclaimed policy of peace, Soviet leaders spoke of a major future war as inevitable, and tried to anticipate its nature through comparison with conflicts of the recent past. In the Soviet information space of the 1920s and 1930s, the Great War was presented primarily from a socio-political perspective. Assessing the First World War as imperialist, Soviet propaganda emphasized that the future conflict would inevitably start as a counter-revolutionary war against the USSR. The Civil War became the main source of heroic military discourse, and was presented as a national war against external enemies. The future war was thereby imagined on the model of the foreign interventions of 1918-1920. The author analyzes this approach with the example of the Soviet campaign dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the defense of Petrograd from Yudenich's troops in 1919.

“History of Factories”: Example of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1930s

The article analyzes one of the first Soviet campaigns dedicated to constructing a “correct” version of history. It demonstrate how and why the project of writing the history of factories and plants in the 1930s was closely intertwined with political, social, economic and cultural processes. Was explained the role of proletarian writer Maksym Gorky in the implementation of this campaign. The study reconstructed structure and tasks of the commission that collected materials and directly wrote the history of Soviet industrial facilities. The research is focused on the activities of the All-Ukrainian edition “History of Factories and Plants”. Therefore, it was analyzed what of the campaign of writing HFP in Ukraine was typical in the All-Union context and what difficulties arose in the organizational work between the “center” and “locally”: uncertainty of authorship, that is, who exactly should write the texts of plant histories (historian or writer) , insufficient number of employees in local newsrooms, lack of funding, late implementation of publication plans and so on. The activity of the All-Ukrainian edition “History of Factories and Plants” was reconstructed on the basis of materials of the Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine. The article drew attention to the problems that arose in the work of the All-Ukrainian edition “History of Factories and Plants”. Namely, it demonstrates how the untimely implementation of plans for the preparation of publications of the history of industrial facilities was “explained” by the Main Editorial Board and how the “search for culprits” in the disruption of publication plans took place. The search for the culprits carried out by the Soviet authorities is closely intertwined with the formation of the image of the “enemy” in the USSR. Enemies were called “pests”, counter-revolutionaries, Trotskyists, “nationalist groups” and so on.Manuscript received 12.03.2020

Of Saints, Shrines, and Tractors: Untangling the Meaning of Islam in Soviet Central Asia

Abstract In this article I suggest that in the Soviet period Central Asians cultivated and conceptualized Islam as an episteme. They did this by reaching beyond alienating (and often ephemeral) categories offered to them by the state. I argue that the constitution of an Islamic culture was made possible, among other things, by Central Asians’ encounters with the past, most notably with what they perceived as an Islamic past. We observe the curious phenomenon of Central Asians’ continuous interaction with the Islamic historical sites that escaped the bulldozers of the Soviet campaigns of religious repression. For some, encounters with the past might be accidental. For many others, the exploration of the past represented a purposive, self-conscious, and reiterated emotional act. I show that Central Asians in the Soviet period—even if at school they were taught little about, and were usually offered a distorted vision of, the Islamic history of their region—were still able to access their past through the surviving architectural presence of Islam. Monumental sites, however, were not enough for Muslims to understand the past and use it to construct their own identity. Such artifacts acquired meaning through an interpretive framework provided by Sufi narratives about saints and their miracles. Therefore, shrines represented for Central Asia a collective memory space, i.e., a place in which the past was preserved for mobilization in the present through narrative.

РОЛЬ ЦЕНТРОВ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО И КУЛЬТУРНОГО ПРОСВЕЩЕНИЯ В СПЛОЧЕНИИ КРЕСТЬЯНСКИХ МАСС НА ТЕРРИТОРИИ КУРСКОЙ ГУБЕРНИИ В 1920-1927 ГГ.: ОСОБЕННОСТИ И ПЕРВЫЕ РЕЗУЛЬТАТЫ

We study one of the most specific forms of work to build political and cultural educational centres in the peasant masses unification. That work was not directly connected with administrative and command methods. We analyze the stages, organization and means for the implementation of the Soviet campaign to strengthen the political education and cultural level centers in the cohesion of the peasant masses held in 1920–1927s. We make a comparison of educational work in the centers of political education with ideological aspects that allows us to trace the dynamics of the Soviet power interaction with the population of the province in the peasant masses formation and consolidation around the Soviet government. We describe the legal formation of the political education centers on the Kursk province territory. During the socialist construction the Council of People’s Commissars adopted a Decree “On cultural and educational work in the village”. The main purpose was to attract as many peasant workers as possible in the country, who were given the right to vote. The young Soviet state needed specialists of the cultural and political education to create a new management structure. In addition, there was a need for qualified personnel in the workplace, who could convey information to the masses. This material explains the basic prerequisites of the cultural and political construction centers, defines the main tasks of the proletariat in the cultural and political education in raising the cultural level of the masses. We consider the role of the mass political work centers in improving the activity of political education, which contributed to the governance of the state, introducing to the political life of the country in addressing the most important social issues of the village.

“August Storm” in 1945 and “Desert Storm” in 1991: An Analysis of the Similarities between the Red Army’s Campaign in Manchuria in August 1945 and the U.S. Army’s Campaign against Iraq in February 1991

이 글의 목적은 소련군이 1945년 8월에 만주의 일본 관동군을 상대로 실시한 만주 작전과 1991년 2월에 미군을 비롯한 다국적군이 이라크군을 상대로 실시한 “사막의 폭풍” 작전의 유사성을 살펴보는 것이다. 여러 면에서 두 작전은 매우 유사하다. 소련군은 소련 극동전구에 배치된 모든 군사력을 총지휘하는 극동사령 부를 조직해서 통합된 전구사령부의 지휘 아래 작전을 수행했다. 미군은 전구사 령부인 미중부사령부를 통해 작전을 지휘했다. 소련군의 기본 작전은 관동군의 방비가 가장 허술한 다싱안링 산맥과 고비 사막에 작전술적 기동부대를 투입해 주공을 펴고 만주 동부와 북부에서 조공을 펴서 관동군을 만주에서 포위해 섬멸 하는 것이었다. 미군의 기본 작전은 작전술적 기동부대가 이라크군 방비가 허술한 사우디아라비아-이라크 국경 지대에서 주공을 펴고 쿠웨이트에서는 해병대가 조공을 펴서 이라크군 주력을 쿠웨이트 전구 안에서 포위하는 것이었다. 소련군은 대대적 기만을 실시해 일본군이 소련군의 병력배치 상황을 오판하도록 유도했 다. 미군은 사우디아라비아-이라크 국경에서 공격을 하지 않고 페르시아 만에 상륙할 것처럼 이라크군을 기만했다. 공격이 개시되자 소련군의 주공 부대는 다싱 안링 산맥과 고비 사막을 넘어 관동군을 기습했고, 조공 부대도 적군을 고착시켜 만주 중부에서 관동군을 포위할 토대를 마련했다. 작전이 개시되자 다국적군의 주공을 맡은 작전술적 기동부대는 고속 전진하며 이라크군을 에워쌀 포위망을 구축했고 조공을 맡은 해병대는 쿠웨이트시티를 공격했다. 두 작전 모두 육군, 공군, 해군의 효과적 제병협동이 역할을 했다. 요컨대, 전구사령부를 구성하고 주공축선을 험지로 정하고 적극적 기만 작전을 수행한 뒤에 공격을 감행했다는 점에서 두 전역의 유사성이 두드러진다. 이 유사성은 우연이 아니다. 미육군 지휘 참모대학 고등군사연구원에서 소련군의 군사 이론을 학습하면서 작전술을 터득 했던 미군 참모장교들이 “사막의 폭풍” 작전을 기획했다는 사실, 그리고 이 작전의 기획 과정에서 이 장교들이 자기들에게 작전술을 가르쳤던 소련군 전문가들과 지속적으로 의견을 교환했다는 사실에서 두 전역의 유사성이 비롯되었을 가능성이 매우 크다고 할 수 있다.This article aims to examine the similarities between the Soviet campaign against the Japanese Kwantung army in Manchuria in August 1945 and the operation “Desert Storm” carried by the U.S. forces against the Iraqi army at the Gulf War in 1991. In many ways the latter bore a striking resemblance to the former. At the end of the Second World War the Red Army placed all the forces of the theater of the Far East under the jurisdiction of the Far East Headquarters, which launched the coordinated operations against the enemy. In the Gulf War all the operations of the U.S, forces were coordinated by the theater headquarters, the United States Central Command. In its Manchurian campaign the basic operation planned by the Red Army was that the main attack should be carried out by the operational maneuvering forces through the Greater Khingan Range and the Gobi Desert defended weakly by the enemy and the supporting attack be carried out in the eastern and northern regions of Manchuria. In the Gulf War the basic operation planned by the U.S. Central Command that the main attack should be carried out by the operational maneuvering forces at the Saudi-Iraq border defended weakly by the enemy and the supporting attack be carried out by the Marine Corps in Kuwait. Before the full-scale campaign the Soviet army launched the massive deception operations to induce the Kwantung army to misread its strategic intentions. For the Iraqi army to be deceived, the U.S. forces pretended to launch their main attack not in the Saudi-Iraq border but in the Persian Gulf. In both campaigns a great role was played by the efficient combined arms of the army, the navy, and the air forces. In a nutshell, the two campaigns shared the similarities such as the organization of the theater headquarters, the tendency to select the harsh terrains as the main attack axis, and the massive deception operations followed by the main attacks. Such similarities are more than a coincidence. The operations of the Gulf War were planned by “the Jedi Knights”, those U.S. military staff officers who had been taught the Soviet military theories and the operational art by their mentors, a batch of scholars majoring in the military history of the Soviet army at the School of Advanced Military Studies, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. In the stages of panning the military strategies and operations, moreover, the “the Jedi Knights” kept in touch with their mentors, who gave advice to their apostles.

The Soviet Educational Project: The Eradication of Adult Illiteracy in the 1920s–1930s

The article analyzes the constituent steps and measures of the Soviet campaign to eradicate illiteracy among adults in the 1920s–30s. A comparison of educational and ideological aspects of this campaign demonstrates how closely they were interrelated and how they facilitated the creation of new patterns of cultural behavior. The author shows that during the campaign entire groups of the population not only learned how to read and write, but also mastered (and partly helped form) a new “Soviet language” for communication with the Soviet authorities and to achieve their own goals through the manipulation of official concepts and terms. The study is based on guidelines for teachers, official Soviet decrees, the media, manuals, and alphabet books.

Tractors, Power Lines, and the Welfare State: The Contradictions of Soviet Development in Post-World War II Tajikistan

Abstract This article considers the Soviet campaign to transform the Tajik countryside by mechanizing agricultural production and bringing the welfare state to the villages in light of broader 20th century rural development efforts. It begins by examining the attempt to mechanize agriculture and electrify the Tajik countryside through the eyes of the officials charged with implementing these technologies. Problems with how these technologies were introduced meant that while cotton output expanded, it required increasing amount of labor. Turning to the problem of resettlement, the article emphasizes that resettlement was shaped by competition for labor between districts and farm managers. Increasingly, in the Brezhnev era, it also came to be seen as an easier way to fulfill the modernizing imperative and the commitments of the welfare state. Under pressure to ensure access to schools and medical services, officials found it more convenient to move villages from mountain areas to valleys where such services could be more easily provided. At the same time, the demand for agricultural labor stimulated a kind of “involution” in the countryside, where managers had to find ways to keep labor on the farm. To do so, they could offer cash rewards, building materials, and access to private land and fertilizer.

‘All Signs Indicate that Gestapo Agents Murdered Him’: Soviet Disinformation, the Katyn massacre and the Raoul Wallenberg Case, 1945–7

In the years 1945–52, that is, between Raoul Wallenberg's incarceration in the Lubianka prison in Moscow (6 February 1945) and the first Swedish demand for his return (11 February 1952), more than fifty people provided the Swedish Foreign Ministry with diffuse and often contradictory information about his whereabouts. This article argues that a number of these testimonies may have been part of a Soviet campaign of disinformation aimed at diverting the Swedes' attention away from Moscow and to have them believe that Wallenberg had died in Hungary. The appearance of messages to this effect by February–March 1945 may indicate that the Soviets had already decided at this early point never to let Wallenberg return alive, or at least to construct an option that would allow for such a decision. In August 1947, after twenty-six Swedish diplomatic approaches on account of Wallenberg over the course of two and a half years, the Soviets handed over a note signed by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinskii that declared that Wallenberg had presumably died in Hungary. The note had the desired effect. No Swedish diplomatic approaches on Wallenberg were made for the next five years. This article argues that the Vyshinskii note was an extraordinary measure taken by the Soviets finally to get the message of Wallenberg's death in Hungary through to the Swedes. The Soviet disinformation regarding the 1940 Katyn massacre provides an interesting point of reference for understanding the way in which the Soviets tried to mislead Sweden over Wallenberg.

Unmasking the wolf in sheep's clothing: Soviet and American campaigns against the enemy's journalists, 1946–1953

This article uses a comparative perspective to examine Soviet campaigns against American correspondents in Moscow, and American crusades against the representatives of the Soviet news agency TASS. Building on Russian and US archival materials, it shows that the practice of targeting the enemy's foreign correspondents transcended the Cold War divide. Yet, different ideological injunctions informed the dynamics of each campaign and the mechanisms available to the participants. The respective campaigns turned journalists into the symbols of socialist and liberal political systems. As a result, the rhetoric of rights, duties, and freedom of the press in the USSR and in the US became entangled in the ideological rivalry of the two superpowers.

Soviet Enlightenment Project: Eradication of Illiteracy among Adults in the 1920s‑1930s

We analyze the Soviet campaign to eradicate illiteracy among adults in the 1920s‑1930s. A comparison of educational and ideological aspects of this campaign demonstrates how closely they were related and how they formed new patterns of cultural behavior. We discuss methodological regulations and decrees of the Soviet government, as well as printed press, study guides, and ABC books. They reveal how entire social strata not only learned to read and to write but also familiarized themselves with (and shaped, to some extent) the new «lingua Sovietica» in the course of the campaign. This new language allowed people to communicate with authorities and to achieve their specific goals through playing with official notions and terms. The soviet approach was specific not just in that education was brought together with solving ideological and upbringing problems but in that it was a totally deliberate and transparent process. Eradication of illiteracy in the Soviet Union was accompanied by radical changes to the way people lived and worked, which resulted in immediate demand for and utilization of the skills they acquired. That was the key to success of the Soviet illiteracy eradication campaign. None of the countries that used the Soviet scheme in their enlightenment projects cold replicate this success, as people were taught literacy with the traditional social relationships being preserved. As a result, knowledge was distributed much slower and population often lost their newly-acquired skills quickly.

Свобода как Принуждение?: Совeтское наступление на “закрепощение женщины” и наследие империи (середина 1920 – начало 1930-х гг., Волго Уральский регион)

The article explores the cross-section of gender differences and colonial/imperial differences on the example of the Soviet campaign of emancipation of the minority women in the Volga-Ural region during the 1920s and early 1930s. Drawing from Soviet publications and archival documents on the Commission for the Improvement of Work and Everyday Life of Women, the article shows that in spite of its emancipatory potential, the official campaign censored alternative projects of women’s emancipation that had emerged in the region before the Bolshevik revolution. At the same time, the institutionalized campaign for women’s equality privileged female activists on ideological rather than ethnic grounds. However, the existing structure of socialization in reality promoted mainly those of Russian and in general, Slavic background, thus reifying the old colonial disposition.

A Difficult Compromise: British and American Plans for a Common Anti-Communist Propaganda Response in Western Europe, 1948–58

The launch of the Western Union in 1948 and the creation of the NATO Information Service in 1950 were important steps in the coordination of the Western response to Soviet and Soviet-inspired propaganda campaigns. By examining how the British Information Research Department worked closely with the International Organizations Division of the CIA in shaping the foundation and early activities of these intergovernmental agencies, this article offers new insight into the role of national information agencies within international organizations and contributes to explaining why, in the early Cold War, the West struggled to produce a coherent and fully coordinated propaganda response to communism.

The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (review)

Reviewed by: The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State Brian Lapierre The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State. By Tricia Starks. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. 336 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper). In her book The Body Soviet, Tricia Starks examines the propaganda discourse on health, hygiene, and sanitation in Soviet Russia during [End Page 547] the New Economic Policy (NEP) era (1921–1928). Health care, she argues, was an issue of vital importance to an early Soviet state that needed healthy citizens in order to promote population growth, expand industrial production, improve military readiness, and recover from the demographic disaster of almost a decade of total war, civil war, multiple revolutions, mass famine, and epidemic infectious disease. In its concerns over population decline and state power, the early Soviet state, as Starks points out, echoed many of the anxieties of European, American, and prerevolutionary Russian social reformers and public health professionals. Where the early Soviet campaign on health differed, she asserts, from those of its ideological archenemies in the industrial democracies was in its ideological utopianism and in its aggressively invasive nature. Soviet health and hygiene polices, Starks shows, were part of a Bolshevik project to use science, propaganda, and state power to create a clean-living class of enlightened and orderly Soviet subjects capable of constructing communism and proving its superiority to a capitalist world plagued by ineradicable dirt, disorder, and decline. Starks traces the roots of the Bolshevik romance with hygiene to the utopian socialist writings dear to the heart of Russia's nineteenth-century revolutionary intelligentsia, all of which celebrated science, communalism, and cleanliness. From these popular writings, the Bolsheviks, Starks argues, learned to see dirt and disorder in political terms as symbols of superstitious tradition and of an oppressive capitalist system that had to be conquered to create both a healthy body politic and an antiseptic communist modernity purged of the backward politics, people, and pathogens of the bourgeois past. To assist in their efforts to both banish dirt and build communism, the Soviet state had, at its disposal, the social hygienists of the People's Commissariat of Health and their grassroots community volunteers. These activists sat at the apex of an institutional infrastructure of dispensaries, sanatoriums, and consultation points through which the Soviet system sought to instill in its subjects the civilizing practices of rational, orderly, and sanitary living. Based on Western and prerevolutionary precedents, these institutions used on-site care, intrusive home inspections, and extensive propaganda efforts (ranging from educational pamphlets and posters to movies and mock trials) to saturate society with the message of Soviet hygiene. Soviet attempts to create a clean-living society also involved efforts to instill ideologically appropriate leisure practices and to avoid the contamination of a NEP-era cityscape lurking with petty capitalist [End Page 548] entrepreneurs, prostitutes, and corrupting Western influences and entertainments. In special institutions like spas and houses of leisure, Soviet citizens could rest and relax in an acceptable environment centered not on chain smoking, problem drinking, and sexual promiscuity but on self-improvement, physical culture, and the construction of clean and incorruptible communist minds and bodies. Attempts to instill appropriate health and hygiene regimes also led to the recruitment and activation of grassroots volunteers to invade and inspect homes for possible sources of pollution. To aid these policies, Soviet hygienists targeted the overworked wives and mothers who, as the agents of stifling tradition and the masters of the domestic sphere, served paradoxically as both the cause of household dirt and disorder and as the only source for a potential solution to these pervasive problems. As source and solution to the unclean domestic order, Soviet women had to be educated, guided, and assisted by the hygiene establishment and its activist base. As the womb of the proletariat, Soviet womanhood also had to be subjected to the state's pronatalist policies and propaganda devoted to the healthful and ideologically wholesome rearing of children. While spending much of the text's space analyzing the verbal and visual discourse of the social hygienists' clean-living campaigns, Starks does not lose sight of the many difficulties these enterprises faced. Most urgently, these...