Cigarettes and Soviets
Smoking in the USSR
- Auteur: Tricia Starks (Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: Sovjetgeschiedenis
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: Cornell University Press
- Verschijnt 15 december 2025
- Omvang: 324 pagina’s
- Uitgave: paperback / ebook
- Prijs: $ 32.95
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Tricia Starks Cigarettes and Soviets review en recensie
- “Cigarettes and Soviets makes important contributions to recent work on the global history of tobacco use, along with adding to our understanding of socialist consumption and everyday life. Most delightfully, Starks’s book demonstrates a keen understanding of Soviet visual culture in all its unex- pected and paradoxical dimensions, and her beautiful prose evokes the sights and smells of ordinary places in the USSR.” (Russian Review)
- “Tricia Starks tells the story of tobacco and smoking during the Soviet period. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that she tells part of the history of the Soviet Union through the prism of smoking.” (Moscow Times)
Flaptekst boek van Tricia Starks over roken in de Sovjet-Unie
Enriched by color reproductions of tobacco advertisements, packs, and antismoking propaganda, Cigarettes and Soviets provides a comprehensive study of the Soviet tobacco habit. Tricia Starks examines how the Soviets maintained the first mass smoking society in the world while simultaneously fighting it. The book is at once a study of Soviet tobacco deeply enmeshed in its social, political, and cultural context and an exploration of the global experience of the tobacco epidemic.
Starks examines the Soviet antipathy to tobacco yet capitulation to market; the development of innovative cessation techniques and clinics and the late entry into global antitobacco work; the seeming lack of cultural stimuli alongside massive use; and the expansion of smoking without the conventional prompts of capitalist markets. She tells the story of Philip Morris’s “Mission to Moscow” campaign for the Soviet market, the triumph of the quintessential capitalist product—the cigarette—in a communist system, and the successes and failures of the world’s first national antismoking campaign. The interplay of male habits and health against largely female tobacco producers and medical professionals adds a gendered dimension.
Smoking developed, continued, and grew in the Soviet Union without mass production, intensive advertising, seductive industrial design, or product ubiquity. The Soviets were early to condemn tobacco, and yet, by the end of the twentieth century Russians smoked more heavily than most most other nations in the world. Cigarettes and Soviets challenges interpretations of how tobacco use rose in the past and what leads to mass use today.
Tricia Starks is Director of the Humanities Center and Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. She is also the author of Smoking under the Tsars.