Historian Publishes New Book on Tobacco in Imperial Russia

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Tricia Starks

A new book that approaches tobacco from the perspective of users, producers and objectors reveals an unparalleled view of Russia's early adoption of smoking.

Smoking under the Tsars:  A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia, published by Cornell University Press, introduces readers to the addictive, nicotine-soaked Russian version of the cigarette ― the papirosa ― and the sensory, medical, social, cultural and gendered consequences of this unique style of tobacco use. 

Associate professor Tricia Starks, the book's author, completed the volume while on a $140,000 National Institutes of Health and National Library of Medicine Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health research grant. 

The heavily illustrated Smoking under the Tsars taps into bountiful material in newspapers, industry publications, etiquette manuals, propaganda posters, popular literature, memoirs, cartoons, poetry and advertising. Starks starts with the papirosa's introduction in the nineteenth century and its foundation as a cultural and imperial construct. 

She situates the cigarette's emergence as a mass-use product of revolutionary potential. She discusses the papirosa as a moral and medical problem, tracks the ways in which it was marketed as a liberating object, and concludes that it has become a point of increasing conflict for users, reformers and purveyors.

The result is an ambitious social and cultural exploration of the interaction of institutions, ideas, practice, policy, consumption, identity and the body. Starks has reconstructed how Russian smokers experienced, understood and presented their habit in all its biological, psychological, social and sensory inflections, providing the reader with incredible images and a unique application of anthropology and sensory analysis to the experience of tobacco dependency.

Starks is an associate professor in the Department of History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. She is the author of The Body Soviet:  Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (University of Wisconsin Press) and the editor of Russian History through the Senses (Bloomsbury) and Tobacco in Russian History and Culture (Routledge).