Bed, Banya and Beyond: Creating the Communal Economy in 1920S Moscow

Bed, Banya and Beyond: Creating the Communal Economy in 1920s Moscow

A thesis presented

Olga Kuzmina

The Standing Committee on Regional Studies—Russia, Eastern Europe, and

Central Asia

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Master of Arts

in Regional Studies—Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

April 2019

Thesis Advisor: Professor Terry Martin Olga Kuzmina

Bed, Banya and Beyond: Constructing the Communal Economy in 1920s Moscow

Abstract

The present thesis is an archive-based study of the formation of the Soviet communal economy in the sphere of public hygiene at the onset of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Using the public bathhouse in early 1920s Moscow as its focal point, this study explores the political, social and economic components of Soviet public hygiene policy as they related to the broader agenda of the socialist state during the period of NEP (1921-1928). The author adopts a social- history approach to examine these issues “from below” through the eyes of municipal officials, state inspectors, journalists and regular citizens who engaged with the communal economy on the ground. The study finds that, contrary to one popular interpretation of NEP as a retreat from socialist principles, the Bolshevik leadership pursued an aggressive socialist agenda in the sphere of public hygiene throughout the 1920s. This was accompanied by significant public support and demand for the implementation of socialist practices in everyday life. However, the decentralization of economic and political control during NEP prevented the Bolshevik leadership from fully implementing the socialist agenda, resulting in an untenable situation that paved the way for Stalinism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One: The Politics of the Banya…………………………………………………………21

Chapter Two: The Banya in the Social Transition of Early NEP………………………………..48

Chapter Three: The NEP Challenge to the Communal Economy……………………………….73

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….92

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..97

iii

INTRODUCTION

‘A Unique Civilization:’ Moscow under NEP

Long before he became known as a major literary figure, the writer Mikhail Bulgakov arrived penniless in Moscow in 1921, at a time of rapid transformation. In the spring of that year, the Communist Party had announced the start of the New Economic Policy (NEP), an experiment with limited capitalism that replaced the policy of total mobilization that had crippled the Soviet economy during the Civil War (1918-1921). The NEP period saw the revival of small- scale private trade, the electrification and rapid modernization of cities, and the rise of the so- called “Nepmen”— a class of small businessmen and entrepreneurs who were viewed with suspicion by the Bolshevik party. Only several years after the revolution that had taken place in the name of the global proletariat, Moscow appeared well on its way to becoming a consumerist society, in a path that painfully diverged from the one that had been envisioned by the leaders of the new Soviet state.

In the urban NEP environment, remnants of Russia's traditional peasant past mingled with the illuminated storefronts and speeding trams of the modernizing present. Demobilized soldiers and orphans flooded in from the countryside, dressed in rags and scrounging for food, rubbing elbows with the Moscow nouveau riche who had sprung up seemingly overnight.

Against the general backdrop of extreme poverty there now appeared flashes of individual success, as ambitious and enterprising individuals sought opportunities that had been unattainable during the tsarist regime. The 30-year-old Bulgakov, despite harboring personal mistrust of the Bolsheviks, embraced a cautious optimism toward the NEP experiment.

He began to write humorous feuilletons for journals and newspapers that captured the nervous energy of the city as its people rushed to cast off their old ways in a rapidly changing system.

These writings also reflected the author’s own view of Moscow as the center of Russian, and

Soviet, cultural transformation. As he concluded in one sketch from the period, “Moscow is a unique civilization, an immense city, and it is the only place to live.”1

Although one could imagine other places to live during this time, Moscow was undoubtedly among the most exciting urban centers of the 1920s. It was here that the world’s first socialist state, proclaimed atop the rubble of a 500-year-old empire, set about creating the world’s first socialist capital city. Following years of devastation during the Civil War, which saw Moscow’s population plummet nearly by half due to hunger and out-migration, the city had now begun a process of massive re-urbanization.2 The former stronghold of Muscovite autocracy was to become the center of a future socialist utopia.

A key component of this effort was the creation of the so-called “communal economy,” a catch-all term that envisioned the transformation of various aspects of urban life — from housing, to eating, to public transportation — into communal activities under the sole regulation of the state. Within this project, the public bathhouse, or banya, became a site of key political importance. It was in the battle for hygiene and cleanliness that the Bolsheviks came to see the

“second front” of the Civil War, which by this point was coming to a close on the battlefield. The bathhouse was to become the setting for the transformation of the unwashed peasants who were streaming into Moscow into a healthy and socialized working class. But the impoverishment of the city in the wake of the war, as well as the chaotic implementation of Soviet leadership and

1 Mikhail Bulgakov, “Benefit Performance for Lord Curzon” in Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories, trans. Alison Rice (Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1991), p. 181. 2 The Moscow population fell by approximately 900,000 residents between February 1917 and August 1920, a loss of nearly 50 percent in a city that numbered two million on the eve of the Revolution. See Diane Koenker, “Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War,” The Journal of Modern History Vol. 57, No. 3 (September 1985), p. 436. 2 state seizure of municipal assets, turned this effort into an oftentimes comedic affair that strained the social tensions carried over from before the revolution and revealed the many pitfalls of socialist central planning.

The present paper will delve into the Soviet state effort to create the communal economy in Moscow within the sphere of public hygiene, which centered on bathhouses and to a lesser degree on the barbershops and laundromats that were grouped into the same functional category as the banya. Focusing on the years 1920-23, when the project was first taking off, the paper will adopt a micro-history approach to examine how the communal economy was implemented on the ground in individual neighborhoods of the city. The heroes of this untold saga are the low- level municipal officials, bathhouse administrators and employees, state inspectors for health and hygiene, and regular citizens, who found themselves engaged in one part of a massive project to construct a socialist society amid the constraints and deprivations of NEP.

This study will look at the ways in which Russian society reacted to, engaged with, and resisted the policies of the Soviet government during the more fluid decade that preceded the onset of Stalinism. The goal is to explore the extent to which average citizens devoted themselves to the socialist project at a time when enthusiasm was still more or less voluntary, to understand how they took part in it in practice, and to question whether the difficulties they experienced during the chaos of NEP may have primed them to accept the radical centralization of public and private life that accompanied the consolidation of power under Stalin. The banya, a central but understudied stage for the main dramas of this period, serves as a lens onto the broader effort by the Bolsheviks to bring socialism into existence in everyday life. At the same

3 time, it reveals the underlying problems of governance and economic planning that arguably made NEP an appealing but untenable model for further Soviet development. 3

Revisiting Approaches to NEP

For much of the twentieth century, historians of the Soviet Union treated the years 1921-

1928 as a comparatively benign prelude to the more terrifying, and therefore more interesting, events of the 1930s. Scholarship on NEP focused largely on the high-level power struggles within the Communist Party following the death of Vladimir Lenin, an approach that contributed to a conceptualization of the 1920s as a “transitional” phase between the revolutionary fervor of

Leninism and the consolidation of totalitarian rule under Stalin.4 The main question posed to this period was how the Communist train, set in motion by the events of 1917, ended up at the station of Stalinism — and whether such an outcome had been inevitable.5 Some scholars responded to the latter question with an emphatic “no,” arguing that NEP had been a viable alternative of

3 It should be noted that the present study uses the 1920s bathhouse as a means to examine the broader environment of NEP, rather than focusing on the bathhouse itself or its role in Russian culture. For a study of the roots of the banya as a Russian folk institution, see W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). The bathhouse as a component of Russia’s cultural image is explored in A. G. Cross, "The Russian Banya in the Description of Foreign Travelers and in the Depictions of Foreign and Russian Artists," Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series 24 (1991), pp. 34–59. For the Soviet period, the changing architecture of the 1930s bathhouse as a reflection of the Soviet mechanized state is explored in Tijana Vujosevic, “The Soviet Banya and the Mass Production of Hygiene,” Architectural Histories 1, No. 1 (2013). DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.az. Gender has likewise served as a lens for exploring the bathhouse as a setting for rituals of Soviet masculinity during the post-war period and, alternatively, as a distinctly female space. See Ethan Pollock, "Real Men Go to the Bania: Postwar Soviet Masculinities and the Bathhouse,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11, No. 1 (2010), pp. 47-76. On women in the Soviet bath house, see Nancy Condee, "The Second Fantasy Mother, or All Baths Are Women's Baths," and Nadya Peterson, "Dirty Women: Cultural Connotations of Cleanliness in Soviet Russia" in Russia—Women—Culture, eds. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 3-30 and 177-205. 4 The evolution of scholarly views on NEP is discussed in William G. Rosenberg’s introduction to Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 5 Moshe Lewin offers this metaphor in his seminal exploration of NEP-as-transition, which argues that Stalinism was dictated by the need to industrialize a society with a deep-seated patrimonial and peasant heritage. See Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). 4 socialist development, and one that was in fact more consistent with original Bolshevik thought, before it was brutally suppressed during Stalin’s political takeover.6 But to the extent that the

1920s were viewed as a phenomenon in its own right, the period became romanticized as a brief window of freedom, during which the relaxation of state controls allowed for a blossoming of economic and cultural experimentation that ushered in the Soviet variant of the Roaring

Twenties.

The revisionist turn in Soviet history that began with the opening of the archives in the

1970s and 1980s sparked a new interest in NEP society and culture as a potential piece to the

Stalinist puzzle. Rather than focusing on the deliberations of the Bolshevik leadership, scholars began to examine the socio-economic dynamics produced by the conditions of NEP, and to question the extent to which the resulting threats to socialist construction necessitated the authoritarian turn in Soviet policy. An important milestone in this academic shift came with the fifth meeting of the Seminar in Twentieth-Century Russian and Soviet Social History, held at

Indiana University-Bloomington in 1986. The product of this conference was a volume of new scholarship on NEP, centered on the notion that the “crucial questions historians still have to ask of this period have less to do with struggles for power than with the complex and consequential interactions between social and cultural components of resistance and change."7 A useful idea put forward in the volume was that apart from marking a transitional phase from a pre-

6 A leading proponent of this view is Stephen Cohen, who argues that NEP policies were supported by the mainstream of Bolshevik leadership, including by Stalin himself, until the latter’s political battle with Nikolai Bukharin, the main defender of NEP, prompted a sudden change of course. See, for example, Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 75-76. By contrast, Sheila Fitzpatrick and others emphasize that Lenin had been strongly opposed to the legalization of trade, and much of the Communist leadership saw NEP as a forced retreat amid desperate economic circumstances. See Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 95-96. Both camps, however, base their arguments on the extent of high-level political support for NEP rather than on the sustainability of NEP conditions as they existed on the ground. 7 Rosenberg, “NEP Russia as a ‘Transitional’ Society” in Fitzpatrick et al., p. 4. 5 revolutionary to a modern, industrialized society, NEP was also a system with its own tensions and contradictions, including ones which required significant mediation by the state.8

In subsequent years a number of scholars have adopted a social-history approach to examine various aspects of life under NEP, including the shifting class relations, the rural experience, and changes in family and gender dynamics during this time.9 Not surprisingly, early

Soviet trade practices and the rise of consumer culture have figured as a prominent area of interest. Notable here is Julie Hessler’s study of socialist consumerism between the revolution and the death of Stalin, which credits NEP with laying the “foundation for the future development of the socialist economy by combining a massive state presence with market mechanisms and institutions.”10 Hessler argues that throughout the period in question, Soviet policy makers pursued consistent Marxist objectives in terms of supply, pricing and wages, and labor relations, but had to temper these goals during times of economic crisis, when the priority of their own political survival came to the fore. In this context, the allowance of private trade and other state relaxations over the economy that occurred during NEP were not a reneging of socialist principles, but were temporary measures to weather the crisis situation that unfolded in the wake of revolution and civil war.11 Elsewhere, Alan Ball explores the role of private trade in

NEP society and traces the unpredictable policy shifts in legislation towards Nepmen that resulted from disagreements within the Bolshevik party about the level of threat presented by the

8 Ibid, “Conclusion: Understanding NEP Society and Culture in the Light of New Research,” p. 318. 9 A good sample of introductory essays to these topics appear already in Fitzpatrick et al., Russia in the Era of NEP. See, in particular, Diane P. Koenker, “Class and Consciousness in a Socialist Society;” Helmut Altrichter, “Insoluble Conflicts: Village Life Between Revolution and Collectivization;” and R. E. Johnson, “Family Life in Moscow During NEP.” 10 Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 7. 11 In a similar vein, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony argues that Stalin’s decision to pursue collectivization was largely prompted by the collapse of the international market for Soviet grain exports during the late 1920s, which required squeezing agricultural output in order to fund the industrialization drive at home. See Sanchez-Sibony, “Depression Stalinism: The Great Break Reconsidered,” Kritika 15, No. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 23-49. 6

“new bourgeoisie.”12 Ball shows how the success of the Nepmen — who at their height in the mid-1920s accounted for the majority of retail sales in urban centers and handled close to 50 percent of the procurement of all agricultural commodities13 — was ultimately deemed an obstruction to the development of the “socialist” economy, prompting the Bolsheviks to crack down on private trade as part of the general curtailment of NEP in 1928.

The notion that NEP prosperity depended mainly upon individual peasant production and private trade is carried further by Elena Osokina, who argues that the suppression of both activities during Stalin’s “Great Break” resulted in the system of shortage and state rationing that persisted, in fluctuating form, for the remainder of the Soviet period.14 Yet Osokina warns that

NEP should not be regarded as a golden age. While the legalization of market forces allowed the country to recover from the economic destruction of war and revolution, the standard of living for the average citizen remained woefully low. Rather than a time of abundance, NEP was closer to an oasis of relative prosperity wedged between the commodity deserts of War Communism and the Stalinist thirties. At the same time, the creation of a state food industry, state trade agencies and state stores during NEP underscores the fact that the Bolsheviks remained committed to constructing the socialist economy throughout the 1920s, even as they were forced to contend with the unwelcome competition presented by private trade.

A final important contribution to the placement of NEP in Soviet development comes from the Russian scholar Nataliia Lebina, who argues that the 1920s were a period of

12 See, in particular, Alan Ball, “NEP’s Second Wind: ‘The New Trade Practice,” Soviet Studies 37, No. 3 (July 1985), pp. 371-385; and “Private Trade and Traders During NEP” in Fitzpatrick et al., pp. 89-105. These studies later appear in book-length form in Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 13 Ibid., “Private Trade and Traders During NEP,” pp. 94-96. 14 Elena Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927-1941 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001). For a parallel study of shortage and survival, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Fitzpatrick argues that shortage became the defining characteristic of Soviet life from the 1930s onwards. 7 normalization in everyday life — in the form of a partial reversion to traditional norms — but constituted an anomaly within the broader Soviet context.15 Following the austerity of War

Communism, Lebina writes, a semblance of pre-revolutionary social and economic relations returned to urban life during the relative laxity of NEP. But with the “great break” of 1929, which saw the Bolsheviks return to policies of class-based distribution and double down on efforts to fully communize Soviet society, the old norms of behavior were permanently rejected and replaced with “pathological norms,” which stemmed from the unique realities of daily life in post-revolutionary Russia. The conditions of shortage, surveillance and communal living space, to name a few — all situations that would be considered anomalous in a traditional society — became structural elements of Soviet reality that gave rise to coping behaviors, such as denunciations or the practice of blat, which carried a pathological character but which would become the new norm in Soviet Russia.

What comes through in the scholarship is a general acknowledgement of NEP as a transitional period that nevertheless laid the foundations for enduring features of the Soviet system. These include the combination of state regulation and market forces that would later plague the Soviet economy, the drive for socialist development as a perpetual state policy, and the emergence of daily survival techniques among citizens living under an overstretched and unresponsive government. But the focus of existing scholarship remains largely centered on state policies as the main factors shaping NEP society and culture, and leave other components of

NEP as a system — if we are (and we should) to regard it as such — open to further exploration.

NEP was not only a stretch of track through which the train of Soviet history rattled on its way toward Stalinism, but a potential destination in its own right, a period that produced specific

15 Nataliia Lebina, Sovetskaia povsednevnost’: normy i anomalii: ot voennogo kommunizma k bol’shomu stiliu (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2016). 8 social, political and cultural conditions which shaped the subsequent development of Soviet rule.

A closer study of the ground-level social, economic and political dynamics that emerged during this period can shed light on the specific tensions of transition that compelled the state to make increasingly forceful interventions into public and private life. At the same time, a focus on the bottom-up formation of NEP society provides a new angle onto the longstanding debate of whether the period from 1921-1928 constituted a retreat from or a continuation of the revolutionary impulse. While much attention has been paid to the concessions made by the

Bolsheviks in the process of softening their economic agenda — concessions which have traditionally bolstered the argument that NEP was a retreat or even an abandonment of the revolutionary cause—, fewer scholars have examined the extent to which Soviet society beneath the party level worked to implement socialist ideals in practice amid, and despite of, the setbacks to the project presented by NEP.

The inculcation of socialist practices in the daily lives of Soviet citizens is the subject of a small but vibrant body of literature that examines byt, or everyday life, in the Soviet Union. The term holds a different meaning from that of “private life” in the West, since the notion of a private realm that is wholly separate from the public sphere has traditionally been alien to

Russian culture. As Svetlana Boym notes in her seminal study on the subject, “the major cultural opposition in Russia is not between private and public but rather between material and spiritual, between byt [every day existence] and bytie [spiritual being].”16 In this formulation, an individual’s private life is not viewed as his or her personal business, but as a space for the projection of the public sphere and its grand civilizational projects into the more mundane domains of home and family life. Throughout Russian history, notes Boym, such disparate actors

16 Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 83. 9 as “nineteenth century Westernizers and Slavophiles, Romantics and modernists, aesthetic and political utopians, and Bolsheviks and monarchists all engaged in battles with byt” in an effort to infuse the quotidian practices of daily life with a deeper social and political significance.17 This trend hit its peak under the Bolsheviks, whose civilizing mission — carried forth to the public by an exceptionally invasive state apparatus — reached as far as the musty corners of the bathhouse as the regime worked to mobilize all aspects of public and private life in service of the socialist cause. In the process, the Soviet leadership sought to transform the inherently static and repetitive practices of everyday life into a revolutionary force.

In the early 1920s, Leon Trotsky led the discussion on how to reshape Soviet man through everyday practice with a series of speeches and articles, later published in collected form as Problems of Everyday Life [Voprosy Byta], which applied the Marxist conception of materiality as the foundation of culture to the problem of creating the new socialist society.18 As the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and the founding commander of the Red

Army, Trotsky argued for the educational and hygienic campaigns that had been carried out among the revolutionary soldiers to be implemented en masse among the Soviet public, and with a similar military rigor. At the same time, the economic reconstruction that had become possible under NEP should be directed at creating the physical environment that could produce a thriving working class. In this way, Trotsky wrote, “the revolution is, so to speak, ‘broken up’ into partial tasks: it is necessary to repair bridges, learn to read and write, reduce the cost of production of shoes in Soviet factories, combat filth, catch swindlers, extend power cables into the countryside,

17 Ibid., p. 31. 18 Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), accessed December 2018 at https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/leon-trotskii-problems-of-everyday-life-creating-the-foundations-for- a-new-society-in-revolutionary-russia.pdf. 10 and so on.”19 In the grand task of building socialism, no aspect of daily life was too small to ignore; between agitating for greater literacy, political engagement and communality, Trotsky railed against such actions as spitting on the stairwell or leaving cigarette butts on the ground as potential seedlings of counter-revolutionary behavior.20 As we will see in Chapter One of this paper, the daily (or more accurately, the monthly) bathing practices of the Soviet proletariat became viewed by the Bolshevik leadership in equally militaristic terms.

The state’s effort to bring ideology into everyday practice had the effect of transforming private life into a sort of “homework” for the average citizen, a striving towards a way of socialist living and thinking on the most perfunctory level that required constant self-awareness and monitoring of one’s daily behavior. This idea of “taking the Revolution inside” forms the basis of the collected essays in a 2006 volume, edited by Christina Kiaier and Eric Naiman, which provides the first in-depth study of private life in the early Soviet Union and its role in shaping the modern Soviet subject.21 Building on the Foucauldian conception of the modern individual as a product, rather than a victim, of power, the authors of this volume continue in the revisionist vein to explore how individuals in the pre-Stalin period emerged as modern subjects through the process of acting out socialist imperatives in the domains of the home, the family and the self. The present study draws on multiple ideas from these essays to conceptualize the

NEP-era bathhouse as a transitional space between the public and private spheres, where individual efforts to transform into a model Soviet citizen met with the state’s project to “not only modernize and improve the material conditions of everyday life but to give it transcendent

19 Ibid., 16. 20 See, in particular, the article “Attention to Trifles!” originally published in Pravda on October 1, 1921, from the collected volume. 21 Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 11 communal or public value.”22 The volume’s focus on individual engagement with the socialist project is particularly relevant to the early 1920s, a period during which relative state laxity lent a greater significance to personal agency as a factor in individual transformation. This ended when the state launched its large-scale and invasive novyi byt campaign to overhaul daily life as part of a cultural corollary to the first Five-Year Plan.

The ‘Communal Economy’ as a Popular Socialist Offensive

In the face of debates about NEP as a potential retreat from the revolutionary cause, a look at what was happening on the ground in Moscow during the first years of Soviet rule strongly suggests that from the very beginning of the 1920s, a concerted effort was underway to start building a socialist society from the bottom up. This is best seen in the early drive to create the communal, or municipal, economy (kommunal’noe khoziaistvo), described by Timothy

Colton as “a major yet overlooked corollary of NEP.”23 The project stemmed from the Bolshevik realization that in order to create the conditions for a thriving working class, the new Soviet capital would have to be restored to a functional state and its infrastructure streamlined to the needs of the burgeoning socialist order. Such an effort required a complete overhaul of

Moscow’s atrophied municipal services and their placement under the centralized control of the state.

During the chaos of war and revolution, city services in Moscow had essentially ceased to function. Dilapidated roads hindered the spread of public transportation, the absence of trash

22 Kiaier and Naiman, p. 10. 23 Timothy Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 158. With this monograph, Colton became perhaps the main Western scholar to devote significant attention to the rise of the communal economy in Moscow during the 1920s. However, his work focuses almost exclusively on housing policy and redistribution — the major and most socially disruptive component of the communal economy, but by no means the only one. 12 collection bred waste and diseases, and the housing stock fell into severe disrepair due to a lack of maintenance and oversight. All of these problems and many others were taken up by the socialist municipal government of Moscow, the Mossovet, whose newly-created directorate of the communal economy (Moskovskoe Kommunal’noe Khoziaistvo, or MKKh) assumed responsibility for the reanimation of practically every aspect of urban life. This mammoth machine with sub-departments in Moscow’s seven district soviets (raisovet) set about sweeping away what it deemed as remnants of the old regime to make way for the creation of a new socialist metropolis.

While the initiative to create the communal economy originated from the state, it quickly grew into a city-wide project that not only engaged the efforts of civil servants at all levels of the city administration, but also drew the active participation of pre-revolutionary experts, small business owners and entrepreneurs, and regular citizens, who joined the effort as municipal workers, volunteers, and critical consumers of city services. What’s more, the revival of municipal life was to a large extent made possible by the efforts of Moscow’s pre-1917 tram and railway workers, firefighters, and sanitary employees, who continued to work and kept the city going as best they could with practically no state assistance during the years of revolution and civil war. These individuals, many of whom would go on to join the Union of Communal

Economy Workers at the beginning of NEP, felt deeply invested in the revitalization of Moscow and imbued the communal economy project with a strong grassroots spirit. The large-scale involvement of Moscow residents across various social and professional groups rendered the campaign to create the communal economy a kind of popular socialist offensive, one that predated by nearly a decade the more well-known “socialist offensive” that came with the top-

13 down imposition of collectivization and the industrialization drive during Stalin’s first Five-Year

Plan.

The Banya: a Peephole into NEP

Alongside the need to address Moscow’s sanitation and housing crises, the development of a culture of hygiene emerged as a leading concern for the new city government. During the

Civil War, the Red Army had already begun to implement emergency hygiene practices as a way to battle the rampant diseases that were annihilating soldiers on all sides almost as effectively as the warfare itself. As the military campaigns of the Civil War wound down, the Bolsheviks increasingly turned their attention to the “domestic front,” where hunger and epidemics threatened the survival of the nascent urban working class in whose name the Revolution had taken place.

But in the new Soviet capital, the leadership came across a problem: instead of a modern proletariat, the vanguard of the working class found itself face-to-face with a mass of unwashed peasants.24 The main social problems of the time, including disease, alcoholism, prostitution and high infant mortality, were seen as the destructive holdovers of the tsarist regime that had to be eradicated in order to make way for the creation of the new “socialist man.” Hygiene policy became one of the main tools which the state employed to this end, and the city’s network of public bathhouses — which came under the oversight of the communal economy department during the early 1920s — became a primary setting in which this policy would be carried out.

24 Here I mean to emphasize the relative absence of an urban working class at the onset of Bolshevik rule. The mass migration of peasants into Moscow and to other urban centers began in earnest in 1928 with the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, forcing urban officials to contend with peasant practices in a way that shaped the subsequent formation of the Soviet system. See David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 14

I argue that the bathhouse serves as a valuable lens through which to observe the broader political, social and economic dynamics that emerged in the urban environment of NEP, for three reasons. First, the banya was the stage for the enforcement of a key Bolshevik policy, and therefore a prominent contact point between the state and the individual. As such, it allows us to observe the ways in which the public engaged with the directives of the socialist state within this sphere of the communal economy, and gauge the extent to which public acceptance, ignorance or defiance of the socialist project at its inception may have influenced the subsequent policies which the state adopted in response. Second, the interactions among city officials, bathhouse personnel and average citizens around the understandably sensitive subject matter of hygiene have left a minor treasure trove of anecdotal evidence that reflects the emerging social tensions of this period. Already in 1921, individuals can be observed framing their complaints, requests, and regular correspondences in the language of class warfare, suggesting that public adoption of the socialist vocabulary began in earnest well before the onset of Stalinism. Third, the documented difficulties of establishing state-run bathhouses amid the supply shortages and competitive environment of NEP serve as an early indicator of the shortcomings of central planning that would plague the broader Soviet economy for the duration of its existence. The uneasy coexistence of state-run and private enterprises, and the detriments to economic efficiency and social welfare that occurred as a result, also serve as a compelling prefiguration to the problems of the perestroika period.25

25 In an interesting comparison, Alan Ball draws a tentative parallel between NEP and perestroika in his contribution to Fitzpatrick et al. (1991). Writing from the perspective of 1986, he suggests that both elite and popular support for tighter constraints of the private sector could result in a crackdown of perestroika reminiscent of the curtailment of NEP. Echoing this sentiment more than two decades later, Stephen Cohen contended that perestroika, like NEP, was a socialist road not taken and compared the arrest of Gorbachev’s reforms in 1991 to Stalin’s abolition of NEP in 1929. See Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 151. 15

Outline and Methodology

The present study is based on documents pertaining to the work of bathhouses in the

Moscow communal economy during the period between 1920-1923, held primarily at the Central

Archive of the City of Moscow (TsAGM). In an effort to get as close as possible to the implementation of the communal economy on the ground, the study focuses on the lowest level of Moscow’s municipal government, the district raisovet, which were responsible for the provision of city services within their respective jurisdictions. Each of Moscow’s original seven raisovety was essentially a Mossovet in miniature, consisting of a central executive body and breaking down into various sub-departments [podotdely] that oversaw such areas as housing, transportation, hygiene and health. True to the general administrative incoherence of the early

NEP, the bathhouses, laundromats and barbershops that formed the holy trinity of the so-called public hygiene enterprises often fell under the purview of different sub-departments in different districts of the city. Thus, for example, in one district the banyas were overseen by the sanitation sub-department, in another they fell under the economic sub-department, and yet another district had its bathhouses, laundromats and barbershops grouped under a separate Sub-Department of

Small Municipal Enterprises. A significant part of the research process turned into a paper chase to track down the relevant sub-department overseeing the bathhouses in a particular district, sometimes to no avail.

In engaging with the archival documents, I take the approach of social historian Sheila

Fitzpatrick to observe the unfolding of history “from below.” Without losing sight of important state directives and developments, the present study grounds its primary analysis in the experience of minor city officials, municipal employees and regular visitors to the bathhouse as

16 they struggled to pursue their individual objectives in the uncertain environment of NEP. These experiences are captured in the administrative correspondence of bathhouse directors and their superiors in the district and Moscow soviets; performance reports of public hygiene enterprises; complaints from workers; and appeals made to the district soviets by private citizens. A particularly rich source of material comes in the form of reports by the state-appointed inspection units, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate [Raboche-Krest’ianskaia Inspektsiia, Rabkrin or

RKI], whose members — oftentimes, semi-literate former peasants who had only recently arrived in the city — conducted surprise inspections of bathhouses, factories and various other municipal enterprises to ensure that conditions were up to proletarian standards. Not infrequently, these inspections resulted in bristling reports couched in tones of barely concealed class animosity that reflected the social tensions that were emerging in the new caste system of NEP. A final source for this study comes from reports in newspapers and periodicals of the early 1920s, dealing in particular with the successes and setbacks of the communal economy and the critiques of the bathhouse found in the satirical press. The present thesis will proceed in the following three parts:

Chapter One: The Politics of the Banya

This study will begin with a discussion of the central role of the bathhouse in Moscow’s transformation to a socialist city, as a site that performed a critical political function in the eyes of the state. Focusing on the bathhouse as the locus of the battle for cleanliness on the “domestic front,” Chapter One will explore the Bolsheviks’ militarization of public hygiene during the epidemics of the revolutionary period and analyze their efforts to mobilize the population

17 through hygiene campaigns that sought to inculcate socialist practices into everyday life.26 It will go on to discuss the difficulties of implementing state provision of public hygiene services across the Moscow districts, and argue that this process would likely not have succeeded without the active engagement of society that was observed on the ground. The construction of the communal economy with the bathhouse at its center emerges as an early communal project that revealed a significant level of support for the socialist agenda among the Moscow population.

Chapter 2: The Banya in the Social Transition of Early NEP

The second chapter will draw upon administrative correspondence within the communal economy, inspection reports from the RKI, appeals from private citizens and the press to explore the formation of socialist urban consciousness during NEP. In their discussions of the bathhouse, individuals reflected an awareness of the shifting social relations that resulted from the emergence of a new class system under Bolshevik rule. In the revolutionary social schema, workers became the new privileged class while anyone who was viewed as impeding their interests and welfare — including workers’ access to hygiene services — became suspected as saboteurs of the socialist cause. In the pursuit of their interests, workers wrote appeals to their district soviets asking for bathhouse passes based on their privileged class status; regular citizens agitated for extended working hours for the bathhouse as a sign of solidarity with the working class; and proletarian inspectors were prone to portray the failure of bathhouse administrators to establish acceptable conditions in their enterprises — a common problem in the material-

26 For a discussion of the broader importance of hygiene to the Bolshevik state, see Tricia Starks, The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene and the Revolutionary State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Starks provides a detailed look at the state’s harnessing of hygiene to promote a model society, and illuminates the semiotics of cleanliness and dirt in the socialist context. Her focus, however, is on the state rhetoric embedded in hygiene propaganda; she mentions the bathhouse only in passing and does not discuss the Moscow communal economy, focusing instead on the work of the Peoples’ Commissariat of Public Health (Narkomzdrav). 18 strapped environment of NEP — as a lack of commitment to the socialist cause. The analysis in this section is informed by Marjorie Hilton’s study of the 1920s retail sphere as an area of social contestation, in which retail workers and consumers, reared on an imperial legacy of adversarial relations, worked to define the behaviors and practices they believed consistent with that of a socialist society.27 By observing the speech and social interactions of Muscovites in the context of the communal economy, this chapter broadly finds that Bolshevik notions of class, privilege and responsibility had begun to permeate society to a considerable degree nearly a decade before the onset of Stalinism.

Chapter Three: The NEP Challenge to the Communal Economy

The final chapter will discuss the economic inefficiencies that hampered the development of the communal economy at the beginning of the 1920s, and the wider implications of these problems for the sustainability of NEP as an economic system. As the Bolsheviks rushed to restore the functioning of Moscow from the ruins of revolution, they quickly realized that the state lacked the resources to take full responsibility for the municipal services which they had promised to the working class. Within the public hygiene sphere, this resulted in a grudging decision to lease less critical enterprises to private owners, while bathhouses, as the most important facilities to hygiene policy, were retained under state control. The resulting inability of the banyas to provide adequate services to the population on state-rationed resources — or to meet the exorbitant social responsibilities placed on them by the state — prefigured the difficulties that would plague many state-run companies with social obligations in the socialist

27 See Marjorie Hilton, “The Customer is Always Wrong: Consumer Complaint in Late-NEP Russia,” The Russian Review 68 (January 2009): 1-25. 19 command economy. Meanwhile, the intense economic competition and the yawning gap in efficiency that arose from the coexistence of private and state-run enterprises within the same sector produced public discontent and calls for an expansion of the state-led economic sphere.

This phenomenon suggests that the centralizing policies that replaced NEP by the close of the decade had not only been a political decision taken at the highest levels of leadership, but to a large extent a response to public dissatisfaction with the economic hardships brought on by conditions of NEP.

What emerges from this study of a single facet of Soviet urban life in the early 1920s is a better understanding of NEP as a system that produced its own unique political culture, characterized by the persistence of military methods in peacetime urban rule; its own dynamic social system, marked by the transition from pre-revolutionary to socialist norms; and a highly problematic economy in which socialist enterprises were forced to deliver the goods that were promised to the working class without being allowed to adapt to the market logic of NEP. Across each of these spheres, conditions were shaped by a fundamental tension between the state and society’s desire to implement a socialist agenda and the lack of resources and capacity on the part of the young Soviet state to bring that about. While studies of NEP from the perspective of the Bolshevik leadership may suggest that it had been a viable alternative to Stalinism, a close look at the chaos on the ground reveals that, at least in the sphere of urban socialist construction, the NEP was a dead end that could not make socialism work.

CHAPTER ONE The Politics of the Banya

Following the large-scale urban flight that had drained the city during the revolutionary period, the population of Moscow began to swell uncontrollably by the beginning of the 1920s.

The population came to nearly double in the first half of the decade as rural folk and demobilized soldiers arrived from the countryside in search of work.28 These newcomers, largely illiterate and unskilled, were crammed into communal apartments that afforded no separate rooms in which to sleep or to eat, let alone to bathe. One new resident, a Red Army veteran temporarily sleeping on the floor of a cafeteria, complained to his district council of not having washed himself in nearly three months while owning just one shirt and one pair of underwear, which had “grown black over time.”29 For the Bolsheviks, whose soldiers were nearing victory against anti-communist forces on the battlefield by early 1921, the next logical task became clear: they would need to create the domestic conditions for a healthy and productive working class. And this meant, first and foremost, giving everyone a bath.

It was in the campaign for hygiene and cleanliness that the Bolsheviks came to see a

“second front” in the battle to build socialism at home. Bolshevik leaders began to speak about hygiene in military terms as they mobilized the population for a life-or-death fight to eradicate dirt and infectious diseases, which had reached epidemic proportions in both city and countryside. The bathhouse was to become the setting for the transformation of the unwashed

28 Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (1995), p. 157. The population of the city more than doubled from 1 million in 1920 to upwards of 2 million in 1926. On urban depopulation during the Civil War, see Daniel R. Brower, “‘The City in Danger:’ The Civil War and the Russian Urban Population” in Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 58-80. 29 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 22, l. 114. This complaint was addressed from one comrade Titov to the Rogozhsko- Simonovskii raisovet and, judging by subsequent marks on the appeal, appears to have been acted upon by municipal officials. 21 masses who were streaming into Moscow into a model proletariat, one that could become the future backbone of the Soviet state.

But despite the state’s concerted efforts to encourage sanitary habits among the population, the Bolshevik plan to clean up the city had to contend with the deficiency of

Moscow’s crumbling infrastructure and the chaotic state of the capital’s municipal government.

Amid these challenges, Moscow residents were presented with an early opportunity to engage voluntarily with the socialist project by aiding in the work of the hygiene campaign. The drive to create the communal economy in the sphere of public hygiene serves as an opening through which we can observe the mammoth task of revolutionizing urban life in accordance with a socialist blueprint. The deficiencies of NEP-era governance revealed in this process — and the resulting discomforts experienced by the population — shed light on the causes of the subsequent centralizing evolution of the Soviet state.

Epidemics and the Rise of “Sanitary Enlightenment”

The Bolshevik obsession with hygiene was forged on the battlegrounds of the Civil War, a conflict in which the number of deaths from diseases famously outnumbered those from fighting. According to Orlando Figes, the Red Army was almost fatally crippled by outbreaks of

“typhus, influenza, smallpox, cholera, typhoid and venereal diseases, but many more men suffered from lice, stomach bugs, dysentery” and other afflictions brought on by the unsanitary conditions of war. In 1920 alone, approximately 30 percent of the Red Army, or more than one million men, had contracted typhus.30 These epidemics spread from the war zones to Russia’s

30 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 598. 22 urban areas, as soldiers, refugees and peasants traveled the country’s railway routes amid the demographic upheavals of the period. They likewise reached Moscow, where, according to one estimate, some 50,000 people died every year between 1917 and 1920.31

The train routes that had served as conduits of disease were repurposed by the Bolsheviks into a part of the solution for combatting outbreaks. Borrowing a technique from the Germans, the Red Army adopted mobile emergency measures to disinfect its soldiers; these included the dispatching of bathhouse-laundromat trains [banno-prachechnye poezda] to the frontlines, and the creation of pop-up stations [letuchki] where soldiers could bathe and wash their clothes.32 In

Moscow, sanitary checkpoints were established in seven of the city’s train stations by a winter

1920 decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, which required all passengers coming from long-distance travel to pass through a checkpoint immediately upon arrival in order to take a bath and disinfect their clothes.33 This “cleansing” of individuals before they entered the new Soviet capital was both a necessary measure to limit the spread of epidemics and a symbolic baptism of the newly arrived masses, few of whom suspected that their bathing practices were about to become a major concern of the state.

It has been observed that the experience of coming to power in a wartime environment conditioned the Bolsheviks to adopt a militarized approach toward governance in peacetime.

This approach had the effect of turning mobilization into a permanent feature of Soviet life.34 As

31 A. A. Il’iukhov, Zhizn’ v epokhu peremen: material’noe polozhenie gorodskikh zhitelei v gody revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), p. 170. Some three million people perished in total from epidemics in Russia between 1917-1922, according to statistics corralled by the author. Ibid., p. 179. 32 Extensive correspondence between the central leadership and the administrators of the sanitary trains and letuchki, dating through October 1922, can be found in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF), f. A482, op. 9. Sanitary trains were used to contain outbreaks at least as late as 1933. 33 O. Iu. Shmidt, “Bania” in Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, Vol. 4 (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1926), pp. 673-674. 34 See Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Holquist argues that the Revolution as an event ended in 1921, but the revolution to create a socialist society became an ongoing project for the Soviet state. 23 the war came to a close, the population became newly enlisted in the struggle to build a socialist society at home, a project that was launched with almost equal military fervor by the state. The

Civil War-era health initiative to battle epidemics likewise carried over into the new state campaign for “sanitary enlightenment” [sanitarnoe prosveshchenie, commonly shortened to sanprosvet], which expanded throughout the 1920s to encompass a range of educational and propagandistic activities that sought to curb the spread of infectious diseases, promote cleanliness and healthy habits among the population, and increase the productivity of the working class.35 As part of this campaign, the Moscow city health department, Moszdrav, deployed a wide range of creative programming to mobilize the large and largely illiterate audience of the capital. This included the production of hygienic posters, the staging of “sanitary courts” and “living newspapers” in which volunteers acted out scenes to illustrate the health issues of the day, and the creation of a special Theater of Sanitary Enlightenment, which held its premiere in 1925 with a medical comedy titled “Main Parasite” [Glavparazit].36

During the early NEP period, Moscow’s newly-formed district councils began to play a significant role in marshalling the foot soldiers of sanitary enlightenment. The districts organized

“sanitary cells” [saniacheiki], comprised of about three individuals elected by the residents of a house or group of houses, who answered to a doctor and monitored the sanitary conditions in a particular section of a neighborhood. This monitoring could become quite invasive. In one district, the members of the saniacheiki had permission to enter individual homes between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. to inspect sanitary conditions in apartments, stairwells and courtyards, and to make

35 For a detailed description of the sanitary enlightenment campaign and statistics on its activities, see Starks, The Body Soviet (2008), pp. 56-64. 36 On the state production of sanitary posters, see Karen A. Fox, “Za Zdorovye! Soviet Health Posters as Social Advertising,” Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 29, Issue 1 (2009), pp. 74–90. The work of the sanitary courts, living newspapers and the sanitary theater are described in the 1928 article “Preparing the Sanprosvet Repertoire” by F. Iu. Berman, head of the scientific-methodological bureau of the Sanprosvet Theater (RGANTD, f. 178, op. 5, ed. khr. 5, l. 1-12, available online at http://rgantd.ru/materialy/dok-3-statya-bermana.shtml#14). 24 sure residents regularly visited the banya or washed themselves at home (presumably, by simply asking the latter about their habits).37 Later in the decade, some district councils established less invasive Houses of Sanitary Enlightenment [Dom Sanitornogo Prosveshcheniia] that hosted lectures, discussions, films and performances on health-related topics, as well as organized exhibits and “mobile libraries” featuring the latest literature on the subject.38

Despite the importance of educational activities to the program of sanitary enlightenment, the priority of the state was to fulfill the practical need to bathe among the majority of the

Moscow population. As the war wound down, Moscow authorities organized the hallmark of their cleanliness campaign, which would squeeze the capacity of the city’s dilapidated pre- revolutionary bathhouses and put to the test Muscovites’ dedication to eradicating the diseases which were now perceived as the main enemy of the nascent revolutionary state.

“Banya Week” as Peacetime Mobilization

The spring of 1920 saw the creation of the Moscow Extraordinary Sanitary Commission

(MChSK), whose purpose was to lead a renewed offensive against waste and epidemics in the city. The bathhouse became the centerpiece of the MChSK’s main push, which appeared in the form of “Banya Week” [Bannaya nedelia]: a massive get-out-to-bathe campaign organized by the state between March 30 and April 10, 1920. During this period, every resident of Moscow

37 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 79, ll. 134-136. This information comes from a report on the activities of the Rogozhsko-Simonovskii raisovet for 1922. 38 Otchet o rabote Krasno-Presnenskogo soveta, s 1 oktiabria 1927 g. po 1 iiulia 1928 g. (Moscow: Tip. Gosizdata “Krasnyi Proletarii,” 1928), p. 21. 25 would be able to get a free bath (soap included), haircut and shave across all 34 functioning bathhouses in the city, which would remain open for 14 hours a day on the state’s dime.39

In advance of the event, the municipal health department published an extraordinary one- time “sanitary newspaper” that outlined the goals of the leadership in organizing the campaign, and called on all Muscovites to fulfill their bathing duty. It also revealed the explicitly military terms in which the state viewed the question of hygiene. The most striking example of this mindset appeared in a front-page editorial written by Nikolai Semashko, the recently appointed

People’s Commissar of Public Health, who would go on to play a leading role in the health system of the Soviet Union. The opportunity to bathe “must be taken by everyone without exception, everyone to a man [pogolovno],” Semashko exhorted:

Anyone with lice is a counter-revolutionary, a White Army soldier. He must be dragged immediately to the the emergency treatment center [v chrezvychaiku]: the bathhouse. It must finally be understood that facilitating the spread of epidemics is the best (and, at this point, the main if not the only existing) way to help the counter-revolution — that the success of the battle with epidemics will determine the speed of our victories on the war front and in the battle with economic ruin...Everyone to the anti-epidemic front!40

The equating of cleanliness with devotion to the revolutionary cause — and the lack thereof to sabotage — became the dominant framework through which the state promoted the importance of hygiene among the population. Within this framework, public hygiene enterprises became somewhat akin to sites of national security, as places which performed the de-lousing and disinfecting functions that were viewed as vital by the state. Any effort to hamper the activity of these establishments was likewise viewed as sabotage; in advance of Banya Week, the MChSK

39 S. A. Gurevich, untitled article in Kommuna i zdorov’e: odnodnevnaia sanitarnaia gazeta, posviashchennaia “Bannoi nedele” (April 6, 1920), p. 1. 40 Nikolai Semashko, untitled article in ibid., p. 1. In addition to information about Banya Week, the newspaper included articles about the health effects of the banya, the differences between Russian and Turkish baths, a long poem about lice, and humorous quips promoting cleanliness (eg. “chtob v zatylke ne chisat’, nado baniu poseshchat’”). 26 warned that any private or municipal barber who refused to give a free haircut to bathhouse patrons would face immediate arrest.41

For Moscow residents, participation in Banya Week was presented as an early way to show their active engagement in the construction of socialism. The MChSK encouraged people to visit the bathhouse by the prescribed deadline in advertisements that read almost like a voter turnout campaign, with one notice in Izvestiia asking: “Will the ‘self-cleaning’ [“samoochistka”] of the Muscovites end April 10? That all depends on you, comrades and citizens!”42 One must question the extent to which Muscovites visited the bathhouse as an act of buy-in into the new political project, rather than out of a simple need to bathe; indeed, one feuilleton covering the event struck a barely concealed note of irony by referring to an unwitting banya visitor as a

“communized inhabitant” [kommunizirovannyi obyvatel’] of Moscow.43 Nevertheless, subsequent tallies by the MChSK suggested that turnout to Banya Week amounted to as much as

75 percent of the city population, though some contemporary observers place that number closer to 50 percent.44 Whatever their reasons for taking part, the event by all accounts proved popular among Moscow residents.45 One newspaper reported that a group of concerned citizens even launched a petition to extend Banya Week, in order to give the still-unbathed part of the population a chance to “finish washing up” [“domyt’sia”].46

41 “Bannaia nedelia,” Kommunisticheskii trud No. 11 (March 31, 1920), p. 4 42 Izvestiia No.77 (April 9, 1920), p. 2. 43 L. R--skii, “Malen’kii fel’eton,” Kommunisticheskii trud No. 18 (April 9, 1920), p. 1 44 A report from MChSK claimed that 560,000 people, or 75% of the Moscow population, visited the baths; see Kommunisticheskii trud No. 27 (April 23, 1920), p. 3. Working with different statistics, a recent scholar calculated that no more than 700,000 people could have visited the bathhouses within the week-long period, which would have amounted to 50% of the population. See A. N. Fedorov, “Povsednevnost’ sovetskogo goroda v 1918-1920 godakh s sanitarnoi tochki zreniia,” Uchenye Zapiski Petrozavodskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Obshchestvennye i Gumanitarnye Nauki No. 1 (2008), pp.64-69. 45 For example, a report on the results of Banya Week in the Rogozhsko-Simonovskii district noted that people were highly satisfied with the event and asked to hold it more often, though some complained of not getting enough soap. TsAGM f. 1474, op. 7, d. 152, l. 44. 46 “Rezul’taty bannoi nedeli,” Kommunisticheskii trud No. 22 (Apri l17, 1920), p. 3. 27

A third notion that became articulated in the discussion around Banya Week was the conception of the bathhouse as a public good that should be provided by the state. “A significant portion of the population doesn't bathe not because it doesn't want to, but because it doesn't have the opportunity to do so,” lamented one doctor in the pages of the sanitary newspaper, noting that a large part of Moscow’s bathhouses were completely out of service or in need of repairs.47 A second doctor placed the bathhouse in terms of class struggle, observing that Moscow had inherited the commercial banyas [torgovye bani] of the pre-revolutionary period, which had been directed at making a profit through servicing the bourgeoisie and were therefore ill-equipped for the protection of public health. “The next thing on the agenda,” he concluded, “is the transformation of former commercial banyas into genuine public establishments, which will require their restructuring and significant expansion.”48 The most direct call for state provision of bathing services was made by one N. Sh., who equated the right to bathe with that of public education. “The Russian people, despite their extreme backwardness, have always valued and understood the importance and necessity of the banya,” the author wrote. Following the socialist revolution, the Russian people would finally secure for themselves bathhouse establishments that

“will be as free and accessible as schools.”49 In recognition of this need, the Council of People's’

Commissars in October 1920 released a decree “On the provision of the population with banyas,” with the stated goals of conducting “a decisive battle against epidemics...and the large- scale introduction of cleanliness skills among the population.”50

As could be expected, the Bolsheviks’ early mobilization of Moscow residents to the

“anti-epidemic front” failed to produce lasting results. Despite its significant turnout, Banya

47 Gurevich, Kommuna i zdorov’e, p. 1. 48 Sanitary Doctor Molkov, untitled article in ibid., pp. 1-2. 49 N.Sh., untitled article in ibid., p. 4. 50 Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva za 1920 g. (Moscow: Upravlenie delami Sovnarkoma SSSR, 1943), pp. 589-590. 28

Week was a one-time event that did not change the fundamental problems with disease, overcrowding and lack of infrastructure that would plague the city throughout the decade. A report from the health department of Moscow’s central district provided a snapshot of the sanitary conditions that reigned in the city only two years later. Among a population of 300,000 in the district — compared to 200,000 in 1918, an increase of 50 percent — the death rate had reached 3.7 percent among adults and 24 percent among children, according to a report by the district health department.51 These deaths were attributed primarily to disease and major problems with waste removal, which facilitated the spread of typhus brought from individuals fleeing famine in the Volga region. Regarding the use of banyas, “which play such a colossal role in our current time that is so rife with epidemics,” the report noted that only 30 percent of the district population had passed through the district’s two bathhouses in the previous month, a situation, it said, that was undoubtedly tied to the high fees for their use. “It can be said with certainty,” the report concluded, “that the entire mass of epidemics which have recently been observed, and their unusually strong development, stem from this anti-sanitary condition of the district and of Moscow more broadly.”

The continuing crisis with dirt and diseases, which stemmed from but grew to outlast the

Civil War, forced the leadership to take matters more firmly into state hands. Beginning in 1920, when bathhouses and other hygienic enterprises were formally brought under state control,

Moscow officials would fight to implement their hygienic directives across the city’s rambunctious districts, where a lack of leadership and expertise — compounded by shortages and fuel crises in the city — resulted in the chronic underfulfilment of sanitary goals for the new

51 Report by the Zdravotdel of the Gorodskoi district to the Presidium of the Gorodskoi district council, March 1922. TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 126, ll. 94-96. These statistics appear consistent with broader mortality rates in Moscow at the onset of the 1920s. In 1920, for example, the death rate in the city was 378 per 10,000 citizens and reached 21.2 percent among children. Statisticheskii ezhegodnik 1918-1920 gg, vyp. 2 (Moscow: 1922), p. 333. 29 socialist capital. The effort to “communize” urban services in the sphere of public hygiene offers a window onto the administrative chaos of the early NEP period, a condition that hindered the provision of public services to the population and stalled the development of the envisioned socialist society.

The Municipalization of Public Hygiene

In March 1918, the capital’s new municipal government, the Moscow Soviet of Workers’

Deputies (Mossovet from here onwards), unseated the tsarist-era city duma in the former governor-general’s mansion at 13 Tverskaya Street. Along with its real estate, the Mossovet inherited its predecessor’s task of providing city services across the capital’s newly redrawn districts [raiony], each one overseen by a district soviet [raisovet] that implemented the directives of the Mossovet on the ground.52 Each raisovet was led by a presidium and channeled its work through departments dedicated to the most pressing needs of the city: these varied across the districts, but typically included departments on administrative, housing, health, sanitation, fuel, transportation, and economic affairs. As the lowest-level formal bodies of governance in the city, the district soviets dealt with Moscow citizens directly. Their representatives soon found themselves on the frontlines of the battle to rid the city from the remnants of the old regime.53

The disorganized nature of municipal governance was immediately felt in the crisis with city banyas, which was second in acuteness only to the infamous “housing crisis” that plagued

52 In 1917, Moscow was divided into 11 districts with a 12th, extraterrestrial district representing railroad workers across the city. By 1920, the twelve districts were consolidated into seven to cut down on bureaucratic costs and to curtail the political influence of district soviets, some of which, notably the central Gorodskoi raisovet, employed a large number of intellectuals. See Colton, pp. 76-77, 135-136. 53 In one poster from 1925, a red-clad member of the Mossovet is shown sweeping away the representatives of the old regime, including a priest and several bourgeois characters, with a large broom. 30

Muscovites throughout the NEP period.54Alongside the degradation of housing stock that occurred during the years of revolution, Moscow lost approximately half of its bathhouses to closure or severe disrepair. According to the Moscow historian Pyotr Sytin, the number of banyas in the city fell from 54 before the Civil War to 31 in 1920, with a capacity that allowed each resident no more than two visits per month in the best of circumstances.55 Following the revolution, the provision of public hygiene services across the city districts fell to the local sub- departments on public hygiene or small municipal enterprises, located variously within district departments on health, sanitation, or economic affairs. The lack of a standardized system for the oversight of banyas and other public hygiene enterprises made it difficult for the Mossovet to combat the problem of epidemics, leading the city to take a series of centralizing measures that would culminate in the seizure of all bathhouses by the state.

As early as July 1918, the Presidium of the Mossovet sent a decree to the district councils regarding the maintenance of the city’s bathhouses. In light of the anti-sanitary conditions of many commercial bathhouses, as well as to preclude the spread of diseases in the city, the

Mossovet asked each raisovet to ensure that the bathhouses in their districts — the majority of which were still in private hands — met a series of requirements. The district councils were to see to it that banyas stay open no fewer than three days per week; that keepers opened the banya for an additional day for free use by the city poor; and that the district councils work to prevent

54 The housing crisis [zhilishchnyi or kvartirnyi vopros], consisting of an acute shortage of apartments in the city that resulted in appalling living conditions for a large number of Muscovites, was a popular topic for journalists and writers of the period. See, in particular, Mikhail Bulgakov, “A Treatise on Housing” in Diaboliad and Other Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). 55 P.V. Sytin, ed., Kanalizatsiia g. Moskvy: ochistka, vodostoki, bani i kladbishcha (Moscow: Izdanie Moskovskogo Kommunal’nogo Khoziaistva, 1927), pp. 62-63. According to an article in the official journal of the Moscow Communal Economy, the number of functioning bathhouses in the city in 1920 was 26. See “Predpriiatiia obshchestvennoi gigieny” in “Moskovskoe kommunal’noe khoziaistvo za 4 goda revoliutsii,”Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo No. 7 (November 1921), pp. 39-40. 31 the raising of prices for banya use by the keepers and bathhouse staff. Failure to fulfill the decree could result in a hefty fine, or an arrest period of up to three months.56

Despite the threat of punishment, district councils did not have much power to implement the Mossovet decree in practice. Reports from numerous district councils in subsequent months and years, including after the state takeover of bathhouses had been completed, reveal an ongoing struggle to keep banyas open for even three days a week due to shortages of fuel and materials. Meanwhile, the creation of a free day of banya use for the poor was never realized, although free visits for privileged groups were organized by individual districts of the city (this topic will be discussed further in Chapter Three). Regarding the third point, on preventing fee raises by bathhouse owners, it was unclear how the district councils were to carry out this task without resorting to coercive measures.

Frustrated by its impotence in the face of the banya crisis, the Mossovet in December

1918 asked to organize a special meeting with representatives of the districts, the union of banya workers, and other concerned parties to discuss the creation of a centralized body that would oversee the work of bathhouses, both municipalized and nonmunicipalized, throughout the city.57

Exactly one year later, the presidium of the Mossovet decreed the creation of a Department of

Communal Economy [Otdel Kommunal’nogo Khoziaistva] that would directly oversee all municipalized enterprises currently under the purview of district sub-departments and streamline their work. The department would focus “first and foremost on the improvement and expansion of the work of banyas, barbershops and laundromats,” coordinating its work on the first task with

56 TsAGM f. 2315, op. 1, d. 2, l. 3. 57 TsAGM f. 2315, op. 1, d. 2, l. 57. 32 a special commission on the improvement of banya services within the health department of the

Mossovet.58

The department became the precursor to the Moscow Communal Economy [Moskovskoe

Kommunal’noe Khoziaistvo, or MKKh], the mammoth division created within the Mossovet in

1920 to oversee city services across all populated areas of the Moscow gubernia. Its responsibilities included the management of municipalized real estate and fulfillment of the housing needs of the population; maintenance of city roads and all public spaces, as well as the canalization and sewage systems, trams and other public transportation, and city lighting; establishment and maintenance of public bathhouses, laundromats and barbershops; organization and oversight of sanitary and burial services; and “custodianship” [popechenie] over the improvement of urban living conditions in the interests of the working population, as well as the protection thereof from fires and other natural disasters.59 The MKKh approved its work with the communal economy department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR, the NKVD.60

With the creation of the MKKh, the city government finally acquired an apparatus that would exert central control over the city’s banyas, barbershops and laundromats. These were brought under formal state control in 1920 with the announcement of new regulations “on the administration of small municipal enterprises.”61 The financing of public hygiene enterprises would now be conducted exclusively through state assignations, determined through budget estimates prepared by each raisovet and approved by the MKKh. After initial difficulties with budget preparations and the search for employees and staff, the municipalization of public

58 TsAGM f. 1616, op. 3, d. 85, l. 31. 59 “Polozhenie o Moskovskom Kommunal’nom Khoziaistve,” Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo No. 1-2 (May 1921), p. 35. 60 According to a May 1922 regulation by the VTsIK and SNK RSFSR, the NKVD had as one of its departments a Main Directorate of Communal Economy responsible for the general provision of public amenities in urban and rural settlements. A.I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, eds., GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917-1960: Dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond “Demokratiia,” 2000), pp. 17, 24. 61 TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 22, ll. 147-148. 33 hygiene enterprises was pursued energetically in early 1921 and considered complete with a

March 1921 decree on the free use of banyas for the entire city population.62 While the running of these enterprises would soon revert to partial privatization with the onset of the New Economic

Policy — a shift that would cause significant troubles to be discussed in Chapter Three — the city’s banyas, as sites of key political importance, would remain under state control for the remainder of the Soviet period.

63 TABLE 1: Banyas Functioning in Moscow

District (raion) Pre-War 1920-22 Approximate population (1920-22)

Krasno-Presnenskii 17 8 245,000

Khamovnicheskii 4 2 220,000

Rogozhsko-Simonovskii 11 4 120,000

Zamoskvoretskii 8 3-5 140, 000

Baumanskii 7 4 140,000

Sokol’nicheskii 7 2-4 —

Gorodskoi — 2 300,000

62 “Predpriiatiia obshchestvennoi gigieny” in “Moskovskoe kommunal’noe khoziaistvo za 4 goda revoliutsii,”Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo No. 7 (November 1921), pp. 39-40. Moscow banyas were to remain open Thursdays and Fridays from 2-6 p.m. and Saturdays from 12-9 p.m., with Saturday use reserved primarily for workers of “physical labor.” See “Otmena platy za pol’zovanie baniami,” Pravda No. 47 (March 3, 1921), p. 3. 63 Figures in the table are drawn directly or approximated from journal publications or district reports from the period, which are listed in the Table section of the Bibliography. 34

Difficulties of Municipal Governance

The triumphant pronouncement of state provision of bathing services in March 1920 disguised a reality that was much more messy than the Mossovet let on. While the municipalization of bathhouses took place on paper, in practice the district soviets, or even individual bathhouse keepers, were often left to run public hygiene enterprises on their own amid a general lack of oversight from the higher-ups. The weakness in every link in the municipal chain of command — moving from the Mossovet down to the presidiums of each district soviet, and from there to the departments, sub-departments, and finally to the individual enterprises in each district — resulted in the stalled fulfillment of directives and a general environment of self- governance (or anarchy, depending on how one sees it) among the local bodies on the ground.

The main problems stemmed from the faulty nationalization of municipal enterprises, the administrative inadequacies within the district councils, and the lack of expertise among municipal employees, which will be discussed in turn in the section below.

Nationalization in Name Only

A look at how the state takeover of bathhouses unfolded in practice comes from a lively notice written through what appears to be a third party by comrade Terekhov, the manager of

Banya No. 4 in the central Gorodskoi district of Moscow. Having managed the bathhouse since

1917 on a rental agreement [arendnoe pol’zovanie] with the communal economy department of his district council, Terekhov was named the director of the establishment upon its

35 nationalization three years later.64 Dictating his statement in September 1921, six months after the full municipalization of bathhouses had been proclaimed by the Mossovet, Terekhov complained that he had yet to receive any directives from above:

The leadership of the banya was asked to produce within the shortest time frame...the following materials: the remainder of cash reserves at the time of reporting, the remainder of fuel, a list of the service personnel, a list of the inventory, and in general all information needed to compile the budget estimates for the banya. [...] The accounting by the banya has NOT BEEN CHECKED BY ANYONE IN THE CENTER i.e. the communal department of the Gorodskoi raion since the moment of nationalization AND NO INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CONDUCT OF FINANCIAL AND MATERIAL ACCOUNTING HAVE BEEN RECEIVED BY THE BANYA LEADERSHIP FROM ANYONE OR ANYWHERE. For that reason, according to banya director Terekhov, the entire enterprise was led by him alone, so to say, ON GOOD FAITH [na sovest’]. Signed TEREKHOV.65

Terekhov’s complaint, addressed to the not-so-distant Sub-Department of Small Municipal enterprises within the Communal Economy Department of the Gorodskoi district council, reveals how municipal bodies with even the most seemingly narrow spheres of oversight (in this case, the running of bathhouses, barbershops and laundromats in a single district) were unable to exert a leadership role or maintain timely communication with the enterprises under their jurisdiction.

This particular failure was all the more inexcusable in the Gorodskoi raion, which was

Moscow’s most densely-populated district at the time and arguably its most underserved bathwise, with only two functioning banyas to its name.

Yet while local administrators floundered on the ground, the MKKh continued to release instructions of increasing specificity and decreasing probability of fulfilment. One circular distributed to public hygiene enterprises in 1920-21 ordered that all banyas and similar enterprises immediately begin providing employees with boiled hot water for tea and other needs, in order to prevent the spread of cholera and serious stomach-related illnesses.66 In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it can only be assumed that this order went similarly unfulfilled.

64 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 203. 65 The uppercase spelling has been preserved from the original doucment. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 173. 66 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 2, l. 20. 36

Administrative Chaos as Constant Condition

Around the time that Terekhov sent his complaint to the Sub-department of Small

Municipal Enterprises, his superior, the head of the Communal Economy Department of the

Gorodskoi district council P. P. Avraamov, was writing his own report to the council presidium about the disappointing work of his department over the last three months. The director began his report with an outline of the bureaucratic history of his department, a helpful gesture not only to the historian but also to his superiors in the raisovet, who by all indications had little idea of what was going on below them.

The Communal Economy Department, Avraamov wrote, was created in 1920 with the merging of three independent departments: Housing and Land, Economic, and Cleaning. The department now had a board of three members confirmed by the executive committee of the raisovet, and consisted of three sub-departments [podotdely]: those on Housing and Land, Small

Municipal Enterprises, and Cleaning. In this way, the product of a department merger essentially broke down once again into its three constituent parts. But the evolution didn’t end there: with the ascendance of a new board, the Sub-department of Small Municipal Enterprises changed its name to the Sub-department of Public Hygiene (a change of which Terekhov, the banya director, was apparently unaware), and further subdivided into its own administrative sections — including the Banya-Laundromat Section which, true to its name, oversaw the bathhouses and laundromats in the district.67

67 Avraamov’s report covers the work of his department from June 1-September 1, 1920, and as such was likely written in the same month as Terekhov’s complaint. TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 67, ll. 93-95, 99. 37

The bureaucratic tangle that produced the Communal Economy Department helps to explain the subsequent administrative chaos that Avraamov reported in his message. The main problem, he wrote, was that the board and sub-departments had very few qualified staff, with the majority being too young and uneducated to get things done. In addition, the department was beset by the chronic absenteeism of employees, a lack of record-keeping, and no system or plan of work whatsoever. As a result, out of five banyas in the district, only two were working (and only at 50 percent capacity), two were in disrepair and not being fixed, and one had been taken over by the district military commissariat [voenkomat]. Moreover, during the previous three years of activity the agency had left no archive of documents, no basic information on the enterprises under its oversight — in a separate report, the department announced that it had recently “discovered” a laundromat under its jurisdiction68— and conducted absolutely no financial reporting. At the time of his writing, Avraamov lamented, the Sub-department of Public

Hygiene still had no confirmed leadership (a circumstance that would explain the absence of instructions sent to Terekhov), while tasks continued to “fall like snow on the head” of an agency with neither the skills nor the manpower to carry them out.69

The committee in the district council that received Avraamov’s report followed up on his complaints and concluded that the department was indeed in a state of “utmost chaos” [polneishii khaos]. The department board barely met and did not appear to address any serious questions; the administrative sections were virtually non-existent; and the absence of any visible communication or oversight from the presidium of the raisovet encouraged acts of unspecified

“sabotage” among the employees. Of the particularly egregious sub-departments, the committee singled out Housing and Land for appearing to “operate completely on its own without any

68 TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 79, l. 1. 69 TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 67, l. 99. 38 oversight from the Communal Department.” Within the Sub-department on Public Hygiene, which the committee listed as having a whopping 3,956 employees — including 270 employees within the sub-department itself and another 3, 517 working in its various enterprises — the committee found that only 15 percent could be considered “qualified” [kvalifitsirovannye], a number that rose to 30 percent among employees of the banyas (the criteria that made one a

“qualified” banya employee, however, were likewise left to the imagination). The report concluded that employees had little ability or desire to work due to their young age and low wages, resulting in absences [proguly] of up to 40 percent at any given time.70

Similar problems with disorganization and lack of accountability were reported in 1922 by the new head of the Communal Economy Department in the neighboring Sokol’nicheskii district, S. M. Khorokhorin. Having found the department in a “most lamentable state” [v samom plachevnom vide] upon assuming his responsibilities, Khorokhorin said it was impossible to procure any data on the activities and finances of the body now under his oversight because no such data existed. Citing the constant undermining of his authority by the presidium, the frequent turnover among sub-department heads, and the ignorance of staff regarding their most direct responsibilities, Khorokhorin said he could no longer work in an environment where he was

“stymied at every turn” [tormoziat so vsekh kontsov] and asked to be relieved of his duties.71

Another source of difficulty for Moscow’s municipal workers came from city residents themselves, many of whom were not shy to take out their frustrations with the difficult living conditions in the city on low-level municipal staff. One vivid description of the work travails in

Moscow’s district councils came from the director of the Housing Sub-department in the

Baumanskii raisovet. Writing to the head of the MKKh in response to the latter’s request for an

70 TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 67, ll. 108, 110. 71 TsAGM f. 3412, op. 1, d. 275, ll. 261-62. 39 explanation of the sub-department’s underperformance, the director pointed to the difficulties of working with the new proletariat:

There is a lot of obscene noise...the citizens who arrive [at the raisovet] berate and heckle our employees who are writing out [housing] certificates; there are hysterics, unruly conduct, the breaking of inkwells and drinking glasses, meltdowns, tears, and other such upheavals. In these conditions the employees carry out their daily work like machines [liudi avtomaty] with their nerves on end [s verevochnymi nervami]. They work in such conditions straight through until 4 p.m. without taking a break. They run to me for help, I understand that this can’t go on and am ready to put an end to this unnatural phenomenon, but it turns out that I am a commanding figure with not only limited rights, but no rights whatsoever, since I don’t have sole and firm control over my own sub-department.72

As a general rule, the staff of housing departments in the district councils were first in the line of fire against district residents, since these departments were in charge of a highly sensitive matter: the seizure and redistribution of municipalized apartments. Yet it is not difficult to imagine that employees of public hygiene establishments, faced with dirty and discontented residents in the overcrowded bathhouses of the city, received a fair dose of abuse as they went about the task of serving the “communized inhabitant” of the budding socialist city.

Municipal Government of Millennials

A final hurdle to the effective functioning of Moscow’s municipal government already noted in the reports above was the lack of experience among its district-level leadership and employees, many of whom were strikingly young. In the important Gorodskoi raisovet, the head of the district council presidium was listed as a man aged only 25 years and possessing a middle- school education [srednee obrazovanie]. His deputies were described as being about the same.

The district council further employed people as young as 15 and 16 as typists and office clerks, the majority of whom had the most basic [nizshee] level of education.73 With such youthful

72 TsAGM f. 2560, op. 1, d. 35, l. 254. 73 TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 41, l. 2. 40 leaders at their helm, the district councils could be seen as governed by the equivalent of today’s millennials, propelled by a passion for the socialist project but potentially lacking the necessary expertise. The young age of municipal employees at the beginning of the decade underscores the large-scale flight of experienced administrators from the city in the wake of the revolution, but also renders the successes that the municipal government did manage to achieve all the more impressive.

Beyond their diversity in age, the makeup of the district councils represented a miniature tableau of the new socialist society, with its emergent class and party distinctions. According to a

1921 report from the Zamoskvoretskii district located across the river from the Kremlin, the district council had a total of 450 members that included 146 workers [rabochikh] (or 32 percent), 136 employees [sluzhashchikh], 16 peasants, 22 “intelligents,” and 136 Red Army soldiers; among all these, 245 (or 54 percent) were party members.74 Following the district council elections of 1922, the percentage of party members rose to 77 percent while the percent of workers in the council membership doubled to 65 percent. Across the new district council membership, 92 percent were men, nearly 50 percent were between the ages of 20 and 30, and 77 percent had only the most basic level of education.75

Noting the longer average period of party membership among the representatives of the

Mossovet as compared to the lesser length of membership within the Zamoskvoretskii raisovet, the report concluded: “we can see that the more responsible and large-scale work of serious political significance is delegated in the Moscow Soviet to old members of the party, who have gone through the underground period [podpol’nyi stazh] and the periods of organizing the

74 Otchet o rabote otdelov Zamoskvoretskogo soveta s 1-go ianvaria po 15-oe oktiabria 1921 g. (Moscow: 1921), pp. 3-4. 75 Otchet o deiatel’nosti Zamoskvoretskogo Raionnogo Soveta Rabochikih i Krasnoarmeiskikh Deputatov s 1-go ianvaria po 15-e oktiabria 1922 goda (Moscow: 1922), graphs on unnumbered page following p. 8. 41

revolution. The smaller daily work in the Raisovet is delegated to young communists, who must

use it as preparation for their subsequent work for the good of the proletarian republic.”76 It is

clear from this statement that the lowest rungs of municipal governance were viewed as mere

training grounds for young communists seeking to aspire to the heights of city administration, an

outlook that may help to explain the frequent lack of attention by the Mossovet to the goings-on

inside the district councils. At the same time, the overwhelming proportions of youth, recent

party members, and individuals with lower education who made up the district councils testifies

to the fact that these bodies were not holdovers from the pre-revolutionary urban regime, with its

attendant “bourgeois specialists,” but rather avenues for the entry and advancement of eager

young socialists into the ranks of the managerial urban elite.

Political Consciousness within the Communal Economy

We have observed thus far how the immensity of municipal problems in the immediate post-revolutionary period, combined with the relative weakness and disorganization of the new

Moscow government, created an environment in which personal initiative on the part of residents and lower-level officials played a crucial role in the maintenance of the city. From the early agitators of the sanitary enlightenment campaign to individual banya directors working to hold their enterprises together, the drive to create the socialist city became, from its beginning, a communal project with significant voluntary engagement on the part of the Moscow population.

The experience of participating in the construction of the socialist city, in turn, had the effect of socializing urban residents and promoting the development of a new political consciousness, one

76 Ibid., p. 9. 42 that identified with the values of communal urban life under the auspices of an all-providing state.

A good example of the grassroots spirit that permeated the restoration of Moscow’s communal economy can be seen in the work of the All-Russian Union of Communal Economy

Workers, a beleaguered pre-revolutionary organization that rallied in the years of revolutionary chaos to become a major force in the reconstruction of the city. In 1921 the union began to publish a newspaper, Voice of the Kommunalnik, whose first issue contained an article outlining the history of the organization.77 Formed in Moscow in 1905, the union initially represented workers of the tram and waterway systems. For a decade between 1907 and 1917 it operated illegally, fighting for the equal pay of municipal workers (as compared to factory workers, who were paid more) and the installment of an 8-hour work day. The revolution allowed for the legalization and massive expansion of the union, whose membership grew more than a hundredfold from 2,050 in 1905 to 240, 875 by July 1921. The municipal workers it now represented included firefighters, tram workers, and employees of canteens, bathhouses, bakeries, hospitals and police departments, among many others; it also had a large female component for the time, with women accounting for 32 percent of its membership. The article proudly noted that most specialists and engineers working in the Moscow administration had fled during the revolution, so the union stepped in to keep the city running despite a lack of expertise. Its activities since the relative restoration of urban services included organizing haircutting classes for aspiring barbers, collecting money to help the hungry, and monitoring developments among municipal workers in other countries.

As the state battle against epidemics rolled out in full at the turn of the decade, the workers of the communal economy saw themselves as necessarily called to the front lines of this

77 Untitled article, Golos Kommunal’nika No. 1 (September 12, 1921), pp. 2-3. 43 domestic war. In one evocative article in Voice of the Kommunalnik, an anonymous author who signed his name as “G.” penned the following rallying call to his fellow workers:

One thinks communal workers are more acquainted than anyone with the sorry state of the city economy. The seven-year period of devastation [razrukha] wrought heavy blows against it. One could say there’s not a living spot on it left [zhivogo mesta net]. Anywhere you look — plumbing, canalization, trams, the gas supply, banyas, laundromats — everything is creaking and barely holding together… A massive, difficult, and — I’ll say it directly — dangerous task has fallen to the Union of Communal Economy Workers: to bear on its shoulders the full brunt of the battle against the raging epidemics of our time, and to carry out the critical work of restoring the health [ozdorovlenie] of Russian cities.78

The author’s conception of Moscow as a sick city, both in terms of its frail infrastructure and its

infected population, presents a vivid snapshot of the new Soviet capital at the end of the

revolutionary period. It also reflects a sense of personal commitment on the part of its residents

to restore the city’s former face. Indeed, the revival of Moscow would be portrayed throughout

the NEP period as a project to bring back the beautiful maiden that the city had once been, only

this time with a decidedly redder tint.79 The author’s use of the Russian ozdorovlenie,

meanwhile, adds a tender note to describe both the literal curing of epidemics and the implied

sense of restoring life to the country’s ailing urban areas.

The conviction among communal economy workers that they were carrying out a great

task was accompanied by the frustration, among some in their ranks, that their efforts had not

received due recognition. A concern that his colleagues were being relegated to a second-tier

proletariat was voiced by one P. Pronin in the pages of the official journal of the MKKh. In an

article titled “Little Attention,” Pronin wrote that there was scant mention in the press and in

official statements about the restoration of the communal economy; all the attention was given to

the “industrial proletariat” in mining and manufacturing at the expense of the “service

proletariat” [obsluzhivaiushchii proletariat], that is, the workers of the communal economy, who

78 “G.,” “Bor’ba s epidemiiami i kommunal’nye rabochie,” Golos Kommunal’nika No. 1 (September 12, 1921), p. 3. 79 One illustration in the satirical journal Krokodil shows city workers patching up the face of Moscow, presented as a slightly battered but still beautiful maiden, and preparing to replace her traditional kokoshnik with a red sash. See M. Cheremnykh, “Poeziia remonta,” Krokodil No. 8 (October 15, 1922), p. 16. 44 furnished the first group with all their living needs. “With the transition to peacetime construction,” Pronin concluded, “the communal economy workers must take their place in the ranks of the industrial proletariat and enjoy the same privileges.”80 The emergent distinction between a greater and lesser working class would become increasingly pronounced during the

NEP period, when relative state laxity allowed for a relapse into less demanding pre- revolutionary professions, and would prefigure the stratification of the working class into the privileged super-achievers and the average rest that accompanied the industrialization campaigns of the 1930s. For now, the “service proletariat” in the communal economy would fulfill a thankless but necessary function in the task of socialist construction, leaving little time to worry about anything else.

The experience of the union of communal economy workers shows that Moscow’s municipal working class was fighting to implement socialist principles in daily practice even before the Bolshevik revolution turned that effort into a nationwide goal. By demanding fair wages and working to maintain the functioning of urban services in the absence of state oversight, municipal workers illustrate the conception put forward in this thesis of the communal economy project as a “popular socialist offensive” — a push for the construction of socialism that generated momentum from public initiative and engagement rather than from the imperatives of the state. Indeed, much of the preceding chapter is an illustration of municipal officials working to keep the urban infrastructure running despite the deficiencies and disorganization of the new Soviet government, a theme that will reemerge throughout this text. It suggests that the socialist effort was a more bottom-up approach than is often acknowledged.

80 P. Pronin, “Malo vnimaniia,” Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo No. 8 (December 1921), p. 2. Some contemporary scholars have likewise noted that “historians and even Soviet officials have tended to ignore the service sector” when discussing the working class; see Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis, p. 233. 45

Conclusion

If St. Petersburg had been the cradle of the revolution, then Moscow became the “cradle of the proletariat,” as it was called in one manual for workers of the communal economy: the city where former peasants and other members of the shapeless masses would be molded into a proper working class.81 The Bolshevik state initiated this transformation from the sanitary front, enacting policies to clear Russia's major urban center from epidemics and instill a culture of cleanliness through the campaign for sanitary enlightenment. The battle against dirt and diseases became the rallying cry around which the Bolsheviks mobilized the population for the new war to build socialism at home.

At the same time, the new Moscow government began to develop a system of centralized control over the provision of public services in the city, with the restoration of public hygiene enterprises emerging as a key component of this task. The state takeover of bathhouses and other hygienic enterprises did not, however, result in the effective cleanup of the city or its inhabitants.

Lack of central oversight from the upper levels of the district councils and the Mossovet, administrative chaos within individual district councils, and the inexperience of leadership and staff resulted in a muddled implementation of the state’s hygienic directives that revealed the deficiencies of municipal governance at the start of NEP. That the city continued to function at all was rather the achievement of individual proprietors, low-level municipal officials, and workers of the communal economy united under the common banner of rebuilding Russia’s cities. In Moscow, the state-led initiative to restore the communal economy of the new socialist capital turned into a communal project in its own right, serving as a vehicle for the socialization

81 P. V. Sytin, Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo (blagoustroistvo) Moskvy (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1926), p. 1. 46 of its inhabitants to a new and collective urban environment. The effects of this process and the social tensions it produced will be explored in the next chapter.

CHAPTER TWO

The Banya in the Social Transition of Early NEP

In September 1921, the director of Moscow’s public Banya No.1 sent a letter to his district council with an urgent request — his fourth of that year — for the provision of basic supplies to keep the bathhouse running. Among the items which he sought were 25 pairs of rubber gloves, ten packs of matches, hanging padlocks, and short-bristle brushes for cleaning.

“In its current state, the condition of the baths continues to worsen both from a technical and a sanitary perspective,” warned the director, A. Dzegilenko, whose first name has been lost to the formalities of Soviet bureaucratese. “While the administration is taking all possible measures, the absence of the most elementary supplies and materials makes bringing the bathhouse into a better condition impossible.”82

By the fall of 1921, Dzegilenko’s Banya No. 1 was one of two bathhouses struggling to serve the nearly 300,000 residents of Moscow’s most heavily-populated central district.83

Formerly known as the opulent Central Baths and located steps away from the Bolshoi Theater, the establishment had steadily descended since the war into a catastrophic state. Visitors to the bathhouse were greeted with broken windows, rotting walls, sagging ceilings and leaky faucets that squandered precious supplies of water.84 Repairs to the heating and drainage systems, which the bathhouse leadership had demanded for months, remained unfulfilled due to the Moscow

82 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 24-25, 27. 83 The Sub-Department of Small Municipal Enterprises in Moscow’s central Gorodskoi district reported having only two bathhouses, Nos. 1 and 4, operating in its jurisdiction in September 1921, TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 37. The population estimate comes from a March 1922 report by the district Health Department. TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 126, ll. 94-96. 84 Inspection reports of the bathhouse from July 1921. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 45, 50. 48 government’s lack of funds, threatening the bathhouse with closure before the onset of the winter season.85

As the bitter Russian frosts approached, the immediate concern of the bathhouse administration was to prevent the building from collapse. But in the effort to keep the establishment running, Dzegilenko and his staff were stepping onto the frontlines of a bigger battle that would pit them not only against the deficits of the overstretched Soviet government, but against the social tensions produced by a traditional Russian society transitioning into the new caste system of a modern socialist state.

The emergence of workers as the central privileged class of the new system was reflected in the topics of discussions, conflicts and complaints that surrounded the construction of the communal economy at the onset of the 1920s. Within the public hygiene sphere, a political emphasis on the ability and right of workers to bathe began to animate the arguments of city officials, banya employees and regular citizens who pushed for municipal services in conditions of shortage and bureaucratic disarray. In the process, individuals began to display a new social consciousness that applied Bolshevik notions of worker’s rights to the problems of the urban environment. One’s attitude toward the bathhouse and its functioning became a gauge of commitment to the socialist project at large.

The Public Bathhouse as a Contested Space

During the transitional period of NEP, urban spaces of communal use became arenas for the development and practice of new social identities, as individuals sought to find their footing

85 Letter to the Communal Economy Department of the Gorodskoi district from the heads of the economic and technical sections of Bathhouse No. 1, July 1921. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 44, 44a. 49 in the shifting hierarchy of the post-revolutionary system. For most urban dwellers, the major change came with the new emphasis on collective identity promoted by the Bolshevik state. This emphasis was manifested in real changes made to the urban fabric of the city, through which the state sought to transform formerly individualistic aspects of habitation, dining, shopping and transportation into collective experiences that would encourage the development of the new

Soviet man. The early crackdown on private property and the packing of residents into newly

“municipalized” apartments, the creation of state-run stores and cafeterias, and the development of city-wide networks of public transportation were some of the main ways in which the

Bolsheviks began to implement their communizing agenda from their earliest days in power, a project that would continue in earnest throughout the NEP period.

Various scholars and observers of the time have remarked on the social and psychological changes wrought by the Bolshevik remaking of the city into a collective living space. Following his 1926 visit to Moscow, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote of the sense of communality produced by the tactile experience of travel on the city’s hectic tram system, an observation which he associated with the leveling of classes in the newly socialist city.86 More recently, the Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym has explored the communal apartment as “the central archaeological site” of Soviet civilization, where the public intrusion into private life — a condition which Boym calls “performance disruption” — led to the development of psychopathologies such as secrecy, envy and embarrassment that became permanent features of Soviet collective living.87

Most relevant to the present thesis is Marjorie Hilton’s delightful study of retail spaces as sites of social contestation in the latter half of the 1920s. Using customer complaints submitted to

86 Walter Benjamin, "Moscow" in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 111-112. 87 Boym, Common Places, pp. 26, 146-149. 50 newspapers and store response books, Hilton analyzes late-NEP Soviet retail centers as places where consumers, employees and citizen journalists worked to define the “behaviors, attitudes, procedures, and practices they believed consistent with a socialist society.”88 With the waning of the imperial retail legacy, characterized by the conception of sales as a professional sphere and the practice of differentiating customers based on their ability to pay, NEP consumers and retail employees were forced to reinterpret their relations in a new system that proclaimed them to be equals as workers of the Soviet state. In their encounters on the sales floor, each party began to

“filter past experiences and expectations through the discourses of revolution” to assert his or her right to acquire a good or refuse service to a nagging customer.89 By following the tales of

“frustrated consumption”90 that peppered the publications of NEP, Hilton shows that what was ultimately at stake was the credibility of the state promise to provide basic goods and raise the standard of living for the average Soviet citizen.

The public bathhouse emerges as another contested space of the NEP period, one in which the social processes described by Hilton were transposed to the sphere of public hygiene at the very start of the decade. The massive urban demand for bathing facilities — combined with their woefully inadequate supply — produced an entire genre of what can be described as

“frustrated bathing” stories, in which hopeful citizens sought the municipal services they had been promised only to find themselves in absurd or humiliating situations brought on by the shortcomings of the state. Amid the subsequent finger-pointing between municipal officials, state inspectors and regular citizens, discussions of the bathhouse began to acquire the vocabulary of class distinctions and animosities that were developing in the new workers’ society.

88 Hilton (January 2009), p. 3. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., p. 11. 51

This trend is reflected in a humorous sketch by the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, who based his stories of the Soviet bathhouse on real citizen letters published in the newspapers of the time. The most well-known of these works describes the narrator’s spat over a shortage of buckets that quickly takes on revolutionary overtones:

I look for a pail. I notice a citizen who’s washing himself in three buckets. He stands in one, soaps his head in another, and holds onto the third with his left hand so that no one will swipe it.

I pulled the third pail toward me, trying to appropriate it, but the citizen wouldn’t let go of it.

“What’s the idea,” he said, “stealing other peoples’ buckets? If I smack you between the eyes with this bucket you wouldn’t like it.”

I said, “This isn’t the czarist regime, that you can go around bashing people with buckets. What selfishness!”91

In the Bolshevik lexicon, individuals who were perceived as hindering the collective good of the socialist state were labeled as sympathizers of the imperial government or as members of the exploitative bourgeoisie. The distinctions between worker and bourgeois, good and bad, new and old carried over from the revolution and wove into the new urban rhetoric, which adapted the militarized and antagonistic tones of revolutionary speech to peacetime use. In the Soviet bathhouse, as in Soviet life more broadly, pretenses to self-indulgence, comfort or luxury were presented as holdovers from the old regime and drew swift public condemnation. Zoshchenko’s narrator serves as an introduction to the real-life cast of characters who battled over the banya in an effort to meet the demands set for the bathhouse by the state.

The following section will explore one administrative battle in the public hygiene sphere as a case study of the new social tensions that characterized urban life at the onset of NEP. The case follows Dzegilenko, the Moscow bathhouse director introduced in the opening of this

91 Mikhail Zoshchenko, “The Bathhouse” in Nervous People and Other Satires, trans. Maria Gordon and Hugh McLean (New York: Vintage, 1965), p. 132. Admittedly, the author was describing experiences that had occurred in Leningrad in the 1920s, but the situation was comparable, if not worse, in Moscow.

52 chapter, in his attempt to procure desperately needed repairs to his facility in the fall of 1921. As the municipal government failed to provide the necessary help, Dzegilenko found himself on the defensive against a representative of the state inspection unit who attacked the director’s performance on ideological grounds. The ensuing correspondence shows how both parties used revolutionary notions of class, privilege and responsibility to defend their own performance, while critiquing the position of the other as inconsistent with the values of the new socialist state.

The remainder of the chapter will examine the broader discourse related to the bathhouse within the public and the press that reflected distinctly socialist ways of thinking about the role of municipal enterprises in the new worker’s society.

The Case of Comrade Dzegilenko

From the beginning of the 1920s, a major source of conflict between public bathhouses and their regulators in the Mossovet was the latter’s insistence that bathhouses satisfy the massive demand for public hygiene, even as the city lacked the resources to equip the bathhouses for this task. Beyond the devastating conditions of the banyas themselves, this discrepancy between ends and means resulted in the bathhouse administration and staff slipping over difficulties in practically every aspect of their daily work. When the staff of Dzegilenko’s Banya

No. 1 needed water-resistant uniforms, the central district’s Sub-Department of Public Hygiene regretted to inform them that it had 230 square feet of tarpaulin to spare, but that the workers would have to sew the uniforms themselves (and that, as a reminder, those uniforms would remain the property of the city).92 In another instance, a letter from Dzegilenko to the district

92 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 97. The measurement of the tarpaulin was given as 100 arshins, an antiquated Russian form of measurement that equals approximately 233 square feet. 53 council asking for additional guards to combat the systematic theft of the bathhouse supply of firewood — an injustice perpetrated “not only by those residents living in the bathhouse courtyards, but by regular citizens walking by in the nighttime” — appears to have produced no response at all.93

While it could offer little assistance to its municipal enterprises, the Moscow city government was quick to transmit its own directives when it needed something done. This included ordering bathhouses to extend their working hours for special occasions, or to provide unpaid entry to important workers and representatives of the state. Around the same time that

Dzegilenko penned his September letter asking the city for matches, padlocks and gloves — a request that likewise seems to have gone unanswered — the Mossovet ordered that Banya No.1 be reserved for a day of free use by the visiting delegates of the All-Russian Textile Workers’

Union, numbering a total of 450 individuals.94

Those who suffered most from this administrative tug of war were regular Moscow residents, the majority of whom were still no closer to getting washed. Given their shortage of materials and staff, most of the city’s bathhouses worked for only several days a week, during which they were plagued by overcrowding and theft.95 In the summer of 1921, Dzegilenko’s bathhouse operated three days a week — Thursdays from 3-9 pm, and Fridays and Saturdays from 1-9 pm — and had, out of a total of 30 private bathing cabins, only two that were not found to be in a completely run-down state.96 The bathhouse also suffered from a severe lack of rudimentary bathing materials. According to several reports, Banya No. 1 served up to six

93 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 104. 94 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 14. 95 In the central Gorodskoi district, a committee of local bathhouse workers petitioned the district council to raise the price of clothing storage to at least 200 rubles from the current 30 rubles, arguing that the latter amount was completely insufficient to cover the cost of clothing that was constantly being stolen on the premises. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 147. 96 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 52. 54 thousand people per day with a supply of only 100 wash-buckets per 500 visitors, a situation that led disgruntled patrons to arrive at the bathhouse with their own pots and pans.97

As his requests for materials throughout the year went unanswered and the conditions in the bathhouse continued to decline, Dzegilenko found himself in what increasingly looked like a two-front war. While he fought the state bureaucracy over assistance to carry out the important public task assigned to him, the embattled director began to face pressure from another branch of the state that sought to present the hardships of the bathhouse as his own personal failure.

The new opponent came in the form of inspector Razumovskii, a representative of the recently-formed Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (RKI or Rabkrin). This early body of workers’ control consisted mainly of unskilled workers and former peasants eager to join in the task of socialist construction. The members of Rabkrin conducted snap inspections of factories, stores and other Soviet enterprises to produce reports that were meant to address shortcomings in the observance of proletarian standards.98 In practice, the inspection reports reflected what one scholar described as “a narrow coercive approach” that elicited the ire of the organization’s initiator, Vladimir Lenin, who had envisioned Rabkrin’s role as “not so much in ‘catching’ and

‘exposing’ (lovit’ and izoblichat’), as in knowing how ‘to put things right in good time’ (umet’ popravit’... vovremia).”99

Razumovskii appears to have conducted his first inspection of Banya No. 1 in July 1921, when he found the bathhouse in a deplorable state. Noting the sagging ceilings and rotting walls that would plague the building into the fall, the inspector emphasized that the bathhouse was

97 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 52, 184, 425. One report noted that individuals waiting in line to enter the bathhouse were holding what appeared to be pots from their own kitchen. 98 Rabkrin was formed in 1920 upon Lenin’s request to involve a broad mass of workers and peasants in inspection work; by 1922, fewer than 10 percent of its members were industry specialists or possessed a higher education. See Michael Perrins, “Rabkrin and Workers’ Control in Russia 1917-1934,” European Studies Review Vol. 10, No. 2 (1980), pp. 230-231. 99 Ibid., p. 232. 55 nevertheless maintained in an acceptable state “through the painstaking efforts of the employees,” and that the defects cited in his report had been previously “directed [to the attention of officials] in a timely manner, but requests for repairs had been declined.”100

Dzegilenko and his staff, who had been present when Razumovskii conducted the inspection, used the report several days later to urge the district council to carry out the necessary repairs within the current season.101 For a time, at least, the bathhouse director and the workers’ inspector appeared to be on the same page.

By October, something had changed. After returning to the bathhouse at the beginning of the month, this time as the head of a special commission to investigate the premises (and with

Dzegilenko and staff once again present), Razumovskii produced a report that, while highly descriptive of the bathhouse interior, was breathtaking in its harshness. “We can observe such impossible and impermissible scenes,” Razumovskii wrote, “as dirt, trash and spider webs throughout, while the bathrooms look like some kind of cesspool of impurities or a suburban dump…in which all the contents of the pipes spill out onto the floor and down the staircase to the street […] A bathhouse in the city center in such an anti-sanitary condition is unacceptable, and the carelessness of its management is criminal.”102

After describing additional horrors in the common sections of the bathhouse, the inspector concluded:

In a word, this is not a bathhouse but some kind of nightmare, and in its current state one does not go there to wash himself of his own dirt, but rather to get a fill of the new bathhouse dirt, not to mention that the administration and the staff are capable of making repairs and improvements, but should be faulted for the carelessness, negligence, and complete unwillingness of either side to improve the state of the bathhouse...Such a chaotic state in a bathhouse has never been observed by me anywhere.103

100 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 52. 101 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 51. 102 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 222. 103 Ibid. 56

The damning report on the allegedly criminal conditions of Banya No. 1 prompted an unusually swift response from the city’s higher-ups. One day after the special commission heard

Razumovskii’s report, the Moscow Directorate of Public Hygiene Enterprises sent a request to the presidium of the central district council, asking the latter to remove “com. Dzegilenko” from his position as “a figure who doesn’t correspond to his designation.”104 The letter stated that the

“Directarate,” as it was repeatedly misspelled in the text, asks to replace the accused director with someone “more energetic,” and to hold the latter legally responsible for bringing the bathhouse to its unsanitary state.105

A week later, Razumovskii submitted a second proposal based on his earlier inspection of the bathhouse, in which he finally let his class consciousness shine. Finding Dzegilenko

completely out of place, when such a director likes only comfort and convenience, and who, it seems to me, doesn’t even look into the bathhouse, at least not into the common peoples’ sections, and probably doesn’t even know where the doors are that lead to them, I propose for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate to recommend…his immediate removal or replacement with a more suitable, although perhaps a less elegant alternative.106

By evoking the imagery of self-indulgence that became associated with the discredited bourgeoisie, the member of the proletarian inspection unit sought to indict Dzegilenko on ideological grounds. The bathhouse director, according to Razumovskii, took care of himself at the expense of the working class, who were made to suffer the indignities that reigned in his establishment. It is unclear what prompted this shift in Razumovskii’s rhetoric compared to the benign assessment which he had given the bathhouse leadership only three months prior. But whatever its cause, the change in tone reflected the rapidly shifting social dynamics of the period upon which one’s entire career prospects could rest. Unfortunately for the inspector, Dzegilenko had caught on to this fact as well.

104 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 221. 105 Ibid. The recently literate authors of the letter, judging by the numerous errors in the text, spelled the Russian upravlenie [directorate] as uprovlenie. 106 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 223. 57

On October 22, ten days after Razumovskii’s offensive, the director of Banya No. 1 dispatched a report marked “URGENT” to the central district council. In it, Dzegilenko responded point by point to the accusations made against him in the inspector’s report. After pointing out that his numerous requests to procure cleaning supplies and construction materials from the city had gone unanswered, Dzegilenko asked how it could be possible that multiple sanitary commissions had inspected his bathhouse, and all but Razumovskii’s found the conditions to be satisfactory, and even exemplary, in comparison to other bathhouses in the city.

Now, Dzegilenko wrote,

the special commission headed by Razumovskii – formed by unknown individuals on an unknown initiative – finds all of these issues [with the bathhouse]. It writes that impurities contained in the pipes flow across the floor, the stairs, the walls and down to the street. How is it, and is it even possible, that no one else but the “Special Commission” could notice this and raise this issue? What this means is that all of this is rubbish and an injustice, and of course none of it exists.

… As regards com. Razumovskii, the leadership of the bathhouse thinks it best to refrain from any explanations, in the fear that it would come to the conclusion that com. Razumovskii compiled this report with the “Special Commission” with the goal of proving the bathhouse leadership incapable of carrying out its work, and in so doing to transfer the bathhouse into private hands.107

With the mention of private ownership, the supreme evil to the socialist state even during the relative laxity of NEP, Dzegilenko fired the final salvo in the war of words against his counterpart. By implying that the special commission headed by Razumovskii had been a ploy to wrest a politically important establishment out of state hands — a claim that remained unsubstantiated and may well have been untrue — the director marshalled the leading antagonisms of the period against his opponent in the inspectorate. While we should be cautious to accept the accusations contained in the reports of either side at face value, the veracity of the claims is not as important as the language and concepts in which they were framed. In their attempt to justify their positions, both men appealed to the values of the Bolshevik state, which viewed energetic efforts to improve the lives of workers as the supreme sign of commitment to

107 Special emphasis added. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 224. 58 the socialist cause — and, by the same token, any action detrimental to the cause as a criminal offense. At the same time, each sought to associate his opponent with the imperial “other” by invoking the notions of comfort, elegance and private ownership that had been discredited by the revolutionary movement. In short, both men — and both of them representatives of official

Soviet bodies — turned the problem of a dilapidated bathhouse into a battle of socialist credentials that reveals the extent to which regular people had begun to employ the categories of

Bolshevik thought by the beginning of the NEP period.108 The ultimate outcome of the battle remains a mystery; no records of further action against the bathhouse director follow, but a list of employees of Banya No. 1 dating to November of that year identifies Dzegilenko as the continuing head of the establishment.109

One week after Dzegilenko sent his defense to the district council, the sewage system of

Banya No. 1 finally burst, flooding the basement of a neighboring building.110 The scene of the flood could have come from Razumovskii’s report, save for one minor detail: the flooding was caused not by the negligence of the bathhouse director, but by the floundering of the new

Moscow government, which could not provide the struggling bathhouse with necessary repairs.

The inability to match resources to the ambitious public provisions mandated by the state would continue to plague the Soviet Union and its citizens for the duration of the country’s existence. In the public hygiene sphere of early NEP, this resulted in the airing of perceived injustices on the part of bathhouse employees, regular workers and the press, who held the state accountable for failing to deliver on its promises in the critical functions of the communal economy. The

108 It may be too early to apply Stephen Kotkin’s notion of “speaking Bolshevik” to the present case, given the more improvisational nature of NEP-era socialist speech as compared to the formalized language of Stalininsm. But the correspondence suggests that both men were consciously using revolutionary terminology to win an argument that stemmed from genuine indignation experienced on either side. For the origin of the concept, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 109 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 327. 110 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 236. 59 language and argumentation of these complaints reveals an early identification among urban residents with the new values of the socialist state, and a desire to participate in the socialist restructuring of Moscow at its most basic level.

Complaints about the Banya as Early Socialist Engagement

In April 1924, 23-year-old urban resident Alexander Yakovlev, the child of a landowning family and a military engineer by training, wrote a diary entry about his activities for that day.

After noting, as usual, the time he woke up, Yakovlev reported that he had attended a series of lectures, read newspapers at the local workers’ club, and went to the banya to have a good wash.

“This time I had really neglected it and hadn’t been to the banya for a whole three weeks,” he wrote. “I won’t slip up like that again.”111

In the years following the revolution, timely visits to the bathhouse became part of the standard repertoire for a model proletarian. The state’s early exhortations to observe personal hygiene amid the years of warfare and epidemics settled into a steady stream of public cleanliness campaigns that continued throughout the 1920s. Yet persistent shortages of fuel, construction materials and bathing supplies meant that most bathhouses worked only the state- mandated minimum of three days per week.112 As a result, workers were able to visit the bathhouse approximately once a month and in conditions of massive overcrowding, which put a strain on bathhouse visitors and employees alike.

111 Alexander Iakovlev, diary entry of April 8, 1924, Prozhito electronic resource, http://prozhito.org/person/857. Accessed February 8, 2019. 112 In September 1921, the Banya Section of the Directorate of Public Hygiene Enterprises of the MKKh implemented a three-day per week minimum for the functioning of Moscow bathhouses. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 59. According to reports from the public hygiene departments of individual district councils, this regulation was observed, at least on paper, across the districts of the city. 60

The final section of this chapter looks at examples from the social discourse surrounding workers’ access to the banyas, in which the dire bathing prospects for the average worker and the pursuit of special bathing privileges emerged as two central points of concern for the newly socializing urban population. This section will also examine the sense of responsibility that public hygiene enterprises began to adopt towards their own employees as part of the broader state focus on workers’ needs. Throughout these examples, individuals can be seen to filter their stories of frustration through the discourse of socialist values that had begun to take hold as

Russian cities worked to rebuild themselves from wartime destruction. The active engagement of regular citizens, city officials and members of the press in the public discourse around the communal economy shows an early demand among the population for the restructuring of

Moscow along a socialist blueprint — a project whose lack of fulfilment during the fits and starts of the NEP period would eventually require a more decisive approach by the state.

Workers’ Access to the Bathhouse

Given the significance of the banya as a key site for the formation of the urban proletariat, the ability of workers to access bathing facilities became a major concern for the state in the early years of socialist construction. Ordinary citizens soon adopted this concern as well, a fact that was reflected in their correspondence with municipal officials. One illustrative message came from an employee of Moscow’s Central Telegraph, who wrote to the city’s central district council in August 1921 regarding “scenes of misunderstanding” that he had observed at the entrance to Banya No. 4, the only bathing establishment operating in the district besides the one run by Dzegilenko. Noting that the crowd of predominantly working-class patrons was unhappy

61 with the early closure of the bathhouse, the concerned citizen suggested that its working hours be extended, seeing as “speculators and characters of so-called ‘free labor’ will always find time to go to the bathhouse, but workers, especially those in physical labor, are relieved of their responsibilities late in the day and as a result are often deprived of the opportunity” to bathe.113

According to his report, the citizen took the initiative to speak to the bathhouse administrator regarding the state-mandated closing time, only to learn that the bathhouse functioned on reduced hours due to inadequate water provision by the city. The association of early closing times with anti-Soviet values was echoed in a different message sent to the presidium of the

Baumanskii district council, in which the author bemoaned the absence of trash removal from the district’s state-run cafeterias. “If the Department of Cleaning only works until 5 pm like all the other Soviet saboteurs [sovetskie sabotazhniki],” it read, “then we will soon suffocate in waste.”114

The topic of the “frustrated bather” became a popular theme in the early Soviet press, which used humorous stories to draw attention to the plight of the unbathed worker in the proclaimed workers’ society. Particularly vocal on this subject was the newspaper Gudok, the official mouthpiece of the Russian Railway Workers’ Union — the body that represented a sector of the working class whose hygienic practices had been a particular focus of the Bolshevik leadership. During the early years of NEP, the newspaper ran a section called “Banya woes

[Bannye bedy]” that featured fictionalized vignettes about bathing from various towns across the

RSFSR.115 In “The Adventures of a Naked Person,” a nude railway worker arrives at the office of Gudok with nothing to shield himself but a washbucket and an unused venik, as he tells of his

113 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 62. 114 TsAGM f. 2560, op. 1, d. 35, l. 137. 115 See, for example, Gudok No. 899 (May 17, 1923), p. 4. 62 futile attempts to take a bath while traveling throughout the country.116 Another text under the title “The Road to Calvary (Once More About Banias)” states that Gudok has taken it upon itself to trumpet the woes of the “banya-less and the badly-banya’d [bezbannykh i plokhobannykh],” and promises that the paper will continue to agitate for their interests.117 Throughout these stories, the newspaper adopts a tone as that of an intercessor on the behalf of the suffering workers’ masses, whose collective journey to the bathhouse is portrayed as a test of almost biblical proportions.

For the workers who were able to procure a bath, the trials didn’t end there; the poor condition of the facilities themselves brought on further miseries. A later article in the satirical journal Krokodil, aptly titled “The Sufferer,” tells the story of a “cleanly citizen” who would visit the banya “every month” if not for the dirt that reigned on the premises. Bathing at home wasn’t an option either, however, for this would ruin the floorboards. “Another slovenly swine could, of course, bathe at home if he prizes his own hide over communal property,” the proud citizen concludes, “but I can’t agree to that kind of betrayal of the revolution.”118 As a result, he goes without bathing at all out of deference to the socialist state.

Special Privileges in the Banya

The scarcity of bathing facilities led individuals to seek out special bathing privileges based on their social position in the new urban hierarchy. On the most basic level, those who identified with the Bolshevik government felt themselves logically entitled to the use of the municipal services offered by the state. This concept was apparently simple enough for a child to

116 “Pokhozhdeniia gologo cheloveka,” Gudok No. 244 (October 24, 1925), p. 5. 117 “Khozhdenie po mukam (snovo o baniakh),” Gudok No. 945 (July 12, 1923), p. 4. 118 Luka Nazhdachnyi, “Stradalets,” Krokodil No. 13 (April 1927), p. 5. 63 understand. In a diary entry from 1922, 72-year-old Petrograd resident Fedor Grigor’ev writes about being amused by a ten-year-old boy who cut the line to access the faucet at a local banya:

“People tell him: ‘Where are you going? Get in line.’ And he says triumphantly: ‘I’m a communist!’ There is general laughter, and he’s allowed to pass. Naturally, he’s not a communist, but he evidently knows that for communists the law is not written.”119

After the Moscow government introduced fees for communal services in the fall of 1921, district departments of the communal economy were inundated with requests from private citizens for free or discounted passes to the banya. Often times, individuals requested the use of private bathing cabins [nomera], using as justification their “responsible position” in the workers’ state or their need to secure bathing facilities for a large family.120 In Moscow’s central

Gorodskoi district, these messages were often addressed personally to the head of the district communal economy department, who would usually approve the request.121 In other cases, district departments of public hygiene grew incensed by the large-scale disbursement of free banya passes by the MKKh, which left lower-level officials scrambling to cover the costs of water and facility use.122 In the permissive environment of NEP, citizens sought to try their luck at all levels of the municipal government to procure better access to the bathhouse by presenting their situation as deserving of special assistance from the state.

While district officials appeared to grant banya passes to private individuals at their own discretion, they adopted a more forthcoming approach towards requests made on behalf of workers’ groups from various sectors of the state economy. Such requests were often predicated

119 Fedor Grigor’ev, diary entry for September 21, 1922, Prozhito electronic resource, http://prozhito.org/person/128. Accessed March 8, 2019. 120 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 263-269, 281. One such note came from a man who requested a permanent pass to use a private bathing room at Banya No. 1 for his family, consisting of his wife and four small children. 121 A typical pass to a private bathing cabin was printed on an official MKKh template and included the ticket holder’s name, the name and room number of the banya, and the day of the week and one-hour time slot for which the cabin was reserved. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 275. 122 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 80, l. 199. 64 on the disproportionate rise of communal service fees relative to workers’ wages, and in practice had to be accommodated by municipal authorities. In this way, a representative of the All-

Russian Union of Railway and Military Transport Workers wrote to the local district council to ask that union members be relieved from paying for communal services that month, since their wages had not been raised in line with the latest increase in prices.123 Elsewhere, a member of the committee for the improvement of workers’ conditions at Pochtamt wrote to the Gorodskoi district council to request free banya passes for the workers of the mail service.124 Soon after, the district’s communal economy department announced that free banya tickets would be granted to all workers of enterprises that remained state-funded during NEP.125 These privileges given to the working class were viewed as consistent with socialist values and did not seem to meet with significant opposition from society at large.

More controversial was the granting of favors to administrators or members of the state bureaucracy, whose less labor-intensive work called into question their claim to special privileges in the bathhouse. These favors could be arranged by an order from the Mossovet to individual bathing establishments, such as when the MKKh presented Banya No. 1 with a list of

30 members of the Cheka to be granted use of private bathing cabins.126 Such bureaucratic favoritism persisted into the late years of NEP, with one district council in 1927 conducting secret correspondence with the local police department to furnish the latter with free banya passes.127 High-level administrators sometimes bypassed the public banyas altogether and created exclusive bathing establishments at the enterprises under their command. This practice was criticized in an article titled “Banya Dictatorship,” published in the newspaper

123 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 88, l. 44. 124 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 200. 125 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 179. 126 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 90. 127 TsAGM f. 2149, op. 2, d. 10, ll. 21-24. 65 accompaniment to Krokodil, which argued that the capitalist class had been replaced by a new privileged caste: the administrators of factories and industrial plants. While regular workers had to make do with banyas that were wet, drafty and “narrow as coffins,” the article said, the administrators — along with their deputies, their wives and their friends — had the keys to the good banyas that were as pristine as the Jordan River.128

The pursuit of special privileges in the public hygiene sphere emerged as a coping mechanism for regular citizens dealing with the scarce bathing services of the socialist state.129

At the same time, granting free baths to workers became an outlet through which the state could continue to implement its public hygiene agenda in conditions of shortage. Yet the development of privileged access for bureaucrats and special organs of the state undermined the envisioned social function of the communal economy as a caretaker for the urban working class, revealing the nascent inequalities in the new socialist system.

Banya Workers as Wards of the State

Municipal officials believed that the public bathhouse, as a communal enterprise, was intended to serve not only the urban population but the workers of the bathhouse themselves, who often struggled to keep facilities running in conditions of extreme privation. The majority of banya employees were unskilled workers, many of them former peasants who had relocated to

Moscow with their families in tow. As such, they were precisely the individuals who were supposed to make up the emergent working class that was envisioned to become the backbone of

128 Vomika and Zaletnyi, “Bannaia diktatura,” Kipiatok No. 7 (April 1924), p. 3. 129 In this way, we can see Sheila Fitzpatrick’s survival-oriented “homo Sovieticus,” which she describes as the product of the shortages of the 1930s, begin to emerge already in the preceding decade. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 2. 66 the socialist state. The importance which the state placed on these individuals is reflected in the efforts of municipal administrators to improve the living conditions of their employees, using the language of the revolution to argue for better housing and pay for the new service proletariat.

In contrast to the rich paper trail left by bathhouse administrators, the employees of these establishments remain largely silent. Employee ledgers from the early 1920s show that the typical Moscow bathhouse employed 30-40 individuals, who worked as cashiers, fire-stokers

[kochegar or mashinist], guards, dressing room attendants [razdeval’shchik], and as the most numerous position — the banya assistant [banshchik/tsa], a role that was often occupied by women. The administrative staff of the banya, including the manager and the cashiers, made approximately double the wages of a banshchik, who typically received the lowest pay despite working in the most direct contact with the bathing public.130 All employees, however, had to make do with wages that fell far short of what was needed to comfortably cover the skyrocketing costs of the city’s post-war hyperinflation, which did not stabilize until 1924.131

The social origin of banya workers is evidenced by the continuation of familial peasant traditions among bathhouse staff, as reflected in administrative documents and contemporary reports by observers. Judging by the last names listed in employee ledgers, it was not uncommon for husbands and wives or other family members to seek employment at the same banya.132 Once there, employees could display a simple-hearted lack of formality towards their urban clients, one of whom complained that several banya staff had “allowed themselves to execute the washing of other peoples’ laundry on banya premises, something I consider to be

130 In Banya No. 4 of the Gorodskoi district, the banya manager received 4,800 rubles a month compared to 2,190 for a banshchik (June 1921). TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 64. 131 The year 1921 was particularly difficult economically due to the reintroduction of currency after its abolishment during War Communism, and the end of rationing of consumer goods. On hyperinflation during NEP see Simon Johnson and Peter Temin, “The Macroeconomics of NEP,” The Economic History Review New Series, Vol. 46, No. 4 (November 1993), pp. 750-776. 132 For example, one banya in the Khamovnicheskii district listed among its employees an Arshinov and an Arshinova, a Bazarov and a Bazarova, and three Kolontaevs. TsAGM f. 2369, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 20, 23. 67 unacceptable.”133 Elsewhere, an inventory conducted at a bathhouse revealed the presence of multiple religious icons displayed in the corridor, the washing area, the first-level men’s room and the boiler room.134 While not decisively indicative of rural origin, these touches of traditional peasant life suggest that a significant number of bathhouse employees came from a non-urban background and brought their practices to bear in their work at the municipal bathhouse.135

A further indication that many bathhouse workers were newcomers to the city comes from the efforts of banya administrators to provide their employees with badly needed housing.

The sense of responsibility that bathhouse establishments felt for their workers is illustrated by a fervent campaign by the head of economic affairs at Banya No. 1, Ivan Avraamovich Bak, to secure suitable living space for his staff. In August 1921, Bak sent a message to the presidium of the Gorodskoi district council regarding the status of apartments for workers and employees of the banya. Earlier that year, he wrote, the city had granted an apartment in a building adjacent to the bathhouse to be used for a workers' dormitory, but the defective sewage and water systems, as well as the absence of stovetops for cooking food, delayed their move-in. Now the repairs were almost done, and Bak asked that additional rooms be given to house the workers, 40 percent of whom lived on the outskirts of the city. The remaining workers were crammed into the apartment whose rooms were intended for 10-15 people but housed families of 20-30 people each, with small children who had been brought from the villages to escape hunger sleeping on the floor.

133 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 80. 134 TsAGM f. 1474, op. 7, d. 189, l. 158. 135 The continuation of village networks and traditions following urban in-migration, and their role in easing the peasant transition to urban life, is explored in detail in David Hoffman’s Peasant Metropolis (1994). While the study focuses on the 1930s, it identifies patterns that can be observed already during NEP, particularly in the chapters on “The Urban Environment and Living Standards” and “The Workplace as Contested Space.” 68

After multiple attempts to address the problem, Bak went to see an official at the district council, who declined to listen to his request for additional rooms and threatened to evict the workers already living in the apartment. An indignant Bak wrote of the meeting:

And here comes the exclamation and the question [i zdes’ to vosklitsanie i vopros]: Merkulov apparently is a member of the committee for the improvement of workers’ living conditions and by his appearance could pass for a worker himself [smakhivaet na rabochego], but in practice he is really a bourgeois-bureaucrat [burzhui-biurokrat], who, without having finished listening to my request...threatened [the workers with] arrest.”136

Bak’s use of revolutionary terminology to label as a “bourgeois” an official who refused assistance to rank-and-file workers reflects a sense of solidarity with the employees of his establishment, along with the expectation that any city official — though technically placed higher than a bathhouse employee — must show concern for the plight of the proletariat to which he likewise belongs.

A similar concern for workers’ welfare appeared in a different area of the public hygiene sphere, when the head of Laundromat No. 1, M. Fedorova, wrote to the Zamoskvoretskii district council regarding hungry workers in her establishment. The workers’ current monthly wages lasted them only a week, Fedorova wrote, as a result of which her employees “fall ill and drop from lack of eating, there are those who haven’t eaten anything for 2-3 days, and such occurrences strongly reflect on the work” of the laundromat.137 Stressing that life had become

“unbearable,” Fedorova asked the council to “turn Your attention to the workers and staff” of the establishment, a request which the latter appeared to address: soon after Fedorova’s correspondence, the economic department of the district council sent a message to the presidium asking to raise the workers’ pay.

The examples of municipal administrators interceding on behalf of their workers, many of whom were likely illiterate and could not fend for themselves, reflects the presence of a

136 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 67. 137 TsAGM f. 1616, op. 3, d. 85, l. 98. 69 genuine belief in the promise of the revolution to improve the living conditions of the working class. As the new socialist capital worked to transform its recently arrived masses into a clean and energetic proletariat, workers both in and outside of the bathhouse found allies among representatives of the Moscow communal economy, who were among the most engaged in the effort to reorient the city towards workers’ needs. The language of the revolution which these individuals employed to argue their case was part of the broader social transformation away from pre-revolutionary notions of service and privilege and towards a new socialist value system that began to take hold amid, and in spite of, the surface-level relaxations of NEP.

Conclusion

As Russian society recovered from years of warfare at the dawn of the 1920s, a social transformation had begun to take hold in the country’s leading urban areas. In the new socialist capital, Bolshevik notions of class relations — centered on the privileged status of the working class — filtered down to the city administration and the population at large, animating public efforts to restructure the city in accordance with the new demands of the socialist state. The communal economy, as a leading component of this project, became a sphere in which city officials, members of the press and inspection units, and regular citizens adopted the discourse of the revolution to agitate for the implementation of socialist values in everyday practice. The discourse about the bathhouse that emerges in administrative documents, newspaper reports and private correspondence of this period shows the extent to which Bolshevik thought had begun to penetrate society by the beginning of NEP. Nearly a decade before the onset of Stalinism, regular

70 citizens began to use the lexicon of class antagonism to push for socialist objectives and pursue their own interests in the new urban environment.

At the same time, the critiques surrounding the communal economy revealed how far the

Bolshevik leadership still had to go to implement their vision. The chronic shortage of supplies in the bathhouse transformed what was meant to be a collective cleansing experience into a mad scramble for a bath, which in turn bred hostility among workers in their relations to one another and towards their superiors in the labor force and state administration. Meanwhile, special privileges for banya use began to appear early in the decade, in a foreshadowing of the stratification that would become a standard feature of Soviet society by the 1930s. The public discussion about the banya, focused on the shoddy conditions afforded to rank-and-file workers and the preference granted to the powerful and well-placed few, shows an early public awareness of the shortcomings of NEP in delivering on the social promises of the revolution.

The problems that beset the public bathhouse pointed to the bigger problem that state-run establishments, meant for the servicing and socialization of the working class, could not function effectively in the conditions of shortage and competition that reigned during NEP. The third and final chapter of this thesis will turn to the economic component of the communal economy, placing the bathhouse within the broader ecosystem of state-run and private establishments operating in 1920s Moscow. It will show how the retention of the public bathhouse under state control throughout the NEP period created an increasingly untenable situation, whereby these establishments were asked to fulfill important political and social demands without access to the revenues afforded by the new possibilities of the NEP economy. Their resulting economic difficulties, and the attendant social discontent, reveal the limits to socialist construction in the

71 environment of NEP that pushed the state towards a decisive policy shift by the turn of the decade.

CHAPTER THREE

The NEP Challenge to the Communal Economy

In the Bolshevik effort to construct the socialist city, economic policy became another major prong of the battle to dismantle the old system of urban social relations. This effort began with the move to replace “bourgeois trade” with “socialist trade” through the curtailment of private trade and private ownership, followed by the replacement of market mechanisms with the distribution system of War Communism, which reallocated goods to prioritized groups in the new socialist society — namely, soldiers and the working class. As key components of the envisioned communal city, the bathhouse and other public hygiene enterprises became an important “good” which the state sought to deliver to the greatest number of workers at the lowest possible cost. Yet the impoverishment of the state following years of revolution forced the Bolsheviks, after their initial radical intrusion into the economy, to reintroduce market elements that carried the risk of stalling the socialist project when it had only just begun.

If we are to treat the years 1918-1921 as a “crisis period” for the Bolsheviks, as Julie

Hessler persuasively shows it to be in her study of Soviet trade, then the onset of NEP in 1921 heralded a new period of normalization, in which a revival of trade and the reemergence of a consumer market served as pressure valves to relieve the acute shortages of the era. At the same time, the state continued to pursue its domestic revolution by introducing state-run networks of stores, cafeterias and other enterprises that entered into competition with the maligned but tolerated alternatives now offered by the Nepmen.138 The state project caught on with the cultural avant-garde of the 1920s, who engaged with the thriving consumer culture of NEP to produce

138 On the Bolshevik effort to encourage Soviet consumption during NEP, see, in particular, Randi Cox’s chapter on Soviet advertising in Kiaer and Naiman, Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia (2006), and Nataliia Lebina’s discussion of standardized distribution of food, housing and clothing in Lebina, Sovetskaia povsednevnost’ (2016). 73

“socialist” variants of household goods, clothing and advertisements that were meant to encourage the formation of a distinctly Soviet consumer.139 In short, beneath the market relaxations introduced by NEP, the Bolshevik state and its supporters continued to wage a fierce battle to preserve and expand on the victories of the revolution by enforcing socialist principles in the daily consumption practices of the population to the extent that economic conditions allowed.

The experience of the communal economy supports this latter view of NEP as a time of continued struggle for the implementation of the Bolshevik agenda in everyday life. While most spheres of urban trade were opened to competition, the communal economy — and its sensitive public hygiene sector in particular — remained under tenacious state regulation, even as its less essential enterprises were allowed to pass into private hands. The bathhouse, as the centerpiece of public hygiene, was forced to continue operating on terms set by the state, which emphasized affordable access for the working class. When the Moscow government ceased its financing of bathhouses under the new conditions of NEP, the latter were left to continue fulfilling the state’s hygienic mandate on quickly depleting resources which they could not restore without reneging on their social contract with the urban proletariat. This chapter explores the plight of public hygiene enterprises at the onset of NEP, using the experience of the bathhouse to argue that a socialist approach to public hygiene provision was ultimately incompatible with the market environment of the period. This reality created an untenable situation that suggested the need for a policy correction if the socialist model of urban reconstruction was to survive.

139 See Christina Kiaer, “The Russian Constructivist ‘Object’ and the Revolutionizing of Everyday Life, 1921- 1929,” PhD diss., (University of California, Berkeley, 1995) and Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 74

The NEPification of Public Hygiene

The state takeover of bathhouses and other small municipal enterprises was a measure that initially existed only on paper. As we saw in Chapter One, the actual implementation of municipal ownership throughout the city districts was a chaotic affair, in which local administrators worked with practically no supervision from the Moscow center to institute systems of inventorization, budgeting and administration largely from scratch. Compounding their difficulties was the ruinous state of most bathing establishments, which had fallen into disrepair during the revolutionary period. By the time the Mossovet proclaimed universal free access to banyas in the spring of 1921, it was essentially offering citizens free use of dilapidated and overcrowded facilities that hardly could pass as a legitimate sanitary service of the kind that had been promised by the socialist state.

The free provision of bathing services proved to be short-lived. Faced with the urgent need to streamline the work of public hygiene enterprises and to repair facilities amid a shortage of funds, the MKKh proposed in the fall of 1921 to begin transferring oversight of these establishments into the hands of private individuals or workers’ collectives on the basis of lease agreements [arenda].140 The financing of these enterprises would no longer come exclusively from the state but from a mixture of state assistance and commercial income. In the transfer process, the Mossovet adopted a different approach towards each of the three types of public hygiene enterprises — banyas, laundromats and barbershops — based on their necessity to the state. Barbershops, as the least essential to hygiene policy, were taken off state funding and

140 TsAGM f. 2313, op. 1, d. 2, l. 12. According to the stipulations for lease agreements outlined in the official journal of the MKKh, leases would last for a period of 1-5 years and operate on the principle of “maximum benefit” to the communal economy. As such, leases should be granted through a system of bargaining and include terms that were more favorable to the state than those typically granted to a private lessee. See “Arenda i kontsessii v kommunal’nom khoziaistve,” Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo No. 8 (December 1921), p. 20. 75 would now operate on income from prices set at no less than 30 percent of those found at private barbershops (which had been allowed to remain operational141); the MKKh would continue to fund its professional hairdressing school and purchase materials for all barbershops under its jurisdiction. Laundromats would remain state-run at a quota of ten per district, but any additional laundromats beyond that amount could be rented to state organizations as each district saw fit.

All banyas in the city, however, would remain under the control of the MKKh and the district councils, operating on reduced prices set by the state. Bathhouses that were registered with the city but in practice were not functioning or under repair — a situation that befell up to half of the banyas in some districts — could be rented to workers’ cooperatives, artels or private individuals, but would still remain bound by state-mandated prices and regulations.142 In this way the Moscow government, shortly after it formally seized all municipal property in the city, began to divest itself of costly enterprises while maintaining control over the politically sensitive issues of pricing and access that were crucial to the continued pursuit of hygiene policy. As it was explained in one internal report to the MKKh, “we must admit that the districts, in the absence of commercial experience and technical strength, are not able to manage the enormous number of various enterprises in their jurisdiction [...] The major district enterprises, banyas and laundromats, as having state significance, must be left [under state control] but streamlined in

141 In 1919 the Mossovet decreed a set of fixed prices for services that would apply to both municipal and private barbershops, but these were largely ignored by private establishments, which by the early 1920s were charging significantly higher fees. For the decree see TsAGM f. 2431, op. 1, d. 29, l. 51. 142 “Predpriiatiia obshchestvennoi gigieny” in “Moskovskoe kommunal’noe khoziaistvo za 4 goda revoliutsii,”Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo No. 7 (November 1921), pp. 39-40. This approach to municipal enterprises is essentially consistent with the concepts of “socialist property” and “socialist transactions,” described by Mark Smith as phenomena that could be managed by private individuals but could not produce financial profit or be used to accumulate resources for any entity outside of the state. See Mark Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 76 their economic management…[while] non-functioning banyas and those running a deficit as well as laundromats in need of major repairs should be rented out on special terms.”143

While it may appear that the state was backtracking on its socialist objectives through the partial deregulation of public hygiene, it was in fact attempting to save these enterprises from complete degradation. Lacking the resources to restore the hygiene establishments under its jurisdiction, the Moscow government chose to acquiesce to the lesser evil and allow a measure of non-state management in the less critical sectors of public hygiene while retaining control of the vital functions of the bathhouse. At the same time, the Mossovet made clear that private oversight of its establishments was a form of temporary custodianship that remained at all times subordinate to the socialist imperatives of the state.

Transfer of Ownership

How did the city’s divestment of public hygiene enterprises work in practice?

Sometimes, the pre-1917 owner of an establishment asked to stay on as its head under the leasing terms set by the state, thereby offering his services to the new municipal government.144 This could be a welcome offer from the perspective of the Mossovet, which was beset by a shortage of professionals in the city administration. In other cases, private citizens petitioned the city with a request to oversee an enterprise within the communal economy. In a letter to the Gorodskoi district council, one individual wrote that he would like to open a “model [obraztsovoe] laundromat establishment” in the area and asked to be entrusted with a facility which he would

143 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 80, l. 135. 144 For example, the pre-1917 head of Banya No. 4 in the Gorodskoi district asked his district council to allow him to remain in his position, “as someone familiar with the establishment,” under the terms of a leasing agreement with the MKKh. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 203. 77 run in accordance with the conditions put forward by the MKKh.145 When district councils cleared such requests with their superiors, the Mossovet appeared to have no problem giving them the green light. In the bureaucratic language of the time, the establishment would be

“transferred” to the individual, who would then “receive” it and serve as its custodian under the central supervision of the MKKh.146 In this way the Moscow city government used the more flexible conditions of NEP to enlist the efforts of pre-revolutionary administrators and enthusiastic individuals in the construction of the communal economy, all the while retaining oversight of the general direction of hygiene policy as it was implemented across establishments on the ground.

Even in the process of state takeover of municipal enterprises, Moscow officials could display a surprising degree of accommodation towards existing property holders. In one memorable example, Chinese laundromat owners in the Gorodskoi district were defended by the

MKKh, which told the local public hygiene department that any takeover of the laundromats by the district would have to be approved by the Chinese workers who were the legal owners of the inventory.147 After investigating the issue further, the MKKh found that there were five laundromats registered to “Chinese subjects” in the district and that these were operating on a cooperative basis [na artel’nykh nachalakh], which was permissible under the new regulations.

An inspection of two of the laundromats found that both had been purchased from their previous owners in 1916, were dirty and small, and were staffed by several Chinese workers apiece. The report said it was impossible to glean anything else of value since the laundromat owners “could speak no Russian whatsoever.”148

145 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l, 205. 146 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 206. 147 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 89. 148 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 208. 78

The transfer of municipal establishments to private supervision was not always a smooth process, however. Resistance to such measures periodically arose from within the municipal administration and from state-run enterprises alike. In one instance, the trade union committee of the Glavodezhda clothes factory wrote to its district council that it absolutely refuses to organize a laundromat with a private owner on its premises, unless the latter were a member of the factory council.149 Elsewhere, the department of public hygiene of the Gorodskoi district denied a request from the collective of workers and employees at Banya No. 1 — the establishment beset by problems described in Chapter Two — to transfer them control of the bathhouse on the basis of a lease agreement.150 The department’s refusal of the request with no accompanying explanation could have stemmed from the importance of this particular bathhouse, as the main bathing facility in Moscow’s central district, to the public hygiene agenda of the state. In its divestment of responsibility for the upkeep of hygienic enterprises, the Moscow government was willing to only go so far in relinquishing control over key establishments in the city’s hygiene infrastructure. A similar resistance on the part of individual workers’ collectives revealed an early disdain for the idea of private oversight among the urban working class, a sentiment that would only intensify as NEP policies continued.

The Move towards Economic Self-Sufficiency

The major change wrought by the introduction of NEP to the operation of public hygiene enterprises was the shift towards a new model of profit-and-loss accounting. Variously expressed in the Russian terms khoziaistvennost’, khoziaistvennaia osnova and khozraschet, this concept

149 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 93. 150 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 326. 79 centered on the idea of economic accountability and self-sufficiency of municipal enterprises without the financial backing of the state. Rather than functioning exclusively on state credit, bathhouses, laundromats and barbershops now had to pay for themselves through the levying of prices, albeit artificially low ones, on the urban proletariat. As it would soon become clear, this approach created difficulties for the enterprises that ultimately proved unsustainable in the face of continued demands for public hygiene put forward by the Bolshevik leadership and the population at large.

An early article published in the newspaper of the Mossovet and the Moscow committee of the Communist Party presented economic self-sufficiency as a new type of “dictatorship” in the economic sphere that would support the construction of socialism. “At present,” the author wrote,

the economy of the country has reached a significant enough degree of ruin to warrant extraordinary measures for its restoration. These measures have been adopted at the country-wide level bravely and sweepingly: the Red armies of the battlefield are transforming into labor armies and a universal labor requirement is being introduced, but this is not enough, because we still have to resolve the issue of how to manage these labor armies across enterprises and on the job. What is needed here is both discipline and dictatorship.151

The concept of khoziaistvennost’, according to the author, implied “honest labor, the careful spending of resources, a thoughtful approach to buildings and inventory, the creation of the best possible working conditions, and the achievement of profits.” At the same time, the article struck a note of warning that would prove to be a prescient one as the problems of municipal enterprises intensified: “If these principles of economic logic are not observed, then under a capitalist system such entities would go bankrupt, while on the path to communism it would lead to ruin and the shortage of goods for private and public consumption.” The switch to the “new rails

[rel’sy]” of economic sustainability, as the introduction of NEP was frequently described, was

151 “Diktatura khoziaistvennosti,” Kommunisticheskii trud No. 7 (March 26, 1920), p. 1. 80 envisioned by the state and its supporters as a move that could potentially further the goals of the domestic revolution; at the same time, it carried the risk of detracting from the promises of the revolution to improve the living standards for the working class.

As news spread in late summer of 1921 that the MKKh would cease to finance district departments of public hygiene, the latter began to prepare for the uncertainties of what was to come. Some departments attempted to determine their material needs for the coming year and procure them from the city government in advance.152 In a major problem for banyas, it became unclear how much to charge workers for communal services as there were no set wages for workers.153 The Mossovet remedied this problem in August 1921 by mandating a uniform price scheme for bathhouse use: workers and employees of state bodies and enterprises would pay

1,000 rubles per visit, while other citizens would pay according to the category of bathing facilities they wished to visit (2,000 rubles for the third and lowest category, 4,000 rubles for the second category and 6,000 rubles for the first category, which included private bathing cabins).154 Unsurprisingly, the adoption of this price scheme was far from uniform across the city, with one district reporting that its banyas continued to function practically for free into

October of that year by “taking a miserly sum from visitors” in the amount of several rubles.155

Nevertheless, by the winter the MKKh had largely succeeded in establishing low, uniform rates across the city’s bathhouses in an effort to maintain affordable bathing services for the working class.

152 TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 67, l. 70. 153 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 80, l. 74. 154 TsAGM f. 2313, op. 1, d. 2, l. 12. These numbers may appear staggering to the contemporary observer but were consistent with the massive hyper-inflation of the period. For context, in October 1921 one Muscovite who described himself as a “small and ungreedy civil servant” reported that his monthly wage was approximately 400,000 rubles and expected to rise as inflation continued. See Nikita Okunev, diary entry of October 14, 1921, Prozhito electronic resource, http://prozhito.org/person/53. Accessed February 16, 2019. 155 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 77, l. 153. 81

The switch to a payment system appeared to resolve some of the short-term problems with bathhouse infrastructure, the most pressing of which was the need for capital repairs. In the

Gorodskoi district, the new flow of income allowed the communal economy department to begin planning repairs to the once-magnificent Sandunovsky baths, a task which had been neglected for more than 15 years.156 A similar experience was echoed by the Sokol’nicheskii department of public hygiene, which reported that it was initially “caught off-guard” by “such quick economic transformations,” but had landed firmly on its feet and was now preparing for a large-scale upgrade to its communal enterprises.157 The income from repaired banyas was subsequently used to patch up dilapidated bathhouses in the districts, which could then enter into economic operation.158 This new opportunity to carry out long-overdue repairs to existing facilities and open previously non-functioning facilities to public use was an early success of the NEP that significantly lightened the burden on Moscow’s public hygiene infrastructure. The initial optimism did not last long, however, as underlying tensions in the communal economy began to emerge.

Within a year of the shift to economic self-sufficiency, municipal officials observed that the work of public hygiene enterprises continued to be hampered by structural problems. The same district council that had earlier reported a quick recovery from the shocks of NEP had to admit, by the fall of 1922, that the presence of “ailing enterprises” under its jurisdiction underscored the “necessity of repairs and the complete absence of funds or materials to carry them out.”159 A Rabkrin inspection of public hygiene departments across the city stressed the unviability of communal establishments in the conditions of NEP until the latter were

156 TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 79, l. 1. 157 TsAGM f. 2431, op. 1, d. 167, l. 167. 158 For example, the Rogozhsko-Simonovskii district council reported that it had used the new income to bring all four of its banyas to full functioning capacity within one month, and had also restored them to “pre-revolutionary levels of cleanliness.” TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 94, l. 67. 159 TsAGM f. 2431, op. 1, d. 275, l, 170. 82 streamlined to market logic, a move that was justified by the need to meet the “pressing demands of the population.”160 The following section will turn to the main difficulties that befell

Moscow’s public hygiene enterprises as they struggled to fulfill a demanding social role within the economic constraints placed upon them by the state and the NEP environment. The strains on the work of these enterprises, and the resulting social discontent, fueled a discourse of increasing hostility towards the market policies of NEP, suggesting that the construction of socialism in the urban sphere would have to be pursued through other means.

Struggles of Public Hygiene Enterprises under NEP

Writing in the 1980s about the problems of command economies, the economist Janos

Kornai identified a peculiar feature common to many socialist systems. Key firms and enterprises in these societies functioned not only as economic units but as political actors as well, fulfilling the social promises of the paternalistic state — including job security, housing and healthcare — for their workers and communities. As a result, these firms had to worry less about operating in accordance with market logic due to their guaranteed insurance by the state, a condition Kornai referred to as having “soft budget constraints.”161 The allocation of essential goods and services by political forces rather than the market often resulted in ineffective distribution and excess demand, suggesting that, ultimately, “efficiency and security-solidarity are to a large extent conflicting goals.”162

Soviet public hygiene enterprises of the NEP period were an early example of entities that carried social and political responsibilities far greater than their daily functions implied.

160 TsAGM f. 2431, op. 1, d. 275, l. 126. 161 See Janos Kornai, “The Soft Budget Constraint,” Kyklos Vol. 39, No. 1 (1986): 3-30. 162 Ibid., 27. 83

Through the provision of launderings, haircuts and baths, these establishments promoted the development of a healthy and conscientious working class that was crucial to the formation of the socialist state. Unlike firms with soft budget constraints, however, they did not receive the accompanying economic insurance from the state, which at this point did not have the resources to sustain them. After the removal of central funding and the shift to khozraschet in the fall of

1921, public hygiene establishments that in theory were too important to fail began to face the constant threat of closure or disrepair, which in turn threatened the success of the broader socialist project. The demands placed on these entities by the state, along with their resulting deficits and the social response this produced, are discussed in the sections below.

Bathhouses as ‘Charitable Bodies’

Municipal hygiene facilities of the early 1920s, and bathhouses in particular, had to pursue the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary hygiene agenda while largely fending for themselves in the procurement of funding and supplies. As part of their social mandate, the state required bathhouses to provide free or reduced-price services to prioritized sectors of the population without granting the former sufficient funds to cover the costs. Thus, in addition to the already low prices set for the general population, bathhouses were to provide free entry to workers of state enterprises, Red Army soldiers and school children,163 a privilege that later extended to cover all children and teenagers, the handicapped, the elderly and the needy [prizrevaemye], as

163 Soldiers and school children had to come in collectives rather than alone to receive these privileges, a detail which underscored the state’s communizing agenda in the sphere of public hygiene. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 105. At a meeting in July 1922, the heads of the district communal departments decided that each district should keep track of the costs incurred from washing Red Army soldiers in order to petition the Mossovet for reimbursement. TsAGM f. 2563, op. 1, d. 80, l. 166. 84 well as military units of district garrisons.164 Bathhouses could also be used to collect funds for state initiatives, such as a drive in 1921 to help the hungry that took a portion of the profits from banya entrance fees, which had been temporarily raised for that purpose.165

District departments protested loudly against the social burdens placed upon them. The presidium of one district council notified the Mossovet that since banyas had been transferred to a “commercial basis” and no longer received government funding, they could not provide for the

“free bathing of just anyone [besplatnoe myt’e kogo by to ni bylo].”166 Elsewhere, a district representative argued for a complete ban on the release of free banya passes. Given the high costs incurred by bathhouses in the conditions of economic self-management, he wrote, the establishment should not be treated as a “charitable body [blagotvoritel’nyi organ]” and must be allowed to charge entry fees for its use.167

Meanwhile, the economic hardships faced by smaller public hygiene enterprises in the competitive NEP environment turned bathhouses into the de-facto breadwinners of their respective district departments. Profits from banyas were used to cover the deficits of state-run barbershops and other district enterprises, which suffered from low visitation and income compared to their privately run counterparts.168 When the MKKh broached the idea of re- centralizing Moscow’s banyas and removing them from district oversight in 1923, a number of districts protested. This prompted one observer to speculate that districts resisted the move because they “often blurred over the irregularities in their housekeeping” by dispersing banya

164 The department of municipal enterprises in the Sokol’nicheskii district complained to the council presidium, asking who was going to cover the costs of allowing these groups free entry as of January 1923. TsAGM f. 2431, op. 1, d. 326, l. 1. 165 TsAGM f. 2313, op. 1, d. 3, l. 13. 166 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 88, l. 142. 167 TsAGM f. 2431, op. 1, d. 326, l. 52. 168 TsAGM f. 2431, op. 1, d. 275, ll. 335-336. 85 profits across struggling areas, a move that had been explicitly prohibited by the Mossovet.169

Noting that bathhouses themselves were running at a deficit and were in need of repairs, the observer concluded that the only way to restore their functioning was to “centralize the management of all Moscow banyas.”170 If bathhouses were to continue to operate as the charitable bodies they had essentially become, they would need to be placed back onto the sustenance of the state.

Deficit and Its Discontents

The inability of bathhouses to adjust to market conditions forced them to operate at a significant loss shortly following the introduction of NEP.171 After seeing initial flows of income, public bathhouses began to flounder as their fixed prices failed to generate enough profit to cover the rising costs of materials and fuel needed to keep facilities running. One bathhouse reported that it would have to raise entry fees by 60 percent to stay out of deficit, a notion that was unacceptable to the Bolshevik leadership.172 At the same time, bathhouses remained committed to maintaining the living standards of their own employees, even as they had to cut staff to remain afloat.173 By the spring of 1922 the MKKh conceded that profits for communal services could only be achieved through an increase in the real wages of workers, a change that

169 “O baniakh,” Kommunal’noe khoziaistvo No. 15-16 (August 15, 1923), p 33. 170 Ibid., p. 34. 171 At the end of 1921, for example, Banya No. 1 reported the cost of running the bathhouse for the year as 9,101,740,320 rubles and its income as 4,227,600,000 rubles, creating a deficit of 4,874,140,320 rubles. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 401. In the Zamoskvoretskii district, the department of municipal enterprises saw its overall debt jump from 145,000 rubles to 3,500,000 rubles in the first half of 1922, leading the department to transfer four barbershops and all eight of its laundromats to lease agreements. Moskovskii Sovet Rabochikh i Krasnoarmeiskikh Deputatov, Otchet o deiatel’nosti Zamoskvoretskogo raionnogo Soveta Rabochikh i Krasnoarmeiskikh Deputatov s 1-go ianvaria po 1-e oktiabria 1922 (Moscow, 1922), pp. 81-82. 172 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 426. 173 One bathhouse reported in the spring of 1922 that it spent 65 percent of its income on paying its workers, a number that fell to 50 percent after the reduction of staff. TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 80, l. 150. 86 was impossible to make in the current economic climate.174 Once again, the state emerged as the only plausible source of funding to keep the bathhouses in operation.

In addition to these troubles, the work of banyas and similar enterprises was disrupted by an acute fuel crisis that raged throughout the revolutionary period and continued into the new decade. Heating materials had been notably absent from the state monopoly imposed on many basic goods in 1918, and these were not brought under state distribution until the spring of

1920.175 What emerged was a centralized system whereby fuel collected in the Moscow region by the city’s central depository, Moskvotop, was redistributed across district departments of fuel

[raitopy] in accordance with established quotas. Amid the fuel crisis Moskvotop found itself in the position of “having to maneuver at its own discretion, ripping off some in order to satisfy the demands of others.”176 As a result, individual districts received only a fraction of their monthly fuel requirements, if they received anything at all.177 The perpetual fuel shortage limited bathhouse operations to 3-4 days per week, while the outdated technology of many bathhouses led to the massive overburning [perezhog] of existing supplies.178 The situation become so bad that banya workers were enlisted in chopping firewood and pumping oil for their own enterprises, a service for which they received additional compensation.179

174 TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 80, ll. 93-94. 175 Hessler, p. 43. 176 Such was the conclusion reached in a Rabkrin inspection of the Gorodskoi district fuel department in the spring of 1921. TsAGM f. 1474, op. 7, d. 45, l. 4. By the following year discussions were under way to reorganize district fuel departments and move away from the monopoly on fuel under the new market conditions of NEP. TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 126, l. 6. 177 For example, the raitop of the Khamovnicheskii district reported that it received only 8 percent of its required fuel in January 1922 and nothing in February 1922, adding that shortages were compounded by the “ceaseless theft of fuel cargos from the railroads.” TsAGM f. 1514, op. 1, d. 135, l. 3. The politically-motivated distribution of fuel at the district level is illustrated in a March 1921 report from the same raitop, which allocated 440 fathoms [sazhen’] of firewood to bathhouses but gave 460 fathoms to Red Army families and 1014 fathoms to shock workers [udarnye rabochie] in the district. TsAGM f. 1514, op. 1, d. 137, l. 2. 178 A report from the Rogozhsko-Simonovskii district in June 1922 noted that its banyas had an overburning rate of 200 percent due to their antiquated heating systems. TsAGM f. 2562, op. 1, d. 80, l. 150. 179 The MKKh announced fixed compensation to banya workers who chopped firewood or pumped fuel with handheld devices [kachka nefti ruchnym sposobom] beginning in September 1921, although it was unclear where 87

Faced with mounting losses, municipal bathhouses attempted to increase revenues by implementing some elements of market logic to the decided ire of Moscow bathers. Districts considered levying fees for individual services offered in the banya even before the removal of state funding — such as the sale of soap and the storage of clothing180 — and adopted these changes shortly thereafter. As a result, 52-year-old Muscovite Nikita Okunev wrote in his diary that one could easily “burn through about 5,000 rubles” during one visit to the bathhouse:

Two thousand to the steam-room attendant [paril’shchiku], 500 to the ‘foot-callus operator’ [mozol’nomu operatoru], 1,000 rubles for a little bottle of some kind of refreshing liquid, 500 for a little sauna whisk [venichek], and ‘however much you please’ to the attendant, i.e. the person who keeps glancing at you sternly to see that you don’t swipe your neighbor’s dirty pants (which happens quite frequently).181

In another instance, Okunev wrote that he had asked a banya attendant to clip his toenails, and ended up paying 500 rubles for this “bourgeois delight.”182 The rising cost of services at what were meant to be affordable municipal facilities prompted the economist Iurii Larin to protest on the front page of Izvestiia that workers were being exploited in the new communal economy of

NEP. It was clear, Larin wrote, that Moscow officials “intended to strip money [drat’] from the worker for everything: for electric lamps, for banyas...this signifies nothing less than an attempt to saddle the working class with the upkeep of cities, which are necessary to the entire population of the country.”183 Satirical swipes at the commercialization of banyas began to appear in the publications of the period.184 The communal economy, which the Bolsheviks had

such work was to be carried out. By the fall of 1921 some banyas had switched to oil as their main source of fuel, while others did not have the technical capacity to make that change. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 9, l. 191. 180 Gorodskoi Raionnyi Sovet R. i K.D. g. Moskvy, Otchet za vremia s 1-go iiunia po 1-e noiabria 1921 g. (Moscow, 1921), p. 18. 181 Nikita Okunev, diary entry of April 1, 1921, Prozhito electronic resource, http://prozhito.org/person/53. Accessed February 16, 2019. 182 Ibid., entry of January 5, 1921. In six months the cost of the same procedure had doubled to 1,000 rubles, per Okunev’s entry of June 16, 1921. 183 Iurii Larin, “Ne pora li pogodit’,” Izvestiia No. 20 (January 27, 1922), p. 1. Larin’s article received a response in the same newspaper several days later, in which the author argued that fees for communal services were inevitable in the new conditions of NEP but conceded that workers’ wages must be raised in order to cover them. [M.] Sovetnikov, “Neprotivlenie zlu,” Izvestiia No. 22 (January 29, 1922), p. 1. 184 See, for example, “Pro bani” and “Khozraschetnaia bania” in Kipiatok No. 9 (May 1924), pp. 1 and 2. 88 envisioned as a means of support and socialization for the nascent working class, was becoming yet another oppressor to the urban population in the deregulated environment of NEP.

Amid the bubbling discontent, it became easy to overlook the fact that the state had initially sought to use market incentives to advance socialist goals. Following the municipalization of communal enterprises, the Mossovet tried to improve their customer service and cleanliness in order to encourage workers to patronize public hygiene facilities. This is illustrated in the example of barbershops, where the Mossovet offered financial rewards

[premirovanie] to employees who displayed “individual productivity,” maintained hygienic conditions and managed to avoid customer complaints.185

The failure of these measures to improve services and the state’s allowance of privately- run enterprises ultimately backfired on the socialist agenda. At the onset of NEP, one official in the Gorodskoi district bemoaned the flourishing of private barbershops and warned that such a

“parallelism” of simultaneously existing state-run and private enterprises would “doom Soviet barbershops to gradual extinction.”186 He added that there were increasing calls from officials and private citizens to open more state-run barbershops in the district, lest the “bacchanal of stealing from clients” continues. Other observers spoke out against the practice of tipping, which had “assumed even wider and more shameless forms under NEP.”187 Whatever their short-term benefit to profit and efficiency, the adoption of market mechanisms by communal enterprises was interpreted by many workers and officials as a betrayal of the interests of the working class

185 TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 2, l. 4. In what would become the norm for state-run enterprises, municipal barbershops saw instances of rude customer service, employees cursing in front of clients, and even of clients being asked to chop firewood to heat the premises. TsAGM f. 2386, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 13-14. 186 In this highly evocative letter, the official reported that there were 19 municipal barbershops but more than 70 private barbershops in the district, the latter of which did not observe official fees and charged between 30-50 times more than what was allowed. TsAGM f. 2434, op. 1, d. 22, ll. 98-99. The official fees [taksa] in barbershops around this time included 3,000 rubles for a shave, 5,000 rubles each for a haircut or a hair wash, and 20,000 rubles for a coiffure. See Otchet o rabote otdelov Zamoskvoretskogo Soveta: s 1-go ianvaria po 15-e oktiabria 1921 g. (Moscow, 1921), p. 15. 187 “Chaevye v parekmakherskikh,” Vecherniaia gazeta No. 3 (December 8, 1923), p. 3. 89 in the urban environment. The communal economy, as a fundamental component of the socializing city, would need to be brought back in line with socialist values if the grand vision of municipal communism was to be achieved.

Conclusion

The preceding chapter has endeavored to show how the pursuit of socialist objectives in the communal economy was disrupted by the imposition of market conditions during NEP.

Faced with the inability to finance the public hygiene enterprises under its jurisdiction, the

Moscow city government began to transfer supervision of less sensitive enterprises to actors outside of the municipal administration, while continuing to enforce socialist pricing schemes that prevented the adjustment of these enterprises to market demands. The city’s policy floundered in particular when it came to the critically important public bathhouses, which could not reconcile the socialist mandate imposed on them with the economic hardships that befell them after the removal of central funding. The problems in the hygiene sphere reflected the dire situation that had unfolded in the system of municipal services more broadly. By the summer of

1924, the deputy head of the interior ministry which oversaw the communal economy reported that “without exaggeration, the communal economy has been driven into a dead end from which it cannot emerge on its own.”188

The failure of the state to implement its revolutionary agenda in the sphere of public hygiene should not be confused with the abandonment of that agenda during NEP, however. On the contrary, it was the rigid pursuit of state control over the pricing and provision of sanitary

188 Quoted in I. B. Orlov, Kommunal’naia strana: stanovlenie sovetskogo zhilishchno-kommunal’nogo khoziaistva (1917-1941) (Moscow: Higher School of Economics, 2015), p. 38. 90 services that prevented this sector of the communal economy from making the transition to market conditions. The Bolsheviks’ revolutionary approach to hygiene — with its militant treatment of sanitation as an issue of state security and its perpetual mistrust towards potential saboteurs and members of the bourgeoisie — carried over from the period of warfare and permeated the urban environment in which NEP policies were introduced. Members of both society and state resisted the handover of hygiene enterprises to private actors and viewed the resulting price increases as a betrayal of the socialist cause. The result, as Hessler wrote, was that the “NEP sought to eliminate inefficiencies connected with too much, and too rigid, centralized control over the economy, but neither at the executive level nor below were the tensions between a policy of liberalization and the habits of the revolutionary epoch effectively resolved.”189 The resolution of these tensions would require a new policy that would merge the centralizing impulses of the state with the social demand for subsidized services, thereby sounding the death knell for NEP.

189 Hessler, p. 53. 91

CONCLUSION

The Communal Economy and the Curtailment of NEP

As the Soviet roaring twenties came to a close, the condition of Moscow’s public hygiene establishments remained equally dire, if not worse, as at the onset of NEP. Stalin’s ascendance to power and the announcement of the industrialization drive in 1928 marked a decisive shift away from the liberalization of the period and towards greater state centralization in economic and political life. This was accompanied by a renewed offensive to implement the socialist agenda that had proceeded in fits and starts in the preceding years. This policy shift brought renewed attention to the role of the public bathhouse and the communal economy in the context of the

“cultural revolution,” the new civilizing project of the Soviet state, which sought to raise the ideological literacy of the population and inculcate the socialist values of communality, cleanliness and hard work into daily practice once and for all.190

When observers peeked into the public bathhouse in the late 1920s, they found the situation far from conducive to that end. Investigative commissions from the All-Union Central

Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) found that by the end of the decade, Moscow had only 44 municipal baths for a population of nearly three million, and that only 0.1 percent of the population was serviced by laundromats.191 The average citizen went to the bathhouse only six times per year as opposed to the “sanitary norm” of 24 times per year.192 What’s more, not a single public bathhouse had been built in the city in the last 13 years,193 while existing

190 For a good overview of this concept see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1932,” Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 9, No. 1 (January 1974), pp. 33-52. 191 These numbers are for the years 1929 and 1930. GARF f. R5451, op. 15, d. 436, l. 41 and op. 14, d. 470, l. 37. 192 GARF f. R5451, op. 15, d. 436, l. 47. 193 Ibid. 92 bathhouses continued to be dirty, dilapidated, and had become dens of prostitution.194 “We speak a lot about cultural revolution, but at the same time we don’t provide the worker with the opportunity to wash himself,” concluded one representative of the union,195 which collectively proclaimed the banya-laundromat system in its current state to be “the main brake on the restructuring of daily life” for the urban working class.196

Changes to the structure of the communal economy began to appear during the first Five-

Year Plan. In 1928, the cities of the RSFSR had 400 banyas, compared to 390 in 1917;197 In other words, it had taken a decade to restore the number of bathhouses in Russia to pre- revolutionary levels in the conditions of NEP. Following the centralization of the communal economy in 1931 under the newly created People’s Commissariat of Communal Economy

(NKKh), the number of banyas in the country nearly doubled to 718 in just five years.198 The industrialization drive had not bypassed the public hygiene sphere, where bathhouses and laundromats based on a standardized new model of the “cleanliness combine [kombinat chistoty]” were churned out by the state throughout the 1930s.199 In Moscow, the Central

Committee of the Communist Party adopted a resolution based on a report by regional party head

Lazar Kaganovich that called on the Mossovet to build four new banyas in 1931 and no fewer than ten the following year, in addition to bringing all existing facilities up to date.200

Even these efforts appeared to fall short of improving the bathing conditions in the country, however. In 1937, the all-union Council of Peoples’ Commissars found that conditions

194 TsAGM f. 2149, op. 1, d. 6, l. 120. 195 GARF f. R5451, op. 14, d. 470, ll. 23-24. 196 GARF f. R5451, op. 14, d. 470, l. 39. 197 Orlov, p. 41. 198 Ibid., p. 67. 199 See Polina Zueva, “Bani pervykh piatiletok v SSSR” in Il’ia Starkov, Aleksandra Selivanova and Polina Zueva, Kupal’nia-bania Rogozhsko-Simonovskogo raiona (Moscow: Tsentr avangarda i proekt “Togda,” 2016), pp. 88-91. 200 Resolution of the TsK VKP from June 15, 1931 reprinted in the unpaginated album Petreikova, ed., Ot Moskvy kupecheskoi k Moskve sotsialisticheskoi: tekst al’boma iz doklada L.M. Kaganovicha na iiun’skom plenume TsK VKP(b) 1931 g. “Za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiiu Moskvy i gorodov SSSR (Moscow: Izogiz, 1932). 93 in Soviet bathhouses were still lamentable based on a review of large cities across the Soviet

Union, including 32 in the RSFSR. Their report noted that the majority of banyas were in an anti-sanitary state, were beset by dirt, dampness and humidity, and appeared to be generally neglected. Meanwhile, many bathhouses were running a deficit due to the widespread use of subsidized entrance fees, and “even the granting of free passes to the banya.”201

This echo of NEP-era conditions in the Soviet bathhouse a decade after the curtailment of

NEP reveals the extent to which structural features of the public hygiene sphere had taken shape

— and had since remained unchanged — in the formative period of the early 1920s. Forged in the revolutionary struggle against epidemics, the Bolshevik conception of the bathhouse as a site of socialist acculturation persisted through the surface-level “retreat” of NEP and re-emerged in the discussion of the banya as a site of cultural re-programming during Stalin’s “revolution from above.” Throughout this period, the Soviet leadership continued to view bathing services and other hygiene facilities as a key public good, whose provision to the working class must be guaranteed by the state even in conditions of economic adversity. The measures which the state adopted to enforce this provision in the competitive market conditions of NEP ultimately detracted from its socialist promise by shifting the costs to the workers. But a correction of this policy through the subsequent recentralization of the communal economy likewise failed to deliver the desired results. Public bathhouses remained overburdened by their social mandate and under-resourced by the state, serving as an early warning of the outcome that would befall many socialist enterprises tasked with carrying out a paternalistic mandate in the Soviet Union.

The present thesis has used the public bathhouse as a setting through which to observe the political, social and economic transformations that unfolded in Soviet urban society as the

201 GARF f. R5446, op. 20, d. 2002, l. 3.

94 state implemented its socialist agenda at the onset of the 1920s. Chapter One demonstrated how the Bolshevik leadership transferred its revolutionary campaign from the battlefield to the bathhouse as it sought to foster the conditions for a thriving working class in the new Soviet capital. Faced with a public health emergency in the wake of the Civil War, the Bolshevik state presented the battle against epidemics as a battle for socialism and mobilized the population towards this cause. While the state struggled to bring public hygiene under central control,

Moscow’s city officials, municipal workers and regular citizens worked to implement the state’s hygienic directives on the ground, thereby transforming the socialist remodeling of the city into a communal project in its own right. The chaotic introduction of municipal control in the sphere of public hygiene revealed the deficiencies of NEP-era governance that would plague Soviet authorities for the remainder of the period.

Chapter Two examined the social transition of early NEP away from a pre-revolutionary society and towards a worker’s state as it played out in the dramas and discussions surrounding the bathhouse. As urban residents and city officials negotiated their interests in the new socialist hierarchy, they filtered their arguments through the discourse of revolution and class warfare, revealing the extent to which Bolshevik thought had begun to penetrate society by the beginning of the decade. Municipal enterprises, and the bathhouse in particular, became understood by officials and patrons as fulfilling an important social function that required putting workers’ needs, especially their cleanliness and comfort, above other concerns. Failure to provide acceptable conditions for bathing — a common occurrence in the cash and supply-strapped environment of NEP — could result in the branding of a bathhouse administrator as a traitor to the revolution, even if the situation was largely beyond his control. In administrative correspondence, such accusations and counter-accusations resulted in dramatic rhetorical duels

95 that reflected the adoption of a new social consciousness by the urban working class. At the same time, the discrepancy between the expected provisions for the working class and the real conditions in the bathhouse revealed how far the Bolshevik state still had to go in fulfilling its socialist promise to the urban proletariat.

The causes of the above discrepancy were finally explored in Chapter Three, which presented the unviability of socialist hygiene enterprises in the competitive market environment of NEP. The state attempt to maintain policy control over communal enterprises, even as it made them fend for themselves financially, proved inconsistent with the envisioned role of the communal economy as a source of affordable services for the working class. As public bathhouses were cut from state funding and the prices for hygiene services increased, urban residents and officials concerned for their plight saw the state as reneging on its socialist promise to improve the lives of Soviet workers. What emerges when we look through the peephole at the early Soviet bathhouse is yet another battleground for the civilizing agenda of one of the leading ideologies of the twentieth century. The Bolshevik failure to fully implement their agenda amid the political, social and economic obstacles of NEP sheds light on the reasons why the Soviet

1920s, despite their potential and appeal as an alternative route for Soviet development, ultimately served as a source for the irreconcilable contradictions that paved the way for

Stalinism.

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